Tripwire came to eROI in need of help with designing their Virtualization blog. The Virtual Black Hole blog combines the different voices and personalities of 4 unique individuals, each of whom provide their own content and ideas based on their respective blog category. As each individual varies on his or her beliefs and insight, Tripwire wanted to reflect this within the design of the site.
Initially, Tripwire had the idea of having different icons, colors and backgrounds for each one of the four authors. They also wanted these differences to reflect the topics of each author’s blog; these including: Steve-Best Practices, Karen-Marketing, Matt-Industry, and, last but not least, Ted-Project Management. The Tripwire team also wanted to distinguish the Virtual Black Hole blog from all others, steering away from the general post after post format of the traditional blog layout. Lastly, they wanted to include Tripwire branding within the overall site but not be designed within the usual brand standards.
After the last week of blog posts looking forward into 2009, I thought it would be relevant for the first blog post of 2009 to be about the Best of ’08. The key to email marketing is personalization and ultra-relevance. This email was to my parents, sisters, and brother-in-laws about a funny video on Saturday Night Live called “Jizz in My Pants.” My Mom’s response was so funny I had to forward it to all eROI employees. If you know my Mom, it’s even funnier.
—–Original Message—–
From: Ryan Buchanan
Sent: Friday, December 19, 2008 1:53 PM
To: Ryan’s family
Subject: Very funny, popular SNL video
Seven Planet is a viable, for-profit business with a do-good cause of building the brand to save the planet. The company has a vision of becoming the world’s first chain of green general stores with the backbone of its sales happening through its world-class website. Work on the site initially began on 7/7/2007 by several friends looking to produce a sustainable business. Similar to a Co-operative, the company is all about giving back to the community and for all who help Seven Planet further its cause. One entirely unique piece of its model is that it gives HALF of all profits to its constituents – Advisors, Store General Managers, Local Suppliers, Global Suppliers, and Patrons.
A friend of mine, Michael Berkeley, is founder and CEO of a very cool startup called SplashCast Media that is making a huge impact in the online entertainment world – their recent success was with integrating with 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. Ah, innovation is a beautiful thing. Remember how I wrote in an earlier blog post about December being The Month of Optimism. Well, here it is. Check out a snippet of their press release below.
At eROI, we launch a quarterly email marketing study on things that make you scratch your head and do a bit of a double-take. Conventional wisdom says that EMAIL IS DEAD among high schoolers and college students. So, we decided to test that hypothesis, and this report has some fascinating discoveries.
Our latest survey uncovers exactly how high school students, college students, and recent college graduates communicate online. 283 high school and college students participated in the study and 29 states were represented.
These survey results reveal eye-opening trends and preferences of this demographic in how it communicates digitally. We also get valuable insight into the effectiveness of marketing messages received through email, and discover areas of opportunity for marketers to connect with this in-demand group.
Students can be an elusive demographic for marketers. From this study, you will learn about a lot of new trends and valuable information about students. You will also learn specific data on which marketing channels will carry and present your message most effectively.
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
It’s been a long, insanely busy week and I’ve neglected you, eROI Days blog readers. I know, it’s horrible. The guilt is eating me up inside. The worst part of it all is that I’ve saved 5 great blog posts to write about last week and some of them are dated now, but you’ll just have to bear with me.
That’s really all I wanted to say in this blog post. Maybe one more thing – I’ve been super impressed with the eROI Fresh Interactive Design and Development blog posts leading up to Christmas with their “12 Days of Fresh” posts:
Our team at eROI had a ton of fun updating and redesigning the Travel Oregon Blog. This project took about 2 months to design, produce and make all other necessary updates. After learning about the wants and needs during the initial meeting with the client, the designer, Elliot, and the rest of the team, knew exactly what they wanted to do to this blog. Deciding to go with an overall rustic look and Oregon feel, Elliot incorporated a few things from the previously existing blog to keep the Travel Oregon personality while almost entirely re-inventing the site to really give the blog its own unique look (such things including a date stamp for entries and the borders around the search bar).
Just saw this article on Reuters. If Facebook acquires Twitter, it could be a huge advantage for users of both like me. There are already some great integration points between the two apps. As business users, we just need to start separating out personal contacts from business contacts. Crap – too late for that now. Here’s the article:
“(Reuters) – Social networking companyFacebook recently held acquisition talks with Twitter, the micro-blogging company, the Financial Times said.
The negotiations, put a valuation of as much as $500 million on Twitter, which has become one of Silicon Valley‘s most closely watched start-ups, the paper said.”
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.
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!
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:
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.
The End Of A Chapter – My Next Move - Just like a good book, there are never really any endings, only beginnings. I wanted to take a moment to let you know that I am leaving my position at eROI as of January 31st, 2011. I will be starting a new position at a company outside of the email marketing and interactive agency business [...]
Join eROI at DMA 2010 in San Francisco – October 11th-14th - Alex Williams, Strategy for eROI, will be presenting in San Francisco at DMA2010 on email, social, mobile and ecommerce. DMA2010 is the global event covering all marketing channels — from traditional...
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