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.
Chris - you have insane skills video editing. I had to share this video you did on CrossPixelNYC blog on to eROIdays (in the spirit of re-tweeting). Again - great stuff!
You’d swear these guys were rockstars with all the attention they’ve been getting for moving their software company from Tulsa to Portland. But, the reality is that it truly is something special with their company, Vidoop, which makes secure password manager software used by banks, financial institutions, and millions of users. The first thing that makes them cool is that they’ve opened up shop in the heart of Portland’s Social Media center in Old Town - the Technology + Arts Building - between Couch St and Davis St on NW 5th Ave (full disclosure: they are right downstairs from us at eROI. The second cool thing about Vidoop is that there are 45 fully geeky geeks who have embraced their inner-geekdom and absolutely love what they do - I’ve only hung out w/ the 6 or 7 Vidoopians who’ve been in the Portland office the past couple months, but Luke, Joel, Scott, Kevin, Mitch, and Matt are pretty sharp and already involved in Portland software scene.
Third, Vidoop documented their journey to P’town with a blog, dozens of videos, pictures, and incessant tweeting - check it out - Follow their Oregon Trail.
Lastly, Harvey Matthews, friend and President of the Software Association of Oregon, informed me that there is a party this evening at 5pm at the parking lot in front of Backspace.
The pictures / slideshow below of the eROI camping trip at Timothy Lake on the back side of Mt. Hood is good, but it’s a bit biased towards the family fun side of things. Kelsey will need to reveal the late night photos and video of some of the drinking games and intriguing conversations. All in all - a great time was had by all 25 folks who joined for a great overnight trip. The link to the slideshow is here if you want to see the full size of the pictures - http://picasaweb.google.com/ryanbuch99/EROICampingJuly08AtTimothyLakeMtHood.
If you didn’t catch our email yesterday and you attended or participated in the big eROI fashion party called FIVE a couple weeks ago, here it is below. Also, we have new video to show you.
The new eROI party video - check it out to see if you are in the video:
1500 people. Quadruple-decker Ice luge. 60 models. 80 amazing fashion designs. Snoop Doggy Dogg’s posse makes a guest visit. The pictures and video really paint the picture better. Hope you enjoy:
eROI made the Portland Business Journal’s Top 100 Fastest Growing Companies in Portland list for the second consecutive year.
Our ranking dropped from #15 to #36, even though we grew absolute revenue by an equal number. From a % perspective, it’s hard to maintain a high % of growth on a much larger number from ‘05 to ‘07.
The management team all attended the event and we were excited to be included in this prestigious group of companies.
When Does One Permission Overwrite The Other - In the world of multichannel and location opt in and opt out how do you keep your lists in sync? Can you?
Let me put some scenarios on the table to give you some real world examples of challenges I have been facing in some recent work with a retailer.
1. Your customer opts in from your [...]
Here is a great example of making your transactional email more than just a notification. When done right, transactional email can be a great branding opportunity.
Check out this awesome shipping confirmation email from Cd Baby below (click to enlarge).
Third, Vidoop documented their journey to P’town with a blog, dozens of videos, pictures, and incessant tweeting - check it out - 
