What I've Been Working on Lately...

Recently, a startup company called defero came to me for advice on how they can utilize social media and other communication platforms to get their company up and running. After a lot of hard work, I was able to deliver to them this proposal, via using the Blogger software. I chose to deliver it this way so that the proposal itself would in effect illustrate how an online communication medium can be used to deliver content. I am very proud of the work I did for them and felt I should share it with a wider audience.

First, a little background on the company. Defero is a new company with roots in old media and looking to expand to the Web 2.0 world. They plan to consult with other businesses to help them utilize social media and other online communication tools to create and deliver compelling content to their customers. It was perhaps a tad ironic that defero plans to provide to other companies the very services that they asked from me!

That aside, I was able to devise a fairly comprehensive strategy for the business launch. I started with an ad campaign, since they were a new company and had to first get the word out and brand themselves. This campaign was designed to drive people to the corporate website, which would then lead people to the blog and social networking accounts. Through this online media saturation, defero would develop contact and dialogues with potential business clients, which would eventually lead to sales.

As part of the ad campaign and overall branding efforts, I first set out to develop a "slogan" that would help to identify and set defero apart. I wanted a fairly short expression for maximum impact. After considerable thought, I came up with - "unleash your message." This gets to the core of what defero offers and describes it in a strong and memorable way. It implies that companies may already have a message, but defero will help them "unleash" it and truly get it out.

After coming up with the slogan, I set about to design a corresponding logo, and came up with this:

I found a pretty cool looking 3-d font and colored in the faces of the letters in blue. The blue and black together created a very visually appealing color scheme. The font had little white specks on the black shadow, which I kept because I liked how it gave it a feeling of being hand drawn. In keeping with this theme, I chose a handwriting font to be used to write the catchphrase. I doctored it up a bit to connect all the letters, and then I connected an image of an open leash on the end. The handwriting theme adds a personal touch, which complements nicely with defero's technological expertise.

With the logo and slogan, I now had all I needed to derive other marketing materials, such as magazine ads, Internet banner ads, and mock-ups of the website:

After I did all this, I could now include them in my proposal for visual enhancement and to use as examples of my ideas. From here, the process was simply about actually writing the proposal and convincing them of the merits of my plan. The key point I stressed was that in order to best market itself as an "expert" on new communication tools, defero must themselves show a mastery of them. Thus, the point of establishing the website, blog and social networking. Where possible, I backed up claims with research and references to other articles. One of the benefits of submitting a proposal online via a blog was that I could simply hyperlink to referenced articles or websites. I found this to be very useful, as seen here:

I think the proposal pretty much speaks for itself. While it was a rather long process, and there were many points where I wasn't really sure if I would reach the desired endpoint, the experience gained was well worth the time and effort. Hopefully this will be the first of many similar type projects, in which I can lend my skills to real-world business needs.