We are proud to announce that the website for our client, The Children’s Medical Center of Dayton, has tied for fifth as one of the top hospital websites, according to the Journal of Healthcare Management. The website was measured based on the quality of accessibility, content, marketing and technology. Because of our work on Dayton Children’s SEO and content optimization, they excelled in both content and marketing.

To learn more about the study conducted by the Journal of the Healthcare Management and the top ranked hospitals, read iHealthBeat’s article, “Comparing U.S. Hospitals and Health Systems’ Website Quality.” To read more about Point to Point’s contribution to Dayton Children’s top ranking website, visit our press release: Cleveland Marketing Firm Helps Client Achieve Top Ranking Website.

We are proud to announce the addition of Moveable Truth to Point to Point.

Moveable Truth is a mobile app development company that broadens our range of services and was created to meet the growing demands for mobile. The addition allows us to build engaging tools for brands that we think will be valued by a marketplace which is increasingly resistant to media noise.

Moveable Truth will develop iOS and Android applications and programs built with a focus on the user’s current environment and social situation.

Moveable Truth has completed and launched its first mobile app. Diddit is a game designed for use in group settings to turn awkward social situations into a source of fun. It is available for the iPhone for free in the iTunes App Store.

To read more about our mobile app development company, Moveable Truth, visit our press release: Cleveland Marketing Firm Advances in Mobile Development, or visit MoveableTruth.com.

We wanted to do something different and unique this holiday season to show our clients, family, friends how thankful we are to have them in our lives.

With the creation of ShareMyGratitude.com, we hope to remind everyone that the holidays are a time for reflecting on the things that makes us feel grateful.

On the site, we are asking visitors to post what they’re grateful for this year along with their current city, state and country. Each submission is completely anonymous to allow for a pure expression of gratitude.

“We’re firm believers that cultivating an attitude of gratitude has profound physical and emotional benefits. Causing us to be more peaceful, more positive and hopeful,” said Mark Goren, CEO at Point to Point. “We want everyone to have the opportunity to feel that optimism, and we think ShareMyGratitude.com is a perfect way to do just that.”

So far we have entries from grateful folks from as far away as Egypt, Italy and France. If you feel like you have something to be grateful for, check out ShareMyGraditude.com and share.

We are excited to announce the launch of the COSE Sales Tool, an iPad app that enables the sales force of COSE to engage and inform small business owners about the breadth of products and services offered by the organization. The app was developed by Point to Point to improve COSE’s sales experience and increase conversion rates.

Point to Point developed the functional requirements of the app, designed the user interface, and assisted with content and programming.

Located in Cleveland, Ohio, COSE is a small business support organization that provides cost-effective group purchasing programs, advocacy on legislative and regulatory issues, and networking and educational resources to help Northeast Ohio’s small businesses grow.

To read more about Point to Point’s latest app development, visit our press release: New App Improves Interface with Small Businesses.

In the span of six hours, two separate — but interestingly similar — stories came across my stream.

The first was The Big Lead reporting that Advance Digital, parent company of the New Orleans daily newspaper The Times-Picayune, is paying players from the NFL’s New Orleans Saints to tweet about the newly redesigned online community… about the Saints.

The parent company of The Times-Picayune is paying five New Orleans Saints players to send out messages on Twitter encouraging their followers to visit the newspaper’s Saints website. Under a contract with Advance Digital, players Drew Brees, Lance Moore, Tracy Porter, Pierre Thomas and Jonathan Vilma each tweeted praise for the newly redesigned Saints community on NOLA.com this month and included a link to the site, urging their Twitter subscribers to check it out.

Nothing unprecedented, as athletes are regularly paid to endorse products. Tweets are just the latest venue. But the handwringing comes from journalists and readers wondering why newspapers and parent organizations are “paying” subjects they are supposed to be covering on behalf of the general public.

Interesting journalistic precedent.

The second story came from Gawker, where an unsuspecting author received an email about inserting links (unbeknownst to the editorial staff) for pay.

We’re looking for writers that can help increase the profile of our clients by linking to them within the context of their articles. The clients are huge, and we generally have one that can fit naturally in the context of most article niches.
In return, we pay generously for a single link for our clients.
If you are interested, I’d love to talk about it more.

Again, this is classic (if not brazen) black-hat SEO behavior. Link buying in this manner has been going on since I can remember. Not approved by Google, of course, but what is these days. It’s rare, however, when the outing of the organization is so public, the blog so A-list and when the entire scope (and potential reach) is so fully explained. Email-by-email (even if it’s not entirely true).

So, two stories. Two marketing/advertising issues that weren’t part of the playbook too long ago. So what do they have in common?

Are they both ethical quandaries? Perhaps. But again, the behavior in both stories is no breaking news.

While they are are not crippling to any organization, what these stories have in common is that they are examples in the Pinhole Economy of the public’s trust being compromised.

Normally, this stuff goes on behind the scenes. We don’t know any better. So when we learn they are going on or that they are common practice, it further erodes the public’s trust in newspapers, in SEO (and SEO practitioners), in links, in the organic nature of tweets, in reputable blogs, in social media marketing, in blogger relations. Not wholesale damaging, but a slow, steady erosion.

In the Pinhole Economy we now live in, transparency trumps control. But these two stories exemplify the opposite.

As we become more skeptical of everything, that tiny aperture we allow messages to flow through becomes smaller. And for marketers, these activities make it even more difficult for even our most relevant messaging to get through to our target audiences.

EDIT: Within moments of posting this story, another paid tweet story appeared on Mashable regarding Office star Rainn Wilson and Del Taco (that was done in jest).

It’s going to get worse before it gets better. Transparency will increase trust. But we’re not there yet.

Blurry Flickr photo courtesy of JackVinson

We are thrilled to announce our newest client, The Children’s Medical Center of Dayton.

Dayton Children’s is one of only a handful of hospitals in Ohio devoted to the health, safety and information needs of children and their family.

Point to Point will be working with Dayton Children’s on search engine optimization.

To read more about Point to Point’s newest client, visit our press release: Cleveland Marketing Firm Welcomes Children’s Hospital

We are happy to announce the addition of The Cancer Center at Lake Manassas to our client family.

Located in Gainesville, Va., the Center is a partnership between Prince William and Fauquier Hospitals that provides radiation therapy with a primary focus on breast and prostate cancers.

Point to Point will be developing a new advertising and marketing communications plan to align messaging and grow market share in the Northern Virginia marketplace.

To read more about Point to Point’s newest client, visit our press release: Cleveland Marketing Firm Welcomes Virginia-Based Cancer Center

Instant history is a wonderful part of our current society.

Recency obfuscates perspective. And it’s often what gets noticed (and actually remembered) is not always what’s important, but what gets the most eyeballs.

We see it in sports, on the news and now we get to see in your own life with Facebook’s latest update to your profile: Timeline.

In short, Timeline turns our profiles into our very own online autobiography, curating our Facebook-based history of activities, photos and other assorted media into a narrative.

And why?

Because Facebook want users to fill in the blanks. And encourage more usage of Facebook-based apps (also highlighted heavily in today’s f8 developer speech) so users will get in the habit of sharing our actions and producing content around the activities from our lives. And Facebook can track the subsequent data.

In other words, solving their problem.

Because recent data — immediate data — is the best data. And Facebook wants to give advertisers the ability to target users on ever more data sets, specifically on the media users consume.

What wasn’t discussed was the brand pages, how those profiles will change and all the Likes you’ve accumulated mean anything. There is a reason for that. For one, they haven’t figured it out. But also brand Likes do not have same engagement as an app, nor offer the same constant ability for users

Because if you’re not part of Facebook’s Open Graph and adding to the data, you’re invisible. Likes are okay and all, but Zuckerberg wants more. He can’t sell brands on Likes. Certainly, he’s tried over the last 12 months.

Whether this works or not teeters on one very important question: Do users finally feel comfortable publishing even more about their online activities?

When Facebook announced their wildly invasive Beacon program in 2007, the answer to this question was an unequivocal no. Yet just a few years later, with the same smiling Zuck on stage, it appears we’re all jumping on board.

And yet, nothing has changed. Facebook still has the same philosophy about what it wants to do with that data. So it needs to scare you into loading your life onto the Book of Faces and happily provide it.

Scaring you into thinking, without uploading pictures (and likes and video and songs and movies and your life), it didn’t happen. Holding us hostage to add to the Open Graph. Otherwise, our story isn’t being told. Or worse, we’re forgotten.

And when it does happen, and we add more photos or whatever, it goes right to the top. Becoming the most important thing about you. Instantly.

Point to Point’s President and CEO Mark Goren was recently honored by the National Committee for Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve (ESGR) as a Patriotic Employer.

Goren was nominated by Aaron McMahon, a 1st Lt. in the Army National Guard with the 1484th Transportation Company, and copywriter here at Point to Point.

“Mark and Point to Point have been very supportive during my mobilization and deployment to Afghanistan,” said McMahon. “They have supported me in every way possible.”

To read more about Mark’s award and Point to Point’s commitment to those who serve our country, visit our Press Release: Point to Point’s Mark Goren Receives Patriotic Employer Award.

After a spending few days at last week’s Content Marketing World, I felt as though I had just left the bar at closing time.

I came out of there dizzy. Drunk on good (no, great) ideas. But still, dizzy.

Myself and many of my content-loving brethren heard a lot about a return to authenticity. We heard about engagement. And removing stock photography from our sites and replacing them with our own. Fascinating our target audiences. Becoming more transparent.

And the positivity hangover lasted even a day later. But then, as it’s prone to do after a long week, came Saturday. And with it, The New York Times feature on Chicago-based start-up Narrative Science that sobered me up rather quickly.

From the NYT:

The company’s software takes data, like that from sports statistics, company financial reports and housing starts and sales, and turns it into articles. For years, programmers have experimented with software that wrote such articles, typically for sports events, but these efforts had a formulaic, fill-in-the-blank style. They read as if a machine wrote them.

But Narrative Science is based on more than a decade of research, led by two of the company’s founders, Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, co-directors of the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University, which holds a stake in the company. And the articles produced by Narrative Science are different.

So there’s that.

Not only can the company take relevant data and produce pretty decent content, Narrative Science is already doing so for clients as large as the Big Ten Network and Hanley Wood.

With apologies to those who are all in favor of Skynet, this newfound progress of artificial intelligence should terrify content marketers, content strategists, journalists, bloggers and all those who dabble in the written word.

But, again, it should. It doesn’t. And I’m all for it. Here’s why.

While authenticity should be a hallmark for your content strategy and marketing, authenticity doesn’t scale well. Writing to fascinate target audiences, and getting them to convert takes a tremendous amount of time, energy and thought. Not to mention replicating said time, energy and thought to each of your target audiences. Now try doing this for each one of your clients.

This stuff is hard. Anything of true value should be.

One of the painfully obvious takeaways about the content marketing space is that it lacks a diverse tool set and data aggregators that can truly help the content marketer/strategist without reverting to freelance help. Yes, in this day and age, we are all publishers. But we don’t have to all be writers.

What I am not saying is that we should outsource our writing to HAL 9000 instead of freelancers. Artificial intelligence cannot replicate our previous experiences that develop true insights to make a difference for customers or prospects. At least not yet, and Narrative Science isn’t close. But what it could do is save us time. It could get us that first draft after we’ve plugged in the numbers. It could help us organize our facts into a narrative. It could even identify areas our research missed. And the best part? It’s all unique, and royalty free.

Who really knows what the future holds? But the writing world is going to continue to change. Get over it.

Just as we use a number of tools, formulas and automation to help with SEO, page design, social media, email and PR, we need to think similarly about we can make content marketing better.

Something smarter.

Because we’re overwhelmed. And there is just too much content being produced daily to not to develop better ways to identify, aggregate, organize and write smarter prose.

Flickr photo courtesy of Wisconsin Historical Images