Download the Extended Audio Podcast Here

You can’t just do social media

Morgan does a great job of relating social media concepts, tools and potential to the goal of portraying a brand or client in the best possible way on the web. “You can’t just do PR and you can’t just do social media,” he says, “because everything has to work together.”

As we are finding with Twitter’s trending topics notifications and hash tags, social media and twitter in particular can be a powerful way to spread ideas. They go “from one person’s idea to a mainstream news story over the course of minutes,” says Morgan.

Filtering those ideas from the background noise is a challenge, and Morgan says that it is up to the individual to accomplish because you can’t automate it. So you have to become engaged and grab a hold of the all powerful CONVERSATION.

Is it REALLY all about Conversation? (yes it is…)

“Conversation means actually engaging with the people who want to engage with you,” says Morgan. Though it isn’t always important or even necessary to have a conversation per se; there are plenty of special cases where information sources, agencies, companies and especially celebrities do just fine without really worrying about conversations.

Still, as Morgan says, “you need to be involved in the conversation instead of having things pushed to you all the time.” Most users are seeking real interactions. Often those interactions occur with or even around a brand.

Social Media As PR

That can be intimidating not only to a lot of PR and marketing professionals, but also to CEOs. Morgan adds, “that should energize companies and really scare them.” Though many companies have stepped into social media to react to emergent issues, it is a far better policy to engage before trouble arises. You can easily quell the bad (if you do it right (OK, and are lucky)) and accentuate the positive.

As we learned from Krista Parry, companies can have a lot of success putting their own info out there for users to find, by posting breaking news and info on blogs and podcasts. “The great thing about using a podcast or videocast for that,” says Morgan, “is you can have everything you want to say encapsulated there.” There are people out there who are super interested in a topic and will seak out lots of information and eventually become defacto experts, sources and influencers, “and you want to be able to provide those peole with as much information as you can,” says Morgan.

Great to meet you Josh, and thank you very much for inviting me out to speak to your class!

Note: In the audio version of this episode you get a few extras. 1) A lot more insight from Josh into how businesses can benefit from using social media for PR (and that’s not just lip-service either, he actually does it), 2) a segment where Josh asks me about my observations on the use of technology I observed on my recent trip to Morocco, and 3) a stumble where my sleep deprivation and jet-lag leads to a funny quote regarding the CDC and swine flu.

-M

Download Audio File Here

Alan Hall is also Founder and Chairman at MarketStar, a successful sales and marketing outsourcing company that he started in his basement in Ogden. Hall is involved in almost every level of entrapreneurship promotion in Utah, from finding venture capital dollars to having simple conversations with new entrepreneurs and answering questions. Our President, Steve Spencer, caught up with Hall last year at a Funding Universe speed pitching event and was very impressed with both his knowledge, passion and ability to help new entrapreneurs find direction.

Hall is taking his show on a much longer road over the next year with Grow America. Thanks for taking the time to talk with me Alan. It was great to meet you!

-Mike

A few weeks ago we launched a new blog for a local Tahoe adventure guide, Doug Stoup, and his guide service, Ice Axe Expeditions. This week Doug and Michael Mitten are trekking across ice and open water through horrendous weather and conditions to the geographic North Pole.

Adventure for a Cause

This isn’t just an adventure. Doug and Michael are out to raise awareness and support for
Macmillan Cancer Support. For years, Doug has been working to raise awareness for environmental, educational and charitable causes, and has always used technology to get the message out about what he and his clients are experiencing and observing. That has included webcasts, photos, voice recordings, and text updates. But we thought they should kick it up a notch and be more social.

Social Media for Expeditions

Doug has a handheld PDA that links up to a satellite phone so that he can send images and messages back to Ice Axe Headquarters in Truckee Ca. There Karyn Stanley, Ice Axe Managing Director, posts the updates to the website, which we built on the WordPress CMS.

Doug and Michael are also sending Twitter updates of their adventure as they get closer to the pole through the ice and open water of the Arctic Ocean. I’m digging following the challenges and trails of their trek on twitter!

You can listen to audio updates that they call in using the file and media sharing service drop.io. This service receives and records the calls, creates an embeddable audio player, and produces an iTunes subscribeable feed so that you can sync the updates to your phone or ipod every day.

The images Doug and Michael are sending back end up on Flickr.com where you can view, bookmark, share and comment. There are some amazing images there!

And all of this is happening, albeit with a little help from basecamp, as the expedition is unfolding, rather than days or weeks after. While we wish we had been hired to tag along and be the tech geeks for the expedition, once we set it all up and got it live, Doug and Michael are able to easily send updates and Karyn is posting them from home — all on their own! On top of that, they now have multiple avenues for commenting and interaction with their growing community.

If you love adventure, please check out what Doug and Karen have been able to do for Education, Environment and Charity with Ice Axe Expeditions. And please also take a minute to look at the important causes they are working for on the True North and the upcoming Two Feet on the Table (launching in April 11th) expeditions. There’s a lot more content and media we’ll be adding to this site in the coming months.

-Mike

Lots of Ski Resorts are using social media to market online, but Krista and Eric, Interactive Marketing Manager at Park City, recognized early on that the web was going to change the way they managed the PCSki message. They stepped in with a blog that they could use to communicate mountain information directly to customers and visitors who needed to know. What they found was an audience with a great desire to consume information and an ever increasing interested in exchanging information.

Since then, they have engaged their audience on Twitter, Flickr, Youtube and even created dedicated channels that communicate directly moms, a core segment of their customers. Their microsite which can be found at smowmamas.com helps mothers plan ski vacations for their families at Park City and gives them specific information to their needs and interests from real moms who write about real experiences. Eric has a great post on ski resorts using Twitter on his personal blog. There are some great comments there about how resorts are using twitter and social media for PR, marketing and engaging customers.

It was also my first time skiing at Park City, and @photo_John, @Jenni_LMT and I were happy to find some steep technical POWDER infested terrain to go along with all the moderate groomers on the mountain. It was a great day!

@pcski on Twitter: 956 Followers, 898 updates, Tweetstats for @pcski.
Park City Blog: 4 authors with profile pics, Video and Flickr slideshows, 19 comments on page 1 for 10 posts.
PCMR on Flickr: 18 sets, 2 friends (wha?), 404 items since NOV 2008.
PCSKI on YouTube: 11 videos, 1531 channel views, 4839 average views / video.

In Social Media it’s good to know what the “gurus” are saying and what the new tools are, but it’s far more important to know what the people in the trenches are doing. Krista, Eric and Park City are a team to watch. What do you think is good or bad about what they are doing? What other examples of Brands using social media effectively are there out there? What new directions are we going to see ski resorts (or any brand for that matter) take in the next year?

-Mike

Note: The video is about HALF the total interview. For the full deal, download the audio, or subscribe in iTunes.

The RGJ is engaged in a lot of interactive efforts to bring community and news content to the public on the web, and a lot of them involve user generated content. Through the years news institutions like the RGJ have had some successes and some failures with this. Beryl says that some of their initial efforts didn’t pan out due to a misunderstanding of what involvement the readers really want to have.

Blogging and social networking are commonly thought of as threats to big J Journalism. But with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ceasing publication of the Dead Tree Edition, and the RGJ and Gannett as a whole engaging in blogger relations and online community outreach and management, we are seeing the two become even more mixed. The eventual result will be institutional and grass roots Journalism becoming even more connected and dependent on each other.

With the acquisition in the last year of Metromix and Ripple6, Gannett has jumped into the nitch social network market, and with great initial success. The Reno Metromix site generates traffic well in excess of similar markets, and social communities like MomsLikeMe are bringing people together to interact while providing valuable user analytics for advertisers.

Beryl also laments the fact that the content management system used by rgj.com and most other Gannett papers is not able to give the community of bloggers what they really want to participate. Beryl however suggests a better solution that would allow bloggers to easily participate while exchanging content for readership in a way that bloggers and news institutions can benefit from and be happy with.

In the end we’ll all have to work together to prevent the loss of either the hard and heavy Journalism News institutions with revenue streams, overhead and full-time staffs, as well as the lone gunnman blogger exposing the stories the paper can’t and won’t cover, even if that occasionally includes his nephew’s B-Day party at Chuck-e-cheese.

Thanks Beryl!

-Mike

ps The video is slightly truncated, but the audio version is the full conversation.

What is a podcast?

Video

MidWest Teen Sex Show: A hilariously funny show intended as an educational resource to communicate sex ed topics to teens. It’s smart, clever, creative, and incredibly entertaining.

Slate V: A short news and entertainment show with varied content from Slate Magazine. It’s a quick little bite of info and perfect for the podcast format.

Freeskier: A great podcast, if infrequently published. They show reviews, athlete interviews and full on ski movies made by independent filmmakers. There is some AWESOME ski content there. Check out the “44 days” episode from October, 2008.

Heavenly Ski Resort Mobile Site

From our experience, the needs of a mobile website user can vary. The heavenly mobile site feeds up mostly information in the form of news, conditions and media updates, and resort info and data. The result is an easy access look at the mountain from anywhere your data plan works, whether that is from a South Lake Tahoe hotel WiFi Link or the 3G network in downtown San Francisco.

Mobile Site Features

Standing in line at a South Lake Tahoe starbucks and want to see which part of the mountain has the best (or worst) weather? Click over to the heavenly mobile webcam page and check them all out. 

Want to know the latest Heavenly snow totals? It’s right on the front page with the temp and current weather. Click through to read the daily conditions narrative, and if you need even more click through to view the full report on the main site. 

While you’re chilling in the airport waiting for your connecting flight, keep the stoke burning and check out the latest Heavenly TV videos from the terminal over the free airport WiFi. The blog page also features more content from Twitter and the Heavenly Blog so you can stay up on the latest wherever you are.

Click “Info” and you’ll find a simple text list of information links for Conditions, Directions, Roads, Tickets, Lodging, Ski School, Trail Map and Contact. It’s all really simple and loads up quickly. The “Roads” link on the info page takes advantage of nvroads.mobi and the CalTrans mobile road info search page. 

Tahoe Mobile Sites

One of our SEO clients, Setpoint Systems, has been producing a video podcast for the last few months. It’s not high production, or high gloss, but it is pretty high on interesting content and info about the busness and economic issues that affect their operations and profitability.

A few months back i was really happy to see their video on the “Financial Crisis” and who is to blame. It was simple, and easy to understand, and I’ve gone back to it a number of times and sent the link to friends and family.

Now they have a new video out discussing the weekly financial health and wellbeing of their company and how they go about determining it. Clark Carlile and Joe Knight even discuss their gross and net profit for the week with actual numbers.

It’s a great little podcast! It’s funny, informative, personal and useful. It makes the people seem like people you’d want to work for or do business with. Since we know them we already knew that, but as a strategic communications tool, it’s a great example of a business being real, and talking about what they love to do.

About Setpoint Systems:

Since 1992 Setpoint Systems, Inc. has delivered industrial automation equipment to manufacturers for testing, inspection, or assembly. These machines are designed following the Toyota Production System philosophy for lean automation. Setpoint designs, programs, fabricates, and assembles machines that help businesses become more efficient in their daily operations and improves the consistency of their product.

Such was the case a few weeks ago when I got a taste of “excellentsalmon” and a random connection over chat…

I was working remote when a chat window from “excellentsalmon” popped up posing the question, “wouldn’t it be cool to play with a kitten the size of an elephant?” I thought for a minute. I had a couple other chat windows open a phone call pending, other people in the room and an event to get to in the next half hour. But I responded with, “Think of the size of the cat box!”

The conversation started a little rocky. Each of us figuring out slowly that an unknown third party had somehow connected us, that i was in pacific time and he was in Central Time and that neither of us was a spammer or malicious weirdo. At first i thought it might be a cosmic connection to the future, but being only a few hours different that wasn’t a significant finding.

I did a twitter and google search on “excellentsalmon” and found one tweet and blog post about a previous incident. In both cases the person assumed it was spam and the conversation didn’t end well. Then I got followed by @caylorb. My chat buddy was on twitter! How cool is that! So we ended the conversation, i saved screen grabs of the chat and we went about our lives.

But here’s the interesting thing. I’ve actually found value in @caylorb on twitter. We’ve pinged back and forth several times. He’s recommended music that I’ve ended up downloading and liking. He’s funny and seems to think i’m funny, he does a video podcast on tech and social media and is into web video. So through a random mischievous chat hack, I’ve made valuable social media contact.

In my mind, and this won’t surprise people who know me, this shows the power of randomness, the usefulness of mischief and, most importantly, the value in taking each conversation at something other than face value. In business and in life, you can loose out on good opportunities by judging situations and people on what they seem to be at first.

This was a small simple event that has continued to inspire me. The connections we have with people are usually so linear. I know bob, who knows Ryan, who knows Martin from another job who i know from an interview 10 years ago… That’s great. They always say that it’s not so much what you know, but who you know.

But how often does the line jump so far outside your sphere? How do you get outside your network and find ideas and people you never would have seen? Just another example of Twitter providing value in meaningful exchange of ideas and social media tools acting as communication hubs and facilitating connections.

And all you have to do is take the time to answer the question…

-M

Read the whole chat.

Chat client: Digsby

Email account: gmail or yahoo
Username: excellentsalmon, ignorantsalmon (more than once?)
Other: i have the digsby chat widget on facebook.
Related links: http://groups.diigo.com/groups/salmon-chat

At the same time we’re hard core geeks, to varying degrees, and we love the gadgets and code almost as much as the snow! (actual results may vary). And we also are really into blogs, twitter, forums and online magazines and video. So it was really awesome to partner with Heavenly to run the first annual Tahoe Snowcial last weekend.

What is Snowcial? Well you could check the buzz around it on twitter, check out the photos on Flickr, and the videos on Viddler, but that might not get you the whole way there…

Social media, online storytelling, and snow sports are all about interaction, collaboration and having fun with friends. So Snowcial was a natural fit once all these guys got in the same place to have some fun. Our original vision included top professionals in social and online media, snow sports media and athletes getting together to talk shop, learn from each other and get some, rather a TON, of turns in on the mountain. It went down perfectly!

We had Ray Sidney pummeling Aaron Lowe, Paul D, and Abe Cunningham at the poker tournament. We had John Shafer talking about the birth of online user generated communities with Pete Blackshaw while touring the mountain. I saw Eugene Lee and Brian Hafer talking with Greg Prosl. It was great to get some of our favorite people in tech, web and snow sports talking together about working together and regrouping again for Snowcial next year.

It was great to meet all of you and see how the worlds of social media, snow sports and online storytelling come together and hit the slopes.

What does Tahoe Snowcial have in store for next year? Plans are still hazy, but everyone was stoked to come back and bring all their friends, and Abe tentatively promised a private concert from the Deftones!

So stay tuned…

-Mike

PS As Brian mentioned int he video, HUGE props and thanks to Heavenly for treating the group so well. Russ Pecoraro and Aimi Xistra organized a great event and we were all super impressed and had a great time!

Also thanks to sponsors Mont Bleu Resort who set us up in some great rooms with jacuzzi tubs and Solscice who hooked us up with some sweet jackets!

The exhibition, “Between Grass and Sky,” features craft work, art and poetry meant to coincide with the 25th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, NV in January. If you are traveling to the event, be sure to check out the exhibit in Reno at the Nevada Museum of Art as part of your trip. Nik is very interested in themes and imagery of the American West as well as the contrast and interplay with more modern and evolving themes, and he has designed an exhibition which will act as a commentary on that contrast.

This podcast was recorded in Josef’s Vienna Bakery and Café at 933 W. Moana Lane. This is one of the best places for breakfast and coffee in Reno and our Favorite. They have great coffee, pastries, food and WIFI! Thank You!

-Mike

Ryan also talked about one of his first projects in national advertising when he worked on the Jared campaign with Subway. Initially, the commercials featured Jared and a voiceover narrator. Ryan had the idea to let Jared speak for himself and that was when the campaign took off.

He also gave some good SoCal insight on Reno and Tahoe as brands and how they interact with each other in the minds of travelers in other parts of the country. Basically, our Sushi is good even by SoCal standards, and the $18.99 All-you-can-eat doesn’t hurt either!

It was great to get the chance to spend time with Ryan and talk branding and advertising with an expert who has worked on major brands like Subway, Olevia, EAetna and Unicef. Their work looks tight and spot on to me.

The local professional associations are stepping up the game in recent months with the AIGA, AMA and A2N2 putting out some national experts like Ryan. Be sure to keep up on the latest speakers and events for the Advertising Association of Northern Nevada.

All of these horsepower podcasts are available and downloadable to your iPod as well. Be sure to click the video subscription button above and get it on your iPod or mobile device for the next time you’re on a car trip, buss ride, or waiting in a long line on Election day!

-Mike

Though that has been around for a number of years, the impressive thing about wordpress is the open source
model and the cool features and updates that keep coming out, incorporating the best of what the community
comes up with.

The cool thing that open source paradigm allows guy like Mullenweg to do is, exactly what they want to
do, for their own reasons and scope. They innovate in creative ways and create products that inspire
culture, are widely popular, and are in the end profitable for the creators and the community. My own
introduction to blogging came from my love of writing and my need to have a format that would allow me
to think in small chunks. Blogs are fairly freeing. They let you focus on the craft of creating content,
not the grit of navigating the digital landscape. As such, the Wordpress motto, “code is poetry” is both
representative and prophetic. Matt, Joseph and the Wordpress team won’t become the Steve Jobs or Bill
Gates of their generation, because what they created and will create will be as much ours as theirs.
The intellectual property is their vision, and their spirit of cooperation to create community driven
software with the end user in mind. Hope you enjoy the video from Matt’s Keynote Address to the group
and the interesting info below about WordPress…

Interesting wordpress facts:

• blogs get 50 to 60 % of traffic from search
• 11.1 million downloads so far in 2008
• 35million new posts this year on wordpress.com
• 4 million per month
• 6.5 billion pageviews
• 230 million unique visitors
• 5 billion spasm were blocked by Akismet and it is 99.925% accurate.

Top Ten Wordpress Plugins:

• cforms
• wp-polls
• WP automatic upgrade
• wp-cache
• wp-db-backuo
• wp.com stats
• nextgen-gallery
• google sitemap generator
• all in one seo pack
• akismet

Great to meet you Matt and see all my SLC peeps, @libel_vox, @Thomallen, @bradbaldwin, @ashbuckles, @cspencer, @thedruidxpawx, @whyisjake, @lauramoncur & @robertmerrill. -Mike

Click To Play

It was no coincidence that Jeffrey came to reno during Hot August Nights. He’s known for photographing cars, muscle cars, motor cycles, “anything with a motor.” See some of his stunning work @ www.congerstudio.com.

-Mike

Grammar Girl, the podcast, is quick and straightforward, giving you a memorable lesson on English usage and grammar. Each podcast is a few minutes long and deals with one issue. Though some topics are big and annoyingly ambiguous, Mignon keeps it simple by focusing on easy to remember rules and examples from common speech.

I met up with Mignon at Java Jungle in downtown Reno, Nevada. We all have special places where we work well and environments that inspire us, and Mignon does a lot of writing from the funky little coffee shop on the Truckee River.

One thing we are always concerned with as a messaging and marketing company is communication, readability and being able to get a point across. Mignon is all too familiar with the issues that social media and technology create for writing. While deemphasizing voice communication and relying on email, text messages, social media, migroblogging and whatever may come next, we have not only increased the amount of writing we do on a daily basis, but we have created multiple new protocols, paradigms and lexicons to go with them. Add on top of that the need to be concerned with how your writing will be indexed by search engines and you complicate the issue even more.

So while you’re driving to work in the morning plug in the iPod and catch up on your grammar with the Grammar Girl and think about all the writing, reading and listening you do.

Thanks for your time Mignon! It was great to meet you and interview another New York Times Best Selling Author (NYTBSA). If you’re in Reno, even if you’re not a NYTBSA, come see us; we’d love to chat about business, technology and communication.

-Mike

SCI is in the new Warnock Engineering building on the University of Utah Campus. The building was donated by UofU alum, John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe. As we found out, the University of Utah has been an amazing incubator for technology innovators, cultivating the minds–such as John Warnock, Ed Catmull, founder of Pixar, Jim Clark, founder of SGI and Netscape, Alan Kay who invented object oriented programming–behind companies like Adobe, numira biosciences, Rayscale, and others.

Chris’ impressive experience includes:

Director, Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute (SCI).
Co-Director, Center for Integrative Biomedical Computing (NIH NCRR).
Distinguished Professor of Computer Science.
Research Professor of Bioengineering.
Adjunct Professor of Physics.
Faculty Member, Computational Engineering and Science (CES) Program.
Faculty Member, Brain Institute .
Co-Founder, Visual Influence Inc.
Co-Editor, The Visualization Handbook.

It was great talking with Chris and learning how the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute is developing world class technology right here in Utah. If you’re in Utah and you want to talk tech with Steve, stop by our office in Draper or give us a shout.

-Mike

This year, though I was invited to the Media Preview of the Great Reno Balloon Race. So I went, and took the video camera with me…

2008 is the 27th annual Great Reno Balloon Race, and they had over 100 balloons and thousands of spectators.

By chance I was assigned to a balloon sponsored by Cathy Blair, owner of Vino100, a little wine shop just down the street from our office. We use that shop frequently for gift baskets or boxes for clients and friends and are always happy with the service and product. Thanks Cathy!

One of the things I mentioned in my blog post about the experience is contrast between some of the other events in Reno that are loud, fast, dangerous and generally have a larger impact on the city. Not that there’s anything wrong with Hot August Nights, or Street Vibrations, or the Air Races, but the balloons are so relaxing, and quiet and slow as the float out of the park and spread out across the skyline @ dawn…

Thanks to the continued support of generous sponsors, the Balloon Race continued as a free event for its 26th year. This year’s Major sponsors include: Wells Fargo Bank, the May Foundation, Silver Legacy Resort Casino, Eldorado Hotel Casino, Harrah’s Reno, Lennar, Shell, Bear Industries, Reno.com, Bonanza Casino, Jack in the Box, Great Basin Internet Services, Communications Installation Services Inc. (C.I.S.) of Reno, KRNV News 4 and KOH Radio. With a special thanks to our underwriters: Club Cal Nevada, Circus Circus Hotel and Casino, Fitzgeralds Casino Hotel, Grand Sierra Resort, IGT, Peppermill Hotel Casino, Sands Regency Casino Hotel, University of Nevada, Nancy Gilbert Attorney at Law and Muckel Anderson CPA’s.

If you missed it this year, check it out next year. Get there early and help launch a balloon. I’d recommend also riding a bike up there as parking can be a major pain. This year the Nevada Bike Coalition set up their Bike Valet.

-Mike

For more great events from the Reno Tahoe Chapter of the AIGA, see renotahoe.aiga.org.

AIGA Online Branding Panel Discussion

(Fade In)

Gene Keenan: That or the concert or whatever and turn that into a participatory experience, using the mobile phone and creating a positive branding experience for the brand with the consumer. And the key to that is creating utility or usefulness for that consumer.

In other words, it’s not about serving up an ad or serving up like a message. It’s about bringing value to that consumer’s life. That’s what’s going to bring, that’s what’s going to make a positive impact on the brand and make a consumer remember that brand for the rest of their life.

Like an example, I haven’t pulled this example out in years, but something we did a long time ago, for Motorola in Times Square, probably like five years ago, we did a simple thing where people could text messages, calls to each other on a board in time square, using their mobile phone. We had 12 marriage proposals in the 24 hours, 36 hours that that board was up.

This is an experience that those people are going to remember for the rest of their lives. It’s a positive brand experience.

David LaPlante: So where do you find your brand inspiration right now, internal, external, what’s got you jazzed up there. Who’s doing good work, what makes your jaw drop and go that’s cool?

Rob Bynder: To me it seems like the question to branding to what end, because it’s easy to have I’m not knocking the kind of stuff you’re doing, because it’s actually really, really cool. But one of the questions I always ask my clients is branding to what end.

Remembering a brand is important, but acting on the brand is really the goal, right? Hopefully people continue to buy Motorola phones or it means something to them.

Gene Keenan: If they continue to make more Motorola phones, which is debatable. (Laughter).

Rob Bynder: You can have that one.

David LaPlante: There’s one we should come back to. Because there’s Motorola at the top of its game the razor, defined the mobile industry. The brand is in the toilet. Let’s save that and come back to that.

Rob Bynder: I think you could say you see that a lot. It’s happening really easy. You could go straight to Apple and say everything they do is golden. They run their brand very well. I can refer to them any time I want to think about how to do something well. I think I can refer to them. Maybe for the last, not all the time. But maybe the last five years.

David LaPLante: Starbucks, you also have to say what you didn’t like about the Starbucks brand.

Stanley Hainsworth: I admire the like you were saying, it’s the brands that have the staying power. Some brands have come out and they made a big hit. And whether their product is differentiating in the marketplace or their advertising is incredible, but it’s the staying power that’s tough for brands.

Brands have been around for 50 years or 30 years and they go through all the cycles. They might have been the industry leader. They might have been the innovator they came out with a product that no one else or did it in a way that no one else did it. But then the competitors or the wannabees, they copy and so how do you continually evolve as a brand? How do you continually reinvent yourself but keep that core that you had intact? Which helped define you in the first place. And one brand that I’ve always admired is Corning. Corning is one you don’t think a lot about as a brand.

But they did dishware, started in 1908 as glassware, innovative glassware is what they started at. Corning is mostly what we know them for, for their glass dishware. Now they make fiberoptic out of glass.

So they kept their core. It’s about innovative glass things, but that’s always been their expertise. But 70% of their business now is in things that didn’t exist five years ago. So they couldn’t have predicted where they’re going to go. And so I admire brands like that that can stay alive and keep reinventing themselves and a company like Starbucks is in that point right now.

How do they reinvent themselves? They’re going through a tough time right now. I was at Nike during two big lay offs and things looked very dire for a while there. That’s when Reebok was a big competitor. They came out with remember the white aerobic shoes. That was like a huge thing. (Laughter) and Nike missed that whole boat. They smeared that.

So Puma was huge. Where is Puma now?

Gene Keenan: Everywhere.

Stanley Hainsworth: So admire those brands that know who they are, that have defined their core and are able to keep that core intact while continually tacking with the wind as it moves.

Rob Bynder: I think related to that is the ability to know that there’s a difference between a superficial aspect of a brand and really maintaining their brand. Whereas, I don’t want to jump the gun on the whole Motorola, jumping back to it, but if they can’t execute, if they can’t continually execute up to their brand promise, no matter how good the advertising is, the brand fails. Because they’re really not living up to the brand promise. So it’s a lot more than sort of the superficial marketing of it. It is can you run your business like Corning possibly, and a lot of other companies, and not screw up the delivery of the rest of the brand promise, product design, delivery, customer service, all these other brand mentions.

Stanley Hainsworth: Fun to see some of these brands that have been hot recently, you know like Method is one that a lot of people talk about. And Erica speaks at every other conference. They’ve done great work, brought innovation into a boring space, previously boring. But you know the things they’ve done like online that People Against Dirty, you saw that website. We can go in and write little confessions and then the hands wash, have you seen that, anybody.

I mean it’s great. It’s addictive. And it’s very much supports their brand promise as well. So it will be fun to watch brands like that to see how they can continue to evolve.

David LaPlante: Gene, what are you liking out there?

Gene Keenan: What do I like? I’m going to take an easy answer. I think the stuff I admire, we just won Walt Disney, I’ve been spending a lot of time watching television, watching a lot of movies. I think the movie industry is interesting constantly have to be innovating, creating great product, whereas a lot of brands like Motorola, for instance, they could skate by. They came out with the razor. Rather than improve the razor, they diluted the quality of the brand by reducing the price of the product and not, instead of putting, instead of taking that money and putting it back into making the product better, they just went to the route and sold trillions of them, not trillions but millions and millions of them.

Look at the entertainment industry, boy, if you’re not producing a great product, you’re out of business instantly. And I think that’s one of the things Walt Disney is trying to do. Walt Disney is actually trying to create a brand around their whole film franchise.

So, for instance, you typically don’t think: Oh I can’t wait to go see the latest Paramount release or latest MGM release. You’re thinking it’s like Will Ferrell, can’t wait to see it. Might have been produced by Disney or Paramount. Disney is actually trying to create a brand around Walt Disney films, which I think is kind of interesting. So they want to create a community around their films and keep consumers engaged across multiple titles, which I think is something that’s really interesting, something that nobody else has done in the entertainment industry. It’s typically been, like, for instance, we do a lot of media planning and buying.

We can work for six different film companies because there’s no conflict of interest. Boy, that light is shining right on me like the spotlight of God. (Laughter) So we can work with a bunch of film companies because there’s no brand there. It’s like you’re promoting a specific film and then it’s gone.

I think what Disney is doing is pretty interesting. They haven’t come to market there with it yet, but I’m going to digress a little bit. One of the things I learned about Disney is they have cut all their fast food they don’t do any single serving restaurant promotions anymore. And they have created food guidelines for all their partners.

So, in other words, if you are a partner of ours, we will not partner with any company that produces super sugary or fatty food or any food that has trans fats in it. Which is a huge departure for Disney, considering they were part of McDonald’s for many, many years. (Laughter) you’ve got the hand over it.

>> Blocking the sun from his eyes.

Gene Keenan: I think it’s interesting that Disney in my mind has always had this family wholesome image they’re trying to live up to that brand promise now by saying you know what we’re not going to partner with companies that are causing obesity in our children, or causing poor health in our audience. I think that’s really noble of them.

David LaPlante: So let’s crank this down to, we’ve all dealt with this situation, either it’s a client or it’s someone, the CEO or someone, organization that can’t get past self referential branding. If it was up to me everything would be put through the filters of skis and bikes and gadgets and that’s the way the whole world should be. And you’re dealing with that client that says: Well, I like red wine and everyone else on the planet likes red wine.

And that’s going to be it. And they don’t listen to the audience. They don’t listen to you. I know, and I’m looking at faces that I know have felt this pain. How do you fight that? How do you get past this self referential marketing?

Gene Keenan: And everybody thinks they’re a comic brand when they’re not?

David LaPlante: Yes. There’s only a handful of those you may have come across one. War stories around this or it’s just changing a brand, changing a paradigm, you’ve got to change people’s minds on that. War stories and tips and techniques on fighting that battle. I know you’re itching to go on this.

Stanley Hainsworth: I’ve worked a lot with internal clients on this, and a company like Nike, we worked from the kids division to the golf to the basketball, and they’re as different, almost as different companies. The audience is so different. And then Starbucks you have the entertainment division, and you have coffee and you have food and car groups, very different kinds of clients.

And there’s a lot of personal taste involved on the client side. And so I think I was able to successfully block a lot of that without being harsh about it because someone says I don’t like green. And so that’s why they’re not going to approve the creative that you show them.

It’s about training your clients how to write good briefs. And then letting them know that you’re going to stick to that brief is going to be your bible you’re going to go with. So any comments will always filter back to the brief. It’s forcing them to think up front and be strategic and really figure out what they want before, because many clients use creative as a means of developing their strategy. Because when they see it, they start seeing it. They’re saying oh, that doesn’t work, I didn’t really mean that.

So we did a lot of training, client training on how to write briefs, how to respond to creative, when we present creative to them. We do everything like role playing and all those things. Put themselves in our shoes and all that so that they could see that if someone says: You know what, I just don’t it just doesn’t feel right. If that’s their feedback, well that’s not very helpful. We don’t know what to do with that.

They need to run it, again, through the brief.

Gene Keenan: Needs to be edgier.(Laughter).

Rob Bynder: Make it more designed.

Stanley Hainsworth: So I would say as a we were talking a little bit about this, creatives are some of the more strategic people that I’ve ever met. And the reason why is because their job is to put together disparate things and make them all funnel together in one message to the consumer.

You might be handed 10 things, didn’t really have much to do with each other. You had to make a campaign around it or website around it, whatever it is. So we tell stories that are at our core. We are storytellers, we have to figure out what the story is. So I find that creators are very strategic. Standing up to clients in a way that let them know we’re strategic thinkers and that we can be their partner on the business side. And that’s the conversation we were just having right before this, is some designers fall into the trap of kind of making fun of clients. It’s like they don’t understand type faces and that stuff. They don’t get creative. That’s not a good thing.

We have a lot to offer each other. And the only way we’re going to get to the real result is in problem solving which is what we do for a living, we solve problems, is by both of us living in each other’s shoes and understanding each other and helping each other to get to that solution.

That was like a lecture, wasn’t it?

Gene Keenan: I thought it was really good, completely. Very empowering. We hear it all the time at work. We always want to make our clients wrong, like they just don’t understand. Or I can’t get them to understand. It’s a disempowered situation for both sides because you walk away from a situation rather than trying to solve that problem. Or you’ll say I don’t want to work for this client anymore, or I want to get transferred, or whatever and I quit my job and go work for somebody else.

David LaPlante: Do you have a good story for that?

Gene Keenan: No but it happens yeah, I had that come up in my work all the time. Like I was talking to Colleen about it. Girlfriend Colleen about it the other night, who is there in the audience, about how I just don’t want to work on this one client. They just don’t understand. They want to hire us as advisors but they don’t want us to be advisors because they want to control everything we do. And I haven’t found, it’s like a Rubics cube and I haven’t been able to solve it.

Rob Bynder: We try to do research because everybody has opinions. And a lot of clients actually surprisingly have not done research. Some of the bigger ones have, but a lot really haven’t. One of my clients is AEG. Has anybody heard of them? They’re based in Denver. They own half the world. Never heard of them but they control everything you do. They own Staple Center down in Las Vegas and half The Kings and the major league soccer league. They either own or run about 20 other venues around the world.

So we went in to do the Staple Center website and the creative director said, I drive a Harley Davidson and I love that website. And you know I hang out on it and write stories on it and I go there every single day and that’s what this website should be like. We had to come back and say, look, there’s a reason that’s not the right solution. Maybe it’s a good idea but it’s not the right solution here.

What we did we did a little bit of solution, we used a lot of common sense and experience, but we did a little bit of research and looked at what the people were using the current Staple Center website for. Which is pretty obvious what they’re doing. They’re researching events. They’re buying tickets, they’re researching parking and they’re gone in 15 seconds. I mean it’s literally like a 15 to 30 second transaction. People are not hanging out. They don’t go to the Staple Center website to interact with that brand.

They don’t care about the venue. They like it. They have a good time there. They care about the Lakers or Garth Brooks or whoever the heck is playing there, right? They want to interact with that. We had to come back and sort of prove to them, or at least lay our case on the table and say, no, we really don’t think that’s it. What’s your product? Your product is events. Let’s sell your events. Let’s not sell the community. People have their own community.

Lakers have their website, their community is happening there, why redo it. So we try and fall back we try and use research and sort of common sense as much as we can. And train them to think about creative and think about briefs and goals.

David LaPlante: So there’s this guy Clay Shirke who writes a lot of crazy stuff out there. Doesn’t get into branding but talks about how things are shaking up, everything is getting weird out there, all these gadgets and technology, all these super smart people. Google has leveled the world. And so he wrote this blog post. Getting a ton of discussion out there right now. And I’m just going to read a little bit about him, kind of use that to set the stage. Then we’ll take it off to the audience.

He said: “I was recently reminded of some of the reading I did in college way back in the last century by a British historian arguing that critical technology for the early phase of the Industrial Revolution was gin. The transformation from rural to urban life is so sudden and so wrenching that the only thing society could do was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing. There were gin push carts working their way through the streets of London.” He goes on and on to talk about how for a whole generation everyone was drunk on gin, nothing happened.

Gene Keenan: Nothing’s changed.
(Laughter)

David LaPlante: He uses that to talk to the world that we’re just emerging out of, saying, you know, television and radio in this one to many noninteractive, we sit around on our couches, our couch potato generation, our fathers and to us many of us for a while, that was our gin of marketing media and branding in that generation.

Now we’ve got gadgets. I’m sitting here I can send Flickr photos up to you. I can Twitter you and U stream you and do a kick video. You’re bad mouthing me in the background, I can hit my Twitter page see what you’re saying about me. People in the Twitter world asking me to ask you guys questions. It’s getting real weird out there. There’s design and brand principles. There’s still print. There’s still all that, but it’s getting weird. What do you guys see, how is that changing your world? Are you excited? Where are you taking advantage of that? Where are we going? Give these guys the spotlight. Start with the gadget guy.

Gene Keenan: Gadget guy, I’ll give you the company line. Our company line which I think is accurate, and you probably heard this before, that brands are losing control, because the brands are really a reflection of the consumer. The consumer controls the brand. And if you go to a site, say you’re going to buy a vacuum cleaner, for instance, you go to a vacuum cleaner site. You see a bunch of glowing reviews about the vacuum cleaner. It’s probably going to be bullshit, but if you go to a blog site and you read a review about that vacuum cleaner you’re probably more than likely to believe that.

And so we have this saying: The brands will win are those whose consumers tell the best stories about those brands. And I think that is so true because in this online world where we’re in this digital world where we are so connected as you were just talking about, you can’t lie to people anymore.

It used to be you could like put together a campaign. You could do a TV spot. You’d hit the whole world, and you could lie about what your product could do and what it couldn’t do.

You cannot lie anymore. We’re in a world where truth prevails 24/7. And there are no secrets anymore. And I think that in a clam shell.

>> Nutshell.

>> Nutshells are bigger.

>> Let’s go with scallop. So I think that is so true. So you look at the videos that just got released of that poor kid in Guantanamo Bay or what happened with the guy who shot Saddam Hussein being hung just terrible thing was happening to him on an old camera, on a little cell phone camera, video camera. That got out to the world, because there are no hidden places anymore.

And so we have to be really careful about what we say. Authenticity and truth is what is going to make us survive and make our clients survive or our brands survive. Like I was talking to my boss the other day, and we were doing this we were doing a campaign. It didn’t go that good. How can we spin it. You know what she said to me? We can’t spin it. We have to tell the client the truth, and we have to say this is what happened and this is why we think what happened. We can’t say like, oh, we knew this was going to happen because of X, Y and Z. We just have to be really honest with our clients.

And our clients have to be really honest with their consumers.

Stanley Hainsworth: Along the same lines, I did a fun presentation in San Diego where I forced myself I wasn’t going to use any imagery that I had. It was just going to be a reflection off I just did screen grabs of how a consumer I started with myself. I kind of Googled myself, and I did screen grabs of that. And I did all the companies that I’ve worked for, Nike, Lego, and Starbucks to show we can put things out there but in the end it’s the consumers who are going to form their own opinion of what the company is.

And as I think about brands that have created communities, Harley Davidson, Lego, other brands who have created communities that exist outside of those brands.

And they have there’s a whole life outside of the brand. And communities and you can generate or facilitate experiences and hope that they catch fire and you can do something online and hope that it gets picked up. But in the end it might be some YouTube video that is a fan of yours but nothing you did actually has much more impact than a multi million dollar campaign that you did.

So it’s such an interesting world right now. I am so excited about it. I embrace all of that technology. And I think they’re just more tools for brands to use to create the community and tell their story, because in the end that’s all that brands are. They’re telling a story. They’re creating an emotional connection.

Gene Keenan: Sounds like a dream.

Stanley Hainsworth: Creating an emotional connection between the consumer product and experience.

Rob Bynder: I hate to think, though, when brands start catching on and they are about doing it in a very inauthentic way, planting a row and pretending it’s real. Or going out and soak a river that’s so underground pretending this is a community.

Gene Keenan: I’ve got to tell you they get busted. It happened to us like six or seven years ago. We tried to do a whisper campaign when we went online to like blog sites and community sites started posting things check out this show or check out this product.

I gotta tell you, there are people out there, because it happened to us, they trace back the they look at the poster. They trace back the ID address, they look at actually where that posting is coming from and they tell the whole world.

Rob Bynder: That’s awesome.

>> That’s what I’m saying, you can’t

>> But what kind

>> You can’t be unethical anymore.

>> What damage does that do to your brand.

Gene Keenan: The brand wanted to do it because they thought they could be smarter than everybody else. Like we were just working in a chop shop. And we were just doing what the brand asked us to do.

Rob Bynder: But you know the whole other the whole social networking aspect of that, and twitter is sort of one thing, but the idea used to be that you make a website and then you get links and you get people to come back to your website. And what’s happening now is that really you build a website and then what you try to do, which I’m just trying we’re working on remax.com right now. So we went to them with this great idea. We thought it was fantastic.

Facebook apps, MySpace pages, Facebook pages. Google apps. Widgets. All these things that are out there that are small representations of the website and the brand online, and rather than expect links to come back to the website, take chunks of the website and put it

Gene Keenan: There are no websites anymore. It’s the brand consumers are allowed to take the brand wherever they want to. If you have a widget, it’s like something we did. I’m sure other companies have done it. But I’m just going to use this example, which is Nike ID, a site where you can go on and create a custom shoe. We create a widget so anybody can take that widget and put it on their school site. They can put it on their facebook page. So you could create shoes on that site wherever it was and you could buy those shoes directly to that widget.

Rob Bynder: That’s right.

Gene Keenan: And the thing is, my phone, like my iPhone, like the 2.0 version of the iPhone had the apps one of the apps I downloaded called app page 1. They have an online version of it started online app page one. What it does it allows me to aggregate all my different websites that I would normally go to, it’s all personal financial stuff.

Like etrade, Wells Fargo, Bank of America. My United account. Like 12 different sites. I can aggregate it all into my own personal website so I don’t need to go to the individual websites anymore. I go to a website that I’ve created.

It’s the idea of like my Google. You go to the Google page. There’s all these different widgets. Create your own home page by pulling in all these feeds from different sites.

>> Net vibes is a great one, too.

>> Net vibes. Or

>> [Inaudible].

Gene Keenan: Yeah, and I think the future is all about contextual perception. And I think Pandora is a fantastic site application. You go on who has used Pandora?

Stanley Hainsworth: Lastfm.

Gene Keenan: That’s another good one. Pandora is a site you can go to, you do a search for an artist. Do a search for The Kinks. It will play a Kinks song. You can say I love that song or don’t love that song. If you don’t love that song, it will pick out artists that are similar to The Kinks within that genre you like. You keep saying yes or no, yes or no. And it creates a recommendation engine. Essentially creates your own personal radio station. For instance on I Pandora, iPhone if I had a 3G phone I could literally plug it into speakers and have my own personal radio station that I created because of my preferences in my car, party, no matter where I go my personal radio station based on my preferences being generated on the fly because of my musical preferences. I didn’t have to create a play list. It understands what I like and generates that play list automatically for me.

David LaPlante: Last question. I want to get

Stanley Hainsworth: One quick on Nike ID. One interesting insight on that. When I was at Nike there were sneaker freaks that would take Nikes and customize them. Combine a golf shoe put the flap on a basketball shoe and color them up and all those things.

So that’s another example of a community developed. Nike watched that community and they said oh, customizing sneakers, so they developed

Gene Keenan: Developed their own sneakers. We have kids lining up. It’s like I have friends who own three, 400 pairs of sneakers they’ve never even worn. They keep them in the box or they put them on a shelf. It’s like they’re pieces of art.

David LaPlante: Last question, before wrapping to the audience, with trying to be authentic, it’s hard to have people who don’t know what they’re writing about be truly authentic. Google controlling your page one Google results, your digital identity is your page one.

The personal brand has come out of the woodwork in the last three years especially. Agencies are looking for personal brands that are congruent with the brands that they have to manage. It’s easy to put a skier in front of a ski resort. It’s easy to put a runner in front of a running company, because there’s no line.

It’s transparent. There’s the passion. There’s the emotion, the connection. That seems to be a trend out there that I’ve observed and I’ve heard dialogue on. Is that something you’re seeing out there and just for the folks in the audience, what are maybe some techniques or tips for managing your personal brands to help snap you to that future brand client?

Stanley Hainsworth: I’m kind of hypersensitive about it right now, as I go from my identity being tied closely with brands. With like Starbucks, Nike, Lego, to creating my own brand and my own agency. And as I start as I choose which clients to work with, that starts forming who you have become, the personality of your agency. And so there’s, it’s interesting it’s a combination of survival. We want to take jobs for money. But that job that you do might not be something that fits with your brand personality that you want to develop.

So it’s interesting going through that right now. And also before I was in the business of promoting other brands, now I’m promoting my own brand and my assistant the other day just called me narcissistic because it’s all about blogging now, and self promotion.

And that’s what we have to do to be heard and to develop your brand, because as you said it’s just, someone just goes on Google and looks you up. It’s not only what you put out there but it’s what others put out there about you. You go and speak at a conference and you’re really lame. Well, that’s up there. Someone’s commented about that.

And maybe that’s a client deciding whether to use you or not. So every move you make is part of your that’s why when I used to when I worked with brands, I always use the analogy of a person, a brand is a person and everything that you do reflects on you as a brand and the way you the person the way the hairstyle they choose or the clothes they choose or the way they talk, the way they interact with people, that all reflects on who you are and the opinions that people form about you.

The same with the brand, everything you do, online, off line, whatever you do reflects back.

Gene Keenan: I don’t know if I have anything to contribute. I’m going to digress and go to a tangent of mine.

David LaPlante: So Gene Keenan got the mobile industry off the ground in the U.S. with a rag tag crew. But sometimes people wouldn’t remember his name, but they would always remember he’s the guy with the scarf.

Gene Keenan: I’m not wearing a scarf. I’m wearing an oink T shirt instead which was three minute music download site before it was shut down. So what was I going to say? Personal brand. Personal brand, I think about me Gene Keenan, personal brand, my stuff, what am I interested in and I’m a conglomeration of brands, right, and I think about how I use brands. For instance, the example I was giving on my cell phone. For me everything is contextual, like what communities do I want to belong in or belong to. And how did different brands fit in. There’s different communities within those different brands that I have specific affinities to. Right?

So, for instance, what’s an example? So say I’m into wine. I have an affinity for a specific wine site. I’m part of that community, but there’s specific people that I’m interested in having relationship with on that site.

It’s all part of this big wine site brand. But within that site, within that brand I’m only having an affinity with specific things. For instance, if you look at you’re talking about how great Apple is. I may only have an affinity for Apple when it comes to the iPhone, right? But I’m really not interested in their computers or iPods or anything else.

But that’s not true, really. (Laughter) But I think that’s true for anybody. There’s plenty of products or brands I can think of that I have an affinity for that I have no interest in anything else they do. And I don’t even know where I’m going with this. (Laughter).

Stanley Hainsworth: Tires or

Rob Bynder: It’s interesting being defined by brands. Your personal brand is being defined by other brands than you’re associated with.

Gene Keenan: Say that again.

Rob Bynder: Your personal brand is defined by the brands you associate with. In other words, I’m defined

Gene Keenan: Absolutely. Because even like there’s a mobile marketing company out there that is they have their idea is you know what a ring back tone is, when somebody calls you there’s a music track playing instead of a ring. So this mobile marketing company came up with the idea we’re going to allow consumers to make money on their ring back tones instead of having to pay for the ring back tones.

The way it works you sign up, go online and choose brands that you have an affinity towards. For instance, I have an affinity for Apple, maybe BMW, BW, or like General Mills, whatever the brands are. I choose the brands I have an affinity for, when people call me they hear marketing messages that are personalized by me about Apple or General Mills. Because you may think it’s awful, but

Rob Bynder: It’s awful. (Laughter).

Gene Keenan: We’ve done research with teens. And teens have come up with this idea themselves, because they don’t want to be advertised to, but they don’t mind advertising to their friends.

Rob Bynder: They don’t know (Laughter).

Gene Keenan: I think it’s funny.

David LaPlante: All right. We’re at a good point to get some audience participation. I meant to say I’ve got a present. They went thrift shopping today. I got you a new one. I want to make sure you compete with Stanley.

If you do go to Stanley, you’ll find many, many mentions of the hair. Great aspect of personal branding. (Laughter).

Transparency. Authenticity. This is the game today. So Jeff, Derek, you guys want to help with the audience figuring out

Questions of the panel?

Audience 1: So we talked a lot about these big brands that you’re kind of pushing to the online space, but it seems like a lot of the newer start ups are leading with that as opposed to building their brand and then taking it online.

What are like the pitfalls and things to watch out for because it’s so transparent? You don’t really know where it’s going to go. You don’t know how it’s going to take it. How do you help funnel that into the right direction or to the right area.

Rob Bynder: Can you be more specific about one of these new brands? Just doing a pure play for the web?

Audience 1: No, no, I’m saying you start up a company regardless if it is a brick and mortar, if it is anything.

David LaPlante: You’re saying they’re starting up a new company?

Audience 1: Exactly.

Stanley Hainsworth: You’re talking like a looped, that’s a company that exists only on the web. But I’m working with a few Silicon Valley start ups like that, and the reason why they were interested in working with me is because they’re interested in building a brand and not just building a website.

So start ups like that have become very conscious of branding, because there’s so many almost identical applications going on right now in the online search space and other places.

So you could it’s interesting taking just take something like Looped, for example, a brand that is about knowing where your friends are on your phone or on your computer.

Can you take that brand, can you figure a way to start extending that into the physical or the nononline space?

Yeah, if you thought about it you could probably it’s about community. It’s about common interests and all those things. So as many brands are moving from physical bricks and mortar into the online space, a lot of the online companies are interested in doing the opposite as well for staying power.

It will be very interesting, Google, you know, there’s no telling where they’re going to end up doing. But pretty much guaranteed it’s not going to be just restricted to the online space because they’re going to have so much money they won’t have to do it.

So I think it’s extremely interesting time we’re in right now.

Rob Bynder: And also to that point, I think as the web is sort of a default marketing channel, the first place I work with a lot of start ups and we don’t print brochures. We don’t do a lot of direct mail like we used to do. We’re doing websites, e mail marketing, campaigns. Based on brand strategies, sound traditional brand strategies. We’re just not going to press quite as much as we used to.

And if we do, we tend to do it after the website is written. All the stuff is written, it’s already there. Sort of flopped from about 10 or eight years ago where it’s the exact opposite. Just make my brochure a website.

Audience 2: It’s true that you have to communicate the web and print and it’s kind of two different communication messages in a sense. I mean it’s all ultimately the same message, but the verbiage is a little bit different. But do you find it more difficult to develop the actual brand platform and the whole design, everything, just starting right with the web? I mean when you don’t have the print and all of the radio and all the media, the traditional media that goes into it like that, where you see and the customer sees or your client will see firsthand the development process and their brand creative and then it’s a little bit easier to transfer into the web, or is it a little bit harder starting at the web and you’re trying to discover your brand.

Rob Bynder: I think you need to start there’s nothing different. The web is just another medium. You need a brand platform. You need a positioning platform. A mission statement. A creative brief. A marketing plan. I mean those are all things and it’s the same thing we’ve been doing for a long time in this industry the web is just a different medium to do it in.

If you don’t do those things you’ll be screwed up on the web or you’ll be screwed up when you get to a brochure. You’ll be screwed up any time you try to manifest that brand if you don’t have that platform, you’ve got nothing.

Gene Keenan: I think it’s a colossal mistake to only do online or I mean depending on the brand, of course. But we work with clients that they have success online. It’s like we’re going to dump all our money online. We’re not going to spend our money on TV, print, radio, anything else because online has been so good. Well, it doesn’t quite work that way.

There’s a, what do you call it when the sum is greater synergistic effect between the media channels that ends up being greater than the individual media channel.

For instance, I work in mobile. Mobile can’t survive on its own unless we’re doing display advertising on mobile sites to drive people to a mobile experience. Mobile is about connecting the different media channels and making them interactive. It’s not so much an individual media channel in itself. Honestly, in my experience off line and print people totally get mobile better than digital people do, because digital people, I think, we’re already have an online experience why do we want to send them a mobile phone. Digital and print people are thinking mobile, my God I don’t have like a static print ad anymore or static TV experience, I can turn it into an interactive experience.

And then maybe they go online. And so I’m digressing again, but I think it’s a colossal mistake to think of like individual media channels I’m going to focus on line or I’m going to focus on print. Really depending on brand, what the strategy is, and what you’re trying to achieve, but keep like I am not a proponent of killing TV. I think TV is going to be around forever in some form.

It might not be the way we watch it today. But TV makes the daily sacrifices of life possible and solves the riddles of our lives. (Laughter)

Audience 2: I feel where this is going, you feel like your creative juices flow more with the traditional media, developing those concepts, because when you were mentioning start ups and going maybe straight to online first or maybe that’s all they have and then you’ve missed kind of the rest of the picture which kind of helps in those creative processes. But, yeah, I know, you have to have nice

Rob Bynder: Can’t work in a silo.

Audience 2: No. Yeah.

Audience 3: I really appreciate the very 30,000 foot discussion. Great to have the quality speakers. Thank you guys. I guess to bring it down a couple notches, 10,000 feet, more tactical: If a brand has traditionally been very much we tell you, you don’t tell us and dabbled in blogs and dabbled in the main community or the sub community, one of our communities, [Inaudible] communities, that’s looking at a facebook fan page, perhaps. We’re not sure. What are some of the strategies that makes a facebook fan page successful? Starbucks having several hundred thousand members and is it around a campaign or is it just creating the community and letting it run, or what are some practical how tos on the facebook page. If that is passe, maybe it is, but maybe it is not.

Gene Keenan: For me I think the whole widget thing and facebook stuff, the stuff that’s successful, is the stuff that actually creates news feeds. If it’s a stand alone widget and nobody is going to come back to that widget.

But, for instance, I get facebook updates from my friends. I get updates about specific applications. Whatever widget you create, you have to make sure that you’re creating a news feed so that it spreads virally consistently every single day that somebody interacts with it or whenever that application is updated. If you don’t have that, it’s kind of like you built a field and nobody’s going to come to it because they don’t know about it.

And secondarily, this is more of a strategic thing, I’m going to talk about Nike, because Nike just launched a facebook application called, The Ballers Network, which I think is a spectacular idea. The idea is you can find basketball courts in your area and sign up for a specific time and have other people in the community sign up for those basketball courts also.

So you can do pickup games with people you don’t even know in basketball courts in your community. I think it’s a fantastic idea. Totally wrong place to do it. Facebook is not the place for a basketball player to hang out. They’re on MySpace. Facebook is primarily, hate to say it, but primarily it’s college educated, primarily white demographic. MySpace is much more of a younger demographic, kids who are just look at the genesis of the two sites, right? Facebook came out of Harvard. MySpace came out of very much a grassroots effort, very focused around youth and music.

And so great idea. Bad execution.

Stanley Hainsworth: I think also feel for Starbucks, for instance, for a MySpace page, sometimes they’ll put up a MySpace page just for that, that current campaign or that drink that’s launched, and that gets back to there’s a lot of tentacles out there, they’re doing sampling on the sidewalks and in the stores and creating awareness and they’re doing advertising. So the communication is happening at a lot of levels. And you’re also starting with a fan base.

And there’s a fan base for every brand. And then there’s those that need to be converted as well, and so you tackle those both in different ways.

Gene Keenan: Then there’s those who have a love/hate relationship with the brand, like me.

Stanley Hainsworth: I guess there’s no secret to a MySpace page. But it’s the momentum that gathers and the momentum comes from starting to roll several small rocks down the hill instead of just one big rock. That wasn’t a bad metaphor was it?

Audience 4: Do you have any stats on how many facebook users actually viral applications?

Gene Keenan: How many facebook users what?

Audience 4: The apps, the facebook apps how many are using them, engaging with them, sharing with friends?

Gene Keenan: You know, I’m not the facebook expert within my company. So I can’t give you

Rob Bynder: I think unless it’s Scrabulous they have short shelf lives especially with privacy issues. I think

Gene Keenan: And the spam issues, like a lot of the apps have, there’s spam apps. When you sign up for the app you have to invite like 20 friends.

Rob Bynder: It’s a big deal.

Gene Keenan: Those apps die pretty quickly, because people dis the gap and say get this out.

Audience 4: What’s the secret to a flaming hot facebook app?

Gene Keenan: You have to provide some useful utility. Some stuff like the little green patch app, I get 30 green requests a day. But that app is generating income to buy rainforest. So it’s an app that I’m willing to participate in, even though I know it’s a spam app. It’s providing useful utility in my mind like I’m thinking like I’ve saved a couple of square feet.

And several million other people save a couple square feet. It adds up to some acreage, right? But that utility, has to provide utility.

Rob Bynder: One of the tenets I have for all the websites that we do, all the interactive projects, and I think you could actually apply here, would be is it useful? Is it usable? And is it desirable? And I think you could apply that to any component you do online and say, you know what, that’s going to work. Hopefully it works, hopefully like the 14 year old kids pick up on it.

Gene Keenan: I just downloaded an app on my phone called the Carling Beer app, cool app. What you have to do is navigate a pint of beer across a bar until you get it into somebody’s hand. It’s a cool app, but it only has like three levels and it takes about two minutes to play. And it’s like, all right, done with that one, no reason for me to come back. No reason to believe. As you were saying is it useful, desirable, what was the other one?

Rob Bynder: Useful, usable and desirable.

Gene Keenan: Useful, usable and desirable. I like that.

Audience 4: One other area that’s like a good example.

Gene Keenan: Useful, usable desirable app, there’s tons of them, man. Like on the iPhone there’s one that’s called, it’s actually being burdened because it’s so useful. The yellow pages, the yellow pages app or Ware.

The one I really love is Save Benjis. Save Benjis. For instance, it’s location of where apps for the phone. I use this as an example. I just went to Greece. I was at the Parthenon. I wanted to read about the Parthenon. I pull out my iPhone, fire up Safari browser. Go to Wikipedia, do a search on Parthenon, click on the link. A lot of clicks. With location aware phone I fire up my phone, there’s an app that fires up a geo app, you’re at the Parthenon. Want to read about it. I click on it and I’m right there.

Tons of apps like that. Imagine you’re standing in front of a restaurant, don’t know if it’s any good or not. Location aware. You pull out your phone. You’re right here in front of Starbucks on 4th and Howard. That’s a bad Starbucks. Don’t go to that one go to the one that’s two blocks away or across the street. Right? So it’s all about utility. I mean for the phone there’s tons of apps. Obviously my specialty is phones. So I’m going to talk about the phone.

But online, Colleen, can you think of any good actually you’re not a facebook user, are you?

Colleen: I cannot think of any good online apps.

Gene Keenan: Games are actually good. Like there’s some facebook games that I play.

David LaPlante: I’ve got one. Megan brought it up. If you don’t get clouded by emotion what you’re trying to do is get your brand in front of the motions that are congruent with the motions of your branding folks. So no secret I love skiing and I joined one million strong preskiing in the Olympics, and if your brand is congruent with my brand, and what I’m emotional and passionate about, come on, let’s go mob scene the Olympics and make sure we’ve got some super pipe going on in the next Olympics for us free skiers, the app is out there someone else created it but you have the opportunity to capitalize on that emotional plug.

Audience 5: I want to ask you about TV on the web. About what Revision3 is doing and Twit television where they’re trying to produce programs that are at a much cheaper level and get advertisers to advertise. Do you think IP television is going to succeed?

Gene Keenan: Here’s my form of IP television. We don’t have fast we don’t have big enough pipes in our home. Have you ever played with IP television. It’s like click, change a channel. And tonight is happening. Click, change a channel. And on the next episode is going to be. It’s like the delay is too great. We don’t have big enough pipes in our house yet.

That’s been my experience with IP TV. But watching it online. I watched, there was a story in Ad Age. I think it was Nielsen that did a study that showed that consumers are more than happy to watch advertising before a video or after a video online in order to get the content for free.

It’s considered a fair exchange.

Rob Bynder: I think it’s a great

Gene Keenan: I watch a lot of TV online. Do I? I watch a lot of YouTube online.

Audience 6: I would just say one thing to his point a second ago. Go do Google I have some experience in IP TV. Do a Google over the top video. I think that’s kind of where you’re headed with that question.

There’s some interesting things to your point. The pipe is getting fatter.

You’ve got the cable guys and the phone guys, but AT&T universe and Vios is rolling out pretty successfully across the country. You’ll have choices to Charter here.

David LaPlante: All right. Last question, Mr. Pickett.

Jeff Pickett: I would like Stanley and/or Robert to talk about AIGA and how it’s important to their career and how it’s relevant and important to the design community at large.

Rob Bynder: Who is not a member here? Raise your hand. Stand up. (Laughter).

Go write a check to this guy.

You’re on the board.

Stanley Hainsworth: I accepted a position on the national board recently and so I have a three year stretch ahead of me to give back to the profession. And that’s what AIGA is. I think Leilani and I were just talking today about how lucky we are as a profession to be doing what we do.

You know, it’s really fun what we get to do. And it’s pretty easy. We have to think hard sometimes, but it’s pretty easy work, as work goes. And so it’s so we have a skill set, and as I said before, I think designers are some of the most strategic people, and I think we have a lot to give back to our communities and back to our professions. And one way we can give back to our communities is through our profession. And a lot of pro bono work and all that we do. And AIGA is a professional organization that has a structure for us individually to gather together and do something bigger through the chapter level and then through the national level as well.

So, AIGA isn’t perfect. Neither is any organization. But the way that it’s going to get stronger is by having more passionate members and more members who are willing to give of their time.

And it will only help all of us in networking, education, all the different things that we’re looking for in our profession.

Rob Bynder: You know, I just have to add: I was talking to somebody about this over I forgot who it was, but I’d say 90% of my business has come through connections I’ve made through AIGA. Whether it’s direct referral, directly working with people I’ve met at these events or projects the connections I’ve made through AIGA have built my business for the last five and a half years.

And business is really good. And the question is, you know it’s only as good as you get out of it only as much as you put in. But it’s true. It’s worth every dime. If you only come to two events and disappear back into the woodwork, you’re not doing yourself any favors. It’s a good community. It’s a good way to give back.

Jeff Pickett: Thank you very much, guys.

(Applause).

The options with the Control4 Technology are amazing. You can store music and video in multiple, or central locations, and it catalogs it all and auto detects it’s presence. It also links systems so that if there is a fire the alarm sounds, lights come on, blinds open, fire trucks are called, the HVAC shuts off to avoid spreading smoke and feeding flames, and the front porch lights start flashing so the emergency responders know which house their looking for. Simply amazing. And the ability to catalog and view 400 movies at a time isn’t bad either!

It’s awesome to have so many leading technology companies for neighbors in Salt Lake City. If there is another company that you’re dying to learn more about please let us know and we’ll go see them.

-Mike

“WingateWeb is the leading provider of enterprise event management software. Our software solutions offer more than just commodity online registration, they enable event managers to produce a truly spectacular event experience for their customers. We pride ourselves in driving innovation and value to your events from start to finish. We have been building innovative event management software and online registration tools for Fortune 100 companies since 1998.”
find out more about WingateWeb products

It was great chatting with Jason in the WingateWeb office, which is just around the corner from our office in Draper. If you’re in Salt Lake City, please stop by and see us!

-Mike

I also got a TubeMogul t-shirt!

-Mike

In this episode Dave visits with Darik Volpa, founder and CEO of understand.com, a business that helps doctors and surgeons explain and illuminate the nature and realities of surgery. The understand.com service goes above and beyond the 30 year old diagrams they show you in the doctor’s office to 3D animations created by the same guys who create video games and cinema graphics. Understand.com’s animations show exactly what the surgery entails from the outside in.

We hope your surgeries are few and far between, but if you happen to be under the knife, or scope as I was just a few weeks before this podcast, be sure you ask your doctor to see the understand.com video that relates to your particular procedure. We also hope the CEO of your company never threatens you with dismissal for insubordination on a video podcast… (Ouch, Dave. That hurts… [;-)])

-Mike

10,000 years ago horses were native to North America. Those horses migrated to Europe and Asia as humans did across the Bering straights. Horses were were eventually re-introduced to North America by the Conquistadors, as humans began the process of re-introducing themselves. Stillman’s book begins with the idea that since horses were once native in North America they essentially came home to re-populate their old stomping grounds: a familiar and welcoming environment.

Stillman’s writing is at once poetic and logical with a strong narrative voice. The book is filled with vivid views of the past through the eyes of the ancestors of the Wild Horses that now roam the west.

“Perhaps the ones that were passed over when the men went below the decks to make their grisly selection sensed—in the way that all animals have a homing instinct, and generation after generation make their way back to their ancestral turf—that they would soon be home, back on the continent that had spawned them, thirteen thousand years after they had dispersed and mysteriously disappeared from their birthplace.”

It was great to meet Deanne and get a chance to sit down to talk with her at her book signing at Sundance Books in Reno.

-M

From The Utah Tech Spotlight:

A couple of years ago I started looking into the local Social networking/blogging/twitter/etc scene, and wondering where to start. What could I really do to get value, and build a helpful network without just spinning my wheels? Many people here in, and outside of the valley were a huge help (far too many to list here now). But one in particular seemed to really be able to cut through all of the crap, and ignore all of the hype, and point a valuable path based on experience. Not only that, but he has always been so willing to share what he has learned, and so humble to deal with.

The My Nevada Dream Job Street Teams, in half kayak gear and half professional attire, were canvasing for Bay Area Professionals to let them know about a recruiting event this Thursday evening at the Ferry Building. The event is free and will showcase the opportunities for a balancing a professional career with the amazing recreation lifestyle in Nevada.

So we hope to see you on Thursday!

Links:
Photos:
Videos:
Event details:
http://mynevadadreamjob.com/rsvp
Eventful.com
upcoming
Facebook
Craigslist

What’s this all about?

-M

But over the years we’ve had the chance to come to terms with our woefully inadequate smog supply. We’ve become “ok” with the fact that we have four traffic cams and two traffic reporters dedicated to only one problem intersection. And while we occasionally have to get up @ 5:30AM to ski (or snowboard) before work to maintain our 61 day/year streak, we proudly wear helmet hair as a badge of honor! We’ve sacrificed our need for cramped over-priced apartments with a moderate organic gardening addiction.

So while in the Bay Area, people may worry about being a small fish in a big pond or vise versa, we worry more about the flow rates of the rapids, the afternoon hatch and the conditions of the singletrack in the mountains that surround town.

If you’re interested, and want to get a little more Reno-Tahoe in your life, join us for a Cocktail Party on:

Thursday, June 26th from 6pm to 9pm
One Ferry Building
San Francisco, CA 94111
Google Map

Eventful
Upcoming
Facebook

Think you can make it? Please RSVP here: MyNevadaDreamJob.

Some cool Jobs in Reno:
Project Manager, Worldwide Credit Services
Program Manager, Compliance -Part-time position
Vendor Account Manager, OEM
Finance Manager
Application Support Analyst
Sr. Credit Manager, OEM
Physical Therapist
Business Partner Manager, AOC
Program Manager, Enterprise, AOC
EDAWN Business Development Director

Some interesting facts about Reno:
It’s 20 min drive to the closest Tahoe Resort. Farthest is 50 min.
We have all night (and all day) bars.
We have fixie bike geeks.
We have hipster bars.
We have 34% fewer cougars and those cougars are 67% younger than SF.
Reno 911 is (while admittedly awesome) is filmed in Bakersfield, California.
What happens in Reno, usually costs you $20 or less.
We have earthquakes too.
They film Modest Mouse videos here.
You can see the white water park from your office.
In Reno, we fight for YOU.

-Mike

We did see some cool stuff. Top on the list of things to look out for next ski season was the Klymit insulation system, a Noble-Gas based adjustable insulation system for sporting outerwear. The system developed by Brigham Young University students uses argon in small canisters to fill chambers to vary insulation.

Mick Hagen won for his college student recruitment tool called zinch.com. This is a social network similar to Facebook, Myspace or Ning where high school students and colleges can create profiles and actively recruit each other.

This is effective for both parties as the Colleges can find good qualified recruits without relying exclusively on contact lists purchased from the standardized testing agencies (SAT, ACT etc) and less effective email marketing campaigns. According to Hagen, colleges are finding this social networking approach more effective at reaching the best students than traditional marketing techniques, buying contact lists for email, mail and telephone. Students everywhere are ecstatic at being able to substitute a “superpoke” for a profile essay when applying to BYU.

We spoke with Dr. Chris Johnson, the Keynote Speaker at the awards presentation and Director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah. The research, advances and inventions coming out of that office are amazing. He told us about a new real-time 3D imaging system that can pinpoint cancer in a beating heard to target radiation therapy.

Also awarded was our client Solera Networks for their Network Monitoring Appliance. This is a tool that lets network administrators monitor, store and review everything coming in and out of their network.

And another cool one comes from Kevin Shurtleff of Mountain West Energy LLC. Shurtleff has developed an oil vaporization technology to extract the remaining 2/3 of oil that is left over with traditional techniques. This could add 180 billion barrels to US oil production with no new oil fields.

It was a great event showcasing the best of what Utah innovators have to offer. Thanks to Stoel Rives LLP and The Utah Technology Council for making this event happen.

2008 Utah Innovation Award Winners

Allocure: Cell Therapy for Acute Renal Failure: Biotech/Pharmaceudicals
Cerametec, Inc.: NaSICON Membrane Technology: Chemicals/Materials science
Mountain West Energy LLC: Insitu Vapor Extraction: Clean Technology and Energy
Raytheon-Sarcos: Robotic Exoskeleton: Computer Hardware/Electrical Devices
Zinch Inc.: Student Profile and College Wizard: Consumer Software
Solera Networks: Solera Networks DS Series Packet Capture Appliance
Klymit: Noble-Gas-Based Adjustible Insulation
Anecare Laboratories, Inc: QED-100: Medical Devices

-Mike

“Nevada has gold, silver, and wild horses.”

Ray Field, Executive Director

Wild Horse Foundation

From our offices here in South Reno we can look out the windows up to the scraggy peaks of the Virginia Range where wild horses forage in the sage and grass. We hike and ride bikes among the Virginia Range Mustangs, we drive up after work to catch the sunset over the Sierra Nevada as they graze the flanks and meadows.

We even use them in our branding materials; of course, we have to give them colored mohawks and other various treatments. But that is just the way we roll! :~)

Nevada is home to more than half of the wild horses in the United States, and for the most part they exist in harmony with the land and people, as integral to our identity as the Sage, Bighorn Sheep, and Lahontan Cutthroat Trout that we hold as official icons. The state derives identity from the western ethos the wild horses represent, and we as a company derive inspiration from their intelligence and tenacity.

So when the Nevada Department of Agriculture announced plans to monitor the largest contiguous herd in the United States with the notion that more than half needed to be removed from the land, we decided to go out and take a closer look.

Thankfully Willis Lamm, a wild horse supporter and owner of Least Resistance Training Concepts; country singer and president of the Let ‘em Run Foundation, Lacy J. Dalton; and Craig Downer, Wildlife Ecologist and expert on the Virginia Range Wild Horses from the University of Nevada, were more than happy to show us around. We would have also liked to have spoken with representatives from the Nevada Department of Agriculture, but they were either unable or unwilling (see comment below).

What we found were a few bands of healthy and happy looking horses ranging peacefully across the low hills above the Carson Valley, southeast of our offices in Reno. The main thrust of the NDA Wild Horse Position Statement is that the range can support about 500 to 600 wild horses, according to an estimate in a study by the Natural Resource Conservation Service in 2001. But that estimate appears only to pertain to the 85,000 acres of rangeland in the study plot. The herd actually roams on more than 200,000 total acres of rangeland. According to the NRCS projections, there is more than enough rangeland to support the 1000 to 1200 Wild Horses known to exist in that area.

Most visitors see the Wild Horses when driving to and from the Virginia City area, but much of the range is publicly accessible by 4×4, ATV, foot and bicycle. Other states like New Mexico and Maryland are actively promoting their wild horse herds and get many thousands of visitors as a result.

From Mammoth Lakes, CA to Yellow Stone National Park wildlife and humans have been butting heads in the West for much of the last century. In Nevada, encroachment on habitat and conflicts with humans are a constant and growing problem. There is no doubt that the Virginia Range Mustangs need to be actively managed to survive; but the volunteer groups, and local adoption can be a benefit to the community rather than a drain on tax dollars. Since wild horses are so closely tied to the existence and history of humans in the west and the unique identity of Northern Nevada that we owe it to ourselves to find a palatable way past this crisis that benefits our land, our horses and the Nevada brand.

For more information or to get involved visit:

• NVWildHorses.com
  
• Wild Horse Mentors
  
• Virginia Range Wildlife Protection Association
  
• Let ‘em Run
  
• Save Nevada’s Wild Horses Diigo Group

-Mike

The Reno Tahoe Chapter of the AMA hosted their annual ACE Awards event last Thursday at a black tie soirée at Harrah’s. We had a fine time with all the fine dining, festivities, and the cheep beer we snuck inside our chrome courier bags. Events like this are a great time to hang out with all the fun and talented people in Reno-Tahoe and a for the Twelve Horses team to celebrate what we do best: results driven online marketing campaigns.

Top honors went to our work with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for the Heavenly Mountain Resort Website. The judging, which was done by the Tampa Bay Chapter this year, focuses heavily on the results of the campaign. Through a combination of keyword analysis, optimization of code and navigations structure, pay-per-click advertising, link building, blogging, and social marketing we have elevated them in the organic search results for many different branded and non-branded keywords. The results have been impressive and the amount of qualified traffic has steadily increased.

An Award of Excellence went to the Las Vegas Monorail Ticketing System, a fully custom built interface that lets the Las Vegas Monorail sell, redeem and service tickets online and through channel partners. This carefully thought out system has boosted sales for the Las Vegas Monorail and exposed them to new revenue opportunities all while being easy to administer, maintain and modify. This entry was by far the most technical, but online marketers need to be able to strategize and scope the design and development of an online application such as this in order to achieve the best results for their company.

We grabbed another award for Heavenly who walked away with an Award of Excellence for their Flash Promotion Widget. Wanting to increase online bookings by featuring different promotions and services on their homepage, but faced with the challenge of limited real estate on the homepage of their website, they needed a new approach. The answer was a fully customizable flash-driven widget that would overlay on the homepage and drive customers to their commerce site, The widget could also be taken on and off the homepage and moved to other areas as needed. Now Heavenly can prominently push packages and last minute deals on the homepage without sacrificing other promotions or compromising the design of the website.

Finally, we took home a Certificate of Excellence for our Bobofest Social Media Marketing campaign for the Reno-Sparks Convention and Visitor’s Authority (RSCVA). The RSCVA is always seeking to enhance the “America’s Adventure Place” message and they wanted to have a greater new media impact online. To that end we coordinated with their traditional Public Relations and Marketing campaigns to take images, video and content surrounding an exciting basejumping stunt that happened in downtown Reno, and spread it far and wide on the web. It garnered a lot of results for them and even today it is relevant and generating lots of views and traffic..

Thanks to the AMA for the recognition, and congrats to all the other talented local marketers honored by the AMA. Super special congratulations to our good friend Dave Archer, who, not only looked super slick in his tuxedo, but also ran off with the Marketer of the Year Award for his work with the Nevada’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology!

-Mike

A blog can be a great tool for ski resort marketing. It’s the best option for centering the social media content that you distribute out to your various web venues. We think this one is really functional and looks super sharp. The designer, Scott Patterson, included some cool social media features like the YouTube window, profile links and twitter updates. He also created drop-down menus to keep the sidebar nice and neat, and a full resort info menu to seamlessly blend the blog with the website.

But when every resort at Tahoe has a blog as part of their online marketing strategy, the challenge lies in rising above the chatter to effectively convey the story of the mountain and the people who make it great. Alpine is doing a great job of it. We think the people who make Alpine Meadows work are awesome, and we’ve had a blast helping them create content and videos to represent their brand and interact with their visitors.

Their Flickr account has been getting great traffic from day one, and we have helped them create a great community around images from the mountain. Google and Yahoo image searches now index Flickr images, but still the traffic from Flickr searches expands by orders of magnitude the viewership of Alpine Meadows content.

The @skialpine Twitter profile is bridging the gap between home and the mountain by helping skiers and boarders stay on top of changing conditions such as avalanche closures, run and lift openings, weather and events in real-time right from mobile devices.

Their video channel is doing a great job of documenting events and operations at the mountain.

Now the SkiAlpine blog is bringing it all together in one place. Check out their blog, video channel, Twitter updates and Flickr account and look for more awesome photos and videos when the snow falls again!

-Mike

You print it out, or copy to a document and print then get out the old highlighter pen. Then you fax it, or scan it and send it along, and soon you have a problem. A problem that, for Ren and Tsai, turned into the opportunity to create a new social bookmarking service.

As we discussed in a previous post, and as Dr. Ren reiterated, Diigo is like del.icio.us on steroids. It takes bookmarking functionality and extends it with forum, blog and messaging features. If you take the time to annotate a page, leave sticky notes, multiple and lengthy comments, and highlight key text on the page, you can then view and forward all the relevant information w/o having to go to the page, or see other public comments and highlights and interact with other Diigo users.

With support for and compatibility with del.icio.us, ma.gnolia and Simpy; plugins or bookmarklets for every major browser; openid support; compatibility with Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Windows Live Spaces and Drupal; a Facebook App; groups, lists, email and widgets; Diigo is embracing the open everything web 2.0 spirit and making a super useful community oriented tool.

But it’s not just for fun! We use it for internal research with private bookmarks and private groups. We have a few clients participating in Diigo groups almost like a Basecamp style project management site. Combined with other free site/services like Flickr, Wordpress or other blogs, and file sharing sites like drop.io and Zoho.com this could give 37signals a run for their money.Thanks to Wade and Maggie for the visit. It’s great meeting leaders in web development who live right here in Reno!

After Earl turned off the camera we gave them each a Red Bull and asked them what’s next. Here’s what they said: A LOT OF COOL STUFF… You didn’t think I was gonna tell you?!!?! Look for just about everything you want from Diigo to come to life in future versions.

-Mike

In this episode of Horse Power Video we cater to the kids! In an age when kids (and everyone else for that matter) get more information and entertainment from the web, ipods, mobile phones and anywhere-but-television, on-demand media, podcasts and mobile downloads become more important and subscription-based media management becomes way more powerful. To that end, here’s an informative and entertaining visit with Mary Schweitzer, some of her favorite dinosaur art and a gaggle of dino loving kids, live in the Twelve Horses conference room…

Mary Higby Schweitzer is a paleontologist at North Carolina State University and the first researcher to identify and isolate soft tissues from a 65 million year old fossil bone. More recently, Schweitzer’s work has provided further evidence of the link between birds and dinosaurs. When she is not discussing the finer points of petrified dino poop with kids, Schweitzer is researching reproductive strategies in dinosaurs and their bird relatives.

-Mike

Bob Starks from Alpine Meadows was stoked to get a hand’s on demo of the Nokia n95. He wants to be able to post up photos to Flickr right from the Summit 6 chair! I almost smashed mine attempting a 360 @ the Kangaroo Park.

Thanks for bringing out the goods Brian! Can’t wait to do it again!

-M

Diigo made some updates to their Firefox Plugin with some cool tips on how to customize it to save space on the toolbar. I use Diigo because it has some more sophisticated notation, collaboration and tracking tools than del.icio.us. Now, don’t for a nanosecond mistake that as in any way dissing del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is my default bookmark toolbar in Firefox. And the simplicity of it’s interface and organization makes it PERFECT for that. One thing that makes Diigo great is it’s ability to add bookmarks TO del.icio.us as well as Diigo.

Dawson found this cool photo sharing tool that seems to combine the greatness of Flickr and Picnic in one slick platform. Photoshop Express is pretty easy to use and mirrors well the Adobe Bridge interface. Probably similar to Lightroom, but I haven’t upgraded to that yet… Uploads are quick and easy. Photo manipulation is simple with a series of graduated options for changing things like exposure and white balance on your images.

On demand media meets the Family Guy with Hulu.com. Video is the king of the Internet and until now TV wasn’t part of that domain. They have Family Guy, American Dad, House, and (Holy CRAP!) Doogie Houser MD, Airwolf, The A-Team!!! There goes my week… You can even embed your favorite video on your favorite blog! Last night I watched an episode of American Dad and only had a couple 30 second Sudafed commercials to sit through! According to Wired, “Hulu, the $100 million video-streaming venture from News Corp. and NBC, has its headquarters in Hollywood — and engineers in Beijing.”

Blinkx.com is a video search and aggregation tool that has the cool embeddable collage function you see below. It searches all the sites, MySpace, Viddler, Veoh, Yahoo Video, YouTube and even Broadband Sports. This is a really good way to showcase your videos, all your friends videos and every other video you find amusing! You just do a search, add videos to your playlist and “wall it.” There’s no login, so you don’t even need to create another social media account!

Awesome!! Check it out. The Web is big, What did we miss last week? What are we going to see this week? If you find something share it with us on del.icio.us or diigo.com.

-Mike

If you have a cameraphone, smartphone or iPhone you probably have a data plan and are likely used to taking photos, text messaging and emailing from your mobile device. Chances are that those features tend to make work take over your life. At the same time tools like twitter and Flickr and the little camera in your phone let you steal back bits of your life and free time by letting you communicate, and interact with friends and acquaintances easily wherever you are.

We at Twelve Horses are also pretty big fans of Flickr for it’s great social / interactive features and it’s HUGE support in the development community. It has a lot of great features, and the more you dig the more useful they get. One I really like is the email to upload. This feature lets you send photos to your flickr stream by attaching them to an email. The subject line becomes the title and any body text becomes the description copy. You can also specify tags that get assigned to all emailed photos. I’ve used this feature to upload photos from bike races or various adventures on the fly and even forward them to my blog in order to have real-time remote blog-reporting.

So I got to thinking…

With Twitterfeed.com and the fact that you can’t post a picture of yourself swinging a dead cat on Flickr without hitting an rss feed, I set out to find a way to get ‘er done w/o learning php, changing business models or calculating billable efficiencies.

How to post photos to flickr and twitter from your mobile phone (or email)

Step One:

Set up email uploads to your Flickr account. You can also set up another email address that will post the photo and caption text to your blog as well. Have that email add a unique tag, like cameraphone, or dailyphoto, or mobilephoto to the pics that come through. Upload a photo, click on the tag and you have a photo stream of just those photos with that tag. Flickr gives you an rss feed for that tag gallery! Copy it and proceed to step two…

step two:

Set up Twitter feed with the rss feed you created in step one. Make sure you select the option to have the url added to the post so your Twitter friends can click on it and view your flickr stream. You can specify the posting frequency as well as the number of posts that twitterfeed posts up for you. 1 post per half hour should be fine for this purpose.

Step three:

Test the system. Best thing to do here is to to load up the most recent Cubeself photo and snap a goofy self-portrait and load it up!

We’re going to be using this feature when we go up to Alpine Meadows next weekend to meet up with Gizmodo and test out the new Nokia n95.

-Mike

Download the video here, or subscribe to video here.

How about that: the last two podcasts have both been done on location! Let’s hope that becomes a trend. We were going to record the podcast Thursday evening, but Kit’s flight from San Fransisco had been canceled and he had to drive over the hill with his son Chris through yet another Tahoe snow storm. They made it just in time for the biggest audience the Reno Tahoe Chapter of the AIGA has hosted to date with 105 people in the NMA’s Theater.

We caught up with Kit on Friday back at the museum after he was done meeting with David Walker, NMA’s new Director, about displaying his flag collection in the museum next fall.

“I’m very confident in what I do; I’ve never met a piece of blank paper that ever scared me.”

Though he can always come up with a solution, he says his only worry is coming up with the best solution for the problem. Since the fastest and cheapest solution is often the favored one, that seems like an unusual way of looking at things. Kit’s insights, in light of the challenges that we as a web development, messaging and marketing company face every day, should inspire us all to think about how we go about solving our client’s problems. Or at least the particular ones in which they involve us…

“There’s an economic aspect of their brand not functioning any more.”

Kit spoke a bit about his work re-branding the company Muzak to change the way it and it’s products were perceived by their potential customers. A non-functioning brand describes, in this case, a company that had changed, but had not changed visually yet. It is amazing how visuals can affect the perception of a company who’s product is sound.

“I think the way in which people understand information is by telling a story.“

Download the MP3

-Mike

It’s always nice when people get back to you

Yesterday the local chapter of the AIGA was hosting a talk by Kit Hinrichs and we wanted to tape the talk and interview him for our Podcast (stay tuned). So I had been collaborating with Leilani on the interview questions via a shared Zoho doc . I’m an early adopter of Zoho @ Twelve Horses, so not everyone is registered and fully on board yet.

So when I went to open the doc from the new Zoho Start dashboard (beta) I kept getting a server error on that file. Other files opened fine, but not the one i needed. [panic...] Remembering an interchange with Aravind a few weeks back where Colin and I Twittered about Zoho and got a response from Aravind, who was tracking the term “zoho,” I sent out a twitter pleading for my document back. (Those of you who think that sending out prayers and desperation to the twitt-ether is pointless READ ON [@mgastanaga and @tjcrawford, I'm looking at YOU!]

This morning I got the following email from Aravind at zoho.com:

Mike : Just saw your tweet – “ok zoho don’t make a fool of me give me my
document back “. Sincere apologies.

Were you able to get back at the document? We would like to help you in solving
this issue. Do mail me more details – like your Zoho user ID, the name of the
document, which Zoho service you were using, the browser name & version etc.

sorry once again for the inconvenience caused.

Regards,
Aravind

I did get my doc back. I went into zoho.com circumventing the Zoho Start and was able to open it. Wheeeeew! Though I seem to be seeing that ctl-Z = all text gone, but the history menu brings it back.

So Twelve Horses raises a glass to our friends @ Zoho.com for their adroit use of social media messaging, multi-modal and cutting-edge business communications, and down right kickass customer service. We could all learn a lot from this exchange!

Below the fold is some additional Q/A with Aravind.

-M

what is zoho built on? I’m guessing it’s open office.

We use OpenOffice in the backend to import/export documents, spreadsheets etc. This interview with Raju, our evangelist, has some details

How many users do you have?

Not sure of the current number but we were around 600K in December ‘07.

How long has Zoho been running?

Zoho’s been there since August-September 2005 (Zoho Writer, Planner & Challenge were the first apps launched).

Where are you based?

Our HQ is in Pleasanton, California. The whole of development happens in Chennai, India.

Who are you guys?

May be this recent article about our CEO will help answer your query.

Where does the name come from?

The name is a play on SOHO – Small Office Home Office. We want to be the IT dept of SMBs

Your web application seems to run a lot better than other web apps, what makes that happen and how will you maintain that as it grows.

We have our own home-grown, grid-based technology. This helps us scale.

How can I backup my Zoho docs so that if there is a real server issue I’m not hosed? There is an offline mode right?

We do run daily back-ups. And our services like Zoho Writer, Sheet, Show, Projects etc. have export options using which contents (a file, a spreadsheet etc) can be exported. That said, easy back-up options for the users have been in our roadmap for a while now. We will soon address this. Also, Zoho Writer has the ‘Go offline’ option which allows you to download upload 50 of your documents to your desktop & work on them offline.

Wait, actually it was a serene and peaceful night on the Truckee River, snow was listlessly falling when we rolled down to the Sienna Hotel, Spa & Casino to hear Louis Navellier speak at Lexies on the River. He had a lot of cool things to say about stocks, Wallstreet and finance, and after the event he and our CEO, David LaPlante, got a few minutes to chat down in the Enoteca Wine Cellar and Tasting Bar.

After we turned off the recorder we went on until we’d finished our wine, talked about the skiing, the new snow and the likelihood of us all being just a tad late for work in the morning…

-Mike

Listen Now (MP3, 23.0)

This is Podcast #40 for Horsepower. Josh Kenzer and Robert Payne did an awesome job finding 39 cool people from Northern Nevada to interview over the last two years. Leilani Schweitzer, Earl Spriggs and Mike Henderson are taking over starting with Horse Power #40. They have a bit to learn, but are excited to get underway.

Someone from the Reno Gazette-Journal had been scheduled to be there, but could not. And that’s a shame, because the RGJ is doing some cool things with social media, though it seems that some of them are still in a beta-testing phase. Specifically, I recently found the rgj Twitter stream. This is a really good way to get content out to people who wouldn’t otherwise interface with the print edition or the website. This gets me a headline every half hour with an article link that I can read right from my phone. Looks like James Ball, Online Content Editor, is behind that. Pretty handy! –Mike Henderson

Twitter was great for following the Nevada Caucus. During the controlled chaos I was getting and sending real-time Tweets to and from people who were at other precincts. Kind of like the ticker that runs along the bottom of CNN. Except Twitter is a lot more fun, and unlike many other media, you know the source of the information, and that lets you make a judgment about the content. The following is some Reno Twitter content from Caucus Saturday. -Leilani Schweitzer

83 Hillary, 129 Obama, not done yet. Edwards not viable. 12:32 PM January 19, 2008 from txt

caucus is a madhouse so many people! 12:15 PM January 19, 2008 from txt

Kucinich and biden unviable in 1018. 12:21 PM January 19, 2008 from txt

191 people here for a projected 70. 12:01 PM January 19, 2008 from txt

Being tempted by cookies & doughnuts to change my vote. I love democracy! 11:43 AM January 19, 2008 from txt

So many people at caucus pulling out all the bleachers. 11:31 AM January 19, 2008 from txt

Nevertheless, this conference was all about the future of economic development in Reno and Sparks, how it is tied to local, regional and national transportation policy, and renowned economists making cheesy jokes while sharing their optimism of the future. During intermission Earl Spriggs, our videographer/video editor, and I went around the exhibit hall asking attendees for their thoughts on these issues and what they thought of Greater Reno-Tahoe.

It was encouraging to hear RSCVA CEO Ellen Oppenheim talk about the cool things going down in town to enhance tourism and our local quality of life, like the minor league baseball park planned for downtown Reno.

Also, RTC Washoe’s Executive Director, Greg Krause, had some really encouraging things to say about the future of local transit policy with respect to alternative transportation modes like bikes, walking and mass transit. RTC Washoe is doing a lot to help with their Smart Trip programs run by Carol Perry.

The outlook from the speakers was far from the lugubrious accounts coming from the media. Though the residential housing market is doing poorly, Jeff Threadgold, President of Threadgold Economic Associates, pointed out that it only represents 5% of the national economy. Since much of the rest of the economy is doing well, the negativity was blamed on the media by most of those speaking. Not THIS, the TRADITIONAL media… (that’s the kind of media which would never mention pachyderm spoor in a business article.) “The world is not falling apart,” agreed Dr. Eugenio J. Aleman, Senior Economist at Wells Fargo, during a panel discussion lead by former local TV news anchorman Tad Dunbar.

As usual, it was great to see Chuck Alvey, President and CEO of EDAWN. He and Doug Kurkul, CEO of RSCC, closed the show with the top 5 business issues for 2008, so I figure it’s a good place for me to close too.

#5 Continued workforce issues and skilled worker shortages.

#4 Education funding shortfall.

#3 Statewide budget cuts.

#2 Tied for second place are: Presidential election and transportation infrastructure.

#1 Residential housing market.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post and watch the video. We’d love to hear what you think. Were you there? Did we miss something? What do you think 2008 has in store for Reno and Sparks?

Thanks to EDAWN and RSCC for putting on the show, and thanks to all the sponsors! Thank you also to those who took the time to comment for the video. It was great talking to you!

-Mike

• Links for You: This is where you’ll find links that people in your network, or who have YOU in their network, have tagged for you. When you use the add bookmark dialog, add your tags as normal, but also select from the list of your network contacts and select those that might also like the link.
  
  Then when you view your del.icio.us page you’ll see the “links For You (15)” notice…
• To really use this tool to its fullest you need the del.icio.us Firefox plugin. There’s a plugin for I.E. but it’s not as functional. I suggest using the bundles view if you’ve gone through the OCD nightmare of trying to categorize your hundreds of bookmarks.
  
• If you’re like us, you have more than one profile that you manage on any one social media platform. That’s a headache no matter how you slice it. You can get around some of that by using Firefox AND I.E. for different accounts, but that gets annoying (especially if you use Firefox, I.E., Opera AND Netscape). Cookie Swap is the solution. Use it with del.icio.us or any other web platform to manage multiple profiles/personalities/clients. Once installed you just right click on the icon in the bottom right corner of the browser window and select the next profile.
  
  Then you can transfer links from profile to profile using the “For:”tag and minimize the amount of times you have to swap cookies.
• Let me take a minute to pipe dream a bit about these two things and a couple of features that I would use A LOT if they existed. 1) Export bookmarks by bundle for del.icio.us. It would be cool to be able to email an unordered list to a friend based on a bundle or a tag. 2) site specific cookie swapping. I want a plugin that will ask me which cookie set I want to use every time a login page loads. Perhaps not that many people manage as many profiles as I do, but I suspect there are plenty. 3) Support for more profiles from Cookieswap.
• Last: Postalicious lets you post your bookmarks with a short message to your wordpress blog. It’s a good way to post actual content to your blog quickly and easily.

We’re always searching for, and tinkering with new ways to communicate, interact and stay informed here. del.icio.us and cookie swap are pretty indispensable once you get used to them. Please add us to your network and send along some links!

Next up on my bookmarking radar: www.diigo.com. Bookmarking, auto importing/exporting, slideshows, notes and annotations…

-Mike

I’m Mike Henderson, a new Content Developer here at Twelve Horses. I just started about 3 weeks ago (just in time for the Holiday Party…) and already I am pretty impressed with all the cool projects we have going. I’m going to be working with clients on creating and developing website content including, copywriting, blogging, photography, video and social media. I’ll also be doing some of that stuff right here on Horse Power!

Last week was a busy week at the Twelve Horses Reno office. I helped the team Q/C and launch new websites for three Reno, NV based companies! Not that that excuses us for not updating the blog… Still, I think they look pretty nice and show off some cool new ideas.

The Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada’s (EDAWN) new website is now open for business. This one was interesting because it required organizing a large amount of content in a user-friendly manner. Notable features include an event management system that ties into Salesforce.com, which very efficiently organizes customer data. The member center provides access to a lot of helpful information. The website also makes use of the RSS puller application, which is a very handy feature within our Content Management System (CMS).

Griffin Transport features a sharp design and a cool Flash locator map with roll-over hotspots to show the global office locations.

Nevada’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology (NCET), for which Twelve Horses is a sponsor, launched a new web site design featuring many social media features to better interact with Nevada’s entrepreneurs and students. Overall, a good example of what you can do with Wordpress.

So that’s what we’re up to. Let us know what you think!

-Mike