Our Perspective

Content Delivery Optimization™ - Engage Your Audience and Become Your Own Media Company

From the desk of Patrick Ward...

From newspapers to iPads - the way we consume and interact with media has changed. How often do you find interesting stories through your Facebook friends or Twitter feeds? Fueled by the increasing pervasiveness of social media, the discovery and sharing of news has changed for good.

We, at 104 West, think this marks an exciting opportunity for communications.

Harnessing the power of social media, 104 West has introduced Content Delivery Optimization (CDO), a proprietary, patent-pending methodology for creating comprehensive communications programs that go beyond traditional public relations approaches. CDO is a program that melds public relations, social media, marketing, content generation and delivery with lead generation and marketing metrics. This type of program enables businesses to directly and persistently reach their audiences where they consume and share news the most, on the web and through social media.

In short, a CDO campaign involves the development of original content concerning a single issue and engages both traditional and social media channels to achieve a persistent stream of communication to critical audiences.

How is it done?

Critical components of a CDO campaign include:

• Creation of original and curated content

• The establishment, improvement or refinement of social media channels

• Development of a proprietary website landing page where all content is housed

• Distribution of content to target audiences with mechanisms to drive traffic back to a client’s website

• Development of specific metrics like lead generation and ongoing reporting/analysis for the life of the campaign

CDO is results oriented and highly measurable, ensuring that your communications efforts are making an impact.

“Everywhere you look people in marketing and communications are talking about social media, but it has been virtually impossible for us to identify a focused and productive social media approach for a business like ours,” said John Hoholik, executive vice president, New Business Development and Marketing at Evolv. “After running our first CDO campaign, we were able to draw a direct line from that focused campaign to significant, qualified sales leads, as well as a more engaged community following –- these are the kinds of the results we have wanted from a communications strategy.”

If you have been struggling to see how your business can utilize social media or just want to bolster your existing efforts, CDO is the program for your business.

The Mother of Reinvention

From the desk of Patrick Ward...

It is by now a hackneyed cliché that the communications world is changing. It is almost equally hackneyed for PR people to say that our industry and discipline need to change with it.  Today, 104 West is acting instead of talking.

We are pleased to launch our latest service, Content Delivery Optimization (CDO), as well as an entirely re-tooled web site.

Anyone who has read this blog for the last six months, and I know that is a small group, has followed our building argument for clients to re-think their relationship with content and communications.  CDO is the payoff of that discussion.  We have an entire post dedicated to CDO, so I won’t burden anyone with another narrative on it here.

We are also very pleased to unveil our new web site.  So many firms simply bolt on new services to their existing web site, partly, we imagine, to dip their toes in the water, and partly to avoid the inconvenience and expense of new perspectives.  We have gone all in.  We are committed to CDO as a new communications strategy for our clients and believed that the most public commitment we could show was to demonstrate it on our own web site.  We want to thank our friends at Chronos Interactive for their partnership on the site. They did a fantastic job.

When we first entered into this persistent recession, my good friend and the former philosopher-CEO at Webroot, David Moll, said that any business who could weather through would be better on the other side.  I retorted that, for us at 104 West,  it wasn’t just the economy that was changing, but also the very nature of the news industry and PR.  I worried that instead of blue skies and calm seas on the other side, it would be more like some Denver neighborhoods after those late summer afternoon micro-bursts. The sky will clear only to reveal that the winds picked up your all deck and lawn furniture, pushed it around for a while and strewn it all over the yard.  Sure, the storm has passed, but the aftermath presents a lot of work.  Unfortunately, I think I was closer to reality than my pal.  But today, we start to put the yard back together....

Thanks to everyone at 104 West who helped in this birth of CDO and our website.  A special note of thanks to Herb Leifer who helped us and me remain true to our idea and kept spinning the wheel as the clay began to take shape. His guidance and patience and persistence were all immeasurable and invaluable.