Our NYC Director, Chris Masagatani, has creating, editing, mixing, and mashing video with a very urban, creative flair. He posted his video to the blog he contributes most to - CrossPixelNYC, however, I couldn’t resist embedding the video in this blog post here. Enjoy!
Obamaween from Christopher Masagatani on Vimeo.
Last Tuesday, an articulate, inspiring man was voted into office and people all over the world celebrated. In my own neighborhood, fireworks went off and a group of 25 college and high school students were banging pots and pans and stopping traffic on Hawthorne Street to jubilant honks in passing cars. My family of four walked thru the misty evening and soaked in the positive energy that had our girls jumping up and down gleefully shouting “Obama.” After my wife and I put our girls down to bed, I headed over to a sports bar, OnDeck, for drinks with some close friends - the place was packed and rowdy with 50+ huge TV screens monitoring all of the events of the evening. The bar became immediately silent when President-elect Obama gave his acceptance speech at Grant Park in Chicago. We hung on every word.
Since then, it’s been an adjustment. The party only lasted one night and reality set in the next day with the stock market down and life moving at warp speed. Every newspaper and magazine has blitzed us with this momentous, historic event and Obama has lived up to the expectation, for now. Expectations are so high, that at some point, there will be cracks in his armour. But, hopefully, as a human race that values inspiration, innovation, and progress over fear, we will support him when he stumbles. As an exercise of documenting a few of the videos and articles that mattered most to me, I am showing them below:
Transcript of Obama’s speech >>
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.
Here is my past blog post and a Danny Deutsch video:
http://eroidays.com/2007/09/10/amazing-inc-500-conference/
Please let me know if you are interested. Thx.
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!
The Freakout from Christopher Masagatani on Vimeo.
We want to know - how does your little brother, sister, nephew, or neice Use Email? We don’t know the answer yet, and need your help to discover how high school kids, college students, and recent college grads actually use email. That’s why we’re conducting this survey >>
All the articles we’ve read pretty much tell us that email marketing will be dead in a matter of years (because kids are only into texting and social networking communities), but we’re a little skeptical of that assessment that email is not or will not be a big part of their lives. So, we are conducting our own survey and we’re primarily using blogs, MySpace, Facebook, and a little bit of email to reach out to our .edu friends. Please help us to fill out this awesome survey, and you might win your very own, limited-edition KillROI in the process.
We need to know what our kids (or nephews, neices, cousins, brothers, or sisters) futures will look like, so please spread the word to fill out this survey; http://eroi.onlinestudentcommunication.sgizmo.com.
Additionally, I’d love to read your thoughts on the survey in the comments below. Thank you thank you!
Here is my presentation to NACHA - National Automated Clearing House Association on “How Financial Institutions Can Use Social Media to their Advantage”
I never thought I’d have ‘thank you Palin’ in the title of anything I’d ever write, but I’ve done it. She and Tina Fey have made Saturday Night Live so unbelievably relevant and funny again. SNL absolutely nailed this skit last night - Baldwin said exactly what most guys (at least my guy friends) are thinking and to make this blog post relevant to online marketing, I must tell you that I don’t watch any of this stuff on TV anymore - I race to my computer on a Sunday morning and laugh my head off watching it on Saturday Night Live’s website.
Chris Masagatani, you were on the SNL set last week, what’s your take on all the new buzz around Saturday Night Live. Please comment below.
Everyone else - tell me - are you watching SNL skits on their site or YouTube on Sunday or during the workweek, or is this blog post the first time you’ve seen its online video? Comment.
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…)
TOM PETERS - A self-described capitalist pig, but a big fan of distributed taxes
SETH GODIN - Not accepting status quo
(GODIN): When asked about the next president, said it’s important to consider:
• How you live the Earth for kids and grandkids
• Amount of debt
• Level the playing field
(PETERS): Small Business leaders should focus in the personal financial issues and microfinance, NOT macro. Everything is ambiguous as hell. Most of the time you could be lying and don’t even know it.
(GODIN) Contract between leader and who is being led.
->Certain things a leader should NOT tell about stupid things said by a board member.
(PETERS) “The Manager’s Handbook of Decency” (Loves that word and word GRACE)
• Caring
(GODIN) Temptation to take a shortcut is so overwhelming because we feel like we deserve it, but we as Inc. 5000 entrepreneurs didn’t take that shortcut – so damaging for taking the easier path.
(PETERS) Engineer, Practical “The Dream Manager”
Everyone has a dream, and as CEO, we are the enablers of our people’s dreams.
(PETERS & GODIN) Great camaraderie, but not afraid to disagree.
(GODIN) There will always be a reason of some catastrophe on front page of Wall Street Journal for me not to reach my goals. We create our own destiny no matter what happens in the outside world. Must be aware of what’s going on, but it can’t change your character.
(PETERS) 100 year flood in financial world. Absolutely floored by crisis, but glad for our leadership in Washington. (more…)
Today’s annual iMedia Connection article is (in years past) the most read article of the year because readers (and authors) like me love the joy of discovering unique / beautiful / hilarious / branded / insanely creative websites. In the “10 killer websites worth watching” article, I got a chance to write about 2 of my favorite sites:
Brand Name: Wacom
Agency/Site Creator: eROI
URL: www.pencollective.com
What is unusual and effective about this website?
A lot of sites try to personalize the message, but the Pen Collective site is different — the highly personalized stories are the messages. The site offers the opportunity to meet such people as Mark, an illustrator who prefers his pen to his girlfriend, or Alex, who will show you how she uses her pen to remove the cellulite from her sister’s wedding photos. The site also allows other users to share their own story with the world and become part of the Collective. Read the full story >>
Brand Name: Converse
Agency/Site Creator: Anomaly
URL: www.thisistheindexpage.com
What is unusual and effective about this website?
This site connects so completely with the nostalgic high school kid in me. It’s like a Will Ferrell movie where a 16-year-old jock or a 45-year-old creative can find their own experience and sense of humor in the content and the way it’s executed. This site differentiates itself from all others with its full-screen videos, never-ending supply of full-screen background images upon refresh, clever URLs with the implied promise of humor and entertainment in each of the individual video vignettes within the overall campaign website. Content is king and Converse nailed it with this site. The “I’m too hot for you” attitude, voice, mannerisms of the girl in OutofYourLeagueGirl.com reminds me exactly of several girls in my year at Wootton High School in Maryland. Read the full story >>
One last thing, David Friedman of Avenue A | Razorfish introduced me to a hilarious site called www.iliketotallyloveit.com - check out the site, but first read his creative review of it.
I got an email from my sister with a link to this SNL skit w/ Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin and another SNL actress playing Clinton. I thought it was worth blogging because Saturday Night Live was the source of so much of my sister and my shared humor Middle School through High School - Dana Carvey, Chris Farley, Mike Myers - now, that I have 2 kids, I’m in bed by 10:30pm most nights, and I’m now consuming this hilarious content on YouTube and NBC’s site (this is the first time I’ve ever used an NBC widget below - let’s hope it’s as functional as YouTube). BTW - I just Googled “FLIRG” and it’s pretty damn funny. Watch the video.
Check out the video clip if you aren’t one of the 10 million views across the hundreds of copies of the video clip online. Couldn’t get the NBC video widget to work on the blog, so I had to revert to faithful YouTube below.
Apparently, I have a problem. I’m too plugged in. Although, I did unplug w/ yoga on Monday. Check out this brilliant viral site - below is the email I got from a Friend who is concerned about me: www.UnplugYourFriends.com or click on the “click here to read it” button below! Don’t forget to join a meetup with me - I know you have Screen Addiction, too.
Last Thursday, I (@ryanbuch) attended an all-day, online marketing conference in Portland called Inverge (#inverge). I gained a ton of insights from conference speakers from Wieden + Kennedy (@rgleeson), Nokia (@karllong), TechWeb (@TonyUphoff), and Vidoop (@kveton) and from freelance social media freelancers, friends, and business associates alike. I even have 6 pages of handwritten notes (pen + paper, not digital) to prove it. However, I managed to get in over 30 tweets (Twitter posts of 140 characters or less) that day which doubled my usage of Twitter for the past four months. I’ve always been open to admitting that, in the past, I have only used Twitter at long conferences and airports when I tell myself that it’s okay to fuel my often-controlled Attention Deficit Disorder.
I used to think Twitter was primarily a distraction with no practical business purpose, but now my latest Binge Tweeting session has provided some epiphanies from first-hand experience. I tweeted about Zappos as a great case study in creating employee evangelists and within an hour, Tony Hsieh (@zappos), CEO of Zappos, began following me on Twitter (which is a good thing for all you non-tweeters). We struck up a conversation on twitter and now I’m an even bigger fan of Zappos. I also realized that over 60% of our eROI employees use Twitter, which is awesome. We can benefit from knowledge sharing, internal quick communication, and even help in some customer service scenarios. The next step is to create a Group within TweetDeck, a sweet Twitter application, with the Twitter handles of as many of our customer contacts as possible to engage in those daily conversations as well and continue to be a resource to them.
To check out other CEOs who use Twitter, read the rest of the blog post. (more…)
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.
Time: September 7, 2008 at 5pm
Location: BackSpace Parking Lot
Street: 115 NW 5th Ave
City/Town: Portland
Website or Map: http://maps.google.com/maps…
Contact Info: 503-999-5849
If I can convince my wife and 2 daughters to hang out with 45 smelly software engineers after 5 days on the road w/ no showers, I’ll see you there tonight. Don’t forget to check out their journey on the Oregon Trail>>
Chris - love your use of original video on your blog - www.crosspixelnyc.com - content in this rocks. It was so good - I had to re-post on this blog so people can see how we roll in NYC. Great job!
© 2008 eROI, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 505 NW Couch, Suite 300, Portland, OR 97209
