By Michael Layne

We’re taking positive steps at Marx Layne to encourage our employees to make healthy choices throughout the workday. We know healthy team members are happy and productive.

We admit we’re a little self-serving, however, since our agency reaps countless benefits such as fewer sick days and lower health care costs when employees exercise, eat right and maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Still, like all employers, we’re grappling with skyrocketing costs for medical, dental and vision coverage and looking for affordable, but comprehensive, options that serve the needs of our people.

Since our inception, we’ve absorbed health care cost increases for our employees or identified alternative solutions to circumvent spikes in pricing. But it’s getting tough.

Two years ago, our insurance provider raised our premium by 20 percent. To avoid this unnecessary hike, we switched providers. Now, our current carrier is demanding a 21 percent increase for the new contract year, beginning Aug. 1. We didn’t take the news lying down, or sitting down. We chose a new plan that emphasizes wellness and maintains costs. Our new insurance program will require everyone to get a complete physical during the initial transition phase and make lifestyle changes based on their doctor’s recommendation to reduce the risk of preventable diseases.

In the meantime, we’re doing our part at Marx Layne by creating workplace opportunities for our employees to get up, get fit and take responsibility for their own health.

Earlier this year, David Stoyka, PR practitioner extraordinaire and budding fitness guru, suggested that we replace desk chairs with inflatable fitness balls to improve spinal health and minimize the damage caused by prolonged sitting. It took a minute to get accustomed to the bouncy seats, but everyone appears to be walking taller.

Last week, Pat Stoll, head of all things necessary to run the place, installed a toaster oven and single-burner hot plate in the kitchen. The new equipment is expected to save energy and spare soups and pastas from electromagnetic-radiation in the microwave. Plus, we traded bagels for organic fruit and purified water, available every morning for breakfast or a midday snack.

And some of our amateur cyclists bring their bikes to work for lunchtime rides – an encouraging sign, but they’ve established fitness goals that would make Jack LaLanne quake with anxiety.

Yet, none of these changes would amount to much if we didn’t recognize our employees’ need for a calm and welcoming environment, so we’ve assigned temperament control to our four-legged workers. Grand, a cool and collected golden retriever, and Rosie, a bichon frisé puppy with a curious nose, show up daily for work and keep the mood light. Our employees may appreciate their 401(k), but they love our K-9s.

Finally, we’ve launched this blog to chronicle these new experiences. Join us online at www.marxlayne.com/blog as we embark on our journey to wellness, managing our waistlines and our health care costs.

The place has gone to the dogs, but we’re on the ball.

By MATT SCHULER, Digital Architect, Marx Layne

If you want to reach out and drive the conversation, there are four pillars of interactive marketing according to Ryan Warren, the Senior Director of Studio Orange at ExactTarget.

You can reach your targeted audiences on a broad range of platforms, but if you connect on email, mobile, social and sites, you’re doing really well.  How we communicate with subscribers, fans and followers is fundamentally changing.  There will be a crossover between the groups as your email subscribers will fan you on Facebook, follow you on Twitter, visit your website and vice versa.

How do we differentiate ourselves from the crowd?  Warren compared our growing digital world to the changing stock on the shelves of supermarkets.  Where supermarkets once carried 20,000 items, now they’re stocking more than 50,000.

“It’s becoming more and more challenging for marketers to reach the right people at the right time,” Warren said.  There will be 3,000 messages delivered in various forms throughout a person’s day and at most they can only recognize 100.

So how do you fit inside that small scope of remembrance? You have to be in the right place at the right time with the right message.  One of the main things ExactTarget does is email marketing. Warren cited statistics about the first place people turn to in the morning to start catching up. The destination? People turn to email.  This is personally relevant for me, because it’s what I do. I wake up and check in on any messages that were sent overnight.

After that, it’s social media time. I turn to Facebook and Twitter. Was there anything that happened that needs my attention?  Do I need to read up on anything?  After that I head to the web. I turn to news aggregators like Techmeme and gather in as many headlines as I can. It’s almost like panning for gold and I’m looking for nuggets.  If you want to drive the conversation, you have to know what people are talking about and plan where it’s headed.

Coordinating the message across channels is important, because it will allow people to connect messages together. If they see something in their email, an update on social media, a link on a news site or another message, it has a good chance of being recognized.

“Real-time data is the new black,” Warren said.  Right now, we’re only on the tip of the iceberg when it comes to interaction management.  We can implement better operations, technology and strategy to manage the conversations more effectively.

“Data is the key. How do you have more real-time conversations with your customers?” Warren asked. It comes back to monitoring.  Do we have the right tools to do the job? They’re out there; we just need to use them.

We don’t need a time machine to drive the conversation—we just need the right tools and we need to use them.

This is the last of a seven-part series taking a look at how we can be a force of change for those around us.

Introduction: Back to the Future Midwest

Part 1: We don’t need a time machine…to predict the weather.

Part 2: We don’t need a time machine…to stay relevant.

Part 3: We don’t need a time machine…to know where we’re going.

Part 4: We don’t need a time machine…to tell the future.

Part 5: We don’t need a time machine…to live in the clouds.

Part 6: We don’t need a time machine…to bridge the digital divide.

Part 7: We don’t need a time machine…to drive the conversation.

By MATT SCHULER, Digital Architect, Marx Layne

“Your mom does Facebook better than you do.” And with that, John Meyer and Scott Meyer of 9 Clouds started their Future Midwest discussion.

Can you remember the last time you pulled out a yellow book and flipped through its pages?  It must have been 1989 the last time I looked through one. The Meyers made a fantastic point about the digital divide, saying your mom is already equipped to do the right things on Facebook because your mom has been doing it forever

I need a reminder to remember my friends’ birthdays, but how many mothers had a card system sorted by months and days to remember to send a card out to a loved one.  The older generation already has the offline skills of being social, but it’s important to translate those into digital capabilities.  “They’re not going to use all of the toys on the playground,” the Meyers said.  “They’re going to focus on one thing.

When you look at the fastest growing demographic on Facebook, lately it hasn’t been teens, it’s been baby boomers.  Parents and grandparents are getting on Facebook because they want to be connected with you and see your pictures

There’s a huge difference between social networks, both in terms of numbers and in types of conversations.  The Meyers compared Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.  For interactions, you have to “know your voice and the playgrounds you’re in.  Do what you do best.

The type of listening that your mother is good at is the type of listening a business should be good at online.  The internet is a gigantic place and we can reach more people than we realize.  “We are no longer hindered by our geography,” the Meyers said.  Online we can reward the trust people place in us, and build it just like we would offline.  There needs to be reciprocity if people are going to cross the digital divide.

One of the things 9 Clouds did is something a lot of businesses are hesitant to do.  They created a tutorial on how to create an iFrame page for Facebook business pages and gave it away.  People used it, and the Meyers said they would often come back because that trust was there.

To bridge the digital divide, time is a large component.  You have to inch people in to things and prepare them, especially if they’re a public business, to take criticism.  The Meyers advised that it doesn’t have to be a huge time commitment, but it should be a consistent one.  You can set up notifications to know when people responded or mentioned you.  By responding appropriately to negativity you can change people from complainers to evangelists for your company.

One important point the Meyers made was about services with comparatively lower number of users.  “Instead of seeing low numbers and saying no one uses the service, use it as an opportunity to say hey I can stand out here,” they said.  There’s a lot of work that can be done in a space that has a smaller subset of users.

And a final word of warning for people who aren’t embracing social media, “five years from now people are going to wish they were on social media.”

We don’t need a time machine to bridge the digital divide—we just need our moms.

This is the sixth of a seven-part series taking a look at how we can be a force of change for those around us.

Introduction: Back to the Future Midwest

Part 1: We don’t need a time machine…to predict the weather.

Part 2: We don’t need a time machine…to stay relevant.

Part 3: We don’t need a time machine…to know where we’re going.

Part 4: We don’t need a time machine…to tell the future.

Part 5: We don’t need a time machine…to live in the clouds.

Part 6: We don’t need a time machine…to bridge the digital divide.

Part 7: We don’t need a time machine…to drive the conversation.

By MATT SCHULER, Digital Architect, Marx Layne

When I think of living in the clouds, several different movies come to mind.  Of course, there’s the skyway in Back to the Future Part II, then there’s the Cloud City in Star Wars, and the freaky planet in Avatar.

Of course, you could also say that everyone is living in their personal cloud right now.  That was part of David Leider’s message about The Evolution of Digital Media.  Leider is the CEO of Gas Station TV.  Everybody is using digital devices and each of them have a different cache of inputs.

“We are wired to be wired,” Leider said. Think about all of the different ways that we gather information.  Leider listed several of things for himself, but his inputs are different than mine and ours are different from yours.  If you’re in the content industry though, you have to compete with a growing field of competitors for a shrinking audience of viewers. Leider cited statistics that in the distant past you could run one ad on one of the TV networks and reach 80 percent of the population.  To achieve that same feat now, you’d have to advertise on 100 channels.

Because everyone has so many options at their disposal it’s important to reach people where they’re at.  You have to seek out and find an audience and make them love you. That’s a very important distinction too, because people will find a reason to be offended. Leider said, “you have to be bold and you have to push and really focus to get people to love you.”

We don’t need a time machine to live in the clouds, people already are.  We need to focus on avoiding the traps, and being bold and aggressive to reach our targeted audience.

This is the fifth of a seven-part series taking a look at how we can be a force of change for those around us.

Introduction: Back to the Future Midwest

Part 1: We don’t need a time machine…to predict the weather.

Part 2: We don’t need a time machine…to stay relevant.

Part 3: We don’t need a time machine…to know where we’re going.

Part 4: We don’t need a time machine…to tell the future.

Part 5: We don’t need a time machine…to live in the clouds.

Part 6: We don’t need a time machine…to bridge the digital divide.

Part 7: We don’t need a time machine…to drive the conversation.