Whiteboard

Pendry White tends to play at the top of the market – strategic marketing counselling for the services sector – but Managing Director Roger White has always insisted that the company should never suggest anything new to a client unless Pendry White knows that its implementation can be managed either by his own team or by bringing on board specialists that he and his colleagues can control from a position of knowledge.

He calls this ‘thinking/doing’ and the mentality includes a commitment to helping companies to do things more effectively in-house through training and/or finding the most effective low cost suppliers, often out of London, to handle those simple, repetitive tasks that we might call classic old world PR or marketing agency work.

The approach, based on White’s senior management experience inside big ticket business, emphasises his role as outsourced marketing support within the client team, supporting the Marketing or Business Development Director personally and directly in order to achieve his or her objectives.

This does not mean that Pendry White is not interested in the commodity end of marketing communications but only that it is interested in managing innovation in a way that provides maximum effectiveness for busy in-house staff.

Its primary concerns are content and the management of delivery and it leaves the ‘nerds’ and the techies to innovate. Our interest starts when the Marketing Department knows that something is happening out there of which it has imperfect knowledge and for which it needs practical and cost-effective solutions in managing its entry into new territory.

Regular readers will have noted that we refuse to be enthusiasts for new technologies and that we avoid ‘evangelists’ – ‘evangelists’ on our Twitter account quickly get unfollowed because an ‘evangelist’ is almost by definition, in this context, an impractical bore. Leave evangelism to those concerned with spiritual matters not to matters of business delivery.

We already have a product for effective management of the content for multiple Twitter accounts and Pendry White has now launched, to a few close clients and associates, its integrated system for the production and distribution of small-scale videos working with its long term independent associate Endorfin TV.

Finely priced (call us as a bona fide potential customer and we’ll tell you how finely), this product integrates content production (scripts, filming and editing) with a commitment to defining the right marketing message and to distribution through the appropriate web channels, with search engine optimisation and follow-up monitoring services.

Nor does the product assume that the Marketing Department knows as much as it might like. The service will set up the accounts that you need and the films can be one-offs or short campaigns built around our understanding of what the public wants to hear about what you have to offer.

The purpose of this, and of other Pendry White products of a similar type covering sales development and the new media, is to give mid-sized businesses and the overstretched marketing departments of larger businesses an ‘in’ into the potential of global communications channels at relatively low cost. The aim is to create content that is not only friendly to the new media but encourages onward viral distribution.

This is not a small community. There are well over 300 video sharing sites on the web in almost every language. Videos can be tailored quite easily to specific types of site and language zones.

Given our historic experience in the Middle East, this product may be of special interest to businesses wanting to export products, services and ideas to an Arab market that, in our experience, much prefers to see rather than read about what is being offered at first stage of the sales process.

The close synergy between the biggest site, YouTube, and Google means that search engine optimisation can be linked to advertising strategies and the provision of creative content to create an unbeatable argument for contacting your sales department amongst the people who most need or want to talk to you – who are, by far, the best sort of customer.

Get it right and you dictate the terms of your reputation, not only for sales development but also for issues management, public affairs and in support of that intangible sense that the company is worth working for and adds more brand value to its customers than just the service it provides.

For more more information, not only on the Pendry White strategy for online video management but also on its Twitter and other online management services, contact either Roger White on rwhite@pendrywhite.com or Laura Hodges on lhodges@pendrywhite.com