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A year ago this month, Blue State Digital LLC lost more than half its revenue when its biggest customer began closing up shop. A year later, the Web development and strategy agency founded in Boston has doubled its head count and is projecting 40 percent to 50 percent revenue growth in 2009 over the $9.6 million it brought in last year.
That big client was President Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign, which used Blue State for voter database services, Web development and strategy consulting.
The Democratic National Committee is still a customer, and Blue State is providing Web tools to Democratic U.S. Senate candidates Alan Khazei and Michael Capuano, but none will contribute more than single-digit percentages of Blue State’s 2009 revenue.
Politics, which used to be 80 percent to 90 percent of the company’s business, is now less than half, founder Jascha Franklin-Hodge said. In the past year, Blue State Digital has expanded aggressively into new business areas, growing an extensive client list of for-profit and nonprofit organizations. The roster includes Anheuser-Busch InBev, the American Cancer Society, the United Way and the USA Bid Committee to attract the FIFA World Cup of soccer to the United States in 2018.
After the Obama campaign’s success mobilizing voters and volunteers via the Web, companies began showing interest in Blue State’s brand of online strategy, which dates back to the company’s work on Howard Dean’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004. Now, companies are realizing the words “voter” and “volunteer” could easily be replaced with “customer,” Franklin-Hodge said.
“During the Dean campaign, we said, ‘How do we give people tools to get involved on their own?’ ” he said. “Our events calendar (online tool) has never been about publishing your events. It’s always been about letting people publish their own.”
Blue State Digital, as the name suggests, works only with Democratic candidates for office. But the company does not apply any partisan conditions to its nonprofit and for-profit clients, Franklin-Hodge said. However, he said, to work with the firm’s strategic consulting wing, a company needs to be willing to break down barriers and streamline communications. For example, requiring 20 people’s sign-off on an e-mail is untenable, he said.
The number of companies interested in pursuing a more open online strategy remains a narrow niche, but it is growing, said Justin Levy, general manager of New Marketing Labs, a social media consultancy based in Boston.
But the leap to crafting a meaningful strategy for engaging customers via social networks is more than most organizations are ready for, said Steve Mulder, director of emerging interactions at Watertown-based Molecular Inc., one of the larger Boston-area Web design and development firms.
Recently, Molecular developed a Facebook application for the Boston Celtics — a game enabling fans to challenge one another to predict players’ performance. If Molecular’s experience is any indicator, for most companies, that level of outreach is a long way off.
“A lot of clients are still doing what we think of as basics,” Mulder said.
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