interlinkONE Announces Release of ilink.Me to Help Measure Social Media Activity

as Part of Multi-Channel Marketing Campaigns

18 November - interlinkONE Inc., a leading provider of web-based marketing software solutions,  announced the release of its latest application, ilink.Me, providing another touch point for multi-channel marketing campaigns. The application creates a link that is an abbreviated version of a website’s typically long address. The link can be posted in an e-mail or on social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn as a way to quickly and easily direct people to a company’s website. With ilink.Me, companies can track when people click on the link, from what site, and whether they accessed it from a smartphone or PC. The application is available independently, but is designed to work best with interlinkONE’s Version 8 marketing software solution which enables companies to build, manage, execute, and measure marketing activities across all channels.

Given the growing popularity of these sites, links that are short URLs are an important element of any company’s social media strategy. Long URLs (or full addresses of websites) don’t always appear properly in an e-mail because they get broken into two lines or work on Twitter because they simply take up too much space. interlinkONE has also integrated the application into its online ordering software, which allows customers to set up storefronts and portals for sales and marketing teams to access, order, and download collateral. Users can gauge the effectiveness of their online marketing activities by creating a link with a short URL for an electronic collateral item, posting it onto a social media website such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and receiving an e-mail when someone clicks on the link.

“Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are channels that must be considered by marketing departments today,” said John Foley, Jr., president and CEO of interlinkONE. “However, a lot of companies are having trouble measuring the success of their social media efforts. Our goal is to make it possible for people to easily measure and demonstrate the success of their efforts in these channels. With this new application, you can see how many people are clicking on a company’s link, where they are coming from, and if they are viewing your materials on an iPhone or on a PC—important information to gather from your multi-channel efforts.”

QR Codes Provide Easy Way to Drive Marketing Efforts

16 November - interlinkONE Inc. announced the availability of Quick Response Codes (QR Codes), an innovative way of connecting stagnate print and an interactive response—a practice known as interactive print—as part of the company’s ongoing development of marketing solutions that build, manage, execute, and measure all aspects of a company’s marketing efforts. QR Codes are two-dimensional bar codes featuring URLs that drive users from printed material to the web, and are increasingly being used on business cards, direct mail pieces, billboards, postcards, fliers, and more to enhance marketing initiatives. interlinkONE’s marketing software makes it easy to generate QR Codes independently or as an integrated part of the company’s end-to-end personalized marketing solutions.

“Many tools on the web help you generate QR Codes; however, interlinkONE offers the only multi-channel marketing software solution that allows you to generate QR Codes and then compare their success to other marketing efforts,” said John P. Foley, Jr., president and CEO of interlinkONE. “For example, you can measure how effective a printed piece was with the QR Code versus e-mail efforts or you can figure out how many recipients clicked the link to your newsletter via Twitter versus how many accessed it via the QR Code on your company flier. These are just a sample of the valuable marketing metrics that you have access to via one dashboard with our marketing software.”

Widely used throughout Japan and in parts of Europe, QR Codes are gaining more popularity in the

United States as more people use mobile phones to access 3G networks. Scanning software can be loaded onto such devices as smart phones. The user then points the device at a code, and the smart phone brings up websites, text or pictures. The code pattern is small enough to be hidden or incorporated into a visually pleasing image.