WE’VE BEEN KNOWN TO THROW A GOOD PARTY

June, 2012

Rapport’s 10th Anniversary and Bill’s Retirement Party

Clients, colleagues, suppliers and significant others all help Rapport celebrate 10 years.

We also celebrated Bill’s retirement (December 2011).

The party was held at Jason George Restaurant on June 20, 2012.


 

July, 2011

Meet and Greet 2011

People new to the Rapport community enjoyed a special Meet and Greet at our office on July 13, 2011


 

February, 2010

How to Make Your Blog Enticing to Readers and Google

with Rob Campbell

Faith Seekings, Bill Tibbles and Terri Carson invite you to come out for a fun and fast-paced discussion on how to make your blog enticing to both readers and search robots.

For most people, blogging is work. Hard work. Understand why good original content gets indexed immediately, and how it can be promoted to find more readers over time. Understand keywords and bookmarking services. Learn how the sidebar can be a content catalyst for building premium social capital and what you can do to help your post find a wider audience.

The blog is the cornerstone of healthy social media marketing, because its the cheapest and best place to tell the whole story. Higher visibility to Google and other search engines = more traffic = more business.

You will learn:

  • The elements of a perfect post – five places to win keywords. .
  • Why the sidebar is more important than the posts.
  • What are the four most essential sidebar widgets and why? .
  • Blog buttons/indexes and community widgets.
  • Three ways blogs make money.

Brought to you by: Rapport and Smojoe These two companies have come together to help clients make the blogs they work so hard on work harder for them, build social relevancy and improve their search engine ranking.

 

December 2009

Professional Uses of Social Networking

with Laurie Dillon-Schalk

Come out for a rich presentation and active discussion on how to use social media professionally.

Seven out of ten Canadians are on Facebook visiting 20 times per month. Firms are mastering LinkedIn to manage their customer relationships. Online video consumption is at an all time high. Has your firm incorporated social media into its marketing plans? Join us and learn how you and your firm can leverage social media professionally.

You will learn:

  • The rise of social media and what is contributing to its growth.
  • The impact of social media on relationship management.
  • More emphasis on what you could be doing with social media.
  • Examples of the impact on the bottom lines for companies.
  • And specific examples on how to use many tools.
  • How to use LinkedIn effectively for client relationship management and business development .
  • Examples of what other professional services firms are doing.
  • A case study reviewing the planning, execution and results of a successful social media campaign using Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Your host will be:

Laurie Dillon-Schalk, Social Wisdom

Laurie Dillon-Schalk is the Chief Marketing Strategist and founder of Social Wisdom – a Toronto based digital marketing agency that helps firms and individuals use social media and the web wisely.

Laurie started her career in marketing and sales at Kraft Canada before joining IBM Global Services to establish IBM’s first marketing strategy consulting practice in Canada. Since 1998, Laurie has been consulting in marketing strategy and has helped over 45 businesses with their web strategy, web redesigns, e-marketing and web operations including firms such as Futureshop, Danier Leather, Blue Cross Blue Shields, SunLife, Holt Renfrew, Panasonic, CIBC, IBM itself, and more. In 2006, Laurie started venturing into social media – first helping IBM Global Services understand web 2.0 concepts, then launched several corporate blogs.

In 2009, Laurie founded Socialwisdom.ca to meet the growing demand for social media consulting and education. Her company was the hired gun behind the 2009 Scotiabank BuskerFest including acting as the voice behind BuskerFest’s Facebook and Twitter accounts. In her spare time, Laurie is co-chairing the American Marketing Association’s Social Media Group for the Toronto Chapter.

 

October 2009

Differentiation-Based Leadership

This seminar was fun, engaging, motivating and useful! It taught audience members a simple formula called ‘1thoughtbranding’ for finding the strongest marketing message for their business, product or service. Great marketing ideas require great leadership to make them stick. This presentation let audiences walk away with tools to establish a meaningful point of difference in the marketplace and the personal motivation to drive it home.

Here are some comments we received:

Thank you for a great event! The lunch was amazing and Michel provided us with a lot of knowledge I can use.

It was a great seminar. My biggest takeaway, what I’m working on now, is: to listen when people give you compliments, rather than dismissing them, as the compliments may identify something unique about you that you haven’t thought of.

I absolutely loved the seminar. It is the first seminar I’ve attended in a long time where I felt like I really got something worthwhile. The biggest takeaway for me was to determine the core strength I have to offer.

Thanks for inviting me to the seminar, which was fantastic. My biggest takeaway was that differentiation is so important that it beats out other important things like addressing weaknesses, i.e. finding and emphasizing the difference comes first, then other things can be dealt with but only without interfering with that difference.

 

July 2009

High Impact Marketing:

Doing More with Less

When your company is in growth mode, having the right marketing materials is essential. However, the natural reaction in this economy is to tighten the reigns on spending and to try to do more with less. While you cannot afford to neglect your marketing materials, you can do more with less using connection, clarity and consistency. Our marketing map will help you evaluate your offering and your impact. Determine how to make sure your tools work better together and lead prospects in the right direction.

In this session you will learn:

  • How to make the right marketing moves at the right time
  • How to maximize the impact of each marketing piece
  • How to avoid the dreaded ‘spaghetti marketing’
  • How to make your budget work for – not against – you

BMOBM- Bring Your Own Branding Materials!

At this workshop, we will be reviewing selected ‘marketing maps’ to determine what changes will make the biggest impact over the next year.

Brought to you by: Rapport Communications & Design Inc. A full-service marketing and design firm that has been serving business to business clients since early 2002

 

May 2009

Viral Marketing Seminar Recap

The May 26, 2009 seminar on viral marketing was both informative and entertaining. Scott Stratten presented key components to creating a good viral marketing campaign, focussed on movies, plus shared with us what he learned from his own experiences.

First, viral movies need to either make people laugh, emotionally move them, or make them say wow! Scott’s advice is to avoid humour as it can so easily be taken the wrong way, but instead focus on emotion-driven wow-factor themes.

Second, determine what it is you want to accomplish with the video (ie: get speaker kit requests, have people sign-up for your newsletter or sell product.) This is key to both developing theme and deciding what to do at the end.

Third, once the end goal is determined, make sure it’s easy to follow through. For example, if you want them to sign up for your newsletter, the last frame of the movie should have an explanation and a call to action, with a place for them to actually sign-up. A tip to get greater conversion – have the Submit button say something like ‘I deserve more’ button.

And finally, make sure you are set up to deal with success. That means having bandwidth that can accommodate thousands of people watching at the same time. Use YouTube to help but also embed it on your site, removing related videos to watch (they lead people away – not good). Warning – By using YouTube only, people can’t go to your site or sign-up for your newsletter and can be lead away by other videos. Have scalable ability to deliver what you are promoting. For example: use a professional contact management system like MailChimp for newsletter sign-ups, have a fulfillment house ready to deliver your products. All of these things can be done with scalable services, meaning you only pay for what you use. If someone orders $100,000, even $10,000 worth of CDs, it is worth paying for some help. Remember, once launched, you can’t stop it.

Viral marketing can be a great and successful part of your overall marketing plan. The key is to develop something that speaks directly to the ‘pain’ of your target audience, to draw them in, then motivate them to pass it on. Viral marketing is the gift that keeps on giving, meaning if successful, once you send it out it keeps going and going without you doing anything about it.

You can make your own movie and start by sending it to your own list. However, between our brilliant movie ideas, professional production and Scott’s list of 250,000 he can guarantee it will be viewed by 25,000 people. Scott has had great success in the past, including a client with a $1,000,000 worth of book sales almost immediately. If you have any questions about how Rapport and Un-marketing can help you develop a viral marketing campaign, please call Faith at 416.368.8956.

 

March 2009

Social Media Success! Twitter Seminar Recap

Thursday March 26, 2009 Rapport hosted a seminar called Social Media Success! with Scott Stratten, Un-Marketing.

Rapport’s interest in hosting a seminar on Social Media was to introduce this somewhat new-to-mainstream tool to our clients as another means of executing their brand. We had almost a full house with people from wide range of businesses. We did a brief overview on social media in general and learned a whole lot about Twitter from Scott Stratten.

In a nutshell:

Scott Stratten prefers Twitter over other platforms for many reasons:

  • the open-door nature of it (don’t have to ask permission to connect)
  • authenticity of the posts due to 140 character limit
  • encourages natural relationship building before a ‘friends’ commitment
  • ability to reply easily
  • potential of the re-tweet
  • easy to follow or un-follow whomever you want

Tips on making it work for you:

  • personalize your home page background
  • write an interesting profile
  • don’t simply put links to your site or blog in a tweet
  • don’t just tweet, read other tweets and replay or re-tweet
  • negative tweets are just not interesting and won’t get you followed
  • check out strangers who follow you, could be interesting
  • don’t tweet anything personal or business you wouldn’t put on a billboard millions of people including your mom drives by
  • you don’t have to be brilliant in every tweet, but….
  • try to write something re-tweetable everyday

How to organize it all:

  • tweetdeck organizes who you follow and conversations
  • use sites like Twellow (Twitter yellow pages) to find Tweeters in certain industries or in your area
  • you don’t have to follow or reply to everyone that follows you

The most important thing to remember is the idea with all forms of social media (LinkedIn, FlickR, Twitter, Facebook, etc, etc.) is not to ask for a sale, but to build relationships. A big thank you to Scott Stratten for giving this talk! I recommend you follow him on Twitter because between amusing anecdotes he gives a lot of great Twitter advice

 

February 2009

Rapport Party 2009!

On February 26th, clients and friends helped Rapport celebrate their re-branding launch, one year inauguration of Tibbles and Rapport integration, their re-designed work space expansion, and most importantly their clients!!! Rapport would like to thank everyone who joined us in our celebration and helped make the event a memorable one!

Catered by Amazing Foods, their unique Vietnamese Imperial Spring Rolls with Chili Sauce served in square shooters, plus the specially-created-for-the-occasion ‘Rapportinis’ were the hit of the night!

Congratulations to Francesco Lopez for winning the business card draw and taking home the martini shaker set!

A special thank you goes out to Celestial Delights and M2020 for their gift bag donations!!!

A great time was had by all!