Blue Ion Team

« Previous Entries

Brain Child

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

Like any great work of art, after the awe of the initial viewing wears off, the mind is left to wonder “how did this all come about?”. Search no more, my friends. Things were bottled up tight during the Beard site development (minus a few attempts by CS to let the cat out of the bag early), but thanks to the extreme sneakiness of some members of the team, we were able to capture behind-the-scenes footage of the making of the Beard website.

Exclusive film can be seen after skipping the intro here - beard.blueion.com

hint: play around with the red signs…

Topics: Blue Ion Team, Fandango, Sweat & Tears | 1 Comment »

Congrats to James

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

After successfully passing the internship test, James has graduated to a featured place on the Blue Ion website, replete with hobby figurine, photo, and bio. Above is an outtake from yesterday’s photo shoot that RP just had to have for his wallpaper.

Topics: Blue Ion Team | No Comments »

Photo Shoot BTS

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

Spent all day yesterday at a photo shoot for a new website we’re working on for an assisted living community. Bishop Gadsden is more like a swanky resort than you’d imagine. We stayed so long we had the residents calling us by first name towards late afternoon.

I brought along my camera to capture the process from our perspective. As you can see, Brennan spends most of his time just laying around.

Topics: Blue Ion Team, Marketing & Advertising, Sweat & Tears | No Comments »

Craig 35

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

CA hit a milestone year today. Headed outside with the crew for a birthday lunch. The weather was fantastic. Happy Birthday Craig.

Topics: Blue Ion Team, Fandango | 1 Comment »

April Fool’s Birthday

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

BBQ lunch today to celebrate DW’s born-on day. Vikings colors on the balloons courtesy of Jim n’ Nicks. Cheers.

Topics: Blue Ion Team, Party | No Comments »

Flashy Grease Monkey

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

What is it that Flash Developers do when not doing sites/applications? Who really knows….but CA is spending his “downtime” rebuilding an 1980 Porsche engine to drop in his 911. The parallels are rather obvious….he wears rubber gloves while working the engine or code, you’ll always find dog-eared instructional manuals within arm’s reach, and…I assume…there’s a lot o’ math involved. We’ll report back on the eventual beta test of the new engine.

Topics: Blue Ion Team, Fandango | No Comments »

Social Strategies For Revolutionaries: SXSW Roundup

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

You know your company needs to be involved in social technologies, but where do you start?

At the “Social Strategies For Revolutionaries” session, Charlene Li, a Forrester research analyst (my favorite of the group), gave us the strategic framework for creating a social strategy that will appeal to executives and your target audience.

If you want to dig deeper, she’s got a book called Groundswell coming out soon. This presentation was based on those findings. Here are some choice notes.

What’s The “Groundswell” in Social?

Definition: people using technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.

What Process Can I use to Create a Social Strategy?

Try using the POST process (people, objectives, strategy, technology). Here’s a couple highlights from the first two. Notice technology is LAST!

People: Assessing your customers’ social activities is key. Why start with Myspace/Facebook if none of your customers are there?

To help with this, use what’s called the “social technographics ladder,” combined with knowledge of your customers age.

Obviously, age is a huge driver of adoption level, but there’s evidence more and more boomers are starting to become joiners rather than just spectators.

Objectives

Based on your objectives, you’ll want to deploy a social strategy tailored to what you want to accomplish. I had originally typed all these out, but here’s the handy chart to show what they mean, along with the tools to help out and the metrics to use to measure success.

How Do You Get Started?

It’s easy to get overwhelmed. So start small. Using the POST process above, maybe you discover your customers all over the blogs discussing flaws with your product. So you could set up your own blog to help answer those issues, or even create a team (like Dell) whose sole responsibility is to root out those negative stories and turn them into a conversation.

Other important parts to keep in mind, specifically related to internal cultures and staffing:

Find people most passionate about developing relationships
Educate executives
Put someone important in charge
Define the box with policies and process
Make it safe(r) to fail

Final notes

Set up your framework and process
Start small, think big
Make social strategy the responsibility of every employee
Be patient - cultural change takes time

Topics: Blue Ion Team, Marketing & Advertising, SXSW 2008, Social Media, charleston sc marketing, charleston sc web design | No Comments »

Last Day Thoughts

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008

The last morning of SXSW Internet fantasy camp…it’s back to reality this afternoon. As I reflect on the experience and what we’ve seen, two things have become very clear.

First and foremost, the game is changing. Moving from building things for people to visit to creating experiences that follow users wherever they go. There are sooo many digital channels today (websites, microsites, search, mobile applications, social media/networks, rich media, email, blogs, etc.) and new devices like the iPhone are allowing users to access all the data in more delightful ways. The challenge and opportunity is to create multiple/mini brand experiences that weave into and around peoples lives. For a great example, look at the brilliant Nike+ effort. It’s not just a campaign or a website…it’s a branded application that has changed the face of running by harnessing the power of music, exercise and community around a user’s life. It looks cool, and works great. It’s about runners and their lives.

Second, it’s clear that my airport card sucks…or that there’s something very wrong with it. One of the best things about this conference is the people/crowd watching (those observations in a separate post to come). I haven’t been to a conference before where EVERY attendee in EVERY session has their laptop on their lap….typing, tweeting, messaging away. At times I’ve just had to pretend, given my constantly weak signal. Time to breakdown and get a new rig.

Topics: Apple, Blue Ion Team, Sweat & Tears | 3 Comments »

Tool Talk - Twitter V. iPhone

Monday, March 10th, 2008

Two technologies are dominating the halls here at SXSW Internet. First, there’s lots of Twitter chitter chatter, including tons of talk on tweets, among attendees and presenters. A few panelists seem to be panelists solely because they twitter all day….perhaps an early signal that something’s about to jump the shark?

But of course the iPhone is the real stud here….everyone’s sporting one. So much so that we’re keeping Simpson’s dinosaur phone in his man purse for fear of being ridiculed or asked to moderate the “Yesterday’s Technology Today” panel discussion.

Simpy’s “Classic” Bag Phone