LexingtonMABuilder.com is a website for Porter Builders, a general contracting firm which specializes in residential and commercial construction and renovation in Eastern Massachusetts.

Berkshire Direct did both the design and the development work on this site.

Local marketing agency Berkshire Direct Acquired, Plans for Expansion Thursday, April 1, 2010

Williamstown, MA (April 5, 2010) – Local marketing agency Berkshire Direct Acquired, Plans for Expansion Thursday, April 1, 2010.

“We are excited about the potential we see for growing Berkshire Direct into a full service interactive marketing agency,” said Allen Jezouit, one of the new partners. “We plan on expanding our marketing services to better serve our existing clients and to help local/regional businesses, organizations and non-profits with their marketing initiatives. We plan on building on to Berkshire Direct’s established direct mail and print advertising business by offering a broad range of new services, including web site design/development, web marketing, mail-fulfillment, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), social media services, video production, television commercials, and a full service sales and marketing consultancy. Our new team has 20+ years experience in marketing, sales, print, web development and design allowing us to better respond to local and regional business needs. As we like to say, we deliver big company marketing capabilities on a small company budget.”

Matt Storey, Berkshire Direct President, said “My family and I are happy that Allen and our talented staff will be able to take the business to the next level for our clients.  We know that Berkshire Direct will continue to serve them with lots of creative energy and provide new opportunities to help their businesses grow and prosper. We will continue to collaborate with the new team at Berkshire Direct on future projects and wish them all the best in this venture.”

Berkshire Direct, Inc. was founded in 2001 by Martha and John Storey, of Williamstown, after having sold their publishing company – Storey Communications, Inc. to Workman Publishing (NY).   Storey Publishing continues in North Adams, MA, as one of the country’s leading independent publishers of “back to basics” books.  Their son Matt joined the company in 2003 as President, and ran the day-to-day operations since then, also serving as the key account manager.  Berkshire Direct began as a direct mail company, with the Gardener’s Marketplace enjoying a 36+ year run, but expanded quickly to include advertising sales, design and marketing for local businesses large and small.  Local clients include Northern Berkshire Healthcare, MountainOne Financial, Williams College, Williamstown Chamber of Commerce, Williamstown Youth Center, Ioka Valley Farm, Williamstown Physical Therapy, Boston Investor Communications Agency (BICG), and New England Landscape & Aquatics.  BDI’s client list also includes Camp Dudley YMCA (Westport, NY), the longest-running summer camp in the country; National Patient Safety Foundation (Boston, MA), a national resource for individuals and organizations committed to improving the safety of patients; and Bucknell University (PA) Athletics.

Allen Jezouit was recruited by the Storeys to join the team at Berkshire Direct in the Fall of 2009 as the Vice President of Business Development after serving as Marketing Director of Redstone Properties, Inc. for four years, and 18+ years in sales, sales management, marketing, and operations with Praxair, Inc.  He has managed the day-to-day operations and growth initiatives at Berkshire Direct since that time.

ABOUT BERKSHIRE DIRECT
Berkshire Direct is a full-service marketing agency located in Williamstown, MA. We deliver big company marketing capabilities on a small company budget. Call (413) 458-1721 or visit www.berkshiredirect.com for more information.

The section of our presentation about getting your website ready is available as a pdf file here

While going through this process, one of our customers Prosperity Candle (whose site is still under construction at this point), sent us a couple of tools that they used as part of the process and we’re pretty impressed with them. Check them out:

The email was about coming up with content ideas, something that anyone who is asked to put out a regular newsletter knows can be a tough task. The occasional writer’s block is inevitable, no matter how talented you are.

Takeaways
Six questions you can ask yourself to generate content ideas:

Great Resources
ConstantContact.com has some great resources you can use:

The first 25 slides from our presentation are available as a pdf file here

The worlds of B2B and B2C marketing are in a tremendous state of flux as marketers seek to take advantage of the explosion in new media while coping with the rapid demise of traditional media. Generally speaking, at this point in the cycle, the winners (e.g. Facebook) and losers (e.g. newspapers) are becoming clear. However, generalities aren’t good enough for you to make allocation decisions for your precious advertising budget. After all, what if newspaper still works for you? Our seminar will discuss the steps you can take to measure the results of your current marketing investments while highlighting the new media opportunities you can’t afford to ignore. Attend this seminar, and you will learn to make future marketing investment decisions with more confidence and to shift your spend into your most effective channels. Bottom line? Your sales will rise.

The Orchards offers wireless service in their meeting room, so please bring your laptop so you can follow along. Questions/audience interaction is encouraged. Specific topics include:

1. Social Networking – setting up a Fan page on Facebook, creating a profile on LinkedIn, and then actually taking advantage of these things.
2. Email Marketing – setting up a ConstantContact or VerticalResponse account, mailing customers, etc.
3. Integrated Marketing – setting up campaigns that integrate print, TV, radio, web, email, etc. and MEASURE THE RESULTS.

There is no fee for Chamber Members and a $25 fee for non-members. This will be one of several seminars the Chamber will be offering this year.

I’ve stumbled across several articles recently by industry experts all circling around the same topic … simpler emails are better.

While it is tempting to design amazing emails loaded with graphics and all kinds of bells and whistles, abundant evidence appears to suggest that your efforts would be best utilized elsewhere.

1. First and foremost, emails need to make it to the inbox. Deliver-ability is your number one concern. Large graphics files or attachments can stop your beautiful creation short of the inbox.
2. Next, you want your emails to be opened. Writing a catchy subject line is important – but there is a balance. Too catchy, and even your loyal customers/readers will think you are spamming them. Consumers are becoming sensitive to subject lines loaded with “FREE” or “LIMITED TIME OFFER” or similar phrases.
3. How does the email look without images? It should still get the message across.
4. Do you have a call to action with a link or links? If not, why send the email?
5. Don’t forget the opt-out/unsubscribe links!

Expectations were high for Google’s new Social Search, which lets consumers search the content their friends produce on social media websites. But privacy restrictions at Facebook mean that Google’s tool isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and other social search tools are suffering as well.

Social Search, which searches content published on Twitter, Blogger, Flickr, and Picasa, only has access to Facebook’s public profile pages, which have very little information on them, according to a PCWorld report. Social Search only combs through public social media content, and since much of the information on Facebook pages is accessible only by signing in to Facebook, Google can’t include it.

Losing out on relevant data from Facebook — which has 350 million members worldwide — makes Social Search far less appealing, but Google isn’t the only search engine suffering from Facebook’s walled garden. Bing announced back in October that it would include Facebook status updates in its real-time search results, but it hasn’t happened yet because Facebook members can’t make those updates public.

The issue that search engines are dealing with is different from Facebook’s ongoing internal privacy policy. The social network is pushing its members to share their information with “everyone on the internet,” but it’s a misleading term. Sharing with everyone on Facebook means anyone on the social network has access to your information, but they must be logged in to see it.

Facebook currently has no plans to let its members make their profile information open to the entire internet, according to the report.

Source: http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/25802.asp

Even newcomers to the Facebook marketing game will no doubt have discovered that the key to a successful Facebook marketing campaign is finding the right people to whom you should peddle your wares.

But here’s the catch: Finding the right market is also the toughest part of promoting yourself on Facebook. If you can do it right, you’ll be able to watch your bank account get fatter and fatter. Do this unsuccessfully, however, and your business will be relegated to virtual anonymity.

Lucky for all of us who want to market on Facebook, however, one company has created a way to make searching for the right target audience for your business a thing of the past.

Web traffic specialists uSocial.net’s new social media service allows customers to buy fans on Facebook. According to the company’s CEO, Leon Hill, this is the quickest and easy way to win the social media marketing game.

Hill explains: “We can deliver up to 10,000 highly-targeted fans or friends quickly and without trouble, to almost any page on the site. There is simply no other service like it on the web.”

USocial.net say they can make just about any business into a nearly overnight success online. What’s more, their program is able to target fans based on their geographical location or by interest or industry.

“We can deliver relevant people in almost any industry or interest group, from pets and animals, to business, marketing and so much more, explains Hill. “Not only that but we can also target geo-locations as specific as country for our clients meaning their final marketing efforts will be that much more powerful.”

USocial.net’s service is not the first service designed to help people make money online, but according to the company it is the very first one to allow customers to buy fans and friends on Facebook.

For more information you can head to http://usocial.net/facebook_marketing or you can contact the company via the form on their website.

Link to the post here.