ForeSite Technologies President and co-owner Mike Giuffrida was in the thick of the IT/Internet race in 1997 when he was IT manager for a small Hartford based insurance company. At the time, mass culture was moving haltingly from the MS-DOS floppy-disk world to the Internet, and his job started crossing more operational lines than ever. But he had little or no backup or support. Realizing that there were many other IT personnel in his situation, Giuffrida decided to become that backup and support, and thus was born ForeSite Technologies.
The 12-year-old company is headquartered in East Hartford with a Worcester office, and it’s looking to establish sites in southern Connecticut and in Providence, RI, to effectively service southern New England.
ForeSite provides IT support functions, website development and strategy.
Giuffrida describes himself as more business-oriented than technical which is why when he brought in a partner in 2001, Ben Sweet, he focused on someone with the technical acumen to do the heavy technical lifting. The company’s infrastructure support includes networks, desktop support, maintenance and emergency planning. Its core market is businesses with 15 to 75 employees but it has also done web development for big companies such as Pfizer and Honeywell. It can serve as an IT backup to clients when their IT staff go on vacation, but it also helps clients focus on business goals – and how they can optimize their technology use to achieve those goals.
Websites have evolved from what Giuffrida calls “online brochures” to electronic sales tools. “Business owners want their web sites to be lead generators for them, not just a way for prospects to find them,” he said.
The company’s white papers – downloadable from its web site – spell this out. The “10 Tips for Developing an Effective Website” and “6 Best Practices for an Effective Call to Action” contain common-sense advice for the presentation of content. The tips are deeply appreciated by those who navigate web sites to gather information: The first two seconds count. Make pulldown menus easy to access. Put your basic information in more than one place. It’s the Internet equivalent of keeping your important information “above the fold.”
But how to keep above the fold in the social media age of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter? First, the “social” moniker turns some customers off, Giuffrida observed. Clients who dismiss Twitter often say, “‘I don’t need to know what someone had for lunch,’ but we’re not following anyone who tweets what they had for lunch. If you follow the right people, and if the right people follow you, you can get a lot of buzz,” he said.
He should know. ForeSite’s blogs and downloadable white papers – and the company’s social media marketing – resulted in a tenfold increase in lead generation in the first month it was used and has continued at that pace since.
ForeSite’s approach to client service is to sell only what makes sense for the client’s business. The company’s staff has been known to talk clients out of annexing glitzy but untried systems into their essential IT operations.
“We’re not just a break-fix company,” Giuffrida said. ForeSite technical staff must have both good technical skills and the ability to relate to people and their business issues. “That’s how we can really make a difference” Giuffrida said.
