Tag Archive for 'Mike FitzGibbon'

The Shadow: Week Four or the Importance of Company Culture

3Cinteractive: The ShadowThis is the fourth installment of a series of weekly blog posts written by Jenny Walsh, intern and office mate of John Duffy, 3Cinteractive’s Founder and CEO . This series takes a look at the inner workings of 3Ci and mobile marketing from a fresh perspective.

The 3Ci semi-annual bowling night took place last week. It was a blast, partly because I easily beat everyone at bowling. Yes, Mike FitzGibbon, I’m talking to you. It was also fun to relax and really get to know people from the office. I met some of the engineers from Uruguay and Spain that were in town, and was able to pick their brains about what to expect from engineering school. I finally had someone on my side about selecting engineering as a career, but they did warn me it is not an easy road. I was able to talk to people I don’t really see a lot during the day and get their advice as I head off to college. Advice ranged from when not to schedule my classes (Friday mornings) to what courses helped them the most in their careers. I loved all the advice and hearing about everyone’s college experiences — some crazier then others.

Besides sharpening our bowling skills I asked Duff what, as a company, was the thinking behind doing something like a bowling night. Duff said it was about enjoying the ride and the importance of culture in a company. He said it was vital to have people that like each other and work together because the quickest way to fail is having a lack of teamwork where egos get in way of the ultimate goal. Jeff Michaud chimed in and said, “It’s about the name on the front of the jersey, not the back.” I really understand what he means after getting to see the 3Ci team at work. It’s easy to understand why the great culture here is a major component of what makes 3Ci successful and also why Duff would be so interested in protecting that and ensuring it continues.

3Cinteractive Culture: Semi-Annual Bowling Night 2010

Boca Raton Company Helps Health Care Industry Go Mobile (South Florida Business Journal)

South Florida Business Journal
Brian Bandell
Friday, July 9, 2010

Mike FitzGibbon

After creating mobile communication platforms for major corporations, Boca Raton-based 3Cinteractive has targeted the health care industry as a promising market for expansion.

The company has a pilot program with Walgreens to alert customers via text message that their prescriptions are ready. It’s working on similar patient notification applications for physician offices and pharmaceutical companies.

3Ci has done mobile applications work for national companies including AutoNation, AT&T and ESPN, mostly with cell phone mass messaging, billing and reservations. Mike FitzGibbon, 3Ci’s co-founder and president, said it spent much of the fourth quarter of 2009 and the first few months of 2010 planning its strategy for the health care market, where inefficiencies abound.

Health care is one of the few employment sectors that’s shown growth over the past year. The combination of aging baby boomers and increased access to medical services through the health care reform law should continue to make technology services for this industry a big market.

When it comes to being interactive with patients, health care is among the least technology savvy fields, FitzGibbon said, but 3Ci aims to change that.

One of the main targets for improvement is cutting down on medical appointment abandonment, he said. “Each appointment is worth a specific dollar amount and staff time,” FitzGibbon noted. “That’s lost revenue.”

Instead of having nurses and office staff call patients, 3Ci has designed an automatic text messaging application that alerts patients about their upcoming appointments. FitzGibbon said it’s more efficient than making calls, especially since some people don’t answer calls when they don’t recognize the incoming number.

For pharmaceutical companies, 3Ci is working on a text messaging application that would remind consumers when to take medications or order a refill. The pharmaceutical companies could also use the application to text coupons to consumers.

Sunrise-based Interim Healthcare is using a text-messaging system designed by 3Ci to contact its home health care providers in the field through mass messaging. The company often uses it to offer assignments and call multiple employees to the office, said Linda Shaub, Interim’s VP of marketing. While it’s not in all 312 of Interim’s offices yet, those that are using it have found it useful for communicating, she said.

John Styers, VP of corporate strategy at 3Ci, said the employee text messaging application has also been used by hospitals, including Truman Medical Centers in Kansas City, Missouri, because it makes sure that requests for assistance reach employees quickly. 3Ci’s other mobile applications for hospitals are for patients: to give them health and wellness news, notify them of available test results and give billing information.

While 3Ci has many predesigned programs for health care companies, it also has the flexibility to customize programs to meet the needs of particular clients, Styers said. Most of the programs it is rolling out were developed by working with a few health care providers, and engineering solutions for them.

“We want to make mobile solutions easier to deploy,” he said “It’s getting the health care facility to crawl by implementing mobile solutions where they can see immediate results.”

Text Me to Reach Me: Texting is how to reach clients, colleagues fast (South Florida Sun-Sentinel)

South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Marcia Heroux Pounds
3:35 PM EDT, April 21, 2010

I recently received a text from a phone number I didn’t recognize, so I ignored it. But more recently, it worked. The text got my immediate attention because it was someone I needed to reach for a project.

How essential is texting for business? Texting may be the new lifeline to clients, customers and colleagues you need to reach — now. More businesses owners and professionals are using texting to reach people who are too busy to check e-mail or disinclined to answer the phone.

“It’s the fastest, quickest way for my clients to reach me,” says Fort Lauderdale career coach Debbie Benami-Rahm. When clients spot a job posting and needs her to review it, they text her with a link and she tells them whether it’s a match.

She sends “confidence boosters” via text before clients go on job interviews and later messages them to find out how the interview went.

Jason Welch, managing partner of R.I.C. Search in South Florida, says his recruiting firm limits the use of instant messaging. He may send a text to let a job candidate know he needs to talk to them or request they read a time-sensitive e-mail.

But some businesses find that texting is becoming essential to reaching their workers in the field.

At Interim Healthcare in Sunrise, nurses receive text messages letting them know about staffing opportunities. “They can send a text message in real time to potential candidates as opposed to picking up the phone and calling one by one,” says Mike FitzGibbon, president of 3Cinteractive, a Boca Raton firm that provides the texting system.

Without the texts nurses working in home healthcare might not know when a patient is being discharged from the hospital, might miss policy changes, and could lose a chance to fill an open shift, says Linda Schaub, who heads marketing at Interim Healthcare.

Continue reading ‘Text Me to Reach Me: Texting is how to reach clients, colleagues fast (South Florida Sun-Sentinel)’

The MMA’s 2010 US Consumer Best Practices Committee Meeting and Dinner

3Cinteractive, along with Neustar, was proud to sponsor the Mobile Marketing Association’s (MMA) 2010 Consumer Best Practices (CBP) Public Forum event. 3Ci also played host to the MMA’s CBP Committee Meeting at our offices in Boca Raton as well as a VIP dinner at the Seagate Beach Club in Delray Beach.

Niki Dunbar, Alison Billings, Mike FitzGibbon, Mark Smith, Ryan Martin
Pictured, left to right: Niki Dunbar, 3Cinteractive; Alison Billings, T-Mobile USA; Mike FitzGibbon
and Mark Smith, 3Cinteractive; and Ryan Martin, U.S. Cellular

By all accounts both the MMA CBP Committee meeting and the Industry Forum were a big hit. All of the feedback regarding the events was tremendous and several highly productive meetings occurred as a result of the forum.

3Ci thanks Neustar, the MMA, the CBP Committee members, and the forum attendees for helping to make this year’s Consumer Best Practices Forum a success, and special thanks go to Kelly Dowling, Jeff Michaud, and Joe Arcadi of the 3Cinteractive team for their efforts.

The forum, held at the Boca Raton Resort and Club in Boca Raton, Florida, discussed the CBP Guidelines, which are produced by the MMA’s CBP Committee (of which 3Cinteractive is a member). The guidelines provide measures of acceptable and unacceptable practices. Updated regularly, these guidelines set the industry standard for cross- carrier mobile content services, such as short messaging service (SMS), multimedia messaging service (MMS), shortcode programs, interactive voice response (IVR), and mobile web.

3Cinteractive Expands International Coverage, Extending Mobile Marketing Reach Across the Americas

3Cinteractive® is proud to announce that it has expanded its mobile messaging coverage to key Central and South American markets. This further extends the reach of Switchblade™, the company’s mobile marketing technology platform.

The mobile marketing platform expansion adds significant markets including Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, and Uruguay. “Our platform is designed to be highly scalable, carrier and aggregator agnostic, and expansive enough to serve the global brands we work with,” explained Mike FitzGibbon, Co-Founder and President of 3Cinteractive.

Continue reading ‘3Cinteractive Expands International Coverage, Extending Mobile Marketing Reach Across the Americas’

3Ci’s Mike FitzGibbon Honored at SFBJ’s “40 Under 40″

Mike FitzGibbon, Co-Founder and President of 3Cinteractive, was recently honored by the South Florida Business Journal (SFBJ) as one of their 40 Under 40.

Mike FitzGibbon, 3Cinteractive
Mike FitzGibbon, pictured center

The Business Journal has long believed that young professionals are among the community’s most vital assets and that it’s important to recognize and acknowledge those who are making South Florida a better place to live and do business.

The group of 40 Under 40 honorees were recognized at a cocktail reception held Thursday, June 18th Design Center of the Americas. In addition, the honorees will be profiled in the the special section of the Business Journal on June 19.

Congratulations to Mike and thanks to the SFBJ for the honor!

3Cinteractive Expands Worldwide Corporate Headquarters

After another year of dramatic growth, 3Cinteractive (3Ci) has completed its expansion of its corporate headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida. 3Ci, recently named the years’ Fastest Growing Technology Company in South Florida by the South Florida Business Journal, has expanded its facility to allow for significant forecasted growth in 2009.

“In these economic times, we are very happy to be in a position to continue our expansion,” said John Duffy, 3Cinteractive’s CEO. “All aspects of our business continue to grow. We added 23 employees in 2008, our revenues grew over 250% from 2007, and we are extremely excited about our outlook for 2009,” said Mr. Duffy.

“While traditional media-based advertising revenues in general are clearly down, mobile marketing revenues continue to grow,” said 3Ci President Mike FitzGibbon. “Advertising Age recently reported that the case for mobile as a direct-response channel could resonate more in the present economic climate.”

“Our elegant SMS and IVR mobile messaging platforms were built to make it easy for marketers to mobilize and reach consumers ubiquitously. We continue to create measurable interaction between brands and consumers,” said Mr. FitzGibbon.