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!
Come to the Portland Art Museum at 7pm tonight, March 7 to check out 8 Cut&Paste contestants do some insane speed designing using Photoshop and Wacom digital pens and tablets. My wife and I are joining another dozen eROI peops to cheer voiceferously our own Tom O’Toole – the talented eROI designer – who is predicted with 3 to 1 odds to win this thing. No matter what, it will be a good time.
Cut&Paste Digital Design Tournament 2007 from Cut&Paste on Vimeo.
In case you missed them, here is one post with all 10 eROI Online Marketing Predictions for 2009:
10. My Dad will use Twitter for first time and get hooked
9. My Mom will get on Facebook and get addicted to chatting non-stop with family and friends
8. Skype and other easy video-creation apps will take off in ‘09
7. Open-source, powerful tools like WordPress and Magento will become more like social apps and promote UGC (User-Generated Content)
5. Email is a whole lot more mobile today, but the formatting is still crap. You’ll see this improve dramatically in ‘09.
4. Social TV on your computer will become more popular than Regular TV among core online users.
2. CRM and Email Automation
1. The Economy will grow in ’09! Optimism will Conquer Fear.
4. Social TV on your computer will become more popular than Regular TV among core online users.
One example of this is a partnership between two startups – SplashCast Media and Hulu.com. The two companies are innovating and creating a whole new experience of Social TV for re-runs of my favorite shows – 30 Rock, The Office, and others shown below. Tech entrepreneurs have been espousing the advent of Interactive TV for 15 years, but Social TV is so much cooler – it feels like hundreds of your friends are watching the same TV show at the same time, commenting on it, IMing, and doing so in text, voice, or video comments.
3. Advanced site search is becoming so natural and intuitive – marketers will prioritize this as an easy implementation with huge ROI for their site.
Search applies to more than just Google. In the business world, we want to be as productive as humanly possible and find a needle in a haystack within milliseconds – this is becoming possible within your own website or web applications with intuitive site search.
Holy crap – I was exhausted last night – crashed at 8pm. I think it had something to do with the Portland Advertising Federation (PAF) Rosey Awards on Thurs night at the Performing Arts Center. Aside from hearing from other agency owners in town how brutal the economy is, it was clear that everyone has been working way harder than normal and was looking to blow off a lot of steam (translation: a perfect excuse for a night of heavy drinking, loud music, and overly-honest conversations). One of the highlights of the Roseys was the hosts – 3 guys who pushed the envelope in a big way – nicely done! If you watch the second video, you might agree with me.
Rosey Awards 2008 Part Five from Dylan Boyd on Vimeo.
Rosey Awards Part Nine from Dylan Boyd on Vimeo.
Here is my presentation to NACHA – National Automated Clearing House Association on “How Financial Institutions Can Use Social Media to their Advantage”
Renny Gleeson, global digital evangelist for Wieden + Kennedy, led off the Inverge Conference, with a personal, philosophical discussion on how fast and far our lives have changed due to digital devices, mobile, and online social media. It was an epiphany for Renny at 4am in a London hotel to realize he’d been screwing around on different social sites for over 12 straight hours. Talk about some high engagement metrics for those sites. This speech was a month ago, but I feel it was still uber-relevant to get perspective on what has led up to this precipitous change. Here are my notes from his speech:
With each tech advance, it takes a little while to connect emotionally with it and through it.
• 1876 – Telephone (killed body language), but made it easier to meet up
• 1844 – Telegraph – Morse tapped “What Hath God Wrought” “Crap, what have we done?”
• 1906 – Radio – > Broadcast
Use Technology to meet up, see one another
1971 @ Email (Ray Tomlinson: @ indicated a user was at some other host) -> Email medium can be the most misinterpreted (lose body language, voice inflection, most range to explain enough to get misinterpreted)
Email vs. Social Media
• Email – Very focused (1 to 1)
• Social Media – Distracted by so many other toys involved in it
– Crib Sheet – Visual cues for displaying emotion
– Dinosaurs in inappropriate places – Flickr Group
– Blip.fm: jam or music
(more…)
Alex Bogusky was on the cover of Inc. magazine a few months ago with the headline something like “Can this Hot Guy Make Microsoft Cool?” Well, Crispin Porter + Bogusky are off to a good start w/ the Jerry Seinfeld / Bill Gates commercials, and even better, the PC commercials. So, I pose the question – did Bogusky make the Inc. 5000 Conference cool? Having been to 2 consecutive years of conferences, I can clearly say that it was already very cool before he came along, but Bogusky did a really good job of speaking to more than just creativity but accomplishing business objectives in a creative way. Here are my notes:
CP & B: 900 employees, 900 freaks, early on, worked with a ton of underdogs. Very Scrappy.
The Truth Campaign- Anti-Smoking
Change the cultural perceptions around a product Brand around youth rebellion. Rebellion is great. This choice is not rebellion, it’s about being manipulated by a huge machine (tobacco campaigns).
Advertising must play into PR and web, social “Playing with your consumer”
Molson Beer- 200 different labels “I’m not wearing any underwear”
Creativity is just a way to leverage business goals
Burger King Whopper Freak out- people got really pissed off with no Whopper. Super funny.
• embrace the creative process – makes it fun
• “you know what you ought to do,” have someone fill in the answer
CP+B 1 Rule: NEVER LIE. NO FIBS. NO BS. (more…)
This is my second consecutive year in attending the Inc. 5000 Conference, and I’m absolutely honest when saying it is the best conference of the year for the following 6 reasons: entrepreneurial energy, dynamic and entertaining speakers, approachability and access to those speakers, strategic and contrarian content, networking with other entrepreneurs from around the country, and Inc. staff is very cool and real.
This blog post is all about who I met and why I’m so encouraged about the future of our country’s industry leaders and innovation. Optimism is the new cynicism and we can’t fixate on the nation’s financial industry woes when we have our own companies to grow, innovative products to build, and value creation waiting to happen. Who I met:
1. Vance Patterson is a stud. I met him last year at this conference – he and I were garnering a bit of attention with our outfits at the Inc. 500 Awards, black-tie event – he was wearing a dapper top hat, tux, and a staff w/ crystal and blue LED light, and I had my late grandfather’s Buchanan-plaid (bright yellow, orange, red) vest and bow-tie on. He and his wife, Mary Joe, carried themselves with cool confidence and engaged in great conversation throughout this year’s award dinner. Of the 6-7 businesses he’s involved in, Vance spends most of his time running an industrial fan company called Patterson Fan Company. We discussed what we love doing (he and Mary Joe ride their Harley Davidson on long trips), family business issues and my younger perspective on what his kids are probably thinking, employee recruiting and retention, politics, and the conference itself.
Gonna be another great event this year…
Internet Strategy Forum Summit 2008
July 17-18, Governor Hotel, Portland
Internet Strategy Forum Summit attendees will gain actionable insight into smart enterprise Internet strategy as they engage with each other and with the VP and C-level keynote presenters from leading global companies such as eMarketer, Forrester Research, Disney, Nike, Intel, IBM, WebTrends and Fandango, who will share their experience and ideas on how to best leverage the Internet and integrate it into your overall business strategy.
There will be 8 keynote-style presentations, a vendor panel, a lunch, a reception and other networking opportunities, all for registration fees starting at less than $249. Friends of eROI can receive a 15% discount on the registration fee by using Discount Code “REACHROI” at registration time.
Presenters and Topics include:
* Daniel Stickel, new CEO, WebTrends (formerly with Google)
* Geoffrey Ramsey, Co-founder & CEO, eMarketer
TOPIC: Mapping the Digital Landscape: A Strategic Guide
* Charlene Li, VP & Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
TOPIC: Creating A Social Strategy That Will Work
* Chris Shimojima, VP, Global Digital Commerce, Nike
TOPIC: Social Commerce: Innovate How We Connect
* David Placier, VP, Consumer Insights, Disney Online
TOPIC: The evolution of CRM: Enhancing Web Site Experiences
* Nancy Bhagat, VP of Sales and Marketing Group, Intel
TOPIC: End to End Marketing Online: A Fundamental Shift
* Mike Moran, Distinguished Engineer, IBM, author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc.
TOPIC: Internet Marketing by the Numbers
* Shane O’Neill, Chief Technology Officer, Fandango
TOPIC: Email Marketing: Beyond Newsletters and Confirmation
Internet Strategy Forum Summit
Thursday, July 17, 2008
8:00am – 5:00pm
Optional Internet strategist career path symposium Friday, July 18, 2008 Governor Hotel, Portland, Oregon http://www.internetstrategyforum.org/summit
An employee sent me an email with this link – fascinating!
Freedom, A Twitter Away For UC Berkeley Student Arrested In Egypt
“As surreal as it may sound, Twitter can get you out of jail! The catch…send the right message to as many people as possible as fast as you can and voila!
UC Berkeley journalism graduate student James Karl Buck (29), former Oakland Tribune multimedia intern, was arrested during a demonstration in Mahalla El-Kobra, an industrial city in the Nile Delta.
What the Egyptian authorities didn’t probably expect was the prompt reaction of a large circle of friends in the United States and the anti-government bloggers in Egypt, who were sent an instant text message from his cellular phone: “ARRESTED,” the San Jose Mercury News reports.
The micro-blogging service allows users to send text messages up to 140 characters long, and the message Buck sent had the desired outcome: his friends called the University, the American Embassy, as well as the Associated Press, the International Herald Tribune and other media.
The result: he was released the next day, although according to his affirmations, the Egyptian authorities told him just hours after his arrest, in the middle of the night, that he was a free man.”
eMarketing Summit @ InnoTech
April 16-17, Oregon Convention Center
www.emarketingsummit.com for information and registration
Use Discount Code EROI8EMS for the $129 price. Prices includes two day summit, both luncheons topics and Don Tapscott Featured Speaker breakfast on April 17.
The 4th annual eMarketing Summit meets in Portland, Oregon this year, and brings together marketers, business owners and internet professionals.
This two day Summit focuses on social media marketing, search engine optimization, email marketing and web 2.0 tools, including widgets and more. Guest speakers include Don Tapscott, Author of Wikinomics; Rohit Bhargava, Sr. VP, Digital Strategy, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, Kent Lewis, Anvil Media; with additional speakers from Northwest Airlines, Razorfish/Avenue A, Hill & Knowlton Digital, Jive Software, Kick Apps and many others.
4/16: 10:30am – 11:30am
What the Heck is a Widget?
Dylan Boyd, Vice President of Sales and Strategy, eROI, Inc.
Matt Bijur, Vice President, Business Development, KickApps
David White, VP of Business Development, FlightStats
Mike Berkley, CEO, SplashCast Media
Widgets are building blocks for social aggregators. Widgets can also quickly help your web site reach new audiences in web 2.0 including social media, blog, web site and more. This expert panel will discuss the roadmap to planning, designing, creating and distributing this innovative gadget.
4/17: 10:30am – 11:30pm
Bringing Sexy Back into Email Marketing
Ryan Buchanan, President, eROI, Inc.
Has your email marketing program gotten tired, neglected, and stuck in a rut? eROI CEO, Ryan Buchanan, will use several case studies from some sexy and unsexy businesses to show how marketers can breath life back into their email marketing program. More…
At the OMMA Hollywood event, finally, a true creative breathed inspiration into an event dominated by metrics, analytics, and agency and media organizational models.
Chuck Porter talked about the power of a story that are sometimes bigger than life, like Burger King’s Subservient Chicken, which has become a cult following in Spain and Japan (long after the site had its heyday).
Also, it’s not always about a new medium. Porter’s agency took an age-old marketing medium in print magazines and placed ads in Cosmopolitan, Maxim with cheesy 80′s style male models with puppy dogs,and Molson Beer, then placed ads in male-targeted magazines about the psychographic effect of 100,000′s of women having a positive association of the male species due to these ads. The creative implementation of both real and faux ads and even made-up magazine covers placed on the back-cover of real magazines was all done brilliantly with a huge comedic and viral impact.
In Porter’s last anecdotal story about the difficulty of selling a risky idea into a brand, Chuck said that Burger King franchise owners wanted to kill Porter if he implemented an idea about killing their best selling product – The Whopper – with a campaign called the “BK Whopper Freakout.” The agency recommended trying it on Cable TV in a zip code for 1 restaurant in Las Vegas and it turned out to be wildly successful.
Takeaway for MediaPost – get more creatives as speakers and show the work – Porter rocked!
Here at the OMMA show in Hollywood, a gorgeous sunny break from Portland rain, it’s been great to connect with the Email Insiders crew, the EEC, KickApps, and others in the social networking / online video world here.
From a presentation standpoint, I was most impressed with Patrick Keane, CMO of CBS Interactive. He talked about trends in online media and marketing:
1. Engagement – advertisers don’t want vanilla users, they want engaged users who spend a lot of time on a media site like CBS or social platforms like Facebook, MySpace.
2. Cross-platform – advertisers want to buy across ALL mediums and channels.
3. Flexibility and Customization
4. Branding + Video – moving faster, demand video
5. Data – need better Audience Analytics
Most interesting, however, was Keane’s central theme of how the online medium is an incremental effect, not cannibalizing in any way. He used the show “Jericho” as an example – on TV, it had a 4.2 Nielsen rating, but online video views added another 0.9 points to it – 1.4 million video views of the current and past shows in the few days following each show.
TV, web, and mobile all work TOGETHER to have an incremental engagement effect. No cannibalization.
Another key takeaway: media sites like CBSSports.com appears like its all original content, but there are actually a significant portion of community features and user-generated content (e.g. Fantasy Leagues, etc.).
BTW – CBS is streaming all March Madness games this Thursday – I hope no one at eROI finds out about this.
We launched our new site at www.eroi.com. I am filled with pride in my team and in the end result – a beautiful, easily navigated website of an email and interactive agency that has done great work. So, we decided to party like it was 1999 (in the Bay Area) in the dot com heyday. Well, maybe not THAT much partying, but we did break out the champagne and orange juice (mimosas) as 10am today. Enjoy the pictures below, but more importantly, please comment on this blog posting of what you think of our site. I’m especially interested in what you think of our Portfolio section and Resources Center. Thanks. You don’t have to say nice things (even after knowing that it took over a year to concept the design and ultimately build the entire site). Here are the pics:
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