08/10/2011

Navistar - Technical Agency of Record

International Truck (IT), a partner of ours since 2005, came to us in 2009 to deepen our relationship - asking that we guide and own their digital solution as their Technical Agency of Record.
We immediately got to work owning the conversation, bridging across division lines, unifying and centralizing interactive environments and establishing success metrics.
We implemented Omniture and developed dashboards to provide accurate and up-to-date metrics for their business users. We use these metrics to guide us when drafting IA and UX, designing a cohesive, measurable solution project by project.

• • Tags
  • Mobile Experiences
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  • Navistar
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  • Web Services
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  • Vignette
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  • CMS
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  • Java
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  • Highwinds
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  • Location-based
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  • Flash
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  • SQL
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08/05/2011

Financial Planning Portal Tools

Ratchet partnered with a Minneapolis-based financial planning company to launch a cutting-edge advisor discovery application. We lead the Discovery and Definition process from the “idea stage” into development and sucessful deployment with a very aggressive timeline. This customer-facing portal streamlined the sales process and created significant operational efficiencies. The application includes a complex matching algorithm to bring customers together with the right advisor, every time. This advisor site platform decreased costs by eliminating the need for a fully centralized site support team, by putting the power of personalized content into the hands of advisors to drive lead-generation and conversions. Since launching, we've partnered with the Marketing and IT team to develop mobile and social tools including LinkedIn integration.

• • Tags
  • Mobile Experiences
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  • SQL
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  • XML
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  • Web Services
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  • Agile
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  • Highwinds
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  • .NET
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07/26/2011

Tablespoon.com

Tablespoon is an online recipe content discovery application for a Minneapolis-based consumer packaged goods company. We were engaged to integrate multiple 3rd party solutions –  including Sitecore CMS, Community Server, Outbrain, Baynote and WordPress – and partnered with several creative agencies along with their internal Marketing and IT teams to bring the concept to a digital reality.

The application features heavy personalization, recommendations, social integration via Facebook Connect and user-driven content such as ratings, comments, sharing and blogs. Since launching, the site has undergone a perpetual data-driven evolution, including new designs, methods of navigation, and a mobile experience.

• • Tags
  • CMS
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  • WordPress
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  • MySQL
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  • XML
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  • Web Services
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  • Agile
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  • .NET
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  • Sitecore
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07/22/2011

Life Time Fitness

When Life Time Fitness began planning a complete redesign and rebuild of their overall web presence – including integrating two public sites and over 50 satellite brand sites, selecting a new marketing technology platform and an overarching re-architecture of how marketing data and traditional systems come together – they came to us.  Core to their objectives was the ability to leverage site usage trends and marry that data with existing online / offline activity to arrive at a model driving 1:1 messaging with each unique user.  We kept this goal at the forefront of the conversation and delivered current & future-state site and system context diagrams along with platform recommendations that are being implemented today.

• • Tags
  • CMS
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  • Marketing Technology Architecture
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07/13/2011

LinkedIn

One of Ratchet’s long-standing clients wanted a more socially relevant approach to search; one where users’ could filter results by who was part of their LinkedIn network. Ratchet partnered with them and the LinkedIn team to deliver a proof-of-concept – something the LinkedIn team believed was a first-of-its-kind use of their tool. The project was recently green-lighted and we are slated to lead this integration effort to their public site in the coming months.