The eROI presenters, Dylan Boyd, Alex Williams, and I, have traveled all over the country to give presentations on various topics from Building Community Online to The Value of a Welcome Email Program to New Trends in Measuring the Success of your Online Marketing & Social Media Efforts. This blog post is an overload of resource material for 3 great presentations - enjoy!
This year’s theme for our company appreciation party was put to a vote. After the votes were tallied the theme was shrouded in mystery until a team email was sent with the reveal in true eROI Rock star fashion. This year it was fated to be… Summer White Party! Using our new eROI Event system we created a totally themed event that the email linked to. Check out the process for creating The eROI Summer White Party.
The finished product, see how it was done below.
The Portland Creative Community took some bold steps with its launch of the Portland Ad Federation Rosey Awards website themed “Nothing Says I’m Better than you Like a Rosey.” The messaging has an East Coast directness to it that takes many Portlanders by surprise in a city that fosters friendliness to strangers, foes, and friends. However, I think it’s the perfect time for Portland to step up and talk with confidence about its creative talent here. Yes, we’ve recently been discovered by the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and other publications as the destination for hipsters (employed and unemployed) to hang out. But, we aren’t getting much positive press for having the second highest unemployment in the country. Now is the right time to shout from the roof-tops that Portland creative agencies do kick-ass work! Kudos to Anthill Marketing for the concept, design, and messaging in the site and entire Roseys this year!
2009 PAF Rosey Awards site
I’m not so sure this site would work in most other industries as it is definitely edgy, controversial, and provocative, but I think it’s a shot in the arm that Portland needs. The true test is to see if agencies from other cities take notice. Then, an interesting dialog will begin.
You’ll start to see this campaign promoted more on Twitter (I love the “Rosey Smack Feed” section of the ‘Win Tix’ part of the site), Facebook, and other blogs in the upcoming months. I’ve got to sign off from this blog post to think of some good Smack Talk myself - submit your own here >>
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.
I’ve attended hundreds of marketing conferences over the years, and spoken at a few, but this one was pretty unique in that the speakers and content were the best of the best from all over the country on leading topics such as email marketing, search marketing, and social media. But more importantly, Online Marketing Summit delivered in making a lot of personal connections primarily through its founder, Aaron Kahlow, who ran an online marketing agency for years and understands the subject material inherently and the crazy breed of people known as online marketers. Here are my tweets from Aaron’s opening session at the Washington DC OMS on May 14:
I highly recommend you attend another OMS - there’s also a good chance you will see eROI folks like Dylan Boyd, Alex Williams, or me speak at some of the upcoming cities - Chicago, Austin, Denver, Minneapolis, San Fran, Portland, Seattle - there are others as well - check it out here >>. I will try to dig up where my presentation from this event is posted - stay tuned.
At OMS Joel Book, Director of eMarketing Education at ExactTarget, had some solid ideas about how to make sure the right message got to the right people. He showed success stories of ET clients that used past consumer behavior to deliver extremely targeted marketing with positive results. Here are my tweets from Joel’s presentation:
DJ Waldow, Director of Best Practices and Deliverability at Bronto, spoke at OMS about the perfect email in a recession. Read my tweets from DJ’s presentation:
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
COST:
$300 per band
Register your Band!
Contact Mike Terry at mterry@magnetoworks.com
Here is my twitter stream from this morning’s Portland Business Journal Power Breakfast event where Ziba Founder, Sohrab Vossoughi, inspired me from a creative and entrepreneurial standpoint. Sorry for the upside down notes, but you’ve got to start at the bottom and read up:
Kevin Tate, a buddy of mine, had an awesome analogy featured on the front page of the Oregonian today in the article “Tech entrepreneurs defy recession” by Mike Rogoway. Here’s the excerpt from the article with Kevin’s quote that really got me thinking from a different mindset:
“Portland fosters the creation of small, furry mammals rather than dinosaurs — the really big things,” said Kevin Tate, 35, CEO of StepChange Group, a social media advertising and marketing specialist in the Pearl District. The “dinosaur” model of big corporate campuses and regimented software development (think Microsoft — or even Google) is going by the wayside, Tate said, in favor of more informal and collaborative arrangements. Portland’s current high-tech foment positions the state well to capitalize when the recession ends, provided its technology entrepreneurs have the appetite to take it on. “What happens when things start coming back?” Tate asked. “Will the small, furry mammals evolve?”
Nearly 9 years ago, 7 mainly tech start-up entrepreneurs co-founded a group called Starve Ups. We all survived the dot com implosion, but were influenced by really wanting to scale our companies for growth. Some Starve Ups companies have grown a little faster than others, but many contain a desire to do something world-changing with our companies through software, social good, amazing company culture or all of the above. I really like Kevin’s quote because it is accurate and represents a strong contingent in Portland’s software community, but I think we need to be honest with ourselves that our dream is to do something bigger and be more like a lion than a forgettable Chihuahua. So, how do we get there? Lack of capital is usually at the top of the list, but our biggest limitation is our mindset. Let’s grow game-changing, sustainable software businesses in Portland and tout Portland’s livability and balance as a BONUS, not a detriment to growth.
Comment below with your ideas of a more representative furry mammal for Portland.
I love that YouTube videos are timeless and all of us can re-live ridiculous moments years later. At eROI, we have dozens and dozens of those moments captured over the past many years on the eROI YouTube channel here >>. So, why am I doing a Flashback blog post? Yesterday, I had a client meeting with my friend James Adair and the typical client meeting turned into something so much better after watching the below video on our big screen. The second video is of distinguished Portland PR specialist, JulieAnna Little Giannini. She was the winner at eROI Idol, so it was only appropriate to include her video as well.
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:
Very progressive. We can’t go backwards now to restrict all info to public.about 3 hours ago from TwitterBerry
Impossible to replicate. It was the perfect storm.about 3 hours ago from TwitterBerry
Grant park had 1 million deliriously happy people. Thx for great presentation @rahafharfoushabout 3 hours ago from TwitterBerry
“Let’s make technology that makes us more human, not less human.”
While I was at SXSW this year, I attended a session that focused on techniques to improve PowerPoint presentations called Presenting Straight to the Brain. I was immediately interested because presentations are a way of life in the agency world. Okay – I also might have been a little interested to see if the panel were giving any tips for mind control that I could use to help in that next big presentation. Though I may have been a little disappointed on the lack of ‘How to Be a Benevolent Svengali’ content, I did walk away with some interesting insight and reminders of how our noodles work.
If you only have time to read to this point- here’s your Twitter take-away. Great presentations add a dash of caveman thinking.
The point being is that we all still essentially think, react and remember more like Fred and Barney than the evolved post-millennial beings we all think we are. Our mind battles with our brain, constantly sending signals to process thoughts, remember information and control our reactions. In the end, our brain typically wins the fight. We are programmed to be at our peak level of awareness when we perceive a threat or when a situation evokes a strong emotion. It’s fight or flight.
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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:
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).
I saw this…
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