Lucky for me, and you, eROI shares in my adoration for the aforementioned things.
To commemorate the holiday season we wanted to say “Cheers in the Name of Frugality” to all of our clients, supporters and friends. Joyfully, the entire company is as narcissistic as I am and thought the perfect gift to you was pictures of us (my go-to gift outside my professional life).
Highlights included: beer showers in the kiddy-pool, “organized falling”, clothing removal and, of course, pet cameos. It was loads of fun and brought all of us together even more. This one will be hard to top.
Yesterday evening symbolized eROI family for me – it was a great day. It started with the eROI NYC video to the whole company. Then, a few eROI event organizers put together a great event where 8 teams of 6 employees competed in a scavenger hunt / bar crawl which involved freestyle-rapping (Kelsey was good, but couldn’t hang w/ Maureen’s Philly-style talent), getting dollar bills to stick on the ceiling at Kell’s, and the last and most important show-down was a limbo contest at Someday Lounge. At this last gig, Mai Nakamura, who is part yoga-master and secretly tours with Cirque de Soleil for being able to contort her body to fit in small boxes, backpacks, whatever. She hardly even tried and she effortlessly destroyed the competition in the limbo contest.
And today, as I was doing some Christmas shopping at the Seven Planet store in Old Town, I saw 500 Santas descend on the corner of NW 4th and Davis like a swarm of red and white locusts. My 7 year-old daughter was with me and we had to capture this unique bar crawl on video:
I recently got an invitation from Techspace, the office building that houses our New York City office, for a holiday party filled with networking, food, music and drinks. To my delight, when I clicked on the RSVP link I was taken to their eROI Event page. We did some custom themeing on their event site to match their website. What I love about this event is that they took the bones of our design and customized it for their purpose. The addition of the holiday image and red button give it a little more holiday cheer than their normal event site would have.
eROI employees live by the work hard – play hard motto and Halloween always presents a great opportunity to balance out the work. This year one of our employees took it upon herself to throw a bash and invite the gang. With Halloween a week away the invitations have been sent out and the tone has been set for this once a year event. Kelsey and her team came up with an amazing email that translated into a one of a kind event using eROI Event’s custom-theme capabilities. One of our designers, Stephen, created a zombie cool invite complete with his signature hash-tags (you would know why I say signature if you follow him on Twitter).
One of our Web Developers, Christine, busted out the production on both the email and the event. The result is a Halloween art piece brought to life.
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!
On April 8th, we got the news that the legendary Hung Far Low Sign had been cleared to be brought back to its home in Chinatown. The challenge was to find the funds to do it. What ensued was an epic email strand of brainstorming throughout our team. The top of all of our lists (well, besides the “Naked Limbo Contest”) was our Marketing Coordinator’s idea to have a huge block party. I think he put it best with “yes, the answer to everything is a dance party.”
Here we are four months later in the final stages of a huge collaboration to introduce the first Old Town China Town Block Party. I’m so psyched that all the creative, delicious and just cool business in this area have all banned together to have fun for a great cause.
Alcoa presents (sorry, that’s the beginning of a TV commercial of “The Catch” in the 1982 NFL NFC Championship flashback when Dwight Clark levitated to grab a perfect pass from Joe Montana to lift the 49ers over the Cowboys). But, I digress. My mind faded to the dramatic music to Monday Night Football, but it’s now back on the prize – bragging rights to the Third Annual PAF Battle of the Bands at Someday Lounge in Old Town / Chinatown, Portland, Oregon where the creatives show their true colors after dark. If you want to take a look at videos from prior year’s Battle of the Band, now is your time to really soak in some entertaining video for 2008. It’s going to be almost impossible for eROI to win it for yet a third year in a row, but we’re going to bring our “A” Game. Check it (this is PAF’s main event email and all the info is below):
BATTLE OF THE BANDS
DATE:
Wednesday June 17, 2009
TIME:
6:00 pm
PLACE:
Someday Lounge
224 NW 5th Avenue
Portland, OR
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.)
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:
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.
Since we are full believers in OPTIMISM at eROI, we wanted to get everyone in the mood to do a little holiday partying and heavy drinking. KillROI is back in action and mixed some killer beats – 3 FREE downloadable mixes (an hour of blissful listening). KillROI also offered himself up for Free – he has no shame and apparently no price. To check all this out, go to the landing page from our email campaign.
…time to put a penny in the old man’s hat. Sorry – inside joke among friends here.
But, back to the point at hand here. KillROI is mixing it up with some Christmas dignitaries in my house. It’s getting a little out of control here as this guy really gets around – hanging with some Nutcracker royalty, then he makes his way onto the Christmas Tree hanging with Big Bird, and now, he’s chilling with our angel – don’t get any ideas. I’ve been a bad boy with missing a couple Haiku Mondays recently, so let’s get our groove on with haikus about KillROI. Comment with a passion below.
Yellow Warrior
Why do they call you KillROI
When you just spread love
Our fearless NYC Director, Chris Masagatani, has been scouring the streets of NYC for 374 days. He and his fiance (now wife) moved there Dec 2, 2007. They moved straight into Hell’s Kitchen and Chris commuted all of 25 blocks to the eROI NYC office in the Flat Iron District of Manhattan where we still operate. So much change in a year – his wife is one of the top designers at nationally-acclaimed design school Parsons, and Chris is truly coming into his own as an expert online marketer, leading email design and web projects for CBS Sports, CBS Watch magazine, CBS Star Trek store among other key eROI clients like digital publisher Zinio, real estate companies like Shares of New York, The Marketing Directors and dozens more unique and amazing NYC-based clients.
What makes our year anniversary in NYC even better is that Chris has found his voice blogging on our new blog in the eROI blog family. Check out the phenomenal, unique video mashups, and photos of NYC life on THE REBIRTH OF SLICK >>
You will feel like you are in New York City when you read the blog posts and watch the videos at www.eroinyc.com
What a difference a good email makes to motivate, inspire, and deliver a strong message. Christine Baker (Twitter handle: @cbakes) creates a different yoga email for reminding all of us at eROI that we have yoga practice the following morning.
I’d like to talk about all the things she does right in the email above:
The preheader “Yoga Friday at 7:45am” reminds me of when it is when I read this email on my Blackberry or in the top area of the preview pane of my email client (even when images are turned off).
Also in the preheader is “View as webpage >>” which allows me to see the full extent of this graphic-rich email if I’m getting a text view of it on my Blackberry or Gmail or Outlook.
Solid, consistent branding
Relevant messaging and imagery (Obama had just won days before and Christine knows her audience well enough to know most of us in the company are big fans)
Clean email design template
Tight, functional footer using a lot of email best practices and compliance: Unsubscribe, Update Profile, Send to Friend, and mailing address.
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.
Great Welcome Email - Every once in a while I get a nice surprise. I was told the other day that Levis had a great new welcome email and that it lived up to the promise on the home page. What was this promise? Well if you look at the home page at the footer they state “Sign up [...]
I am excited to join a great panel for an upcoming Software Association of Oregon event called 
