Zanola on Campus -- Blogs to Buzz

Today’s blog post is brought to you by Rachel Ballard, Zanola Company’s research manager.

I recently wrapped up my “Blogs to Buzz” course, the first step in the completion of my Social & Digital Media Marketing certification.

The second day of the course was a lot of fun for me, as we took what we had learned over the two eight-hour sessions and made practical applications to our own lives. Each team member had an opportunity to discuss their company or organization, and together, the class brainstormed how to practically apply what we had learned to our work situations.

The lecture session explored content marketing, and the evolution of company marketing and branding. We discussed how the traditional press releases and media outreach are slowly fading away, and are being replaced by the use of new media and technology to reach out to directly engage the consumer.

Through practical application of these skills, we are even more able and ready to launch Zanola Company and our clients into the future of marketing within the new media. This course has set the bar high for my Social & Digital Media Marketing certification!

Zanola is happy to have the opportunity to learn more and remain relevant and vibrant in our field! We are also excited to put these new skills to good use for our amazing clients. Stay tuned for more.

By Rachel Ballard

Zanola on Campus: Stay Tuned for Upcoming Webinar

You may recall that Angelo Zanola has been taking Geographical Information Services classes at Washington University. The new research techniques we are implementing in our research studies are exciting and allow us to dig into data in a whole new way. If maps like these intrigue you …  stay tuned for an upcoming webinar announcement. 

Expanding the Depth of Research Studies

At Zanola Company, we are always looking for ways to expand the scope and depth of our research studies. For that reason, I've been taking classes at Washington University in St. Louis for their GIS Certification Program. GIS, Geographic Information Studies, is a system of computer tools and techniques that allows for the creation, manipulation, display and analysis of information in a spatial system, and will allow Zanola Company to expand its resources as I learn.

I just finished the program's introductory class, and integrated my usual Zanola Company work into my final project. For this project, I compared the data collected through MarketGraphics® audits over the past five years to every single residential parcel sold during the same time according to the St. Louis County Planning Department and Assessor's office to see if we had missed any subdivisions. 

After importing every parcel in St. Louis County, I narrowed it down to residential new construction sold between 2008 and 2012. I then manually eliminated every parcel that corresponded to a MarketGraphics®-tracked site. With each step, I made a fresh map, and in the end had 47 lots that could indicate missed subdivisions. After visiting them in the field during the current MarketGraphics® audit, I found one small subdivision with fresh activity and one currently-tracked subdivision with an addition that had not been counted. We are now looking into expanding this type of audit to other counties we track based on the availability of comparable data.

This type of project, with its multiple layers of municipal and proprietary Zanola Company-created data, is just a small sample of the type of analysis GIS will let us undertake. Adding even more depth to our research studies benefits each and every one of our clients as we build an even more solid data foundation for you to base your development, building, and marketing plans on.

By Angelo Zanola