2011 is finally drawing to a close, so now is the time to reflect on the past year’s marketing highlights and stumbles, along with improvement opportunities for 2012. 2011 was a big year for Right Source Marketing; we expanded our team and our client roster faster than we expected, introduced a new content marketing offering, and rolled out our brand new website and blog. We also created a lot of content, and we’re very thankful to all who read, shared and interacted with our posts!

Just like last year’s, here’s a “Reader’s Choice” list of your favorite 2011 blog posts on Marketing Trenches. We compiled this list based on page views, comments, and tweets (maybe next year it will be Google +1s!), so also thank you for jumping in with comments and sharing our posts with others! The wait is over; here’s the countdown of the top 10 Marketing Trenches posts of 2011:

10. What Makes an Exceptional Social Media Manager?

The Must-Haves, Nice-to-Haves, and Bonus Points you should look for when hiring someone to manage your social media.

9. 10 Things You Should Include in a Social Media Plan

If you’re the fly-by-your-pants type, you might want to skip this post because it has the word “plan” in it (yikes!), but Mike Sweeney lays out exactly what you need to take the pain out of planning.

8. What Angry Birds Taught Me About Social Media

Forget what Mom said. Mindless games can teach you something! Find out what the smash-hit game can teach you about the social media realm.

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Welcome Allison Novak:  Right Source Marketing’s New Marketing Associate

Over the past month, the Right Source Marketing team put together our strategic plan for 2012. While we pride ourselves in helping clients with strategy and planning, it was quite an eye-opener to go through this process for our own company.

One of the most important components of this plan is a set of core values that we adhere to, or what we refer to as the guardrails that keep us on track even in moments of chaos or confusion. Those guardrails also guide decisions on the people we want to work with, including full-time staff members, part-time staff members, contractors and partners.

It became very clear during this process that Allison Novak is someone that fits into those core values, because she is talented, likable, hard-working and detail-oriented, all while maintaining a healthy sense of humor. Although Allison has been working for Right Source Marketing for the past 10 months, please join us in welcoming her in her new full-time role as Marketing Associate.

Allison will continue to be heavily involved in our content marketing and social media services, and will take on new responsibility in areas such as client account management and reporting. And of course, as with every other Right Source staff member, she will be a regular contributor to the Marketing Trenches blog.

As always, a quick note on what we learned during this hiring process – patience is an extremely valuable quality, for both the job seeker and the hiring company. In this case, it took time for us to figure out the right fit for Allison at Right Source, and it took time for Allison to figure out if we were the type of company she wanted to work for. Consider this a victory for patience, and one that will reap rewards for both sides, hopefully for years to come.

If you’d like to connect with Allison, drop her an email, find her on LinkedIn, or follow her on Twitter.

Approximately two and a half months ago, we decided that in order to grow Right Source Marketing in a structured fashion, we needed someone that eats, sleeps and breathes organization. Someone that loves a good list, and more importantly knows how to prioritize that list. Someone that can create a sense of calm in a storm through proper planning and coordination of resources. Someone that understands that it’s not about checking something off as complete, but checking something off as complete, on time and according to our high standards of quality.

And of course, someone that is likeable and easy to work with.

The Right Source Marketing team is proud to introduce you to Alecia Farley, our new Project Director based in our Baltimore office. Alecia started with us just last week, and is already knee deep in learning our operations, processes and client profiles. In short, Alecia is charged with making client projects run smoothly and improving the operations for a variety of Right Source Marketing functions.

Alecia comes to us from the Greater Baltimore Technology Council (GBTC), where as Director of Professional Development she oversaw a number of programs designed to provide maximum value for the GBTC membership base. Prior to that, she served in VP-level marketing roles for M&T Bank and Allfirst Bank.

Alecia comes to us with not only an impeccable professional reputation, but also something that we were desperately seeking – someone that can forcefully spike a volleyball on the heads of all of our competitors. Ok, so maybe we won’t follow through on that, but Alecia is a member of the United States Volleyball Association and plays in mid-Atlantic tournaments frequently.

As always, a quick note on what we learned during this hiring process – all other things equal, the candidates that pay the most attention to detail almost always make the best candidates overall. Attention to detail makes or breaks a services company, and especially makes or breaks the project management function in a services business.

Please join us in welcoming Alecia to the Right Source Marketing team.

If you’d like to connect with Alecia, drop her an email or find her on LinkedIn.

Going all the way back to my corporate marketing days, I’ve been skeptical about industry events and trade shows. Too much cost, too little return. Too many sellers, not enough buyers. A lot of conversations, not much action. Traditional marketing at its worst.

So it was with reluctance that I decided to attend What’s Next DC this past Monday at the Marvin Center on the George Washington University campus. The reality is that I had no choice in the matter. In addition to my wife being a George Washington graduate, I was also asked to participate in a panel on digital media for the Broadway League’s conference at the Willard across town, which is where we got married. She was thrilled about the day, and she wasn’t even going to get to be a part of it.

You now have way too much context for this post. My apologies.

Before I get into observations, let me say that Tod Plotkin and the Green Buzz Agency team did a phenomenal job in putting this event together. DC is not a marketing town. It never has been, and likely never will be, and yet Tod’s team managed to conceptualize, organize and promote a show that drove attendance levels I’ve never seen for this type of event.

Now, for those observations…

1. Hubspot has put together a messaging platform that is well-organized and a mission that is well-funded. Marketing, however, is largely about differentiation, and software doesn’t drive differentiation.

Brian Halligan’s keynote was fantastic. His message is spot on. His company is successful.  His charisma is contagious. Hubspot is merely a piece of the puzzle though; Hubspot still needs solid services companies to help organizations take advantage of all of the opportunities present in new media. People – not software – drive differentiation. Hubspot is certainly aware of that, which is the likely reason they nurture a very active partners program.

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Would you be curious to find out how local wine could help seniors learn about technology? How the phrase “how-to” in itself is the start of a culture? How, soon, you might be able to push a button and have 20 forks instantaneously manufactured in your kitchen?

If so, you should have come to CreateBaltimore this past Saturday, January 15th, to find out.  In MICA’s Brown Center, almost 200 innovative Baltimoreans gathered to take a step away from the chaos of daily life to collaborate on how to turn ideals and ideas into action.

From Ellen Lupton’s opening speech on design thinking to post-event drinks at Joe Squared, CreateBaltimore pulsed with energy. Organizers Andrew Hazlett, Dave Troy, Scott Burkholder, and J. Buck Jabaily, set the ball rolling, but participants were in charge.

If you’ve never been to a barcamp (I hadn’t, until Saturday), they’re delightfully unorthodox. The schedule hinged on sessions that were submitted and selected by the crowd. Attendees chose three out of the 15 sessions to participate in—sometimes, conversation leaders emerged, sometimes, a group discussion happened organically.

Yes, Baltimore has too many problems to cover in one day of discussion, but on Saturday,  CreateBaltimore attendees gave it their best. Some of the problems addressed included: improving the complicated public transit program (step one: use it!), getting people to stay in Baltimore, keeping literature relevant after the book, increasing diversity and acceptance in Baltimore, and using food to build a better community. And I’m leaving a lot out—the full schedule is on this Google spreadsheet.

Sure, at CreateBaltimore on Saturday, we attendees may have focused mainly on ideals and ideas, and not enough on action. But we fired each other up about the same problems, or the same innovative solutions. We made connections to build support networks for future actions. We created a community out of passionate individuals. And of course we ate a lot of pizza, and drank a lot of Zeke’s.

By going on a bike ride with people we met at the event, by writing blog posts about it, and by continuing the conversation in any medium, we can keep the community going, and keep the stage set for action.

You can read the tweets surrounding the event by searching for #createbmore, or watch some of the sessions live on Radar Redux.

To steal from CreateBaltimore’s blog: “Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

And that minority needs more events like CreateBaltimore to keep ideals and ideas, not just necessity, driving our actions.