OurTraction

Last year we held a fundraiser/food drive for the London and area food bank. We committed to match every pound of food donated with $1, up to $1,000. The result was over 1,000 pounds of food and $1,000 donated to the London and area food bank. We also had the advantage of getting to see Shawn pranked pretty hard.

This year we’re again aiming for 1000 pounds of food and rtraction will once again match $1 per pound donated up to $1,000. If we hit our goal we will host an rtraction Game Day Friday, January 21st, 2011.

An rtraction Game Day means we shut down the office at noon and play games until… whenever. We usually have at least 2 xbox 360’s, a Wii, and a PS3 going with games ranging from COD, Halo, Left 4 Dead, Rock Band, so there’s something for everyone’s taste. Typically these are held at our office, but this year we’re going to do something a little different:

We’re inviting you to join us for the rtraction game day! All you have to do is bring 20 pounds of food as a donation and drop it off at our office by December 17th.  The first 20 people to do so will get an invite.

For information on how your business can help, please see the Business Cares website.

Our company has a quarterly* team building excercise – the goal is to improve communication, trust and the overall effectiveness of the team. We also tend to have fun.

* Any planning or regularity in these events is not expressed nor implied

For the fall activity we decided to try Paintball. Why? I’m not entirely sure, as using high-powered air rifles to shoot paint-filled gel-cap balls at each other doesn’t seem to be a good “team building” thing. However, through the day I did learn some valuable tips.

Trust

I didn’t shoot Shawn despite him being on the same team as me – largely because the Blue team was beating us handily and we couldn’t afford to be a team member down, but he doesn’t know that, so we’ll say that we built trust that day.

Communications

When your team mate says “WATCH YOUR RIGHT!” and you think to yourself “I know there’s someone on my right, that’s what I am shooting at” – it behests you to clarify “Do you mean the person I’m shooting at? Or the two people I don’t know about sneaking up on you?” Simple communication like this can save you getting hit by a lot of paintballs.

Overall Effectiveness

When we worked as a team and had a game plan, our team did much better. If we started a round saying “Uh, let’s just go!” we died/lost in spectacular fashion. Just like in web work, a little bit of planning goes a long way!

The team gets ready to battle

We decided on one round – everyone vs. Shawn – it was pretty short.

1. A successful application includes a well thought out and extensive cover letter and resume which are submitted to the appropriate company personnel in the method indicated on the job posting followed by a follow-up phone call one week later.

2. Always dress in business-appropriate and professional attire at the office. Men – wear ties, women – wear slacks, and no open toed shoes!

3. Arrive early, before your 9 a.m. start time, be prompt with your 30-minute lunch break, and leave at 5 p.m. (or later, but never before!).

4. Leave your phone in your bag, and turn it off or keep it on silent mode.

5. You probably won’t ever see the boss as they have a top-floor suite so you may not need to worry about this one – but do not speak until you’ve been spoken to, especially from the boss.

6. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT spend any time whatsoever checking facebook/tweeting/reading personal emails.

7. Odds are you won’t get to know your coworkers for several months, if ever. You probably won’t be invited to company outings, and if you are it was probably only because they were being polite. But don’t take it personally.

8. You will spend most of your day photocopying, filing, typing, and making phone calls.

9. Your work day will be highly structured with little opportunity for creativity and experimentation. People will tell you what to do, and pile papers high on your desk with things they don’t want to do themselves but they can get you to do because, after all, you’re the intern.

10. You must wear shoes at all times….

ummm.. wait. scratch that.

What To Expect With An Internship At rtraction

A successful application includes a well thought out and extensive cover letter and…
1. Be proactive. I got to know some of the people working for the company and the company itself before applying, albeit through twitter. That being said, just because there isn’t a formal job posting doesn’t mean they don’t want you!

Always dress in business…
2. Well we still dress professionally, it’s true.. but no ties or slacks required, jeans appear to be acceptable (although I haven’t been officially informed of that.. uh oh)

Arrive early, before your 9 a.m…
3. Let’s just say I’ve enjoyed a few rounds of Halo during lunch breaks. I’ve even managed to accomplish my goal of not finishing in last place – and it’s only been three weeks! (and punctuality is still a valued attribute here at rtraction)

Leave your phone…
4. Phones.. what are “phones” these days anyways? Mini computers, that’s what they are. And we are in the digital and everything related business – so phones are cool. Especially iPhones it seems..

You probably won’t ever see the boss…
5. *Flashback* First Day

Enter: David Billson, President and Co-founder “Let’s just grab a desk from storage and bring over a laptop, and we’ll be good to go” The desk gets brought up and gets placed, you guessed it, right next to his desk in his office. Now, this probably seems like an intimidating situation – and you’re right, despite the fact that David is one of the most approachable and down-to-earth guys I’ve met, it’s still kind of intimidating sitting right next to the “head honcho”.

Do not, I repeat, DO NOT spend any time whatsoever checking tweeting…
6. Twitter is practically a requirement of the job.

Odds are you won’t get to know your coworkers for several months…
7. I have already had the opportunity to get to know several of my new coworkers – from wandering the streets during Park(ing) Day London, to playing Halo in the boardroom at lunch, to after-work beers at Crabby’s. I’ve worked for a reasonable number of companies in my eight or more years of being employable – and I can honestly say that I have not met a more cohesive and dynamic group of people who are fun to work with and expert at what they do.

You will spend most of your day photocopying…
8. I’m not entirely sure there is photocopier here..

Your work day will be highly structured with little opportunity for creativity…
9. We’re in the business of creativity and innovation! What would work be if there was no room to experiment and grow. This is the place to be for all things out-of-the-box.

You must wear shoes at all times….
10. nik:

Adding a diagonal ribbon to a thumbnail is easy with PHP and GD. You may be able to accomplish this task with CSS3, but the result can be a little buggy (strange wiggles on mousover), and it currently is not consistent across browsers. You can create dynamic images in PHP using GD functionality.

The Ribbon Base Image

The ribbon base image that I use is not a transparent PNG – rather, behind the red banner I have a pink background. In PHP we will tell GD to interpret pink as transparent so that our edges are smooth. Feel free to use this image for your own purposes.

Using GD to Add Text

This file will take the base image and place white text over it. Now we can treat this file as an image, and include it in our CSS or image tags. Note that this file refers to arial.ttf – this font file (or whatever TTF font file you decide to use) must be in the same directory as ribbon.php. You can find arial.ttf in your computer’s fonts directory.

Usage

The important part here is the background-image. Notice how the text we want is in the query string of ribbon.php.

Styling and Position

This will place the ribbon in the lower right corner, above the image.

Questions, comments or optimizations? Let us know in the comments.

I have enjoyed Scott Stratten’s content for a little while now – starting with http://www.nooooooooooooooo.com/, his twitter feed, and most recently his book UnMarketing (Affiliate Link)

I briefly met him at Canada 3.0 and was delighted as he tore into a panel of traditional marketers, deflating the myth that we as a society want and crave interruptive advertising. That panel session was worth the price of admission to the event.

Therefore, I was very excited to get my hands on an early copy of UnMarketing and it didn’t disappoint.

It was the most engaging book on business I have ever read, consuming the better part of a weekend like only Robert Jordan, JRR Tolkien and TH White have done in the past. Before reading the following review, a couple of things to keep in mind:

1. Scott’s sense of humour is perfectly matched to mine – sarcastic with a slight chance of ranting. If you don’t find sarcasm an appropriate use of humour, you may not find this book as amusing as I did. Scott wields sarcasm like Picasso wields a paint brush.
2. I hate cold calling and have never done it to build my business…

What does cold calling have to do with this book review? Scott takes an aggressive early swing at traditional marketing techniques and I agree with every single point he made. Every one. At one point I even shout-whispered “HELL YEAH!” (children were sleeping at the time).  Scott quickly segues into better ways to engage customers, building long term relationships and discovering the potential for every interaction with a prospect – online and off.

The tips and ideas flowing out of this book easily pay for the cover price – it is well worth the read.

Learning and Loving it!

The reason I am telling you to go buy it now is that it is FUN TO READ and INFORMATIVE. Yes, I said it, a sales/marketing/business book that was actually a pleasure to read from cover to cover. I actually counted out seven times I laughed out loud, at one point earning a quizzical look from my wife.

The last book that made me laugh out loud while reading it was Douglas Adams some 15-20 odd years ago – particularly the part with the jaguar guarding the records room, but that’s a story for another time.

Scott has deliberately set out to make a very different kind of marketing book and in most ways it works.

Room for Improvement

The only disappointment found is that there are 56 chapters, and each chapter has at least one, in many cases several key action items, things that you can take and apply today. There are no “chapter summaries” that give you the key take aways from the chapter to start your to do list.

Now to be fair, I typically completely ignore the chapter summaries in most other business books – however, there is so much great content/ideas in this book that I would have liked a quick reference I could go through with a highlighter and say “these are items we are implementing this month”.

I am going to re-read the book – probably starting tonight – and create a chapter by chapter summary for myself.

No Proof, No Pudding?

As a suggestion to Scott, more “Proof” (Scott has a section of a book covering the 3P’s of an article/presentation) throughout the book would be a nice addition – there are a few case studies from Scott’s perspective, i.e.: Switching from Tim Hortons to McDonald’s coffee (by the way – can you get deported from Canada for declaring that in a public forum?)

His book would have benefited from some examples of companies who have put some of his advise into action – not just to build a marketing consultancy like Scott –but how an actual accountant, retail store, local restaurant, etc. put his advice into action and benefited directly.

There is a similar issue reading Trust Agents by Chris Brogan (another excellent book) – perhaps the UnMarketing techniques have not been in play long enough to show the specific gains to specific organizations. Maybe we’ll see UnMarketing 2: People Actually Listened so Now I Can Show You

All in all you will benefit greatly from reading Scott’s book on the new marketing models for our generation of customer engagement, and you will thoroughly enjoy it.

If you are interested in social media, viral marketing, or ol’ fashioned treating the customer first, this book is for you. Pick up a copy at Amazon.com or meet Scott at his UnBook Tour in London. or in other cities near you.

Update: Scott has his Tim Horton’s & McDonald’s story excerpt on his blog.

When a company is seeing a major decline in their market share, they have a couple of options. Their advertisements could play it safe and focus on the traditional approach. Or, they could be like Proctor and Gamble and trust the direction of their creative agency to turn the Old Spice brand around and throw all assumptions out the window.

By now I’m sure you’ve seen the widely successful Super Bowl Ad for Old Spice body wash. Old Spice recently followed this up with a second advertisement using the same unique and unusual creative stylings. However if you thought that a couple of funny and unique videos was all the company had up their sleeve, then what took place on the @OldSpice Twitter stream (combined with other social media activity) during the last few days must have you reconsidering that position.

A relative new-comer to the microblogging site, Isaiah Mustafa and the Old Spice team turned the Internet on its head when the started personally interacting with their fans online. It all started out with the relatively innocuous tweet:

“Today could be just like the other 364 days you log into twitter, or maybe the Old Spice man shows up.”
What we saw was one of the most original and innovate uses of the Internet and social media since Zuckerberg stole a series of yearbook pictures from the Harvard student body. (or a couple of rainbows appeared in the sky)

As fans interacted with Mustafa, he would respond to their messages via short YouTube clips. The responses were done in the same random, post-modern, uber-meta style as the rest of the Old Spice advertisements, which made them entertaining and addictive; it was impossible to just watch one clip.

And oh yeah… It was in real time, as in you could make a comment or ask a question and within minutes hopefully watch a response from Old Spice.

Target the Audience

The brand capitalized on influencers, like Kevin Rose and Alyssa Milano, and used them to spread the campaign beyond Twitter. Sending personalized videos to both “web” celebrities and media outlets promotes the brand and this advertising campaign to even broader communities.

You could easily write this off as a really cool idea, wish that you had thought of it or think that it’s only possible because of the enormous budgets multinational brands like Old Spice have available…

Or you could think about what the lessons are for your brand.

What Are You Doing?

Old Spice has effectively shown the internet what social media promoters have been telling brands for years: successful usage of social media requires you to honestly listen to and interact with your users and then provide them with relevant information and content to consume.

Should you run out and start recording a bunch of personalized video responses to questions and comments posed by your audience? Are you’re willing to take the risk needed for fast turn around times?  Do you have chutzpah to create entertaining videos that capture users attention? Video responses work for Old Spice because it’s the format viewers expected from the brand.  What medium and what type of conversation will your users expect from you?

Run with It

Even if you don’t think the format will work for you, there are tonnes of lessons your marketing department can learn from Old Spice:

• Its not enough to just respond when you feel like it – if you’re really listening, you need to respond when your audience is ready and with the information they’re expecting.
• You already have interesting and relevant information or marketing to share;  if you can share it in an engaging manner then people are going to spread it for you.
• Old Spice broke down our silo assumptions;  that Twitter is for Twitter responses, blogs for blog responses and YouTube for inane comment responses. Instead, they connected various platforms together in an incredibly effective way.
• We’re not done innovating yet, and it’s always possible to take simple ideas and combine them into a new and interesting way of presenting information.

If you want to read more about what’s going on behind the scenes of the the Old Spice shoot, there have been a few great interviews with the creative team of Wieden+Kennedy.

Titus and I had a wonderful opportunity this past week to speak to civic leaders at the Ontario Municipal Administrators Association about the importance of engaging online websites, social media, and open data. The underlying theme of the day was that better engagement from the city/regions results in better citizenship engagement and an overall improvement to the quality of life in those regions.

We had some tough questions from the audience around social media policies; where do the lines between personal liberties and freedom of expression cross into professional conduct and employment agreements. We were very grateful for the additional insight provided by Dennis Flaherty from the City of Markham around the importance of having a good, clearly communicated policies AND social media training in place.

Both Titus and Dennis brought up that the challenges with social media and employees excercising poor judgement in a public forum is not a new challenge, and in fact many of the employment contracts already have provisions in them that protect the municipality in the event that employees are excercising poor judgement, provided the aforementioned policies and procedures are in place.

One interesting point that came out during the question and answer period is the lack of information around community pages on Facebook, and a general lack of participation in Wikipedia. A challenge I’ve put out to attendees from the session is to task someone within your team to ensure that your municipality is participating in generating the content for both community pages and on Wikipedia.

During the presentation, we showed some examples of some websites that do a great job of broadcasting out information to their constituents:

• www.waterloo.ca
• www.portcolborne.ca

We also discussed Social Media Policy and suggested a starting point could be our own social media policy generator:

• www.policytool.net

There is a lots of information about social media and to get a handle on the scope, popularity, and sheer importance of it all, we recommend the excellenet Socialnomics video:

We gave some examples of what some municipalities and citizen groups have been able to do with Open Data:

• www.data.gov
• www.data.gov.uk
• data.vancouver.ca
• www.ottawa.ca/online_services/opendata/index_en.html
• www.vantrash.ca
• www.eatsure.ca
• www.nextstopapp.com
• www.taxicity.ca

And suggested that if there was interest in learning more, some great resources are;

• A great resource for open data discussion/dialogue – www.eaves.ca
• Our blog (you’re on it!)
• Another passionate individual on the topic of Open Data talks at TED

Our slide deck was mostly visuals to aide in the discussion, but here are the key talking points per section:

Website

• We are living in an age of participation and websites need to encourage that
• Avoid using “closed” file formats that require additionally programs to open, such as PDFs
• Start using RSS Feeds to push content to citizens

Social Media

• Conversations are happening online and municipalities should be part of that
• Content should be engaging and connect citizens with services
• Explore the POST method to develop a strategy

Open Data

We wrapped up the session by issuing a challenge to all present to work harder to position their Municipalities as leaders in these areas. The changes we’ve seen in the first decade of the 21st century are only the tip of the iceberg and there is no better time to get involved.

IE 6.x has long been the bane of any sane web developer. Many, many hours are spent making otherwise perfectly healthy website implementations work in this broken, and terribly outdated browser.

IE 6.x is continuing to experience a decline in usage; Google (and Google owned YouTube) have already discontinued support for the browser.

We are jumping on the bandwagon. By default, rtraction quotes will no longer include IE 6.0 support in quotes, RFP responses, etc. We will still include IE 6.0 support as an optional line item.

Here is what this means to our clients:

1. The average cost of our website implementations will drop significantly, especially for basic content management systems. It’s actually scary to analyse how much time has gone into IE 6.x support over the years. Now we’ll have that time to spend on other, more innovative things.
2. Websites built/quoted before this announcement will continue to support IE 6.x. Additionally, for our public sector friends support is still available for those sites that are required to have backwards capability.
3. Our developers will be happier. I am expecting a parade, or some equally elaborate celebration now that this announcement is formally made.

As always, if you have any comments, complaints, etc please comment below or drop me a line directly – email hidden; JavaScript is required.

As a newcomer to the industry, I found Canada 3.0, held in Stratford, ON  May 10-11th, a great place to be immersed in ICT culture. It was a golden opportunity to connect with like-minded, highly creative and collaborative people who are shaping the very world we live in. Most importantly, I appreciate the awareness I gained about the major needs unique to the ICT industry:

- increasing homegrown R&D opportunities
 -upgrading our digital infrastructure to accommodate digital innovation and Canada as a digital nation
- increasing digital literacy in our youth and current adult workforce
- producing more Canadian content and becoming identifiable globally
 -growing the overall Canadian ICT industry

From the perspective of a former educator, I chose to attend the learning stream, as well as the creating stream. What I was looking forward to most was the opportunity to participate in what was being touted as highly interactive breakout sessions to develop immediate action steps to help create a digital economy. But what actually took place was far from being interactive. Each session was essentially a one-way conversation and ended up being a rather large let down. While the speaker panels were clearly stacked against those who were the most active in the industry, I was relieved to see that in each case, the digital savvy panelists ’represented’ and fought through the noise to be heard – at least by the audience.

What amazes me is Canada 3.0 succeeded in pulling together some of the brightest minds in the business, but neglected to use them as a resource. I know the attendees I spoke to also felt the same way. Why was that? If change is truly going to happen then an open dialogue must take place and those making the changes need to feel they have some ownership over the changes they are going to be making.

Maybe next year…