Kirsten Chapman, principal and founder of marketing and public relations firm KC Associates, has spent her career working to drive demand for her clients' products and services.
This time, she's done it for herself, creating a groundswell of interest in one of her Long Lake company's internal marketing tools. She's developing a product based on that tool and launching a new venture to produce it. None of which, by the way, she set out to do.
The product is a commercial version of her firm's Web Presence Optimization (WPO) offering, a dashboard-based system that enables companies to measure and optimize their online visibility and even benchmark themselves against competitors.
The company is WPO Inc., which Chapman started late last year with Tom Pick. He's an independent consultant who handles digital marketing strategy for KC Associates and writes about that subject on his widely followed blog, Webbiquity.com.
Known as the WPO Metrics Dashboard, the patent-pending product enables companies to maximize the online visibility of almost anything that appears on the Web, from company-generated press releases to news, blog and social media mentions to paid advertising. The dashboard uses more than 100 metrics from a variety of sources to measure a company's online business results, Web visibility and Web presence compared to competitors.
"Marketing people are out there always trying to create demand," Chapman said. "Really what's happening to us is the demand is creating the business. You'd think we would have seen that this would have made a good business. It just didn't occur to us because we had our heads down being consultants."
Pick is credited with coining the term "Web Presence Optimization" in early 2010 and was instrumental in defining the basket of online metrics and the internal dashboard that KC Associates then began using with clients.
The response came quickly last fall when Pick began blogging about the dashboard on Webbiquity, MarketingSherpa and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's small business website, said Chapman.