We are only two days away from the Old Town Block Party and the entire neighborhood is buzzing with anticipation. As I mentioned in my last Block Party post, this was born out of a brainstorming session at eROI and now has grown into an event with over 20 booths, a record release party, Seven Planet store opening and a rummage sale just to name a few happenings. The eROI lounge will be by the exit on 5th, between Couch and Davis. Come down and say hi to us and all the other Old Town businesses. I can’t think of a better way to spend a Portland Saturday then with food, drinks, shopping and a lot of music. Let’s celebrate our community and help re-erect the Hung Far Low Sign!
Dawn Foster just sent out an awesome Flickr slideshow done by Aaron Hockley. I’ll figure out the iframe work-around to get the embedded slideshow working correctly when I get into the office tomorrow. As I was sitting next to fellow current, current, and former eROI teammates Dylan, Summer, and Garrett, I couldn’t help but commenting on all of the things that Portland creativity, informality, and general vibe offer that you simply can’t find anywhere else. For example: I would never see a toddler or infant at a late-night business event on the East Coast where “ear muffs” are needed in many of the presentations. I doubt other cities have women crescendo into near-real orgasms over vegetables during a presentation. So, to start off my twitter stream from the big Ignite6 night, I’ll pick the one that sums it all up – “What’s great about portland? So communal – techies bring kids to the event, casual, real, accepting, creative, inspiring.” Here’s the rest of my tweets:
# James keller on being a hooker in rugby. Great lessons, entertaining #ignite6
Eva – brilliant thinking
Authority – like librarians – its about what’s real
Anything happens at #ignite6 – veggies an aphrodisiac
Ice cold swim after sauna – shrinkage can be an issue #ignite6
Sauna cleanses you inside and out #ignite6
After intermission – sauna etiquette pres, #ignite6
# Kgw – lesson 1 – be careful who you call a hipster. Epic fail. At #ignite4 (more…)
I met Tom Szaky, barely 25 years old at the time, and a pure, scrappy, entrepreneur’s entrepreneur, at the 2007 Inc. 500 conference in Chicago. He spoke before keynote President Clinton and was clearly the more engaging speaker of the two (a pretty tough feat considering how dynamic Clinton used to be). Tom, born in Hungary, grew up in Canada, and dropped out of Princeton to start “The Coolest Startup in America” called Terracycle where every product and its packaging is made out of garbage. His story is fascinating and the lessons business leaders and public policy-makers can learn from his success are significant. The irony for Portland, one of the greenest cities on Earth, is that most business leaders and policy folks had never heard of him and were quite doubtful that some young kid would be any good as a keynote speaker at the wildly successful Greenlight Greater Portland annual event – thankfully, Tom proved them wrong with an excellent presentation of how to win by innovating and by being greener, better, AND cheaper. I don’t have his presentation electronically, so until I get it, you’ll have to settle for the YouTube video on his Good Morning America and Oprah appearances six weeks prior.
My two fellow eROI NYC folks, Chris Masagatani and Kavita Makadia, joined me in attending the June 1 Ignite NYC event just a block from Chris’s apartment in Midtown. I had been to an Ignite event in Washington DC which was pretty good, but a little stiff and serious, so my expectations were moderate before going to the event. At this NYC event, I was blown away by how creative, funny, and polished each of the 5-minute presentations were. I highly highly recommend you watch the video below of the brilliantly funny Baratunde Shares of The Onion.
The unsung hero behind an amazing integrated, grassroots campaign of traditional marketing, in-person events, and social media (well, she was mainly the social media part) gave a great keynote speech at the eMarketing Summit of Innotech today. Rahaf Harfoush was great. I show my twitter stream below of notes from the event, but also noticed she just launched a new site and blog – http://www.rahafharfoush.com/
Here is my twitter stream from Rahaf Harfoush’s awesome keynote speech at Innotech:
eROI employees, significant others, and kids joined in the festivities to help raise $110,000 for Friends of the Children in this year’s smash hit Bowl-a-thon! More than the dollars raised, we had an awesome time this past Saturday rocking out to Britney Spears (special request from Sydney) to learning more about the Friends organization in movies and meeting a bunch of the kids and mentors in the program. Check out this slideshow:
Like most of you, I got dozens of corporate “Happy Holidays” emails. Most had great intent behind them (donating to good causes instead of sending a paper card or gift), but these email campaigns lacked creativity and fell flat in their execution. GoDaddy’s holiday email and flash landing page was so tame and off-brand from the edgy stance they’ve taken with their Super Bowl ads. Some of our vendors sent me holiday emails that were strong sales pitches – not appropriate for a time of reflection and authenticity. Most other emails had generic subject lines like “Happy Holidays from x” and generic email design with low or generic results to their campaigns. I liked 2 holiday emails (beyond our own holiday email) – the first was from Michelle Obama – the main thing I liked was that the Obama campaign FINALLY didn’t ask me for money for themselves – they did ask me to donate to my local food bank.
The second holiday email campaign (see above for email design) had such compelling and humorous, original content on its landing page that it made up for a slightly expected subject line and simple email design and copywriting. Basically, this email from Sandstrom Partners was incredibly effective at getting me to click on the main call to action and even better at getting me to laugh as I completely connected with the agency gift conundrum. See if you think their video landing page is funny too >>
Thank you to everyone at eROI who donated to the Women’s Shelter! I’m really appreciative that you ran with this whole donation effort on your own and got so many employees here to give so generously. Garrett, Summer, Chuck, Meaghan and Kelsey delivered the boxes of various warm donations to the shelter on NW 5th and Burnside in Portland this morning. They were very grateful and surprised by the amount of donations eROI had collected for them. I am sure we have made many Women happy (and warm) this Holiday Season.
Many many cocktail conversations with friends this 4-day holiday weekend and the general tone of them was very upbeat, while still being quite realistic. My favorite conversation was when a neighborhood friend and I were talking about how fear breeds fear and the media, the blogosphere, and everyone’s psyche is consumed by fear. Towards the end of the conversation, we completed the following phrase after a long pause with the same exact word “fear is so………..Bush.” This blog post isn’t intended to be negative or political. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
I’m experimenting here, but I’m deeming December as the month of optimism. Many will call it naive. Others may say it is a pipe dream. But, I think that it will produce positive results, reduce stress + anxiety, and make it a far better month all around. It’s not going to be easy to take this stance – the stock market rose 17% over the past 5 business days, and media is refusing to write about anything that doesn’t focus on “disaster”, “crisis”, or “depression.” F*** it – I’m going with optimism – join me – it’s the good side of life.
BTW – today is Haiku Monday, so write about some December optimistic memories, experiences, or themes.
I believe, believe
in optimism optimism
Life is better that way
Everyone has been referring to today as Black Friday, the first day that many retailers get into the black all year due to the increased buying for the holiday season. Today was especially critical, given the economic conditions, and for consumers, all the amazing SALES that are happening. But, for a growing trend of companies, today could be named GREEN FRIDAY as retailers, like eROI client, Seven Planet, are trying to educate people on mindful commerce of buying goods that are good for the planet as well as bringing in a little green money to sustain their business model.
Today was the first day of the soft launch of this green general store. eROI designed and produced this dynamic, search-engine-friendly, e-commerce site, so please check out the site (www.sevenplanet.com) and check back in to this blog for a more in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at what went into the thought process for the business model, website strategy, design, and development.
Last Tuesday, an articulate, inspiring man was voted into office and people all over the world celebrated. In my own neighborhood, fireworks went off and a group of 25 college and high school students were banging pots and pans and stopping traffic on Hawthorne Street to jubilant honks in passing cars. My family of four walked thru the misty evening and soaked in the positive energy that had our girls jumping up and down gleefully shouting “Obama.” After my wife and I put our girls down to bed, I headed over to a sports bar, OnDeck, for drinks with some close friends – the place was packed and rowdy with 50+ huge TV screens monitoring all of the events of the evening. The bar became immediately silent when President-elect Obama gave his acceptance speech at Grant Park in Chicago. We hung on every word.
Since then, it’s been an adjustment. The party only lasted one night and reality set in the next day with the stock market down and life moving at warp speed. Every newspaper and magazine has blitzed us with this momentous, historic event and Obama has lived up to the expectation, for now. Expectations are so high, that at some point, there will be cracks in his armour. But, hopefully, as a human race that values inspiration, innovation, and progress over fear, we will support him when he stumbles. As an exercise of documenting a few of the videos and articles that mattered most to me, I am showing them below:
Here is an email that I’ve been sending to my entrepreneur friends in Portland today:
Tom Szaky is one of the hottest, most dynamic, young green / sustainable entrepreneurs in the country. I’m writing you because I know you’d love meeting this amazing entrepreneur who is coming to Portland b/c of its green, sustainable presence (and because I asked him after getting to know him at the past two Inc. 500 conferences).
Tom Szaky is an absolutely amazing speaker (up there w/ President Clinton as another keynote at the Inc. 500 conference last year). I invited him to fly out here from Trenton, New Jersey to speak to 45-60 entrepreneurs at eROI and he’s able to be here on Sat, Nov 15 at noon (free lunch). This is a Starve Ups event – thanks to John Friess and the Starve Ups member companies for making this happen.
He really is an amazing guy (27 years old and running a $15 million green / sustainable company called TerraCycle where everything about its product and packaging comes from waste) – please consider coming to this.
Fortunately, in Oregon, we all mail in our votes, and I did so the first day I got the ballot, so I’m off the hook. For those who haven’t voted or don’t intend to vote, you are missing your opportunity to have a very real impact in a critical time in our nation’s history.
Black and White OR White and Black - The other week Anna Yeaman at StyleCampaign put forth an idea and backed it up with a test on the concept of the uses of black and white as a background in an email and how it performs. Her test has been on my mind making me take a closer look at not only our [...]
Below is a list of real holidays, wacky holidays, and pop culture events in March and ideas you can utilize to develop timely and relevant email marketing campaigns.
Here it is, your March Email Marketing Calendar.
