BridgeView Marketing’s all-star team of veteran industry experts specialize in public & analyst relations, social media, Internet marketing, web development, copy-writing, collateral design, and lead-generation/inside sales for private and public high-tech, clean energy and green data center product and service companies. W

What sets BridgeView apart from “single service” agencies? Senior staff, program measurability and affordability for starters. Also, each of our high-impact services are highly valuable on their own merit, but also play a crucial role within a fully integrated marketing and communications ecosystem where all services are working in unison to drive leads and increase measureable web traffic.

Rake Narang: Tell us about your business and the work you do. What exactly do you do on a daily basis?

Dale Allaire: At the highest level, BridgeView Marketing is a public relations, social media and marketing firm that specializes in working with high-tech, green data center and sustainable energy products and services companies.

What sets BridgeView apart from traditional agencies is that we offer multiple, quality services under one roof including public/analyst relations; social media marketing program development and support; corporate branding; HTML email marketing and tracking; web development and SEO; and lead intelligence.

We aren’t attempting to boil the ocean by offering such a broad range of services and not every BridgeView client utilizes every service that we offer. Our philosophy, which is based on close to 20 years in the high tech market, is that PR, social media, marketing and web SEO need to work hand-in-hand to drive lead-generation at some level. We understand the importance of brand visibility (awards, feature stories, speaking opportunities, optimized news releases, social media campaigns, etc.), but this is the easy part! At BridgeView, we take PR and brand visibility to a new level by mapping it to website traffic and prospect lead reports.

We have many clients who continue to generate leads and pipeline revenue based on our unique approach and reporting processes.

Rake Narang: What are some favorite projects you've completed and why?

Dale Allaire: One of our largest clients (interconnection, colocation, data center, cloud space) based in NYC, depends on BridgeView to manage its entire PR and social media program. We also developed and wrote their entire web site (plus 16 micro sites for SEO purposes); we optimized their sites and continue to maintain their optimization ensuring they are on top of the search engines with their requested key words; we developed their entire collateral brand package; we continue to write and develop case studies, white papers, and HTML marketing campaigns (with detailed tracking per campaign) for them, and there are many other areas where we support them.

This client is a lot of fun for the BridgeView Team because it enables us to illustrate, through our weekly web analytics and prospect reports, that our efforts are driving visibility and leads. Like many BridgeView clients, this company has been able to map pipeline revenue back to our PR and marketing programs. Nirvana!

About Dale Allaire

Dale is a founding partner of BridgeView Marketing (BVM) and is responsible for managing marketing communications, lead-generation and media relations initiatives and campaigns for high-technology and sustainable energy clients across a wide variety of market sectors.

A 19 year sales, PR and marketing veteran, Dale has developed and coordinated all aspects of direct marketing, channel marketing, public relations, analyst relations, customer relations, internal communications, sales and lead-generation and has worked for such companies as Cabletron Systems, Nortel Networks, SilverBack Technologies, CEPA Technologies, and Pannaway Technologies.

Since the early 90's, Dale has shared a common vision with co-founder Mike Emerton which led to the formation of BridgeView Marketing. The basic premise of this vision was to provide high-tech organizations with the PR, marketing and lead-generation resources traditionally associated with larger corporate agencies—but with the responsive, high-touch customer care and value of a boutique firm. Also, to build an experienced and professional team that could become more than a client's "agency of record"—but rather an integrated extension of their core business process.

Dale's experience and knowledge has fueled the creation of a truly unique agency model which combines the core services that any high-tech organization needs to bridge the gap between sales and marketing.

Rake Narang: What are some of the challenges you have faced in your line of work? What core-competencies have benefited you the most?

Dale Allaire: The last 2-3 years have been challenging for PR and marketing firms overall. Clients lose funding, their markets slow down, etc. What has enabled BridgeView Marketing to continue to maintain a solid technology client portfolio is our broad portfolio of quality services. When PR or marketing contracts have slowed down, we’ve been able to increase our web development /SEO and inside sales contracts – and vice versa. And, when these companies come around financially, we typically see increased business in other areas than what we were originally brought in for.

Rake Narang: When does external PR versus internal PR work better?

Dale Allaire: External PR (encompasses social media, industry analyst relations, award submissions, speaking opportunities, blogs, etc.) and internal PR go hand and hand in our experience. However, internal PR doesn’t often accomplish the goal of increasing brand and company visibility, and it doesn’t drive measureable web traffic and leads. External PR does all of this!

Internal PR is a component of every program we build for each of our clients. It’s essentially the development of a thoughtful communications program between the marcom director or VP and his or her employees. We support this communication and develop best practices programs on a client-by-client basis.

Rake Narang: What are some of the benefits small and medium businesses can get from external PR?

Dale Allaire: A comprehensive external PR and social media program creates brand and company awareness with key buying audiences. These programs also drive measureable web traffic and prospect leads. Again, nirvana!

The thing that small and medium companies need to be careful of is not investing in PR for the sake of PR. They need to be sure they are building a program that is integrated with marketing, branding, lead-generation and web SEO.

Rake Narang: How does a company handle a mistake that will be seen publicly? And are crisis communications best handled by external PR?

Dale Allaire: The BridgView Team has extensive experience in crisis communication situations and different rules apply for private versus public companies. Depending upon the severity of the news item, we sometimes advise our smaller, private companies not to engage in external PR. There are times when it’s best so say nothing. We use our in-house agency tools to measure “sentiment ratings” across social media and blogs – then respond accordingly if needed on a case by case basis.

For larger public companies, it is very important to get out in front of negative news. There are many strategies for this but in short, the best way to address “not so positive news” is to flood the market with more positive news including customer releases, awards, etc. This strategy also aides in pushing negative news off the top pages of the search engines.

Rake Narang: Does the rapid social media growth further strengthen the role of external PR in providing effective results?

Dale Allaire: Absolutely! 10 years ago, social media didn’t exist – at least not to the extent that it does today. For each BridgeView Marketing client, LinkedIn (groups), Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs and other social media platforms are standard fare and are developed in conjunction with more traditional PR activities such as news releases, awards, editorial calendar opportunities, etc.

We’ve proven time and time again that aggressive and fully optimized social media programs/campaigns – if developed as a part of an overall program – drive increased, measureable eyeballs to websites – which translates to leads.

Rake Narang: What contributions do you feel your work offers to society as a whole?

Dale Allaire: I genuinely wish I could say that our work as a PR and marketing agency is helping to save lives or better the quality of life for an ailing child – but it doesn’t. BridgeView Marketing makes regular charitable donations to children’s organizations each year and that is a testament to the hard work that our team puts in over the course of the year.

One area where I do feel we are having an impact is through our expertise in promoting green and environmentally friendly technologies and services companies and we hope to do more of this as the technologies progress.