Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Feb
3
The International Ticketing Association is holding it’s annual conference in Salt Lake City this year at the Salt Palace (Man that place is big). I attended both the morning and afternoon sessions.
In the A.M. it was with Pro Sports/College Athletics Mini Conference. The group was mostly ticketing directors and box office managers from the MLB, NFL, NBA and colleges, but had vendors like Tickets.com, Ticketmaster, Veritix and of course Twelve Horses. The “Sports Guys” are relatively new for INTIX (last few years) but absolutely came out in significant, if not the majority numbers. Topics ranged from ticket printing, to print@home, box office logistics etc. There definitely was an underlying consensus around the down economy and how to continue to maintain attendance levels. The tactics that put butts in seats and performed were, deferred payment plans, payment installments and franchises using financing vendors that extended credit to purchasers who in turn paid over time. Groups that adopted these practices (US & Foreign) were reporting anywhere from 15% to 25% bumps in their ticket sales. I would say when your spending $1,500 to $10,000 on season tickets payment plans definitely would help. Great session with LOTS of open collaboration.
Later in the day I went to the “Breakout Sessions for Non-Sports Topics – College & University PACs” (Performing Arts Centers), The “Artsy” side to see what they were spending time and energies on. Because most of these organizations are non-profit or extensions of state agencies, “Doing more with less” was a significant topic. Also how to incentivize students to use these amenities and facilities. While there were not any commonalities in the tactics these groups were using, like with the Sports guys, there were lots of small ways that add up. Bundling of the entertainment and then food was a big one. We all like to eat right! I think the one I found the most profound was around the perception of value for these tickets. Basically if tickets are given away to students, the perception is they don’t have any value. But! If tickets were packaged as a student wide activity fees (everyone pays) or charged for, even if only a few dollars, then attendance went up. Perception of value, just like perception of brand, was a huge factor. Again LOTS of open collaboration and sharing of ideas.
Posted in Salt Lake City, Technology, Uncategorized, Utah, events
Oct
28
In this episode of Horse Power I spend some time with Ryan Berman of Fishtank Brand Advertising out of San Diego, CA. Fishtank is doing some really cool work with Pony Shoes to bring them back from a fairly long hiatus from the sports market. Part of their new campaign involves using imagery and stereotypes from brands like Nike, UnderArmor (who actually make shoes now too) and Adidas to show their product right next to the familiar brands and get people to add Pony Shoes to their list.
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
Posted in Horse Power Podcast, Podcast, Reno-Tahoe, Social, Uncategorized, Web & SEO
Oct
9
In this episode of Horsepower I get to talk to a software developer who helped to change the way communication,
interaction and sharing is accomplished over the web. Some might argue that blogging isn’t fundamentally
different now than it was 15 years ago. While you could have built your own blog with html or php,
the cool thing is that I can go to wordpress.com (or blogspot.com, typepad.com or moveabletype.com)
and sign up and get a blog in less time than it takes to pick a title and a tagline. No credit card
necessary.
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
Posted in Geeky Stuff, Horse Power Podcast, Podcast, Salt Lake City, Social, Uncategorized, Web & SEO
Sep
18
In this episode of Horsepower we talk with podcaster and New York Times Best Selling Author, Mignon Fogarty. Mignon created the Quick and Dirty Tips Podcast network with her Grammar Girl Podcast and has risen to the top of the iTunes podcast directory. If you’ve searched for podcasts, you’ve no doubt seen her cheery cartoon icon gracing the list of most popular podcasts.
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
Posted in Horse Power Podcast, Podcast, Reno-Tahoe, Social, Uncategorized
