eROI Days Email Agency

The PDC (Portland Development Commission) put together this video featuring business folks from Laika, Ziba, Columbia Sportswear, Oregon Iron Works, Vestas, Wieden+Kennedy and eROI. If you dig Portland and the surrounding area, check out the video below.

As I was biking in to work this morning along Waterfront Park (Willamette River and Mt. Hood views), I caught up with a colleague of mine who works at the PDC and we rode the rest of the way into work together.  It was one of those “Portland moments” where it would be unexpected anywhere else for a couple business guys who haven’t seen each other in 3 months connect on a morning commute into work.  Portland, like Amsterdam, has a biking culture, and with the right gear, it’s refreshing to bike rain or shine (although SUN is so so much better).  Here is the NY Times article my Dad (who lives in Washington DC) sent me as I arrived at my desk this morning:

“A LOT of good cyclists come out of Portland just because you can ride year-round,” said Bruce Rogers, an athletic-shoe designer visiting from his home in Hailey, Idaho. “I love coming back because I love the biking, no matter what time of year it is. More than fitness, it’s a fun outlet. As long as you have decent rainwear you can ride in any weather.”

Careering through streets on a bicycle in Portland, Ore., this time of year can be an easy weekend adventure that mixes showers, sunbursts, cafes and a robust bicycle culture. And equipped with a sturdy rain jacket, booties, fenders and a bike map (a waterproof version that folds to the size of a credit card is handy), visitors can enjoy the city the way locals do.

Check out the rest of the New York Times article here »

We, at eROI, have been working the last year on creating a new generation of Event Registration Software, eROI Event, with an enhanced user experience. We are currently in the Beta Launch Phase with a limited feature set, but we are excited to get this early-release version of the product out in front of our clients and the tech community in Portland. Our goal is to gather real user feedback as we continue to develop and enhance the product. We are offering a freemium version of the product for free events, but should a user prefer to hold paid events, we can enable the Payment Gateway feature for a minimal monthly fee of $50.00.

Novel concept, but I actually used our eROI Event tool to create an event for our Employee Disco Party on June 26th (if you are one of the 2 friends that employees can invite, then you too can join in the fun). I thought some screen shots of the back-end admin area would help you see why we are excited about this beta release (even though the feature set is slightly limited for the next 1-2 months until we get feedback from all of you that want to signup for a FREE account for free events (to use for RSVPs to dinner parties, seminars, BBQs, industry networking events, business meetings, etc.)

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I love the comments from this video (and I need to give thanks to Alex Williams at eROI for sharing this enlightening piece of film below). Here is my favorite comment (by “iknklst” on YouTube):
“I make my business cards out of unrefined nuclear waste. They glow in the dark quite nicely, and give the receiver terminal cancer within ten minutes of touching it.

One person I know , a self-made man, very succesful in business, was aked for his card one day.
He looked at the person blankly, then said “Business cards are for used car salesman and hotel managers. If you don’t already know how to contact my office, there is nothing I need to talk to you about anyway.”

Portland, Oregon is a long way from Washington D.C. So, we should be psyched about playing host to the New Media Strategist, Rahaf Harfoush.  She led arguably the social media strategy for the best online campaign implementation of any major politician in the history of politics (love the drama of that sentence even though politicians have really only used the web significantly in the past 4 years). Harfoush is the keynote speaker at InnoTech Portland:

Date: April 23, 2009
Time: InnoTech starts at 8am, Harfoush speaks at 11:30am
Place: Oregon Convention Center, Portland, Oregon
How much: BIG DISCOUNT if you use these codes when you REGISTER HERE >>

(INN48 – gets you a $12 Discount so it’s only $48 for General Administration)
(EMS20AT – gets you a $20 Discount so it’s only $129 for the two day eMarketing summit)

I was fortunate enough to attend SXSWi in Austin for 5 inspiring days with a number of my colleagues. Out of the many engaging panels I attended I really enjoyed the core conversation session: How to Create a Great Company Culture. Sam Decker (BazaarVoice) and Jason Black (Boundless Network) were the presenters and shared their opinions and advice around their own company cultural experiences.

Jason Black at SXSW from Diverge Communications on Vimeo.

It is one thing to preach culture and another to resonate it. I believe that these two are the real deal and truly do take the time to understand and value the importance of their own company culture. One of the first things Black said that rang true is that investors look at spreadsheets, while he looks at the lines around the numbers. The lines are the culture and you need them in place to make the numbers work. I could not agree more with this analogy. Here are a few other key pieces to creating a great company culture that Decker and Black shared with us:

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I got a lot of comments on my look (see below) where I sported the 70′s stache for a solid 2 days.  Most of you cringed in pain just looking at me with my stache.  But some of you liked it, like a yearning for the days of Saturday Night Fever.  So, your task is to comment below with a haiku on how you feel about 70′s style in today’s age.

Of all of the talks given at SXSW ’09, I loved the last 15 minutes of Tony Hsieh’s presentation the best. This part of his talk focused on The Science of Happiness and his earnest desire to spend 10% of his time studying the structured elements of what makes all of us happy. The three levels he shared were: rockstar, flow, and meaning/higher purpose (check out Slide 44 on the Slideshare presentation below). I’m now dedicated to reading and learning more about this balanced, structured approach to happiness. Comment below if you recommend a good book that speaks to you on this topic.

Watch the entire slide show—-

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To the rebel in all of us, James Powderly is our part-nefarious, part-make-the-world-a-better-place hero. As you’ll see from the video and my tweets live from the Monday keynote speech below, Powderly is intoxicating in his allure to scrawl graffiti all over a 500 foot building with amplified lasers and projectors. He even got incarcerated before the Beijing Olympics last year for 10 days for attempting to pull off an impermanent graffiti trick on mass scale. What he didn’t talk about until the last question of the session was his new project to enable a quadriplegic man to be able to do art again, but this time through his eyes (and lasers) instead of his hands. Creativity in such an authentic way – not sure you get a sense of his energy from the video below.

My tweets for this SXSW session—-

#sxsw keynote – just had 2000 people cooperatively give middle finger to speaker james powderly, grafitti research lab12:18 PM Mar 16th from web

Research and track grafitti all over world12:19 PM Mar 16th from web

Learning what a #led throwie is. Very cool on a mass scale12:23 PM Mar 16th from web

Take a laser and write in huge letters on a huge building12:25 PM Mar 16th from web

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I went back through my 287 tweets from five days at SXSW Interactive with an intention to do a dozen different blog posts.  Instead, I realize that I just need to share bits of inspiration instead of piecing together thorough notes for each session I attended.

Overall takeaways:

• Portland interactive and social media attendees were huge – there were probably 250+ Portlanders attending SXSW and we got to spend more quality time in sessions, restaurants, house parties, and bars in Austin, TX than in Portland – funny how that happens.
• eROI team-building was pretty amazing.  There were 15 of us at the event and it allowed us to learn and share in a very human way, which is a lot tougher to do in the office.
• Informal vibe to the event: thankfully.  Couches were in some sessions, outdoor tent parties just outside the Convention Center. But, the tone that speakers and attendees had was very informal and allowed for the walls/barricades to be down to facilitate networking and learning.
• Rebellious attitude – maybe this is the influence of indie musicians and film-makers filling in towards the end of the Interactive part of SXSW, but one keynote in particular exemplified this: James Powderly explaining his mass-scale graffiti art. I loved this edge to the speakers and sessions.

OK – I guess I need to do separate blog posts to show some cool visuals and videos of my favorite influences there.

This morning, eROI Sales & Strategist, Alex Williams took this fine photo in Los Angeles, of all places. Hopefully, Alex will comment on this blog post with a quick update of what he’s learned from Mediapost’s OMMA Hollywood event, which is all about online media, marketing, and advertising.  A quick reminder that Optimism is the eROI mantra for 2009 and beyond, and what better day to see this huge banner than a day the stock market skyrockets.

I’m publishing my schedule for SXSW – it’s kind of ridiculous how much stuff there is to see and learn.  This is my first time to the amazing, well-known event and we are showing up in full force – 1/3 of eROI staffers will be there, but clients, don’t fret, we will be on email and working during most of it.  Cheers!

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Marketers: know this – doing things the same old traditional way that you’ve always done it is not going to work anymore.

We, as marketers, need to innovate. We need to take a risk with our methods, our message, our mediums, our transparency, and our openness to listen to customers.  We need to take a risk with new products, software development, feature roll-outs, user-interface design, cutting edge design, and pushing our brand to mean something in today’s world.

We meet with clients regularly who have almost waited until its too late to dramatically improve their results on increasing the number and quality of leads captured, nurture campaigns, resource centers, the works.

Start small – celebrate your wins even if it is something less than a website launch.  At eROI, I am really psyched about a landing page we rolled out that is compelling and has a much higher conversion rate than we’ve ever had for our own marketing purposes – tell me what you think.

http://www.eroi.com/eroi-email-marketing-study-7-elements-of-email-survey-results-report/

Geoff Ramsey, co-founder of eMarketer, wrote an awesome tactical article on “How Staying Positive is Good for Business.”  As you know, I’ve been writing blog posts for the past 3 months about how fear is so 2008 and that this year, 2009, is the Year of Optimism.  Well, it keeps getting harder and harder to truly believe that 2009 will be optimistic as the news media keeps reinforcing doomsday news constantly.  So, take a minute to Geoff’s 5 guiding principles of positivity:

1. Understand Your Locus of Control

2. Tighten the Spigot

3. Focus on the Opportunities

4. Leverage Data to Construct Opportunistic Experiments

5. Invest in the Future

I especially like this quote from the article: “I don’t care how hard this period is. You have to have the combination of believing that you will prevail, that you will get out of this, but also not be the Pollyanna who ignores the brutal facts. You have to say that we will be in this for a long time and we will turn it into a defining event, a big catalyst to make ourselves a much stronger enterprise.”
—Jim Collins, management guru, as quoted in Fortune, February 2, 2009

I’d also like to hear from all of you about a specific positive personal or business experience or news that you’ve read that stood out above the rest – please comment below (in haiku format, of course).

Okay, I admit it – I am still more of a Twitter lurker than anything so far. I do occasionally throw a thought or 2 up but find it still a little difficult since I’m usually caught between 6 different things at any given time. One moment I could be grooving to some great new music while scanning the plethora of fantastic news and info beamed to me via Google Reader. Meanwhile, I’m likely having a conversation with one of my super hero Account Execs about a particular client/project situation and also thinking about the email I was in the middle of replying to before I began to think about how much I like this one song…

So then I turn to Twitter and gag. Gee, any of this is really worth a tweet, right?  Then I get distracted by someone or something else that needs immediate attention. By the time I get back to Twitter the moment has passed and I’m on to 6 other things and the cycle starts all over again. Yikes! Therein lies my dilemma. I want to share these things but I don’t want to be one of the those folks suffering from “Twitterhea” either –you know who you are. Your constant blathering has to be a sign of some sort of neurosis.

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