Linda Passante, chief executive officer of The Halo Group in New York, won a Stevie® Award for Best Entrepreneur in a Service Business - up to 100 Employees - in the 2007 Stevie Awards for Women in Business.

Nominated for her vision and focus, and for the management skills that successfully guided The Halo Group through its most recent growth phase, Linda Passante helped found the company with Denise Goodwin Pace in 1994. 

The Halo Group started simply as a private corporation with a telephone, a chair, and a clear concept.  Linda realized that in the rapidly changing world of marketing, businesses needed to marshal new resources to compete. She therefore embarked upon a series of bold moves that laid the foundation for Halo’s growth.

Introduced a New Agency Model
Linda saw an opportunity to uniquely position Halo and create a new source of consultative revenue. As CEO, Linda retooled Halo into a brand development company, designed to help businesses drive profit by focusing all their marketing practices—internal and external—on connecting with their customers. Halo would deliver everything their clients needed to do this, from marketing plans and budgets, websites, advertising, retail design, public relations, and viral marketing to sales presentations and collateral materials.

Entered a More Competitive Marketplace
Despite intensive competition from larger, well-resourced advertising agencies and vertical marketing-related firms, Linda successfully transitioned Halo from a small regional ad agency on Long Island to a brand development company based in the competitive environment of New York City. Halo officially moved to New York and closed its Long Island office in Fall 2005.

Built Human Capital Resource
Linda invested in creating the right group of consultants and communicators for this new company model.  An early adopter of Brand Planning hiring, she built a planning department—unique for an agency of Halo’s size. She also bolstered Halo’s interactive, search-engine marketing, public relations, and other capabilities to ensure that Halo had the expertise to efficiently focus its clients’ resources. Linda has doubled the size of the staff since Halo moved into the New York City.

Expanded Halo’s Global Resources/Revenues
Linda guided the global expansion of marketing efforts for clients such as St. George’s University in Grenada, West Indies, to more than thirty countries. By creating a network of international strategic partners in areas like media buying services, she positioned Halo as a single turnkey resource for all her clients’ global marketing needs. This capability was critical to solidifying existing business and securing internationally focused new business.

Winning New Business
In making these bold moves, Linda has defined a new segment in the industry, grew capitalized billings by 40%, and positioned the company for further growth.

Since expanding its global connections, Halo has enjoyed successive new business wins, including Guy Carpenter, the world’s largest risk and reinsurance broker; The New York Knicks (Knicks City Dancers); online dating site Tango Personals; and Plan!t Now Org, Morgan Freeman’s non profit disaster-prevention advocacy group.

The Halo Effect
The Halo Effect is the company’s blog site, designated as “a place where CEOs, CMOs, and VPs of Marketing and Advertising come for ideas and answers.”  Following is a selection of some of the many useful items to be found on this blog:

What the Hell is … Contextual Marketing?
By Halo on August 29, 2008 4:33 PM
Contextual marketing is online advertising placed and appearing according to how relevant it is to the content the consumer is viewing in response to a search. It is targeted advertising that looks to align with the interests of a web surfer.

Google AdSense is the most popular form of contextual marketing. A search engine bot, known as Mediabot, indexes the material on a website and determines which advertisements submitted to Google are a match. Search engines, including Yahoo! and Microsoft, display advertisements on search results pages. Those advertisements are selected based on the key words that a person enters into the search engine.

The idea of contextual marketing has been controversial because critics claim it represents an invasion of privacy. In 1999, when the search marketing company DoubleClick (now owned by Google) attempted to use the information it had collected online about consumers to create targeted promotions offline, the corporation was taken to court over its privacy policies. Public reaction led online marketers to focus on delivering marketing messages that drive responses without being intrusive.

Origin:
Contextual marketing is based on the idea of personal profiling, where information about web surfers is collected via cookies. In 1995, permanent cookie technology was invented, which allowed servers to send packets of information to web browsers, and vice versa, in order to track the websites visited by the person at the computer.

What the Hell is … Piggybacking?
By Halo on July 3, 2008 12:00 PM
Piggybacking is where smaller brands use well-known brand names, trademarked terms, or slogans in their online search advertisements to draw traffic to their websites. It is a growing issue for search engine marketers and Fortune 500 companies as advertising dollars shift online where brand abuse is rampant. Google's trademark policy is hands-off and encourages advertisers to resolve trademark disputes directly with a company that they believe is violating their trademark rights.

Marriott International and American Airlines contend that this practice is potentially driving up costs and confusing potential customers. American Airlines filed suit against Google last year, arguing that unchecked piggybacking was a case of trademark infringement.

Origin:
Piggybacking was initially a business term that referred to reducing costs by adding a new project to an existing one. It was extended to the online arena with wireless networks to refer to computer users hopping on an unprotected wireless connection.

About The Halo Group
Founded in 1994, The Halo Group is a 30-employee, Manhattan-based, independent brand development agency. Halo combines brand architecture, marketing consultation, and communications services for its international clients. Since its founding, Halo has been honored with almost 250 creative awards, including many in international advertising agency industry competitions. For more information, visit www.thehalogroup.net.

About Linda Passante
As CEO, Linda Passante has been the engine driving The Halo Group’s consistent growth and evolution into a finely tuned brand development company. Halo’s “consultants then communicators” business model is based on Linda’s belief that brand building begins from within a company with clearly articulated goals and a single-minded commitment to those goals.

Linda started her first advertising agency in 1982, and through the years marketers have turned to her for leadership in the art and science of connecting with customers.  She has been recognized as a thought leader by New York Institute of Technology’s Executive Excellence Program, SmartMoney.com, and was chosen as one of Newsday’s People to Watch.

By Anthony Balderrama, CareerBuilder.com writer

Sometimes we have lofty work goals: become CEO, earn a million dollars before we're 30, make the cover of Time magazine. And other times we have simpler aims. Perhaps the most universal concern of all workers, regardless of gender or industry, is the desire not to appear foolish.

The prospect of committing a faux pas in front of your peers, boss, or clients is enough to make you blush. A case of the hiccups or giving a presentation with your zipper down will haunt you for the rest of your career.

The odds of making a social misstep increase when you travel abroad. Executives making business trips to other countries often find themselves trying to put their best foot forward but instead end up stepping on the toes of their hosts.

Don't always clean your plate
The dinner table is the perfect venue to commit a well-intentioned gaffe. Nancy Mitchell of The Etiquette Advocate trains clients on business protocols and etiquette. One of her clients recently admitted that he offended a Chinese business associate on his first trip to Beijing. The business associate invited him to dinner on the first night of the visit. His research taught him that in China, he shouldn't discuss business at such an early stage of his trip, so he went to dinner confident about his efforts to keep the conversation on learning more about China and his host's family.

As the evening progressed, the American politely ate every bit of food on his plate, even as the courses continued and he was full. When the evening ended, the host's warmth had disappeared and he gave the visitor a cold goodbye.
The next morning he found out from a co-worker that in China, cleaning your plate means you weren't given enough food. Several helpings of food signal that the host wasn't generous to his or her guest.

Don't get caught off guard
Business travelers can often find themselves in awkward situations through no fault of their own. Asking "How are you?' can get some surprising responses, says Elisabetta Ghisini, author of "Communicating the American Way." Americans will normally respond to that question with something quick and cheerful, such as "Fine!" or "Good. How are you?"

"But if you happen to be traveling to Eastern Europe, such an upbeat attitude would be out of place: 'I'm surviving' or 'Terrible' are perfectly acceptable options," Ghisini says.

In Germany, unlike in the United States, the birthday boy or girl has the responsibility of initiating a celebration, a fact Dustin Weeks learned shortly after she began working for a German company. She didn't expect any sort of celebration because she was a new employee, so she remained silent on the matter.

"I was rather surprised when the HR manager who hired me came down to the trading floor to wish me a happy birthday and then all of my colleagues knew," Weeks says. "They immediately formed a line to shake my hand and wish me a happy birthday. I quickly realized that I was supposed to bring in a treat to celebrate my birthday after a few asked me what I had brought."

More tips
Other rules of etiquette business travelers might find quirky can be found in "Cross-Cultural Selling for Dummies," by Michael Soon Lee. Among them:
- You shouldn't give a Chinese person a clock as a gift. This can be viewed as an unlucky action signaling someone's death.
- Knives don't make good gifts in Japan, as they can be seen as symbolic of cutting ties with the recipient.
- In New Zealand, a common greeting between two people is to rub or touch noses.
- In Middle Eastern countries, you shouldn't use your left hand for greetings or to hand someone an object, as the left hand is seen as unclean.
Before you head overseas to woo a client and make some important contacts on behalf of your company, do your homework. Buy some books about etiquette and search online for tips. Some countries even have government-sponsored Web sites that tell visitors what to expect. Perhaps your best resource is a friend or colleague who has visited the country because they can give you advice based on their experiences.

Anthony Balderrama is a writer and blogger for CareerBuilder.com. He researches and writes about job search strategy, career management, hiring trends and workplace issues.

Copyright 2008 CareerBuilder.com. All rights reserved. The information contained in this article may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without prior written authority.

Richard Branson, the legendary founder and chairman of Virgin Group, became only the second-ever recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Stevie Award this summer, when he was presented the award as part of The 2008 International Business Awards.

The IBAs were presented in Dublin, Ireland on September 8 (see summary of the event below), but Sir Richard was unable to attend. So we asked Tanya Beckett of the BBC, who emceed the IBA ceremony, to present the award and chat with him, and we videotaped their meeting in London earlier this summer.

		Watch the Podcast Interview ...

Blogs, or web logs, are all the rage these days. Each month in this space we'll point you to several blogs that we think might be of interest to you.

Change This : ChangeThis is creating a new kind of media. A form of media that uses existing tools (like PDFs, blogs and the web) to challenge the way ideas are created and spread.
TeeBeeDee : An online community for people over forty who know that life is still To Be Determined.
BookSlut : A monthly web magazine and daily blog dedicated to those who love to read. Aconstant supply of news, reviews, commentary, insight, and more than occasional opinions.
The Halo Effect : Blog site of The Halo Group, designated as “a place where CEOs, CMOs, and VPs of Marketing and Advertising come for ideas and answers.”