I am proud to announce Mitra Creative’s win of two 2010 MARCOM CREATIVE AWARDS, including a MarCom Platinum Award. We received the awards for our work for Nurture Marketing (formerly the Nurture Institute). 

READ THE PRESS RELEASE HERE 

With this year’s wins, Mitra Creative now has two MarCom Platinum Awards (2010 and 2009), and three MarCom Gold Awards (2010, 2009, and 2007). Thank you to everyone on our team for your brilliance, and a huge note of thanks goes to Nurture Marketing and our clients for making these wins possible!

We at Mitra Creative are proud to announce our latest achievement–the creation of a new brand and progressive new website for NURTURE MARKETING (Nurturemarketing.com). Nurture Marketing (formerly the Nurture Institute), is a full-service marketing agency that offers a broad spectrum of traditional and non-traditional services (lead generation, communications, direct mail, e-mail campaigns, assessments and planning, branding, training and meeting facilitation), as well as a highly-developed platform of channel marketing services (they have built comprehensive programs for Microsoft, Nokia, and others).

The concept of Nurture Marketing was originated more than 20 years ago by the company’s co-founder and one of its senior partners, Jim Cecil. It focuses on combining good marketing principles with the nurturing of prospects and customers to dramatically increase sales revenues. Today, Nurture Marketing is not only a set of best practices, but also the name of a powerhouse of a company, led by Jim, and the company’s other partners, Eric Rabinowitz (Jim’s co-author on the successful books, “Nurturing Customer Relationships,” and “101 Business Love Letters“), Barbara Pfeiffer, and Jennifer Herold-Garcia. They believe in, and now ARE, Nurture Marketing.

We were invited to bring our business expertise, award-winning design acumen, and our technical expertise to the task of taking an objective look at the former Nurture Institute, and now (with the new branding), Nurture Marketing’s visual brand and web presence and uplift and modernize it–in keeping with Nurture’s progressive offerings and recent, significant growth. We took the company’s now-previous brand assets and revitalized them with a fresh, forward-looking visual sensibility. We also built a new website for Nurture from scratch — approach, design, development — utilizing a modernized, easy-to-use content management system framework, powerful, provocative 21st Century aesthetics, and a true Web 2.0/3.0-and-beyond information architecture. For example, we put Nurture’s Blog at the center of the site’s Homepage, enabling a “living dialogue” with prospects, clients, and business partners, and tying together follower and consumer communities.

Nurture Marketing’s management team is thrilled with the results. According to Eric Rabinowitz, “Thanks to the design, creative, and implementation team at Mitra Creative, we now have a magnificent new brand and website that reflect the quality of our work, and our service to our customers.” We are thrilled to have been given the opportunity to serve this wonderful company and team!

With the release of WordPress® 3.0, the popular Blogging platform has taken another step toward becoming a full-fledged CMS (Content Management System) along the lines of Joomla® and Drupal®.

The first thing a user will notice about 3.0 is the new default theme. “Kubrick” has been replaced by “Twentyten.” Twentyten allows you to choose your own header image, and with the click of a mouse, you can determine whether a Page layout should be one or two columns. WordPress 3.0 also includes a greatly improved menu management system, so that a non-technical user can create customized menus on a Page-by-Page basis.

Version 3.0 has not changed the fact that WordPress allows you to choose from a wide array of plug-ins. Again, with a few clicks of a mouse, you can download and install a plug-in that will give you a contact form, manage comment spam, optimize your Pages for SEO, and even go so far as to provide you with an e-commerce solution.

The role of a website is changing. It is no longer the unique representation of a company or individual on the Internet. Today you can follow a company or individual on Twitter or and Facebook, connect on Linkedin, and post comments to a Blog.

For each Page you build in a WordPress website, you have to confront the questions–is this a Page or a Blog? Do I allow comments or not?  In a way, it provokes the question: what is now a Website vs. what is now a Blog? With modern tools available, a Website should no longer be just an online brochure. It should, similarly to the example cited above about the use and “conversational” aspects of Social Media platforms, encourage active dialogue with site users, including information seekers, consumers, those who are interested in what you have to say and what you show/demonstrate on your site, and more. Because WordPress started out as a Blogging platform, it is highly suited for this interactive world.

A fascinating article appeared a few days ago on Mashable.com regarding the ongoing Content Curation debate. Defined in an article on Social Media Today titled “Manifesto for the Content Curator,” by Rohit Bhargrava, “A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online.”

We at Mitra Creative believe that conducting research on, aggregation, and posting of content on various Social Media channels to promote ideas, thought, education, and more, adds value and depth to a topic or issue. Our team has found it valuable to augment our/our clients’ self-published information, which may appear to be “self promotion” even when self-published material represents original thought, with additional, more “objective” content.

The Mashable.com article, by Steven Rosenbaum, states, ” ‘Curation comes up when search stops working,’ says author and NYU Professor Clay Shirky. But it’s more than a human-powered filter. ‘Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.’ ” This is, in our opinion, one of the great examples of Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s Web 3.0 concept, where metadata is now blended in a large virtual repository and used to aggregate thought and even solve problems.

Read the article and see the video here.

As all of us at MITRA CREATIVE wish our families, friends, clients, colleagues and followers a very Happy, Prosperous New Year, we want to share with all of you a great article that we read on the popular and highly informative, “social, media, brand” information resource/Blog called Penn Olson. The article, by contributor Willis Wee, speaks of the “4 Reasons To Employ Social Media in 2010″:

READ THE ARTICLE HERE

We usually comment on what we read, but this article — containing a compelling, concise video called “Social Media ROI: Socialnomics” (from the insightful work and writings of Erik Qualman) — brilliantly summarizes the Business Social Media landscape and we feel it does not require further narrative.

We very much look forward in 2010 to providing valuable information, articles, information about Mitra Creative’s happenings on this Blog, and working with many of you to support your interactive/media design and development, marketing communications strategy, corporate digital video production and Web 2.0/3.0 and other needs!