In a first ever national webinar focused towards families and consumers, the National Private Duty Association (NPDA) is hosting Home Safe Home: Making Informed Senior Care Decisions, an educational event that covers advice on hiring a home care provider. This live and interactive consumer-oriented event will be offered Sept. 23, 2010, at 8 p.m. EDT.

To register go to www.privatedutyhomecare.org.

You do know it when you see it or experience it. A dining experience is enhanced by the service. Given the food, the reason for being there, has to also be good, but the excellence comes with how that food is served, and how the wait staff makes you feel- special? Or just like another diner?

Searching for solutions on line is no different. In shopping for a home care solution for a mother, the basics must be present. For home care it is the services, explained clearly and in a layman’s language, and location(s) served. Also good for home care is some personal information about the agency staff, in particular where does the buck stop? Is that person one who drives the staff towards excellence?  A concerned adult child is looking for some assurance that her mother will be cared for in a loving and safe manner. So, the website as the adult child’s first encounter with the world of home care must relate something personal about the agency and its management. Read the rest of this entry »

corecubed specialized in Internet marketing, but it took a strategic corecubed team retreat this past week for us all (except one) to agree upon that. Since 1998 we have been building websites, using search engine marketing strategy, and helping clients grow their businesses using the internet. So, this morning, I went to Wikipedia to see what the thoughts were on internet marketing, and here is what I found. Should be no surprise that Wikipedia says that internet marketing is “also referred to as i-marketing, web-marketing, online-marketing or e-Marketing,” and “is the marketing of products or services over the Internet.”

Wikipedia goes on to say that “The Internet has brought media to a global audience. The interactive nature of Internet marketing in terms of providing instant responses and eliciting responses are the unique qualities of the medium. Internet marketing is sometimes considered to be broad in scope because it not only refers to marketing on the Internet, but also includes marketing done via e-mail and wireless media. Management of digital customer data and electronic customer relationship management (ECRM) systems are also often grouped together under internet marketing.”

And, it was if we wrote this about our company, since Wikipedia continues to explain that “Internet marketing ties together creative and technical aspects of the Internet, including: design, development, advertising, and sales.” Read the rest of this entry »

Marketing 101, Tuesday,  October 12, 2010, noon-1 PM Central time

Marketing 201, Tuesday, October 19, 2010, noon-1 PM Central time

Marketing 301, Tuesday, October 26, 2010, noon-1 PM Central time

This 3 part webinar series presented by Merrily Orsini, MSSW, expert home care marketer, is a members-only benefit for the Illinois HomeCare & Hospice Council. Over the course of these three sessions, members will get the basics of marketing home care services,  ways to maximize the agency dollars spent for results gained, and specifics on using traditional and non-traditional marketing efforts combined.

More information soon at http://www.ilhomecare.org/

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Well in a word, almost everything.  The Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft held its 9^th annual art car weekend starting this past Friday. If you have never attended an art car event, it is really something to behold. Artists take free reign with decorating their cars from tasteful to ridiculous to sublime. The car that got the most attention this year (and for good reason) was the fish car. You would really have to see it to believe it, as it is a car with lobsters, fish and sharks, all moving and singing, led by a singing bass standing up at a microphone and a lobster conductor waiving a wand to the tune of the music.

Fishcar Lobster Conductor

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Value innovation occurs when a company implements a strategy that decreases costs, eliminates competing factors and offers something new the market has never seen. This strategy from Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne results in what the authors call a “blue ocean.”  Those who operate traditionally, fighting and drawing blood by competing on cost and factors that already exist, are in a “red ocean.” These competitors are required to totally rework their thinking just to keep up with the innovator. The concept of creating products using the blue ocean strategy changed the way I conduct my business, and I believe it will change yours.

Read the complete article here.

Soaring heat in Louisville today, with temperatures expected to reach 100. Yesterday, however, I was at a spot in the Adirondacks where there was a record low of 36 and the makings of a truly remarkable location:  White Pine Camp. Once used by President Coolidge as a retreat, the owners of this spectacular “camp” have managed to create a truly remarkable experience that, based on marketing theory, does, indeed sell itself.

Self selection is how folks get there, and referrals. No TV, no cell phone access, just pure nature and rustic accommodations with touches of luxury where needed.  So how do they market? Catering to the high end travel and leisure business they invite the travel writers to come and visit and then just let them experience it. They provide excellent services and accommodations to their guests, and the property manager makes certain that guests know what they are in for prior to booking. It certainly is not for every vacationer, as this is a place where one can be inactive as possible (picture book at lake with view), but also highly active with kayaking, canoeing, hiking and exploring the countryside. There are no locks on the cabins. Nothing unsafe in the area (except for moose and bear) and no reason for alarms or calendars.

"Truly Remarkable" Just Needs the Right Place to Tell the Story

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January 23-25, 2011 Long Beach, California

Westin Long Beach Hotel

“An Interactive Marketing Primer: Social Media to Websites” presented by Merrily Orsini, MSSW

More information on conference coming soon at www.pdhca.org

The kinds of questions I get when I do marketing seminars, or webinars about private duty are so specific to the entrails of running a private duty business that it is hard for me to understand how someone who has not actually done that can answer the in-depth level of response that my viewers/attendees expect. As a consultant, myself, to industries in which I have not had a business, I know that I do bring something to the table, but it is not that deep understanding that one only gets from doing something oneself.

The difference between experiential knowledge and knowledge obtained by research, consulting or learning from others is simply different. Thinking of an analogy, it seems that you can learn how to climb, what supplies to take with you, what to do in case of an emergency, but until you have donned the equipment, faced the elements, and actually climbed a mountain, you really cannot empathize with the hardships you face, the meaning of split second decisions in an emergency, the responsibility and the feel of the weight of the responsibility that comes from having safety over the lives of others.

Translated into running a home care business, it seems that starting, growing, understanding hardships, facing challenges and the problem solving that evolves comes out of that experience allows a person to walk that talk better than not having experienced it. It is facing a difficulty and working through it that gives a greater depth of ability to understand issues.
Our Private Duty Business Manual and all the forms one could ever want to use are available for sale on our Home Care Agency Marketplace, www.markethomecare.com. All of these processes and forms come as a result of years of experience actually starting and growing a business, and running it profitably along the way. Many of the questions I get on the private duty marketing webinars are answered in our marketing module, and all the information in all of our forms and manuals has been personally vetted, if not written, by me. So, why not use a proven tool to help growth, and one that comes from experience, having walked that talk for over 17 years and having talked that talk for 13 more.

Well it has been a long time in coming, but corecubed has a newly redesigned website. Done in ExpressionEngine it allows us a great showcase of some of our client work, and also I now have the ability to edit internally, so I am not at the mercy of my wonderful designers, rather in control!

Some benefits to using a content management system (CMS):

1. Updating. It is really easy to update a website without needing to know programming code or be skilled at web design.

2. Cost savings. It is much quicker to add pages, post articles, and link to files than it would be with the old standard HTML designed website, and you don’t have to pay another skilled person to do it.

3. Scalability. With a CMS site, planned and designed for growth, expanding and growing is easy to do with a great system already in place. ExpresssionEngine and WordPress allow for easy expansion without starting over from scratch.

4. Community & Connectivity. When updated often and set up to integrate with social media outlets, a CMS often has the ability to easily make connections with other sites and to bring more visitors to yours.

However, let me emphasize that there are other reasons that make a CMS site beneficial to the business, but those relate to the skill set of the designers and the people planning the site (which we have in depth here at corecubed):

1. Clean code. What that means to you is that the search engines like it and it makes the site ranking better if the parsing is easy.

2. Flexibility. We can easily change out showcased items on the home page, what is featured on the inside, and where photos and text are located.

3. Attractiveness. Well this is not really the CMS, this is our designers! They do know their stuff and continue to deliver top quality and incredibly attractive design.

Note that the clean code and attractiveness come from the skill of the person setting up the CMS. Don’t be misled thinking you can slap up a CMS site and have clean, SEO-friendly code out of the box. It is as easy to build an awful CMS site as it is an awful HTML site! “Well. Maybe even easier…….” says Will Chatham, Web Manager at corecubed.

Join us with a new website or a redesigned website if your business is sluggish, or if you have new products or a new story to tell. We specialize in content-driven websites and utilize ExpressionEngine and WordPress on a regular basis. Our web design team is deep and rich, and we use these tools to provide ourselves and our clients with powerful content management that doesn’t sacrifice SEO, clean code, or beautiful custom design.