Changing faces of Aleuromedia
Back in 2007, when Kenny and I first launched Aleuromedia we focused primarily on visual communications, with the greatest emphasis on video/screencasts for the web.
Aleuromedia first home page
Our site was pretty sweet we thought; no page barriers because it is not really a “page” and we didn’t have to promote that analogous constraint anymore. We had a cool flash banner and music. We had one screencast and one talking head video on the home page demonstrating who we were and what we did. All in all we thought it was pretty slick.
Six months later Kenny decided the entrepreneurial roller-coaster was not really a good fit for him and so it was just me and I needed to change things.
AleuroSolutions first home page
I’ve always been the strategist and implementation specialist. I kept being asked for help from start-up businesses and take on interim leadership roles with these fledging companies to get them launched and self sufficient. I spent most of my time bridging the gap between product development (mostly software) and sales and marketing. So keeping Aleuromedia focused on visual comm, I branded these consultation and start-up services as AleuroSolutions. The new website was much less about “product” and far more about “service”. I was trying to fit the comfort level of IT in New England. I was so wrong to ever consider trying to fit into something. I mean the reason I was getting business was because I wasn’t like everyone else. Duh! – what a dork.
AleuroNPO first home page
Last year I was very fortunate to have Tara Mahady make herself available to me after her success at NHPR and start consulting with Aleuro. We fleshed out the service offerings specifically targeted to non profits. So much of what I do with business is 100% transferable to nonprofits, the difference is the lexicon, the corporate culture and values, and often times the priorities. Having worked with non-profits myself since the late 90′s and Tara having more than 20 years of nonprofit work under her belt, we were a unique team and needed to show that.
Second AleuroSolutions home page
So we kept Aleuromedia focused on visual comm., branded AleuroSolutions to contain all the business service offerings, and picked up AleuroNPO to focus on nonprofit consultation and education. Keeping things separate and tailored to the audience. Very
“TRADITIONAL MARCOM”. Only all the while I am teaching people about social media, kicking down make believe barriers between “professional life” and “personal life”, talking to them, and trying to help them understand that its more than marketing- it’s operations. I’m beating the drum of conversation and dialogue and digital/virtual existentialism. I’m setting Traditional Marketing rules on fire and declaring revolution against one-way, broadcast message media. Only my website didn’t even enable the kind of interaction I was talking about. Carpenter’s house blues.
I’ve taken several clients in the past year away from custom web development to easier to maintain, layman enabled tools like WordPress. Money is tight and I’m always against single points of failure, so if a business is depending upon “web-shop-of-the-day” and it’s costing them arms and legs, I recommend getting out from under it and going with something like WordPress. Pay for the education, once (or twice) and then be self-sufficient.
In answer to the questions about why my site wasn’t a WordPress site, and in resolution to the many communication limitations of the previous sites, and in effort to greater embrace transparency – I’ve brought all three entities (AleuroNPO, AleuroSolutions and Aleuromedia) back together as one WordPress powered website.
