> #1 on Google = 75 new clients in just 4 months

The client: Shareholder.com

The situation:
In the wake of financial disasters at Enron and other companies, the U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley legislation was passed in 2002.

Shareholder.com, a shareholder communications and investor relations intelligence services company, developed a Whistleblower Hotline product as an outsourced solution for public companies to comply with rule 301 (the so-called "Whistleblower Hotline" provision) of Sarbanes-Oxley. Shareholder.com launched its Whistleblower Hotline product into a crowded market and was having difficulty getting noticed. Only a handful of sales resulted from the initial days of product availability.

Ron Gruner, CEO of Shareholder.com, brought David in for Ongoing Strategy Sessions over 20 months to work with him and Shareholder.com marketing executives. A primary aspect of the engagement was to help Shareholder.com develop thought leadership-based online marketing programs that reach buyers directly.

David worked with Shareholder.com on a new content rich Web site for the Whistleblower Hotline product which included a thought leadership Webinar called "Whistleblower Hotlines: More than a Mandate." The Webinar featured guest speakers Harvey Pitt (former chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) and Lynn Brewer (author of the book House of Cards: Confessions of an Enron Executive).

The result:
600 people eagerly watched the presentation live because the Webinar discussed issues of importance to buyers of Whistleblower Hotline services and the guest speakers are thought leaders that buyers are interested in learning from.

As a result of traffic driven from the search engines and great thought leadership Web content (such as Webinars), the product launch was a success. In the four months immediately after the Webcast, the company signed 75 clients. The Webcast archive of the event continued to work throughout the year, advancing the Shareholder.com brand presence, generating sales leads, and contributing to the strongest Shareholder.com stand-alone product launch ever.

The Shareholder.com thought leadership pages were visited frequently and linked to often, and they became highly ranked by the search engines. In fact, at the time of this writing, Shareholder.com is number one out of 258,000 hits on Google for the very important phrase "whistleblower hotline."

In early 2006 Shareholder.com was acquired by NASDAQ in a transaction that enables NASDAQ to offer Shareholder.com services, including Whistleblower Hotline, to its 3,200 listed companies and other publicly held companies.

What the client says:
"The Webinar was very important because when we launched the product we were starting from a position with no market share within this product niche," says Bradley H. Smith, director, marketing / communications at Shareholder.com. "Other companies had already entered the market before us. The Webinar gave us search engine terms like 'Harvey Pitt' and 'Enron' and offered a celebrity draw. Search engine placement was important because it created our brand as a leader in Whistleblower Hotline technologies even though we were new to this market. Besides prospective clients, the media found us which resulted in important press including prominent placement in a Wall Street Journal article called 'Making it Easier to Complain'."