I've just finished rolling out a new branding product to my department at Cisco. A while back while working on some personal branding and career planning I developed an idea to better brand the virtual account managers within my group and also improve communications with the internal and external (partner) audience that we speak to daily.
Using photoshop and some corporate approved photography and design I composed an email banner that installs across the top of newly created emails within Outlook and Apple's Entourage. These new email banners have a picture of the VCAM along with contact information. When a user clicks on the banner it links him/her to a Webex Sales Portal where each Cisco VCAM has customized their own page with regional contacts, links, documents and webex recordings.
The response has been tremendous. I rolled it out to approximately 50 people in the organization and in a matter of days I had tons of requests from other groups within Cisco (and also partners for that matter) wanting a banner of their own.
The moral of the story is that email is the most highly used and most under-utilized branding tool in the marketplace today. There are several companies in that area that are starting to see email as a platform that can be improved on in many ways.
One of those companies is Incredimail (http://www.incredimail.com) They offer features for your email including notifiers, emoticons, email backgrounds, ecards, animations, and 3D Effects. Another company is Goldmail (http://www.goldmail.com) which offers an email service that embeds a link and takes the reader to a hosted video message.
There are also several companies that hope to expand the searchability and useability of current email clients like Outlook. Two of these companies are Xobni and X1. They help users manage the large numbers of emails coming into their inbox, help manage text searching within those emails and builds connected links between users and subject lines.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
