PORTLAND – MaineToday Digital, a marketing agency specializing in new media, will launch operations Tuesday from offices overlooking the Portland waterfront.

The startup has about 20 employees and plans to become a one-stop shop for Maine businesses that want to reach customers through digital media, from websites to YouTube videos to text messages, said its president, Steve Galligan.

“It will provide a single solution for all their digital needs,” he said.

The new company is a spinoff of MaineToday Media Inc., publisher of the Maine Sunday Telegram, The Portland Press Herald, Kennebec Journal and Waterville Sentinel. It is based at 7 Custom House St. in the Old Port.

“What we know today is that we are better positioned than any other company in the state to be the leader in this field,” said Richard L. Connor, owner and chief executive officer of MaineToday Digital and CEO of MaineToday Media.

A staff of about 10 advertising sales representatives spent two weeks in training and Wednesday will begin working with local and regional businesses to take advantage of social media and create digital marketing campaigns, Galligan said. The other half of the staff will provide office support and production, and the agency will work with a number of partner companies for production support.

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Services will include search engine marketing and optimization, and marketing with social media such as text messages, Web videos and Facebook pages.

A local tanning salon, for example, fills its tanning beds in the evening by sending text message reminders to its customers at a certain time in the morning, said Barry Jackman, director of advertising sales and marketing. With such targeted digital marketing, he said, “we can target it down to the lunch hour or dinner hour.”

The agency also will design and manage websites and provide a service called reputation management, which allows a business to track comments made about it in social media and even respond directly to customers. “Anytime, anywhere something is said about them,” Galligan said.

Galligan said the marketing products are intended to complement the advertising opportunities provided through MaineToday Media’s newspapers and websites.

“(The newspaper) is the breadwinner for the company and will be for a while,” Galligan said. “But it would be naive to think that people are not looking for other ways to reach out to customers.”

Michael Learmonth, digital editor at Advertising Age magazine in New York City, said the agency is part of a “mini trend” among news organizations.

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“Media companies, in addition to selling ads, are offering creative services,” Learmonth said. “Why give up that portion of the creative (marketing) budget when you’ve got the designers and you can provide the service?”

The launch of the marketing agency also marks an important step toward a revamped MaineToday.com Web page, according to the company.

Jaica Kinsman, executive producer at MaineToday Digital, is leading a team that will rebuild and relaunch MaineToday.com in 2012 as a statewide “community-based, social news portal,” she said.

“We want to provide news and information about the outdoors, theater and the arts, dining, travel,” Galligan said.

The new MaineToday.com site will feature content from MaineToday’s three daily newspapers and the weekly Coastal Journal, as well as additional content from other sources, such as community collaborations, said Angie Muhs, who has been named executive editor at MaineToday Digital. Muhs will continue as managing editor of The Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram for the time being, while working toward the website launch.

“We’ve got really good resources in the newspapers we own,” Muhs said. “We can be a central location for all of the news out of Maine.”

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Connor, the CEO, said the launch is part of a strategy that goes back to his purchase of the newspaper company in 2009.

“When we started MaineToday Media, we had a thesis that we could be the statewide leader in the various levels of the Internet. We’ve watched, studied and experimented. We have seen our online audience continue to grow exponentially. By the beginning of this year, we began to see even more clearly the new possibilities for our company in the digital world,” Connor said. “While surveying the rapidly changing digital landscape, we eventually learned more about what we didn’t know than what we did know about new media.

“What was clear is that we needed an expert with extensive real-world digital experience. Luckily, we found that in Steve Galligan, who has had tremendous digital experience with some of the most successful businesses and product vendors both inside and outside our core business. It was a bonus that he had also lived and worked in Maine. Steve has developed an incredible team and a suite of new media products that is dazzling. We are now ready for launch.”

“What we know today is that we are better positioned than any other company in the state to be the leader in this field,” said Connor. “As we grow and succeed our digital business, all of our employees at MaineToday Media will benefit from it because MaineToday Digital, while a separate company, is partially owned by all of our employees through their stock ownership plan.”

Staff Writer John Richardson can be contacted at 791-6324 or at:

jrichardson@pressherald.com

 


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