Today at 2Pm, all of the members of Portland Advertising Federation’s Colaboratory program presented their final marketing plan to Sameunderneath, a local sustainable clothing company.

Team Lattice showed a 5 minute video about their experiences before delving into the presentation.

The Lattice Presentation

• Research and Strategy
• Digital Brand Experience
• In-Store Branding
• Spreading Awareness
• Experiental

The Types of Sameunderneath Buyers

• Change Agents
• Enlightened Rebels
• Movers and Shakers
• Established Pioneers

Some of the brilliant ideas they came up with were as follows:

• Consumer Education: hangtags with information about the company’s values and the clothing ingredients and creation process. This will allow the consumer to really interact with the history of each piece of clothing.
• Stickers that can be written upon, to generate content for ideas — to spread the sameunderneath brand. Biodegrade nontoxic stickers.
• Chalk wall poetry can then be put on the walls of buildings with the sameunderneath.com logo at bottom - generated from Stickers #colab
• Projecting comments from a live Twitter feed about the Sameunderneath product on the catwalk of a Sameunderneath fashion show in LA. Sponsored and attended by socially-conscious, high-profile musicians.
• Branding on the inside of the clothing, so that wearers can lift their shirts to show, indeed, that they are wearing Sameunderneath. (Serves as an advertisement for photo opportunities, and a chance to show off nicely toned Yoga-abs?).
  • Flyers
  • Website relaunch
  • Outdoor wallscapes
  • Magazine
  • Documetnary Series
  • Sameunderneath Film Festival
  • 30 second Promotion
  • T-Shirt Challenge
  • Banner Ads
  • Pioneer Square Gallery

The Sameunderneath Target Market:

“People who give a Damn”
And for people who love music——>Advertising on Pandora.com”

Audience Interaction

Lattice team members ended by handing out stickers to everyone in the audience, saying, “Please, finish the statements on these “biodegradable, non-toxic stickers” and place them in locations that are poinigiant (and

Ryan Christensen, Founder of Sameunderneath said, “this idea is genius…(holds up the stickers with fill-in blanks) …when I first began Sameundenerath

An LA Resident Responds to the Sticker Idea

I was live blogging the Colaboratory Presentation as it happened, and I received a reponse to the stickers from @willtorres from Los Angeles, California.

@willtorres: “@caseorganic yeah, i love the stickers idea a lot. i was going to imitate a project i found with stickers throughout the city.”

Looks like their idea will be a great success.

—————–

Team Kiwi Presents

Luke Rolka:
Sameundeneath started as an educational curriculum…an idea. Now it has transformed into this business model. This socially responsible business.

“What we want to do is take this and make it big — move it national”.

“We want to take Saemunderneath and turn it into a model of super awesome success”.

Bryan Davidson: Even as Samunderneath grows, there are certain values that must stay the same.

Bryan Davidson’s words were, true, charismatic, thoughtful and provocative, which mirrored exactly the bullet points on the screen.

“You’re not just selling clothes, you’re selling a value system.”

“It is important to keep things small while thinking large. So we propose a new role of Community Director, because the world needs more Ryans.”

Luke Rolka: Consumers these days are really looking for ways to engage in a brand.The director is taking the Sameunderneath values and living and breathing them…becoming the representation of the brand. here in Portland. Then they can take that knowledge and adapt it to a city that they’re going to be running, and see how they can do it there.

Christine Vo: Sameunderneath is known very well in portland right now, but we want to take that internationally.

The T-Shirt Challenge

A way for designers to really get their name out there and show off their work.

Film Festivals, Lecture Series, Art Shows, and a Magazine

This was a decidedly different take then the music /urban street appelation basis of the Team Lattice presentation.

Founding of a Corporate Magazine, each zine with region focus, showing what each of those locations are doing with their local community and the Sameunderneath brand.

Then Unveiled a New Website: in which each of the pages have great design, Documentary Series, Philosophy, Community. “Get Involved” tab.

“What would you say to the world if you had 30 seconds to speak your mind?”
Rebels are encouraged to speak their minds on any subject and submit the video to the Sameunderneath website.

Flyers Embedded with Seeds

In order for you to grow, you have to engage with the customer. How better than by growing pieces of paper? Flyers embedded with Wildflower seeds. They can be buried in the backyard and have the words, “grow your paper and your ideas”.

“Each city’s flyer will have a different skyline, and we will try to get local artists to do the images for them. At every point, it is important to get local artists to do things for the compay…all these things create sustainable organic growth frr your company.

Then at the end presented a marketing plan roundup which included:

~.——————–

Now Ryan has to choose. It is a very intense decision. He leaves to use the restroom.

Sameunderneath had a 1.5 million growth revenue last year. The company is interested in affordable and efficient marketing methods for growth.

It all comes down to the customer base. Are they artsy and into film? Are they into music? The marketing plans seem to target slightly different demographics. Lattice presents an urban grassroots music-base, and Kiwi defines the demographic as a more thoughtful, artsy, film-loving creature.

The success of either marketing plan all comes down to what best fits the true demographic of Sameunderneath consumers.

To Team Lattice: One of your best points was the paper; that pamphlet that has the story that goes into the stores to educate the people. Something that each floor sales staff can read to better understand the product.

To Team Kiwi: We’ve been doing flyers since the beginning of the company, but now we’re starting to do personal invitations. It’s a way to say, we don’t want to waste your time with pieces of paper. With a private invite, people have to go out of their way to ask their friends to attend an event, and it is more word of mouth than objective and detached.

Ryan: This is a really difficult decision. They’re two different plans.

I really liked the fact that Team Lattice had the fill-in sticker that told the story of the brand. At the end of the day, it’s a new version of “hello my name is” Things like that are so personal and so engaged with community. It could go anywhere and be filled in with the culture of that community, that space.

To Team Lattice: I thought you ladies did a great job and restrained it to what really matterned.

In addition, your presentation’s marketing recommendations started small and then went big, just like how Sameunderneath should be growing. If you had shown me the magazine in the beginning, I would’ve discounted it right from the start. Do you have any idea how much it costs to publish something like that?

To Team Kiwi:What I really liked a lot was Bryan. You were kind of the leader of the pack. It wasn’t a presentation—you were being you.

The Decision

Ryan buys enough time to think, and then makes his decision. It is Team Lattice. But he points out that he doesn’t want to make a decision at all, because both teams came up with exceptional ideas.

“I would like each and every one of you to E-mail me,” he says, “and each of you to come to visit my creative team. I want both teams to be there to put in opinions and voice their two cents.”

The Colaboratory Sameunderneath Discount

Ryan added that, “Between now and the end of the month—everything in the store is $20 from now until the end of the month. Just let the store staff know that you’re a member of Colab and this discount will be available to you”.

Final Thoughts

According to Malcolm McCullough, author of Digital Ground, “Design is the Product”. Design is what people experience, what they see…all text, all seen and unseen material. It is that Psychology of space that design induces that makes a person feel positively or negatively about a space or thing. Online voluntary communities need a base under which to interact. They cannot be forced into acting voluntarily. They must weave themselves into the brand’s story.

I believe Team Lattice did this the best, because they created three distinct and affordable ways in which consumers could weave themselves into the brand’s story while helping to tell that story. The hang tags describing each piece of clothing and the company’s philosophy, the fill-in stickers, and the concert were all integrating factors that weaved the brand into the lives of the consumers.

It has been an amazing experience watching the #Colab members interact with each other and their agencies. I can’t wait to watch how they develop in the future. I’ve never seen such a dedicated and intelligent group of designers work so hard on a project before. Kudos to everyone. Team Lattice and Team Kiwi will go incredibly far, and soon.

~.—————————————

About the Colaboratory Internship Project

Sponsored by the Portland Ad Federation, the COLAB project believes that “Interning at 1 agency is so pre-millennial”, and takes a different route in inspiring the creativity and professional education of its interns.

From the Colaboratory website: “COLABORATORY takes place over 6 weeks in Portland, Oregon. 10 participants are selected and individually paired with 3 of the 11 agencies based on their strengths and interests. Interns spend 2 intensely focused weeks at each agency learning from all disciplines”.

Interns:

• Allison McKeever
• Bryan Davidson
• Christene  Vo
• Heather Schwartz
• Kim Karalekas
• Luke Rolka
• Melissa Casillas
• Mary McPherson
• Megan Nuttall
• Whitney Bard

Agencies:

• Ascentium
• eROI
• Anvil Media
• Fish Marketing
• the|new|group
• Grady Britton
• CMD
• Asterix Group
• HMH
• Livengood|Nowack.

Also check out the Team Lattice business card: It grows with their ideas.



Hazelnut Tech Talk is proud to play a part in reporting the COLAB experience, and is dedicated to connecting COLAB members with local networks, people and events that are moving and shaking the design world.

All of the members of COLABORATORY have been blogging about their adventures since their first day. Bram Pitoyo built a way to follow all of the action at once. It also checks the latest Twitter conversation that’s hastagged #COLAB, so you do none of the work and get all the results. Check out Bram Pitoyo’s COLAB Feed Aggregator from Yahoo! Pipes.

A Colaboratory Visit

Today, Bram Pitoyo and I visited CoatesKokes to see what the Portland Colaboratory members were up to. The two Colaboratory teams were hard at work on their final PR and Marketing pitch for Sameunderneath. We watched them interview some CoatesKokes employees about what the Sameunderneath brand stood for. After about an hour of this, James Rice made a visit and let the team in on some strategic presentation advice.

James’ advice came at the right time — both teams have only seven days left before their final presentation to Sameunderneath. With only a week left in the program, he aimed to give them strategic advice on creating engaging and successful Marketing/PR plans.

James Rice is the Digital Brand Strategy Director at Ascentium, an agency specializing in interactive media. He has an intense track record. During his 15 years of agency experience, he’s only lost 5 clients. Compare this to baseball, golf, or the Olympics.

———————————————————–

James Rice Begins

James Rice: One of the things that most people forget, especially at your age, is that the concept of a team is very important. Never lose sight of that.

Collaborate

photo credit: Capra Royale

One thing we pride ourselves on is that everyone feels like they can work together to execute to that client’s expectations.

For instance (he pointed to Colab member Christine Vo, who was sitting to his left) if Christine and I were presenting to a client, a sort of conversation could go on between the two of us. It wouldn’t be like divisional, like assigning one person slides 3 and 5, or dividing up the work.

If you have the appropriate discussions in front of customers, that will speak volumes for people wanting to hire you.

———————————————————–

On the Errors of Big Agencies

There are some errors that most BDA (Big Dumb Agencies) make in presenting to potential clients. One of them is that they are used to pitching the team. CoatesKokes doesn’t do this.

It’s not about the people, or the history of whatever. Introduce your like this: “This is Joe, and he’s the account planner, and Sarah is the copywriter”. That way, the client sees what the agency is going to do, not what its people did in the past.

In case the agencies are listening, the idea of a BDA is not mine. George Parker coined the term on his blog AdScam.
He lived in Boise Idaho, and is a kind of blogger pundit. I highly suggest reading his work, as well as Marktd.com.

That all said — act as a team.

———————————————————–

Clients, Challenging Brands, and Organization

photo credit: gcoldironjr2003

1. Clients want to hire people who are enthusiastic about the business — who have taken the time to learn — who work together to challenge each other. At the same time, never be afraid to challenge the brand’s assumptions.

2. Be very organized in your thoughts — you have to be able to tell the story. Always pretend there’s a director over your shoulder, or that you’re presenting to your own camera.

Those are the two big tenants of presenting well.

———————————————————–

Passion, Slides, and Owning the Room

photo credit: jurvetson
Clients want to see that you’re passionate about the presentation.

But don’t put everything on the slides. If I see slides with more bullets on them, I’ll probably scream.

OWN the room when you step in. What’s on the glass or projected, will fill the gap.

What is most important is that you’re standing there with your team, and you’re passionate about what you say.

———————————————————–

Words Inspire Images

photo credit: Georgieporge

I was in my car the other day, and Posion’s Every Rose has its Thorn came on the radio. I listened for a moment and then switched over to CD. That Niel Young’s Cowgirl on the Sand. That was much better for some reason.

What made it better? It’s the same when it comes to presentations.

What we want to do in presentations is to get someone to think uniquely, or to present something that shows we’re unique. The phrase “Cowgirl on the Sand” shows something to our mind. It really conjures up an image. It is also unique, while the phrase “Every Rose has its Thorn” is overgrown; cliche.

Always try to come up with polarizing and intriguing things, and be very vocal; personable.

(At this point, James Rice began to wave his hands around a bunch).

Also use a bunch of hand motions.

(He pointed to the whiteboard behind him).

———————————————————–

This whiteboard is your best friend.

photo credit: Ben30

Once we went on a pitch and won HP as a client against a big competitor. We presented without laptops and Powerpoints and just brought in a whiteboard. That way, we could actually involve the clients in our presentation. They could watch it develop instead of sit there on the screen — this unmodified, ungrowing series of static images.

That’s one of the things I’d like to see in every presentation room. A whiteboard on which you could project a presentation on the lower part of it.

———————————————————–

Owning the Room During Electronic Malfunction

photo credit: Qfamily

Sometimes you come in, and there’s stuff that sometimes doesn’t work. White boards solve that. When possible, always have a backup. You shouldn’t need a Powerpoint to pitch an idea. It should be there in your head, and the head of your team.

———————————————————–

The COLAB Sameunderneath Presentation

James Rice: Lets talk about the Colaboratory presentation to Sameunderneath. How much time do you have?

Colab Member: 30 minutes for the pitch, and 15 for questions and answers.

Another Colab Member: No, it was just 30 minutes.

At this point, the team realized that there was a discrepancy of time-knowledge amongst them.

James Rice:
This brings up a good point. There should be that one point person who is in change of the entire thing. There always should be a pitch leader who is collecting all of the ideas. Everyone will take care of parts and pieces, but there needs to be part of a collector.

———————————————————–

On the Presentation of Self

photo credit: Steve & Jemma Copley

Never spend time on welcomes. I’m probably the only team that doesn’t do biographies. With Linkedin, Facebook, ect. out there, and there’s a good chance they know it is you.

As soon as you state, “I did this”, your design work becomes about your past.
If I could bestow any philosophy — it’s all about what you did — it’s about what you’re doing.

———————————————————–

On Thanking the Client

photo credit: carakatze

Don’t thank them like, “we’re happy to be here”

I’ve seen it done where people are so soft, like “I really appreciate the time”

Clients want actionable people that are ready to hit the ground, who are ready to kick some ass.

Say: “On the left there’s Chris Stein.

If you introduce her, it begins to be like a team.

———————————————————–

The Whiteboard

photo credit: mlinksva

On the screen, you can’t do the kinds of things you can do on the white board.

(He goes to the board behind him)

I just did this in a pitch the other day. I called it this area on the board, and made it the impact zone.

Instead of having an agenda — there are other certain things you can do, like you can take little sticky things and put down the thoughts on each other, and then start to arrange them into logical clusters.

—-
So then there’s these points of impact, and you can put them on the very first slide. For instance it can say the six things we’re gonig to do for you.
For samenunderneath you’re impact zone is going to be brand, exposure, orginality…ect.

What else do you want to do?

Do you want to create a new customer? Attract a new customer?

———————————————————–

Innovate in the Marketplace

photo credit: Lauras512

If you just put one or two words here and tell a story around them.

If I were pitching for Sameunderneath I’d probably be like “we’re here today because you’ve had a large impact to a very unique set of customers in what you’ve done for the last nine years…” We’ve looked at what kind of impact you’ve had in the marketplace.

If we were look at your brand expansion and how we can bring about greater exposure through your “market expansion plan” (adding sometimes its fun to put in phrases htat sound big)
today we’rll talk about how you can re-imagine your plan.

Lets look at brand experience, social retail. It is these thigns that will increase your exposure in the lines of your market plan.

Sameunderneath will take on this exposure and expand on it.

When I talk about a markting plan I have certain fears.

ROI would be on there.
(But I hate the word ROI — I’d prefer rather to use measurement…or culpability).

I’d have a statement and the impact points of ‘experience, authority, understanding.’

When I talk about experience a story is already starting to unfold.

Powerpoint presentations makes us be explicit.

I try to rip those bullets out and say them, not show them.

A slide can say “new ideas have the power to break boundaries set by others’ assumptions.”

———————————————————–

Branding a Presentation

photo credit: PinkMoose

You can also turn the presentation…not to your brand but to their brand.

Build the presentation like you work for them and put their brand on the bottom of the slides.

We do a lot of quite a few pitches that we do at Ascentium, and the strategy used depends on the type of pitch. If it is a type of social media strategy, then that comes on our deck (our brand and feel).

———————————————————–

Building from Scratch

photo credit: Richard Jones

We put all our presentation material on the network drive and it’s a mess.

Even though the presentation material is there, every time I build it from scratch.

———————————————————–

Finding Inspiration

photo credit: alicepopkorn

I have a delicious tag called inspiration…or “fucking rad”.

They’re where I go when I need inspiration.

Another thing I go to is Flickr.

If I’m stuck while making a presentation, I get what I want to say, and then create those keywords. And I build a slide desk with just thoe images.

And I begin to fill in those gaps “what do I want to say”.

Sometimes I put those ideas on notecards.

Question: What advice would you give to someone not as comfortable with presentng to a group?

James Rice: There are some amazing creatives that don’t want to pitch. They want to contribute to ideas.

I don’t pracice creating or programming anymore.

In the big picture, I’d probably, over time, find out where I’m there on it.
I have to ask the question of whether I want to pitch, or do I want to contribute a lot of really great ideas that are on the pitch?

In the case of Friday…get over it!

You’re gonna have great ideas…

You’re too young to be nervous.

———————————————————–

Images

photo credit: gutter

If your image is about expansion, find images of storefronts on Flickr that exist in other locations. Map the Sameunderneath logo onto them and see what happens. How does Sameunderneath fit in other ecosystems?

How could Sameunderneath fit into other cultures and other audiences.

As we looked at your plan of expansion…then do a map.

———————————————————–

The Awesomeness of Circles

photo credit: kyz

People love circles by the way

And if you draw circles and shit…

(He shows the group a slide filled with various objects).

Then clients will love it. They have the capability to show growth and change.

If you can draw what you’re trying to say people are going to love it. You’ll be so successful.

———————————————————–

Macrovisualizing

photo credit: audreyjm529

(Points to the board — where many ideas are listed).Man…this could be a slide of 26 bullets.

James RiceDon’t increase the number of slides to decrease the nubmer of bullets.

What I’d do is macrovisualize what I’m trying to visualize.

(Points to the jars of M&M’s on the table… (see, M&M’s are not triangular or square. They’re circular).

———————————————————–

A Sample Introduction

photo credit: eyeliam

James Rice began by drawing a vertical line on down the white board. One one side of it, he drew Sameunderneath.

James Rice: Here’s Sameunderneath .. it’s made a great impact on 18-24 year olds.

Then James started circling the logo, adding concentric rings around it that were larger and larger as they progressed. He led them to cross over to the right side of the vertical line.

James Rice: And here’s where we need to take it. This is why circles are powerful — they show the progression of time.

Where we need to take it is the 30-40 year olds…and increase the core audience. Then, as time progresses, the 30-40 year olds need to be come the main audience.

Try to draw you what you’re going to say.

———————————————————–

Learning from Failure

photo credit: zentolos

Instead of saying here’s what succeeded, I’d like to tell you about something that failed.

It’s fun to give you advice based on a thing that didn’t work .. because it is easier to see know what went wrong.

I’ll tell you what went wrong this time.

We hadn’t met the client before, and we were up, literally, for 61 hours.
Thus, we had no context, and with only three days to prepare, it was pretty much impossible.

We should’ve been more prepared for it; I should’ve told them no.

But we all realized we liked the three day thing.
Because when you have three weeks, you smash all of your ideas against the wall. You force yourself over them too much, until they become less of what they were before.

Like my writing professor in college said — write it. And then you’rll rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it. But just write it.

———————————————————–

On Taking Breaks

photo credit: dennis and aimee jonez

Don’t stay continuously working on something. You need to give your brain a break.

More importantly, focus it completely for a while, and then step back.

(He examined the presentation on his laptop).

I also used the colors and blue…maybe that was the problem.
I also didn’t use rounded corners — against my best intentions.

I’ll give you a secret — brand voice is what happens when you come in with
Your goal of the presentation is to distill it down into memorabale, topical, organized pitches.

You should have over 15 slides, ideally. And talk to your slides — they’re meant to work for you. They’re also touchpoints.

———————————————————–

On Pitching

photo credit: akeg

“When will you be pitching?” He asked the Colab Members. “Will you be practicing?”

It was stated that team Lattice would be practicing at Studio Bard on Wednesday.

James Rice: Does everyone have soem Sameundernath clothing?

I might do that if I were pichng htem as a client. It’s more gimmicky — but it shows that you’re all invested in the brand.

———————————————————–

Ten Things You Can Really Remember

photo credit: seanmcgrath

Look over your documents and come up with 10 great things that you really remember.

Make sure those ten things are what is remembered when you walk out of that room.

———————————————————–

Create a Visual Analysis

photo credit: playerx

Come up with your own type of visual analysis.

Everything dyou do should be expressed visually.

(James went again to the whiteboard and drew circles).

James Rice: Here’s our biggest MINDSHARE competitor.

Here are some very unique ways for you to expand your customers…and increase their mindshare.

———————————————————–

The Impact Zone

photo credit: Ana Filipa Machado

Identify the expertise in the creative ideas… identify zones within your plan where you now have it down cold.

Know it more than what it takes to get into that plan. Consider:

• Brand
• Exposure
• Originality
• Innovation
• Expansion
• ROI

———————————————————–

Conclusions

It was great to hear what James Rice had to say about the creative industry. As an Anthropologist, it was an interesting injection into a world of competing teams, creative ideas, and intense work methods. I look forward to seeing the future ideas that come out of the mind of James Rice and the Colaboratory members.

———————————————————–

Resources

photo credit: markhillary

Check out the blog of James Rice
And you can follow his Delicious Links.
Or you can follow James Rice on Twitter.

———————————————————–

Thanks for Reading Hazelnut Tech Talk!

If you liked this article, you may want to follow my updates on Twitter, or subcribe to this site’s feed.

What’s creative and groundbreaking, and capable of topping iPhone buzz on Twitter?

It’s Cre8Camp, the inaugural unconference that brought 50 creatives to SOUK, a coworking space (322 NW 6th Avenue), this Saturday. Within the first hour of introduction and networking, about 24 topics were developed for discussion, and groups of creatives went off to various conferences rooms and hallways to delve into some of the most intense dilemmas, new media techniques, and social prerogatives that currently exist.

The event was covered masterfully on Twitter, allowing the rankings for the hashtag identifier #Cre8Camp. There was so much buzz involved that #Cre8Camp trumped mention of the newly released iPhone 3G on Twitter. By the end of the day, #Cre8Camp was second only to Dark Knight.

The conference was organized and sponsored by @stevegehlen, @CarriBugbee (Big Deal PR), @feedia, @brampitoyo, @7thscreen, @sadiemedley, @julsd (Owner of SOUK) Great Lunch from @turoczy (of @siliconflorist), @ahockley (amazing photos of the event to come soon), and the Art Institute of Portland and ISITE Design.

It was live-Tweeted online by @StevenWalling (Wikipedia/Wiki God), @CarrieBugbee (amazing job) Me @caseorganic, @sadiemedley, @staceyanderson, @notbenh @feedia, @brampitoyo, @Theinfovore, @lilbutterfly, @JeanAnnVK, @unclenate.

The event was mind blowing and incredible. It will probably take me a week to fully digest and analyze the information gathered.

If you have information you’d like me to include in future updates on the information gathered during Cre8Camp, please E-mail me at caseorganic@gmail.com.

Today there was a Lunch and presentation at Nemo on using Ning for customized social networks. Dave Allen, Director of Insights & Digital Media at Nemo, introduced Rachel, who demonstrated the customized functions of Ning.

Dave Allen:
The purpose of this lunch and demonstration is to create a sort of town hall meeting.

Nemo is a 11 year old company that is unique in that it has managed to develop itself professionally without any sort of Press Releases or major media at all.

We have 5 blogs that function outside of Nemo, as well as an Private internal networking that we’ve been using to demonstrate the capabilities of blogs to our employees. It is a place for experimentation and messages.

We feel that in Social Media everyone is running around on different race courses. All are doing their own thing, but no one knows where the finish line is.

The five outside blogs are not integrated with each other. We hope to use Ning’s capabilities to create PR 2.0 and Social Media for Nemo.
We’ll be releasing the new version of Ning in September that will network all of these blogs together, and will serve as a force to expand Nemo’s online presence and capability.

BLOGS:

• Pampelmoose

• Social-Cache

• StudioNemo

• Strangebeautiful

• NubbyTwiglet

We hope to add:

• Ink Show

• Yourblog.com

And:

NemoHQ.com (coming soon)

In addition, other blogs will be linking to Nemo, and these blogs and our own will run through Ning, which provide linking to everyone in the world.

The Ning Presentation:

Rachel:

I’d like to talk about how you or a brand can use a social network. People are currently using social networks to connect with other people. The Internet can be used to replicate any sort of media. Newspapers, television, art exhibits and flyers can be duplicated and be functional online.

The truly native behavior of the Internet is two-way. So is a social network. In media terms, the Internet is the only place where people have a depth conversation of two way in many forms of media. In photos, media, discussion forms, and blogs.

Because of this, people are responding to social networks in huge numbers.

The early days of the Internet saw two major services; AOL and CompuServe. AOL was a fantastic service for the general public because it taught people how to be online — how to use chat and E-mail..

And when a company like Nike wanted to be on the Internet — it would post its page on AOL.

Then Netscape came around and allowed people to jump on the Internet from site to site without constraints.

Now we have Facebook and other applications that teach us how to be social online. They allow us to post videos photos, news feeds.

Ning is a platform for the creation of your own branded social network.

It allows you the opportunity to control and expand your brand to your biggest fans. When you have a Myspace page, that page’s community is comprised of Myspace members and friends, but the data is owned by Myspace. You don’t get to keep data on your own community, and your visitors are constrained to Myspace’s look, feel and format.

By having your own social network, you can show what your features will be and your member’s social information. You can have your brand really expanded.

You can thus have your own online hub. If you think about a brand, it’s really spread across the net. It allows the people who are talking about you on Youtube, and those who have found you through promotions with companies like Eventful, Facebook and Myspace.

General online fan groups comprise a very fragmented image. You don’t have any centralized space to really collect your tribe.

Centralization of data allows them to meet each together while connecting with you. It eliminates the barriers that divide fans up into different social services.

You can then use those different touch points across the web, on those different blogs, to gather them into a tribe on your own social network. Then you can give them access to RSS feeds, embed codes, and they can spread your image across the web as your own personal street team .

We’re three years old, based in Palo Alto California.

We raised 60 million dollars back in May. If you build a social network on Ning you’ll know that you’ll be online for a long time. We’re not just going to evaporate. We have about 65 employees, almost of which are geeks. Your network is up fast, and runs smooth. We have a large engineering team. This team is always thinking about what social networking features you need in order to have the most social network for your brand.

—-
Case Study: The ImSaturn Social Network.
Saturn simply went to Ning.com and created their own social network without even calling us. Saturn has really created their own social universe.
Events and Bloggers

They have a lot of events they sponsor. For instance, they’re a sponsor of Project Runway. They recently sent one of their advertising directors out to blog about the experience. They have a Saturn blog/event/picture of the day. They’re running many different groups. There’s the Saturn Tuners Club, which was actually started by Saturn blogger. His blog is advertised on the front page.

The Saturn community space is really respectful of the Saturn community and helps them to get their own words out. They’re very respectful of the universe of different bloggers and clubs. How can they take these different groups who are part of different parts of the web and bring them all into this world.

Saturn sponsors a lot of events. You can see these events “Rally Customer Appreciation Day” on the event calendar.

At this point a freelance designer sitting next to me said, ” ‘Have a Saturn experience!’ That’s marketing right there.”
Widgets

Then there is a page to give their members all sorts of different widgets. Photo, video, and music players can be added to your site as well. These allow your brand’s supporters to share your videos on Facebook, or add them to MySpace.

——-

Case Study: AskPatty.com

Kiss my Astra (Patty is a women’s car dealer blogger. She’s pretty popular, so you can start to create news about what you’re doing on your own social network.

–

Case Study: Greekster.tv

Greekster is a Pizza Hut branded social network. It’s just targets to college students and those who are a part of fraternities and sororities—the ones most likely to order pizza. It’s very event focused. There’s a Hot or Not section for that allows members to become stars on the front age.

—-

Case Study: The Good Charlotte Network: Beating Paparazzi to the Punch

Good Charlotte’s main website is actually built on Ning. Two members of Good Charlotte are using their blog while on the road. They are also currently dating Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. This means that they are constantly getting harassed by camera crews and media.

To combat this, they’re blogging and taking pictures themselves and posting them on the social network in order to control their own stroy. By controlling media first, through Ning, they are beating Paparazzi to the Punch.

Now news outlets like Press Magazine are going back to the Good Charlotte to get the news, instead of taking the news themselves.

The latest blog pot is about a move about the Bra Boys, a epic about Australian Surfers. They use the Ning portal to point to the Bra Boys website from Ning, thus acting as a promotional interface.

Merchandise

They use the social network to sell all of their own brands, like the DCMA Collective, and band merchandise is linked to their Ning Site.

Good Charlotte’s page uses Ning’s capabilities to form the questions that one can asks their members when they set up their profiles. You can ask certain questions to really let he members to express themselves.

People are allowed to modify their own CSS on the page.

Then there’s the Good Charlotte Facebook page. This page links back to www.goodcharlotte.com, and a Ning photo player shows the GC’s photos on the Facebook network page. They work in unison to for more powerful promotion.

Case Study: Maloof Money Cup

Maloof Money Cup, the World’s Greatest Skateboarding Competition, is based in Orange County.

They embedded a bunch of YouTube videos come from their social network which runs on Ning.

And there’s my.maloofmoneycup.com that only allows people who are competing in the skateboarding event to become members of the page.

There’s the latest activity feed. Just like on Facebook you can see what your friends are up to.

Case Study: The SXSW ‘08 Insiders Guide.

Those who were attending South By Southwest were able to use the website I created by Ning as a community device.

Another good part about the database is that you can export all member data by .CSV and import it into a php email database.

People fill that out and you can export it into you own CRM database.

http://www.SXSW.ning.commain/feature/add

There are tons of featured widgets that allow you to bring pretty much anything into the applications. From the main page, a widget can be edited or modified.

In the end it adds up to a very concrete CMS.

It really gives you the ability to make your own experience online and really bring people into your own space.

—-

Questions from the Audience

CMD Agency:

You look at the big sites like Myspace/Youtube/Fllickr. That’s where the eyeballs are. Lots of clients want their own community, but there’s a question of how to balance the control you get from a privately branded site like on Ning vs. the social focus that is available on Myspace (which is where all of the visits are focused).

Rachel:You have to think about what’s most appropriate for your client. They are using our photo player here to populate their Facebook page.They have 67,000 pans of Good Charlotte on their Facebook page.

This makes Good Charlotte capable of gathering an audience on their Facebook page and gather their audience which also happens to be on a Facebook page.

A lot of Saturn members are blogging. Saturn found some Saturn members that were good bloggers, so then they featured the blog posts of these members. Ning allows you to use your community to generate content for you.

AlphageekTV: Why did the skateboarders lock the community to members of the competition only?

Rachel: I imagine they anted to make the competitors be the celebritities of the site and have hte members forcus in on them ..

Big Deal PR: What I’m always curious about is the flexibility of a system. What kind of programming help do you need in house in order to adapt it, and how adaptable is it? Is it at all possible to optimize it for search engines/?

Rachel: We’re constantly updating all of the tabs and widgets like so that search engines can always find it. When we upgrade we don’t just do it once — we constantly improve it, so that because search engines are always changing.

If you know a little or a lot of CSS, or you’re a PHP developer, you can use our API’s get access to our source code and really ad in your features.

That’s our job, to really help link you into your community through a completely customizable interface.

Angie, Freelance Designer: How long does content remain up and live, and the space parameters?

Rachel: Content goes up as long as you want to. Not sure of the dimensions, bur can ind out that information for you.

Question: Bandwidth limitations on your site?

Rachel: Secret: We’re not charging for bandwidth and storage right now. Everyone will get 100 gigs of free bandwidth and 10 gigs of storage. After that, you’ll be charged $9.99 a month for an additional 100 gigs of bandwidth and 10 gigs of storage.

Question:
As an Admin can you limit the size of uploads that users can upload?
Do you also have the ability to link back to other sources to use their bandwidth?

Rachel:
We give you 10 text boxes, and you can embed in any third party information in them. We’ll be putting our fill weight behind OpenSocial. We’ll be supporting third party social applications. The members of your social network will be able to add an open social app onto the first page.

Question: Can you do custom Javascript in those text boxes?

Rachel: Yep — custom javascript, custom hacks … hack away!

—–

That was the event. Overall, I learned a great deal about how brands can use multiple sites to set up campaigns/communities across formerly disparate social networking sites.

If you currently use them, RSS feeds are a great way to accumulate timely information from reliable and influential sources. RSS feeds are one of the best ways to keep up on social trends, new tech gagets, people, and business ideas. If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, there’s a 3.75 minute Commoncraft Video called RSS Feeds in Plain English.

One of the most useful ways I’ve been able to use RSS feeds has been through the use of an RSS aggregator as a search engine. My favorite platform to use is NewsFire (click to download) for Mac, but other RSS readers exist for Windows, Linux and Gmail.

The best part about Newsfire is that it has a search feature at the bottom right corner of the screen. The search tool allows many blog posts to be searched through at the same time.

This search feature can be used to search through all aggregated RSS feeds.

Categorizing Data:

Newsfire makes it easy to categorize data into groups. I chose Lifehacking-type blogs, Tech News, Design News, SEO, Marketing, Business Development, Usability/Architecture, Local Portland Groups, and Mail/Personal. I grabbed mail my mail from Gmail and my @caseorganic Twitter ID from Summize.

The only limitation is that you cannot rearrange the categories. This will hopefully probably be fixed with NewsFire’s next release.

The key to using RSS as a Search Engine is going out on the web and finding the best sources that aggregate the best data, and then storing it all in your NewsFire feedcapture device. Then, wait for the data to accumulate. Go to NewsFire –> Preferences –> Feeds, and set “Delete items” to “Never”. If you use Spotlight, you can enable indexing of content so that you can use Spotlight to search your feeds as well.

With this structure in place, I can search my RSS reader for “local SEO”, to check news related to these terms. Another option for maxxing out your RSS reader is to subscribe to Twitter topic feeds via Summize. That way, you not only get the topics that are being blogged about, but what everyone in the world is saying about those topics.

What is Coworking? It is simply working side-by-side with more than one person. No one has to be working on the same project or talk to each other. Simply being there with someone else negates the lonliness of working from home, or working in a hostile corporate environment.

Coworking is successful in corporate environments, especially startups, and is also ideal for entrepreneurs who need a support group while they develop independently.

It’s also useful to have others to bounce ideas off of.

Ingredients for Coworking. Shared working. Time sharing. Think sharing:

1. Large wooden table.
2. Large room with high ceilings.
3. Next room and kitchen with access to food and coffee.
4. Bathroom.
5. Powerstrips.
6. Computers on swivels (for screen sharing).
7. Good lighting.
8. Good window.

Shared working 2.0:

Costs: Space, and a projector to put computer screens onto wall.

Benefits:

• Others can watch media.
• Others can choose to show others media.
• Processes can be shown in motion.

Image below shows shared working space during the day and at night. This is what the dining room of the Woods house in N. Portland looks like. We set it up like this, and it works.

The same concept was written about in the NYTimes. Here.