Andrea Goldstein is a member of the Towson University Class of 2012 who interned with us this fall. We wanted to give her a chance to share some of what she learned on our blog. Below are her words of newfound wisdom—beginners and veterans alike, we hope you can learn from this post as Andrea learned from her experience with us.

Stepping in to a new company is always quite the adventure.  Even though I knew what Right Source Marketing did before I started, I was excited to be able to get some hands on learning experience in a marketing field that is becoming more important every day—content marketing. While working at Right Source, I was not only introduced to content marketing, but also effective team dynamics, and the wild world of social media when before, I was normally on the other side of the table as a consumer.  Overall, what I learned goes far beyond teachers and books.

Here’s a few top takeaways:

1. The importance of  personal branding. Originally I met Will Davis, Right Source’s Managing Partner, when he came to Towson University to speak on the importance of blogging – little did I know he would be my future employer.  At the time, he inspired me to start my personal blog, and to take more seriously how I was viewed online. Slowly, I began to brand myself and the next time I saw Will at a Towson job fair, he seemed excited to know I had started blogging. One thing led to another, and here I am sitting in Right Source’s office today writing this blog post. Will said a large reason why I got the internship is what and how I wrote on my blog.  It will be hard to forget the first few times I met the Right Source team, somehow they took a complicated concept and made it seem so simple: write online, brand and market yourself, and you’ll get attention from the right people.

2. A small business can do big things. Working at Right Source is definitely not what I am used to after interning at 200+ employee companies.  The work that comes out of the smaller RSM team is astounding.  Everyone has their specialties, and they all complement each other.  We have everything from the business savvy, social network savvy, copywriting savvy, and project managing savvy—and a large network of specialist partners. Right Source works with national companies – because they can.

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Many content marketers don’t think beyond the corporate blog, or perhaps the occasional webinar or eBook. Yet if you look hard enough, you’ll find surprising ways to create effective, shareable content hiding right under your nose.

Here’s my quick list:

1. Job Posts—Especially with the difficult economy, people love job matchmaking, and are quick to share job posts. The funny thing is most job posts are awful: they’re poorly written, poorly formatted, and just plain boring.

This job post from a local company is a breath of fresh air. It combines videos, well designed text, and a lot of personality to clearly address the details, but also show why the job would be exciting. Unfortunately for anyone seeking, the job has been filled—but take a look at this post, enjoy, and be inspired for when you create your next job post (or go take it to your HR department).

Whether or not they show your company in the best light, people will share your job posts. You should be proud of them.

2. Unsubscription Confirmation Pages—A while back, Groupon’s unsubscription confirmation page made the viral rounds. Normally, these pages are boring and blank—if you’ve made it to the unsubscribe page, it’s clear that you’ve left the fold of treasured customers. Yet there’s value in creating an unsubscription page that leaves a smile on a former subscriber’s face. It’s likely that unsubscribers don’t hate your company, but just want off your email list. So it’s still in your best interest to make them happy.

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Yesterday and today, I joined social media marketers from around the Baltimore area and the country at Social Fresh Baltimore. I’m posting this blog post halfway through the second day, so if the afternoon talks are left out, my apologies–please help me out and comment with your afternoon takeaways.

Here’s the top five things that stood out for me from this event:

1. Measure the impact of mobile marketing before you dive in. As both @seo_girl and @jeannehopkins spoke to for web, and @meladorri spoke to for email, check your web and email program’s analytics to see which platforms and devices people are using to consume your content. If a lot of your traffic comes from mobile devices–and more importantly, as @seo_girl pointed out, if your mobile bounce rate is high–you’re probably missing opportunities for mobile marketing, or doing something wrong.

2. QR codes can be cool, but they can also be wasteful and ridiculous. Whatever you do, provide multiple options for access. Yes, more and more people are using QR code scanners, but that doesn’t mean you should plaster QR codes everywhere. As @thetimhayden covered, first, think about how people are actually using their phones–do you really think people are going to be able to scan a QR code from a billboard? To get around this, when possible, provide a link, an SMS option, and a QR code so people can access your content in the way that’s best for them. For a laugh on this count, check out @unmarketing’s video ranting (thanks to @cc_chapman for providing).

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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.

The following is one of the best-of from students in David Toliver’s Georgetown School of Continuing Studies Interactive Marketing class. The following post is by Stephanie Spano, Marketing and Communications Manager at Engility Corporation.

Web design is one of the aspects of marketing I enjoy the most. Working closely with graphic artists to develop new banners and graphics is a creative and fun way to visually promote company capabilities. Updating and creating new content keeps a website fresh, grabs the viewer’s attention, and ensures frequent re-visits. The creative side of web design lets the imagination run wild, like a seven-year-old kid pretending to live in Oz, not Kansas.

Since my days starting out as a Newbie Marketer, I have learned that there is a whole other side to web design besides creating engaging graphics and content. Sadly, it is not the actual Wizard of Oz behind the web design curtain. It is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  Read on for a basic overview of the key ways to get this hidden force to work for your business.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a broad discipline of Internet Marketing used to promote websites. A popular and well known strategy within this discipline is SEO. Ever wonder why the results are displayed in a particular order when you conduct a search in Google, Yahoo! or Bing? SEO is the answer. SEO will help you promote your business by increasing your website’s visibility in search engines.  There are three basic “behind the curtain” aspects of SEO to keep in mind that will help you develop more effective graphics and content for your website to improve its ranking.

1. Not So Creepy Crawlers (Think Charlotte’s Web, not Arachnophobia)

Search Engines operate by sending out millions of bots, commonly known as “spiders,” to crawl the web’s 30+ billion pages and index its content. Information gathered by the spiders is stored in gigantic datacenters all across the world. When you conduct a search query, the indexed information is pulled from these datacenters in fractions of seconds. Read the rest of this entry »