ITster!

Time to grow again …

We tried this last year and ended up with a pretty incredible addition to our team (Chantelle Diachina) so we figured we’d try it again and see what happens.

One important addition to the list of qualifications below: special consideration will be given to those with 3 or more years of client management experience.

Rather than an iron-clad job description and title, here is a list of the skills we’ve determined are ideal for this position:

Required:

1. Loves working with a variety of clients in different industries
2. Strong Writing Skills
3. Strong Oral Communication Skills
4. Great Problem Solving / Creative Thinking Skills
5. High Energy / Positive Mojo
6. Analytical Thinking
7. Good Negotiation Skills
8. Ability to Edit/Proofread (Attention to Detail)
9. Ability to create and deliver killer presentations
10. Nothing gets you more excited than writing up a solid pitch/proposal to a new prospect
11. A desire to work with our community to make it a better place to live

Would-be-Great-To-Have:

1. Technical Aptitude (not programming, but not afraid of technology either)
2. Marketing Aptitude
3. Experience with Non-Profits
4. Experience with High Tech/Medical Agencies
5. Graphic Design Skills (for presentations, documentation)
6. Understanding of Financials / Budgeting / Business Lifecycles
7. Have your own Blog / Twitter Account / Website / Facebook Fan Page
8. Know how to spell HTML

Why would you want to work with us? Several reasons, really. A chance to work on exciting, dynamic projects. Perhaps you want to help us build a stronger community by doing good. You like the challenge of working in new, emerging media technologies. You (or your family) are a big fan of international standards in web development. You like robots. Maybe, just maybe you have a healthy hatred of all things undead. You like to rock out. And last but not least, you like to work hard AND play hard with your peers.

If you have these skills and a desire to work in online marketing with our team, drop me a line and maybe we can create an opportunity together. Alternatively, if you know someone that is ideal – please pass them along.

And last but not least, if you’re happily situated in your job and don’t know anyone looking, please leave some comments about any thoughts you have for any important attributes for individuals working with clients in the digital media / online marketing space – your feedback is welcome and appreciated!

The last time we tried this a few people have commented/wrote/called, etc asking how they can contact us if interested (and specifically what to send). I’ve been asking interested individuals to send a note describing what about this blog post resonates with them and sparks interest, identifying the skills in which they excel at and perhaps the ones that need work. And, of course, a traditional C.V. is always a good idea! You may send it directly to me at email hidden; JavaScript is required

Recently rtraction had the pleasure of being one of four finalists for the Medium Business category of the Business Achievement Awards, a ceremony hosted by the London Chamber of Commerce. The event hosted in London, Ontario is the largest of it’s kind in Canada with at least 1,200 business leaders gathering to recognize the achievements of a sample of the great businesses in our local community. We shared the finalist category with a local family attraction – Eastpark, an airport – London Airport Authority, and a leader in London’s legal community - Legate and Associates.

We were also thrilled to see two other companies from the digital media sector, Echidna Solutions and Digital Extremes nominated in the small and large business categories; their nominations bear testimony of the growing importance of digital media to the economic landscape of London.  We were also happy to see one of rtraction’s clients, Kingsmills, nominated in the large business category.

I did prepare speaking notes for the event and as I re-read them last night, I realized that they are just as relevant notes for a finalist as they are for a category winner. Therefore, I have posted the speech that was not delivered below as a thanks to everyone who has contributed to our success over the past 10 years. The parts that are in italics were to be included for the long version – I was not sure how much time I would have had on stage.

I would like to congratulate the other finalists in the medium category; it is
an honour to see our name listed amongst such excellent London landmark
companies.

Thanks to our customers for the 10 years of support, business and referrals. We
wouldn’t be here without you. I would especially like to thank Brad Geddes from
Magiseal Corporation and Meredith Fraser from LUSO Community Services for
supporting our BAA application.

I would like to thank Techalliance for over eight years of partnership with our
organization and our technology sector; we are grateful to their leadership in
organization our Digital Media sector.

We also would like to recognize our other community partners such as the
London Economic Devleopment Corporation, Open Data London Group, unLondon, and
Emerging Leaders. It is all clear we are on Team London and moving our region
forward, collectively.

It is no surprise that we have three great companies nominated in this year from
the Digital Media sector; you have only seen the beginnings from this group and
we’re excited to be part of this cluster in London. Another London Digital media
company Resolution IM was nominated for an award at SXSW, the equivalent
of the Oscars in the digital media realm.

You have a strong digital media cluster right here in your own city and I hope
that you are proud to have us representing London in the digital world.

I would like to thank our all of our team for their excellent work this year that
lead to this award. I am truly blessed to come to the office each day to work
with intelligent, thoughtful and outright funny people. A special thanks goes to
Shannon Gallagher, Titus Ferguson and Chantelle Diachina for their work on our
BAA presentation.

I accept this award on behalf of my other two business Partners, Shawn
Adamsson and Josh Dow. I am fortunate to have two partners that challenge our company
daily, sometimes hourly, on how to improve our business. We are the company
that we are because of their ingenuity, passion and hard work.

Last but not least I would like to thank my wife Kate. She is one of the often
uncredited success factors in our company, working behind the scenes and
offering advice and guidance. I am fortunate to have a great work life and a great
home life, and she is the magic that makes both of those realities possible.

I did not include a thanks I would like to add – all the wonderful support we received from people at the actual event, to the support over the Twitter (You can see the twitter stream here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23ldnbaa). It was wonderful to hear from all of you!

Here is the video from the awards night, as produced by Wizards of Video:

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.

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.

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.

When our local health unit released its Food Inspection Disclosure Site we thought it was a great resource to find out about our local eating establishments. The interface for the application is very good if you’re looking for information on a specific establishment but we found it difficult to get a sense for what might be going on in your neighbourhood or region.

One of the advantages of working in a digital technology firm is that all someone has to say is something like “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if you can see this on a map?” Because the answer is yes, you can. After a few days of solid effort by our team, we are happy to introduce: EatSure.ca

We uncovered a few surprises ourselves doing this initiative – for example – looking in your area may turn up your grocery store has a critical warning. I didn’t even know that grocery stores were inspected!

We believe that the resource itself will be useful to the people in our community but we also hope to start a community discussion around the importance of open data and how citizens can imagine new and exciting ways of using that data.  We were able to create EatSure.ca with only the information that is provided to the public web browser; we could make the application more powerful if we had access to the underlying data that drives the health unit’s web site.

We are aware of only one other initiative in our area – a Blackberry application that was developed by a Fanshawe College student on his own time to display London Transit bus location data (not yet available for public use). If you are aware of any other open data initiatives in our community, please post them in the comments below.

Across our country, cities like Toronto, Edmonton, Ottawa and Vancouver have embraced open data and have initiatives well underway. Edmonton is also launching a contest for open data applications and offering $50,000 in prizes for winning entries. And around the world the US and UK governments have massive programs established.

At the forefront of the open data movement in Canada is David A Eaves. Recently he launched a citizen led initiative to advance the progress of open data across the country – datadotgc.ca.

“Unlike our American and British peers, the Canadian Federal (and provincial…) government(s) currently have no official, coordinated effort to release government data. We think that should change. But rather than complain, we thought we’d do something. This is our effort. A stab at showing our government, and Canada, what a federal open data portal could and should look like.”

Our political leaders are excited by the ways in which open data can be used to enhance the lives of our citizens and it is up to us who are interested in technology to continually better the services that are available.  Technology geeks like to do these types of things for fun, to see if they can, and for the general service of our neighbours, friends and peers.

All we need, our government friends, is the data. Please?

For years now if a company was privately held it meant that the information that was available about the organization was what they chose to tell you through advertising, media buys, and the occasional magazine article. Even publicly held corporations had means of controlling the information that was distributed about its organizations.

Compare that to the traditional non-profit who by very definition of the structure have to be open and accountable to their stakeholders which include:

1. The Members/Board of the organization, Employees and Volunteers
2. The community in which the non-profit is serving
3. The “clients” or recipients of the service from the non-profit
4. Federal, State/Provincial and Local/Municipal governments

Non-profits have strived to measure, listen, solicit feedback, measure again, and report. And once that report is completed the process starts all over again.

Employees, Customers, Vendors and Community as Influencers

Fast forward to the days of social media. The privately or publicly held business is no longer in direct control of its marketing – what people see and hear about the organization is strongly influenced by how they engage with – you guessed it – their stakeholders:

1. Employees of the Organization
2. The community in which the business operates
3. Their customers/clients
4. Federal, State/Provincial and municipal governments

For the For-Profit business, ignoring any of these stakeholder groups could result in significant communication challenges for the company.

In this new reality I wonder if For-Profit companies can look to the best practices developed over years of improvement on best practices in the Non-Profit.

In short: Listen, Measure, Report. Show your accountability to your stakeholders.

I wonder if a potential solution for a business is to look to your favourite Non-Profit and observe how they operate in an open and transparent way. What do you think?

As posted yesterday, Chris is leaving our organization. That has created a challenge – how do we fill the position of Client Relations Manager that he is vacating?

In conversations around replacement postings, we’ve discussed titles like Account Manager, Inside Sales Rep, Sales Support, Communication Manager, Client Manager, Stank Funk Enforcement Officer (ask Josh) etc, etc. The list goes on and on. In an organization as multifaceted as ours, it’s difficult to pin any one title to the role.

And so we thought: let’s take a different approach. Rather than an iron-clad job description and title, here is a list of the skills we’ve determined are ideal for this position:

Required:

1. Loves working with a variety of clients in different industries
2. Strong Writing Skills
3. Strong Oral Communication Skills
4. Great Problem Solving / Creative Thinking Skills
5. High Energy / Positive Mojo
6. Analytical Thinking
7. Good Negotiation Skills
8. Ability to Edit/Proof Read (Attention to Detail)
9. Ability to create and deliver killer presentations
10. Nothing gets you more excited than writing up a solid pitch/proposal to a new prospect
11. A desire to work with our community to make it a better place to live

Would-be-Great-To-Have:

1. Technical Aptitude (not programming, but not afraid of technology either)
2. Marketing Aptitude
3. Experience with Non-Profits
4. Experience with High Tech/Medical Agencies
5. Graphic Design Skills (for presentations, documentation)
6. Understanding of Financials / Budgeting / Business Lifecycles
7. Have your own Blog / Twitter Account / Website / Facebook Fan Page
8. Know how to spell HTML

Why would you want to work with us? Several reasons, really. A chance to work on exciting, dynamic projects. Perhaps you want to help us build a stronger community by doing good. You like the challenge of working in new, emerging media technologies. You (or your family) is a big fan of international standards in web development. You like robots. Maybe, just maybe you have a healthy hatred of all things undead. You like to rock out. And last but not least, you like to work hard AND  play hard with your peers.

If you have these skills and a desire to work in online marketing with our team, drop me a line and maybe we can create an opportunity together. Alternatively, if you know someone that is ideal – please pass them along.

And last but not least, if you’re happily situated in your job and don’t know anyone looking, please leave some comments about any thoughts you have for any important attributes for individuals working with clients in the digital media / online marketing space – your feedback is welcome and appreciated!

UPDATE 01/25/2010: A few people have commented/wrote/called, etc asking how they can contact us if interested (and specifically what to send). I’ve been asking interested individuals to send a note describing what about this blog post resonates with them and sparks interest, identifying the skills in which they excel at and perhaps the ones that need work. And, of course, a traditional C.V. is always a good idea! You may send it directly to me at email hidden; JavaScript is required

Thanks to all our community members that have passed this on!