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:
I love the comments from this video (and I need to give thanks to Alex Williams at eROI for sharing this enlightening piece of film below). Here is my favorite comment (by “iknklst” on YouTube):
“I make my business cards out of unrefined nuclear waste. They glow in the dark quite nicely, and give the receiver terminal cancer within ten minutes of touching it.
One person I know , a self-made man, very succesful in business, was aked for his card one day.
He looked at the person blankly, then said “Business cards are for used car salesman and hotel managers. If you don’t already know how to contact my office, there is nothing I need to talk to you about anyway.”
If you’ve got a couple hours to spare, then you should read this whole 176 page report. If you only have 5 minutes, it’s worth skimming thru the online pages. Razorfish, one of the largest digital agencies in the world, did a phenomenal job with laying out the landscape of online for the first half of this year (I don’t think anyone can accurately predict what’s going to happen 6 months from now, but I am an optimist and think our industry will grow at a healthy clip in the second half).
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.
Okay, I admit it – I am still more of a Twitter lurker than anything so far. I do occasionally throw a thought or 2 up but find it still a little difficult since I’m usually caught between 6 different things at any given time. One moment I could be grooving to some great new music while scanning the plethora of fantastic news and info beamed to me via Google Reader. Meanwhile, I’m likely having a conversation with one of my super hero Account Execs about a particular client/project situation and also thinking about the email I was in the middle of replying to before I began to think about how much I like this one song…
So then I turn to Twitter and gag. Gee, any of this is really worth a tweet, right? Then I get distracted by someone or something else that needs immediate attention. By the time I get back to Twitter the moment has passed and I’m on to 6 other things and the cycle starts all over again. Yikes! Therein lies my dilemma. I want to share these things but I don’t want to be one of the those folks suffering from “Twitterhea” either –you know who you are. Your constant blathering has to be a sign of some sort of neurosis.
We just had our Software Association of Oregon (SAO) Membership Committee meeting on Friday (full disclosure: I am on the Board of SAO so I’m a bit biased in favor of the organization). I have to admit, I’m pretty fired up about an important cause we are undertaking. With the help of staffer Bryce Yonker, Vidoop’s Scott Kveton, and ViaWest’s Jim Linkous, we have some serious firepower to get out into the software community in many places where SAO is not (and we know that there are a lot of those places).
Our cause is to engage with software freelancers, engineers, tech entrepreneurs, interactive freelancers, bloggers, mobile app enthusiasts, anyone related to the tech industry in Oregon and let them know that SAO finally has something pretty valuable besides great networking and events – SAO is one of the only associations that now offers Healthcare coverage to single employee companies or organizations – yes, freelancers can finally get affordable medical coverage thru SAO (thanks to Regence Bluecross Blueshield for getting flexible with us to make this happen). When SAO President Harvey Matthews mentioned a year ago that SAO was looking into having this unique health coverage come to fruition at a Bar Camp, he got a standing ovation. Let’s hope that kind of goodwill is still there in the software community in today’s economy. To learn more about the healthcare plan, go to SAO’s site >>.
Here are a few of the events we’ll see you (thanks Scott Kveton for heading the charge on this) – source for these events and more is http://calagator.org:
** Lunch 2.0 – AboutUs
** Ignite Portland 5 – 2/19
* RecentChangesCamp – 2/20 – 2/22
** Lunch 2.0 – OpenSourcery
** Innotech – 4/22 – 4/23
** BarCamp Portland – 5/1 – 5/3
* Webvisions – 5/21 – 5/22
** Open Source Bridge (the OSCON replacement) – 6/17 – 6/19
Also: we will try to make some of the Beer & Blog events that happen every Friday, 4-6pm, at the Green Dragon.
KillROI has been a busy robot, checking out the scenes that Portland has to offer. Thanks to Nancy’s creative use of her camera and for sending us the hilarious photos, we are able to share those adventures with you. Here is what Nancy had to say about KillROI’s adventures:
We’ve had a lot of fun touring around Old Town Chinatown, KillROI’s home (and mine).
From a First Thursday event at ANKA Gallery, to the Steel Bridge and the Portland Classical Chinese Garden, KillROI took it all in stride.
On a tour of the Central Library’s eco-roof, KillROI proved to have no fear of heights, and on a snowshoe trek to Mt. Hood’s Trillium Lake, KillROI conquered a mountain of snow.
My personal favorite is the “where’s waldo” version–the hood of an art car. Where next? Only the Shadow knows . . . .
Thanks again Nancy and we look forward to what lies ahead for our good friend KillROI!
I have an admission to make – last night, I had a shocking thing happen. I momentarily lapsed into non-optimistic thoughts. It had nothing to do with politics or business. It had to do entirely with an Act of God.
In Portland, we’ve had huge windstorms. During dinner at a friend’s house, a massive tree branch came crashing through my Prius back window. I love nature, but this time, my love affair was tainted for a night and the next morning.
So, after having seriously f@*#ked up dreams all night, I went for a long run in the morning and began processing my thoughts. Before, my run I glanced at the NY Times front page article titled “Poll Finds Faith in Obama, Mixed with Patience.” In many of my blog posts, I’ve talked about 2009 being the year of optimism and it has been an optimistic year until the bloody tree limb incident last night. But, I knew I could mentally power thru these dreaded pessimistic thoughts.
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
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
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.
Black and White OR White and Black - The other week Anna Yeaman at StyleCampaign put forth an idea and backed it up with a test on the concept of the uses of black and white as a background in an email and how it performs. Her test has been on my mind making me take a closer look at not only our [...]
So then I turn to Twitter and gag. Gee, any of this is really worth a tweet, right? Then I get distracted by someone or something else that needs immediate attention. By the time I get back to Twitter the moment has passed and I’m on to 6 other things and the cycle starts all over again. Yikes! Therein lies my dilemma. I want to share these things but I don’t want to be one of the those folks suffering from “Twitterhea” either –you know who you are. Your constant blathering has to be a sign of some sort of neurosis.
I am excited to join a great panel for an upcoming Software Association of Oregon event called 
