Keeping clients happy isn't just an aspiration at LeapFrog Interactive; it's a way of doing business. To discuss how LeapFrog keeps good client service front and center every day, we've gathered a roundtable of Client Services' finest: Account Managers Trish Pendleton, Heather Radford, and Lauren Pate, and Lori Druen, Vice President of Client Services.

How do you keep service a priority?

Trish Pendleton: It's something that's always top of mind. Staying in touch with our clients as much as we can. Replying to e-mails right away, even if they don't require a response, by sending a simple thank you. Making sure our clients know that we're constantly thinking about and working for them. These are just some of the ways we can give our clients that something extra.

Heather Radford: I think knowing your clients' business or industry and educating yourself about what they do is important. That way, when they have questions for you, you can answer them correctly in regards to their industry. It also helps to try and make a connection with them, even on a personal level, to help build a relationship.

Lauren Pate: It's really easy for service to be a priority for us because it's our focus and what we do all day, every day.

What makes what we do here at LFI different from other agencies in terms of providing client service?

Trish: I think that at LeapFrog client needs are handled with more personal effort. We're more likely to bend over backwards to accommodate our clients than some larger agencies that I've worked at or heard about. This extra effort comes from how we feel about our clients. We consider them our partners, and their success is just as important to us as it is to them.

Lori Druen: We actually practice what we preach. We're committed to providing a high level of service, and anything less than that isn't acceptable. We are available to our clients whenever they need us. We don't shut down our accountability at 5 PM.

Heather: Each client gets their own very involved marketing, creative, and development teams. Client Services serves as the liaison between the client and the rest of the company but when we're talking about ideas or designs for a new project, all the client's teams sit around the table discussing how we're going to execute plans.

Lauren: We keep everyone in the loop. If I'm out and someone else in Client Services is going to follow up with a client I have, they know enough about the client that the client never feels as though it's somebody new who doesn't know anything about their account or project.

Heather: For our clients, no matter if it's Trish's client or my own, we become the voice inside and outside work for our clients. If someone on the street asks me what I do for a living, I'm very likely to talk about all of LFI's clients rather than just the specific ones I work with. There's a lot of pride within all of us for all of our clients.

What were the driving forces that made us want to break from the norm of typical agency provided client service?

Lori: I think it started from our clients telling us that we were different. When I started hearing that, I decided to put even more focus on it because it was apparent that our bare minimum is a lot of other agencies' high point. I couldn't believe it personally, but it was feedback we received across the board.

Lauren: Right now you really need to set yourself apart from everyone else. The level of service we provide makes a big difference because everyone's trying to decide where to put their money. It's a much bigger deal if they feel like they have a team with them.

Heather: With our clients, we strive to be proactive as opposed to being reactive. We bring new ideas to the table all the time and question our clients about things - have you heard about this, have you thought about doing that. We aren't just order takers.

Trish: We just took a focus on always looking for and being open to ways of improvement. We also tell each other about things that worked well with our clients that might work for their clients. It's about professional development and making sure people within our department are always growing.

How have we gone the extra mile for our clients or even what we do each day that adds a little personal touch?

Lauren: We've gone to and helped out with some of our clients' events. We even help brainstorm ideas for these events. We're so up to speed on when these events occur that we can offer our clients help ahead of time. We also remember milestones in our clients' personal lives, like their birthdays or things their kids are doing. We think about those events and put them on our calendars because we know they matter to our clients, and they really matter to us.

Trish: We've helped plan one client's internal meeting. They actually reached out to us if we could lend any creative ideas for this meeting. They knew we were creative people, and they asked if we could share some thoughts to spice up what they had planned. It was really fun to help out, and the meeting was a success!

Heather: For some clients, we aren't just their liaison with LeapFrog's various departments. We're also their liaison with their other vendors.

Trish: The level of work we do is unlike anything I've ever seen. If an urgent request comes from a client, we'll work through lunch, work late, and work weekends to get it done. Our clients' urgent needs become our urgent needs. It's important to them, so it's important to us, too. We go above and beyond.

Some agencies have a lot of internal competition because teams are so focused on their clients and which team can get the most business or get a project out the door faster. Here it's not like that at all. All our clients get equal attention and service. It's not about competing - we're a team. The entire company wants to see all of our clients succeed, not just the ones we work on individually.

Sometimes I wonder what some brands are thinking when they introduce a new product.

Recently, Arbys, the reigning roast beef brand leader, introduced its new sandwich line: the Roastburgers. My initial impression was, "Arbys is making burgers now? Not so sure about that one." Then when I went to an Arbys to pick up a roast beef sandwich for my wife, I saw a picture of the Roastburgers. I looked at it. Then I looked at it again more closely to make sure my contacts weren't playing tricks on me.

The Roastburgers, as it turns out, are not really burgers. They are actually roast beef sandwiches. The only "burgery" aspect of them is that they have toppings you'd expect on a hamburger, like tomatoes, red onions, lettuce, bacon, and even special sauce.

Arbys calls Roastburgers "the burger done better." Which is nice except a Roastburger is not, in fact, a burger done better. It is, in fact, a roast beef sandwich who knows somebody.

After discovering the truth about these impostor burgers, I wondered if the Roastburgers couldn't have been marketed in a way that caused less confusion. Wanting more information, I went to the Arbys website. There I learned that the sandwiches are described as being made with "oven roasted roast beef." This made me wonder how exactly Arbys has been roasting the other beef it has been serving up all these years.

Not long after my site visit, I started seeing the Roastburgers TV ads. Let me get this straight. Arbys has been doling our roast beef sandwiches now for decades, but now that they've added tomatoes and onions, we're supposed to believe that this is the moment the burger kings (pun shamelessly intended) have decided to unleash the hounds, actually worried enough about the Roastburger to start flinging all-beef patties around. If you missed it, you can see the commercial on Arbys Facebook Page.

My initial thoughts about all of this were that Arbys, from product naming to product marketing, appears to have misfired on a sandwich that apparently, from what those who have tried it have told me, isn't all that bad. Heck, the more I read about the Roastburgers, the more I thought I actually might want to try one. But maybe that was the point.

Maybe this whole thing was deliberate. Maybe Arbys had a cunning plan to promote the Roastburgers this way. Because if they actually had their traditional brand and positioned the Roastburgers as just fancier roast beef sandwiches, I never would have gotten my Irish up and written about them. I probably wouldn't have noticed them at all. Now I'm actually wondering if this is more a case of Arbys taking its traditional brand positioning and playing off of it than Arbys simply sensationally whiffing on a product introduction. My practical side learns toward the latter. My conspiracy theorist side, however, thinks the former has credibility. My stomach, ever the realist, thinks the Bacon and Bleu Roastburger looks awfully tasty. And sometimes, you just have to go with what your gut is telling you. And mine apparently is thinking Arbys. So it looks like Arbys might have a winner after all.

There's a tendency among brands, especially during tougher economic times like the ones we're in now, to cut back on marketing efforts that they view as fluff.  Social media tends to fall into this category in the eyes of many advertisers.

The obstacle that needs to be cleared for many brands is that the way to set goals and measure success for a social media marketing campaign are a world apart from other forms of interactive marketing. Because it works differently and it isn't as quantifiable as other forms of interactive marketing, social media ends up being seen as fluffy and not as important by these brands.

Social media, however, is probably the most important thing any brand can do.So to get these brands on the social media bandwagon, it's important to provide them with some education about social media and the marketing power it has in order to get them just as enamored with it as their customer base is.

First, brands need to understand that they need to have different expectations and goals for their social media marketing campaign. Social media won't provide them with results that generate hard numbers like 2 million impressions. Metrics like brand lift and buzz, user sentiment about the brand in blogs and forums, and how this sentiment about the brand stacks up against its competition are the measuring sticks that matter in social media.

Brands also need to understand that results won't come in a lightning bolt but start with a groundswell that then builds and develops over time. The impact of the brand's social media marketing efforts can be gauged by comparing the level of buzz from before the campaign's launch to where it's at six months later. Whether consumer sentiment has changed for the better since the campaign's inception is also evaluated. Success or failure is judged over time - there are no quick fixes in social media ; A successful campaign, however, can return results that provide long-term benefits to the brand.

These results, however, can take a form that might make brands think their investment has been wasted. The number of fans for a brand's Facebook page or the number of users participating in its blogs and forums will be smaller on paper and seem less consequential as a result than the million impressions another form of interactive marketing might return. The difference with social media is that sometimes 30 users can provide an influence that packs as powerful a marketing punch for the brand as those million impressions.

These 30 users will be the voices praising and advocating the brand away from the brand's social site. These individuals carry a big stick when it comes to driving user sentiment because they are the ones who are going online and serving as brand advocates, spreading the good word about the brand entirely on their own.

These brand advocates also help illustrate another unique selling point for social media.  Unlike PPC or e-mail campaigns that run for a set period and then stop, a social media campaign's groundswell can build and keep growing without any help. Users will keep talking about the brand as part of their ongoing online conversations. In essence, the social media campaign will feed itself. As long as a brand stays responsive and engages with its users to keep sentiment positive, the social conversation will continue as users spread positive buzz about the brand.

If a brand still needs to be convinced that social media works, a timely example illustrating the impact social media can have is readily available. Barack Obama fully capitalized on the power of social media. With millions of fans, his social media groundswell played a big part in getting him elected. This type of success story should provide the last nudge a skeptical brand needs to keep social media as an ingredient in its marketing mix.