Neighborhood America and ISC Put Race Fans in the Driver’s Seat

With more than 100,000 passionate fans capturing pictures and video at the Richmond Spring NASCAR Race Weekend, the May 2-3 event sets the stage for International Speedway Corporation (ISC) to engage consumers through a new online community powered by Neighborhood America, RacingOne.

With RacingOne, the excitement of race day doesn’t have to come to an end after the weekend. The online community creates a space, centered on the ISC brand, where fans:

• Share pictures and video taken at Richmond Spring and subsequent races
• Connect with other motorsports fans
• Exchange personal experiences and ideas for enjoying the different tracks

ISC benefits from the word-of-mouth marketing, which routinely occurs on enterprise social networking sites, to increase ticket sales and promote RacingOne as a branded community where advertisers can target consumers.

Photos and videos captured during the Richmond Race will set the stage for continued conversation and allow like-minded fans to connect with each other. Through the online community, enthusiastic fans enjoy the opportunity to extend their ‘Race Day’ experience, take part in peer reviews and rate the user generated content. It is expected that the online community of motorsports enthusiasts will continue to build, creating momentum leading up to every race thereafter, and providing ongoing engagement between fans and the ISC brand.

“ISC is an emerging industry leader and we are privileged to work with a team that possesses exceptional insight and understanding of the value that strategic consumer engagement can bring to an organization,” said Kim Patrick Kobza, President and CEO of Neighborhood America. “This is precisely the type of thinking that must evolve in the marketplace – and quickly, if businesses are to remain competitive.”

The strategy behind RacingOne keeps revenues at the forefront - engaging consumers, extending the ‘Race Day’ experience, and fueling long-lasting customer relationships.

Stay tuned for a video that showcases the excitement of Richmond Spring and how ISC intends to harness the energy of race fans in the RacingOne community.

The Changing Face of CRM
By Michael Thomas, Director of CRM

According to Datamonitor, the research, data and analytic company, the CRM market is set to double to about US$6.6 billion with a growth rate of 10.5 percent through 2012. This growth is due to a number of factors such as penetration in new vertical markets and the ease, and flexibility, of deployment. In 2007, Gartner stated the CRM market was on pace to exceed US$7.4 billion.

Growth is positive, especially for CRM vendors, and it reveals that companies are now embracing the essential need to become better at managing all of their relationships, and do a better job of looking after their current customers in addition to trying to find new ones. Having an efficient CRM solution will always be a requirement, but the work is dependent on the effective balance of people to adopt and use the solution, efficient processes to follow, and an adaptive technology to enable it to work together.

There are a multitude of factors driving CRM growth but none has been as effective as on-demand applications also known as software as a service (SaaS).

SaaS
SaaS alone represents more than US$1 billion in CRM revenue and continues to rise as more companies embrace the benefits of this platform. CRM solutions delivered this way have changed the landscape and allowed more companies access to world-class solutions. Paced by the success of CRM leader salesforce.com, 80 percent of CRM solutions have SaaS as a delivery mechanism. Here are a few factors as to why the SaaS model is preferred:

Cost – the lower cost of deployment as well as lowering risk has aided in the success of SaaS solutions. The pay as you go model has made it easier for companies wanting to lower the cost of ownership. The SaaS model has sliced the up and running time by 50 percent, eliminating the need for the usual 18-24 month implementation, and upgrades are transparent.

Ease of use - SaaS CRM solutions are not only easier to configure but easier for the end user, causing them to embrace and utilize the tools more. The integration of the CRM solution with popular tools such as Microsoft Outlook or other e-marketing solutions assists in positive adoption – a key factor in the success of CRM implementations.

Flexibility – The deliverability of SaaS over the Internet allows access virtually anywhere. The whole movement of web-enabled applications, coupled with service-oriented architecture (SOA), allows a multitude of configurable solutions that will aide in collaboration with other applications, giving companies a holistic view of the health and efficiency of their business.

Web 2.0 and Customer Experience Management
While positive growth in web-enabled CRM systems has made it easier for companies to manage relationships, it has also changed the way that prospects and customers interact with companies. Web 2.0 strategies and technologies have made this interface bi-directional, meaningful and relevant. Consumer generated media such as blogs, podcasts, social networking as well as solutions such as YouTube has given a global voice to the customer that cannot be ignored.

This has given rise to a new term, customer experience management, which allows the experience a customer has with your company to be expressed – good, bad or indifferent. Companies cannot control what is being expressed about them, but by managing this exchange they can react, learn and adjust accordingly. The power shift has changed and staying on top of this change will require new ways of handling customer interactions. The key to managing all of this is the ability to capture and measure it. Customer loyalty is not the measurement that it has always been and can be easily swayed and revoked based on good, bad and indifferent experiences.

All of this is placing emphasis on the next phase of CRM – what some are calling CRM 2.0. Regardless of how CRM is defined it will always be the underlying foundation of managing relationships. Executive support, strategic process planning and user adoption will always be the defining factor of success, rather than the technology chosen.

The Neighborhood America Story Comes to Life






It began with a big idea... leverage the power of the Internet to give people a voice and organizations a way to listen to them.

And it grew into a leading force in the industry... enabling both private and public sectors to engage consumers for the purpose of driving results.

We invite you to watch this five minute video, which chronicles our company's foundation, our history and our charge to conquer the world!

Click on the image, or visit our NeighborhoodTV channel on YouTube to rate, comment, and share with friends.

A Company Like Me, Part 1
by Paul Greenberg

But there is one other facet that can't be ignored for CRM 2.0 - and that is that we're not just talking about personalization, but we're talking about humanization.

Read the full blog post that appeared in PGreenblog.

Local Stations Should Be Socializing
by Adam Armbruster




As you no doubt have heard, social networking is an American habit... We recently spoke to Dan Miller... about how a local station and its advertisers could benefit from social networking.

Read the interview that appeared in TV Week.


Adidas Deal with NBA Builds Mobile Database
by Giselle Abramovich

Not only did mobile help Adidas extend the reach of its brand, but the mobile channel allowed for a customer-centric program providing consumers the opportunity to keep up-to-date on NBA All-Star Week special events.

Read the full article that appeared in Mobile Marketer.

Incorporating Social Networking into your Editorial Plan


If you’re not the kind of person that picks up the phone to call a friend, plan get-togethers, or return voicemails in a timely manner… it’s hard to stay connected, isn’t it? And it used to be that if you lost someone’s phone number or email address, and didn’t have another way of contacting them… well, that was it for the relationship.

In the last couple of years, that’s all changed, thanks to social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. Now, even if you lose touch with a friend or former co-worker, you can find them online and, hopefully, continue where you left off.

So how can this new media help executives, editors and publishers of leading media websites – both on the business and editorial sides?

Neighborhood America CEO Kim Kobza chaired a panel discussion at the Interactive Media Conference 2008 that took a provocative look at how audiences are connecting with each other, and how journalists and advertisers are able to connect with them. The session titled, “Social Networking – Connecting with Your Users,” was on Day Two of the conference, May 15.

Kobza shared his expertise on the subject and how Neighborhood America uniquely helps media companies, like FOX News and Scripps Networks, to incorporate enterprise social networking into their business plans. These media companies have had tremendous success leveraging this new media to engage audiences, collect content from them and, yes, what everyone wants to know about… monetizing the interaction through increased advertising revenue.

Jim Sexton, former senior vice president of Scripps Networks Interactive, also took part in the discussion, in his new role as SVP and editorial director of SPC Digital. Rounding out the lineup was the director of marketing for Digg, Beth Murphy.

Breed Heads to Hollywood

Some have called him a star. A man whose personality commands stages and charisma charms audiences (okay, maybe I’m over exaggerating… but really, he IS a charismatic speaker).

Fortunately for us, Neighborhood America’s Senior Director of Sales, Jason Breed, isn’t quitting his day job anytime soon in search of the bright lights of Hollywood. The audience he entertained, and at the same time educated, was at the Digital Hollywood Spring conference, May 7.

Digital Hollywood Spring is the premiere entertainment and technology conference in the country, with over 15,000 top executives attending each year. The Conference partnered with the Online Marketing Summit (OMS) to provide attendees useful information on successfully building and executing online marketing strategies. The OMS track featured 5 sessions – a keynote speaker and four workshops – each with an expert panel of strategists and practitioners.

Breed presented a workshop, “Social Media and Measuring Online Success: The Real Applications of Social Media and How to Truly Benchmark Marketing Success Online,” in which he discussed social media strategies that actually drive ROI versus applications that are deployed for the sake of following the latest fad. Through real world examples of companies that are generating value from enterprise social networks, audience members learned about what works and what doesn’t.

Most recently, Breed has had the privilege of sharing Neighborhood America’s best practices and strategies for building online communities for the OMS Regional Series, which made stops in over 10 cities across the U.S.