For a second consecutive year, PollStream's solutions helped a client take home the top Ragan Recognition Award!

Competing against over 500 nominations, this year's Ragan Recognition Gold Award went to Baker Hughes, a leading oil and gas service provider. Baker Hughes won the 2008 Grand Prize for Best Intranet HR Initiative for their Employee Share Purchase Program (ESPP) campaign. Leveraging PollStream's Multi-Language and Poll-in-Email modules, Baker Hughes' winning three-week campaign resulted in an impressive 28% global increase in new ESPP enrollments.

Ila Owers, Senior Compensation Specialist at Baker Hughes, accepted the award, saying, "Our goal was to increase worldwide participation in the ESPP and we did that by engaging employees in a fun and effective way. I'm thrilled that our hard work was recognized, but the real winners are the employees who were able to better understand the Plan. Thanks to PollStream we were able to communicate the Plan and help employees see the value in it."

Last year's Ragan Award for Best Employee Newsletter was presented to RBC for INsite — an internal publication and forum built around PollStream's Comment Engine and Poll tools that successfully engages and informs employees while delivering measurable results to the communications team.

Congratulations to Baker Hughes! Take a cue from the winner's circle — contact PollStream to learn how to successfully develop deeper online connections with your audience.

PollStream would like to introduce you to our new standard in engagement analytics tools: the Trendline Report. With Trendline, now included for all client accounts, you have a visual perspective on the performance of your Poll, QuizPoll or Comment Engine. The report displays engagement data over time and overlays a trendline that clearly shows if audience participation is gaining or declining. Trendline provides real-time insight to help you make important tactical decisions.

In the world of online communications, you cannot get away with guessing. As Avinash Kaushik, the author of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day, notes on his Occam's Razor blog, obtaining useful insight through metrics requires that your data be taken a step higher — and made into actionable information. Only when your data is displayed to you in a way that indicates your logical next step can you truly make informed business decisions. When creating Trendline, we followed this philosophy of easy, usable data. The path from engagement insight to communications excellence is an easy one to navigate with Trendline Report as your road map.

This is the second part of a series exploring the art of managing customer relationships though online communications.
Previously: Keep It Relevant.

What makes a relationship unique? Shared interests? Chemistry?

Marketing relationships most definitely rely on a certain kind of chemistry: usually it's some combination of demographics, benefits sought, and past behavior. And, of course, a handful of other factors unique to each situation. That last one is important to remember because while marketing models are essential to your job, from the customer's perspective the only segment that matters has a population of one.

Conversational marketing gives the old adage, "imagine that you are talking directly to the customer" new meaning. In today's online environment you are speaking with — not "to" or "at" — the customer. This means that your communication tools need to provide dynamic interaction and have the ability to incorporate customer feedback.

PollStream's tools for online engagement give you the ability to initiate a dynamic, two-way dialogue with your customers. You can gather rich feedback as you engage participants in a relevant and meaningful discussion, and incorporate event triggers to deliver additional requested information.

Next time: Time for a Change in Behavior

• Qwest Communications