Linex Blog

Another improvement to our Smart Alerts platform going live today is the updated folder structure. 

Smart Alerts clients logging in today: note the simplified in-page folder management, as well as a whole new permissions table for these. Decide exactly who has access to amend your alerts and searches as well as who can view them based on office, practice area or individual. 

For now your folders maintain organisation-wide visibility by default. We are glad to help you get your permission structure decided, and to discuss best options for your specific needs. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and we can arrange a time to review your folder structure together. 

As our clients give feedback, so we respond. We have a made a few funcitonality improvements to the way Alerts are managed. Everything is done in the same way as previously, simply with added options and better visibility. 

Alert Edit

In terms of editing individual Smart Alerts, you can now also exclude individual articles from any automated alert, with a simple 1-click. In addition we can create custom disclaimers to be added to your alerts, saving you the need to have to type the same text multiple times. 

Mass Email Users

Need to get feedback on an alert? Want to know if your end users are really reading those costly subscriptions? Use the mass email option to send the email directly from Linex, with a pre selection of users by alert, office, or more. 

View an archive of all published alerts, complete with publish date, recipient list and content for each. 

I am very pleased to be adding a guest post by the knowledgeable and fascinating Laura Hannan (ask her about her life sometime, it tells like a movie). Laura is a Business Development manager at Chameleon, a digital communications organisation creating results for B2B and B2C organisations across web, mobile, search and social.

If you want to get in touch with Laura use the links below or let me know and I will be glad to pass on your details to her.

Marketing for Professional Services Firms

How do you market organisations online that have traditionally relied on referrals, face-to-face networking and the reputation of individuals or partners?

I think it comes down to your brand.

Professional Services firms are generally made up individual experts and it is from these individuals that people buy.

However, it is an organisation’s brand that attracts the best people to work for them in the first place, so internal marketing of that brand to partners, their marketplace, Universities and Alumni is something that most firms are perfectly familiar with.

With the best people working for them, the brand over time stands also for a place where a specialty lives.

Even the industry I work in, a digital agency, we are just a group of digital professionals.  We should be leaning on every individual’s expertise whether they gained that experience within these four walls or not.

Traditional ‘referrals-type’ professional services firms are now relying on search traffic for new business leads.  The brand benefits of being at the top of search for your services keywords are harder to measure and therefore often ignored.

Some B2B organisations have been slow to dominate their brand search page.  See PwC filling up the page with paid and organic search, link extensions, places and maps.

Online advertising / affiliates where brands can gain a lot of impressions are unlikely to be as effective for professional services firms as other sectors.  However adverts focusing on individuals will have more traction, e.g. on LinkedIn individuals by default allow their data to be used in advertising.

ePR and blogger engagement is a great way to promote both the individuals and the brand together.  Perhaps try influential websites within your sector e.g. http://www.big4.com/blog/news

Social media is an interesting channel and one we get asked about a lot by B2B organisations, usually asking “what should we be doing?”  This is probably another blog post all on its own!

For larger professional services organisation, brand and buzz monitoring can be incredibly effective to react to news/PR/blogs and measure brand reputation and penetration.  If someone is saying something negative about your brand, you’ll want to know about it, and if there are positive comments you will want to keep that buzz going for as long as you can.

We’ve been working with Drivers Jonas Deloitte, Kingston Smith and RIBA.

For more chat and debate feel free to connect http://uk.linkedin.com/in/laurahannan or www.twitter.com/laurajhannan

With a slight delay, here is a quick review of the first website mentioned by John DiGilio in his SLA presentation. Namely: Jig.com

I'm going to go ahead and say that it is built like a search engine, but hear me out before you roll your eyes and exclaim "who needs another search engine?". 

You know when you need to find an accountant in York, or whether the Canon EOS Rebel T3i is better than the Canon EOS 5D Mark II for your needs, or not just a list of blogs about puppies, but some commentary on what people like and why? You probably Google it up, with a query like "account reviews in York" or "best puppy blogs", and get a list of links you examine one by one. 

What if instead of search results, you got actual answers? What if instead of search queries you asked actual questions? 

Hold that eye roll again: it's not another Q&A site either. Forget Quora, Mahalo and a plethora of others. Somehow Jig seems to have succeeded in merging these two worlds under an elegant userface and with very straightforward usability. It is not a site to ask about long opinions on the value of semeiotic studies. The query box starts with the words "I need" and you fill in the rest. 

The site was founded by Delicious creator Joshua Schachter, so we know we are in good hands already. Apparently a future development will be "offers" alongside the answers. Whether for products, services, both, I do not know, but I look forward to seeing how that will work. 

To be honest I can't quite put my finger on what it is (premise that I have been staring at my computer screen almost non-stop for 10.5 hours now, so excuse my reduced brain speed), but this is great. It makes the process of searching so much simpler, the replies are qualified and I like that you can turn those into a conversation to get a deeper understanding. 

Check it out, give it a go and let me know your thoughts, I'm curious as to how you will find this site. 

A few months ago we first unveiled the Email2Linex solution, granting clients a Linex inbox for all their external email subscriptions. Combine these with other sources in a Smart Alert, or, new and improved, use the new alert type in Linex. 

Is this subscription only going to a select number of users within your organisation? You would rather avoid combining it with other sources, but in fact want the end users to have complete continuity of service? No problem. Do this all through Linex. You manage just one user and distribution group list, your analytics are all in one place, and the end user receives the original email as per its own schedule. 

If you are a client and want to know about setting this up just let me know. If you are new to Linex, and would like to know more about this solution, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and we can arrange a quick online demo.