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Archive for the ‘Management’ Category

Our team has been working diligently the last few months to role out our second private label product Deal Current.

Deal Current is a 100% turn-key, private label daily deal software solution for media partners.

We have spent 6 months researching 50+ competitors in 66 markets to combine the best practices.

Read more about Deal Current and we appreciate your feedback.

Daily Deal Software, Daily Deal Solution, Private Label Daily Deal Software, Deal Current

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I met with an amazing company in San Diego last Friday that has an amazing mission, Patnerships with Industry.

Here is what their website says they can do:

PWI provides job training, placement, and ongoing support services for adults with developmental disabilities to work in the community. In collaboration with outstanding partnerships with over 350 employers, PWI creates employment opportunities for individuals and meets employers’ labor needs. Founded in 1985, PWI serves over 650 individuals daily.

After meeting with them, here is what they can do for your business:

PWI gives developmentally challenged adults jobs by providing a very cost-effective outsourcing solution for San Diego businesses who have busy work, repetitive project work, or bulk packaging needs. For example Cox Cable use them to clean and repackage remotes. A car company uses PWI to put plastic packaging on a rubber shock absorber.

PWI has project managers that monitor the job, a great assembly room, insurance, and they manage all the payroll for the staff. Its a win/win for San Diego companies.

So if you are San Diego company, contact PWI, if you need:

  • A thousand products put in packaging
  • Thousands of envelopes stuffed an mailed
  • Staff for a repetitive job that needs quality control

Its a great solution and a great benefit to the community!

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There are two things that get me really jacked in life: Good ideas, and good ideas put into action.

Cristo Rey is a network of private schools set up primarily in neglected urban neighborhoods.

Here’s what’s great about the schools: Their mission is to narrow the ‘achievement gap‘ that is to say they focus on preparing at-risk, urban, and blue collar youth with the attitudes and skills necessary to achieve in college and beyond.

Here’s how they do it (excerpt from Workplace U on American RadioWorks)

The Cristo Rey business plan works this way: Employers pay the school what they would pay a full-time, entry-level employee, minus benefits. In Birmingham that’s $21,500. That one job is shared among four students, who each work on a different week day. A student’s work-study income pays about 70 percent of that student’s tuition. Parents pay a fee based on their income sometimes less than $100 a month. Foundations, charities and donations make up the rest. The Cristo Rey Network is sponsored by dozens of major corporations and by grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other philanthropies.

The Story (on Workplace U) focuses on Carlon Harris a high school junior in Birmingham who works as an administrative assistant at a Birmingham business incubator. This would a daunting assignment for any high schooler, then factor the social, economic and potential challenges at home.

Various types of public charter schools have been filling this void for quite some time now and are now very popular across urban cities. High Tech High is a group of high schools, middle schools and one elementary school in San Diego County whose goals (among others) are to increase the number of educationally disadvantaged students in math and engineering who succeed in high school and post-secondary education (High Tech High’s Goals).

While High Tech High’s science focus is badly needed in American Education, their admissions process is a lottery- A lottery??? What good does that do anyone? You’re removing any element of motivation.

Cristo Rey has found the winning formula; motivated kids possibly lacking family or social structure put them in a situation with high expectations combined with real-world experience that shows them what they’re working towards.

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I have re-discovered my favorite site on the internet– Stuff White People Like. What is beautiful about this site is it’s simplicity– It’s short, well written and cleaver.  These types of sites seem to have exploded all over the internet in recent years. Earlier this year Ben Huh did an interview with Mixergy.com and shared some insight into how he built a network of these sites anchored by I Can has Cheezburger and Fail Blog that generated 218 million page views in September alone.

In terms of content and community management he has it dialed down to a science:

  • Site visitors are lazy! – There are TONS of alternatives for your customers so following the KiSS model (Keep it Simple, Stupid) minimizes their opportunities to get distracted.
  • Content + more content – You don’t want to shut visitors out that want to spend more time. If you’re following KiSS content generation should be easy and you can pass it off to users. In the case of I Can Has Cheezburger there is no shortage of cat pictures and stupid captions to put under them.

funny-pictures-cat-tastes-your-icecream

  • Quality Content= Value – Think of these sites like fast food restaurants. Items on the dollar menu are cheap and easy to make and a $1 double cheeseburger seem like a great value.
  • Get innovated once you have their trust – I got in the habit of reading Texts From Last Night every morning while eating breakfast. Then they released the Iphone app – Texts From Last Night meet another morning routine ;)

Anyone thinking of investing time or money into one of these sites has one big question: What happens when the fad passes? Huh points out that allowing the community to guide the content will ensure that visitors keep coming back. Even if/when one of these sites runs its life cycle all that’s lost is the design and software developed for the site. Computers and humans can be reassigned to other projects that generate other KiSS sites….

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It’s been a great few week of calls and conversations with some major players across quite a few industries.  What’s interesting about the work we do is how applicable it is to so many types of business.  I wanted to share some great ideas from the interaction we’ve had across many seemingly different org types.

Real Estate – A great conversation this week with the CEO and Marketing Director of a major Real Estate Group in Wisconsin.  We talked about the type of advertising and marketing they’ve done in the past, and how they create messaging to their prospective new home buyers.  Some great questions to consider:  How do you get a message out to area home shoppers that it’s time to buy, or to buy from them?  How do you capture people before they are ready to buy a home, so when they are ready, they come back to you?  How do you capture buyers who are increasingly younger, and don’t seek news in the same places you’ve advertised for years?  Our contests applications create relevant engagement with these prospective new home buyers because we custom design the contest around an idea that would interest your target market.  If you’re looking to target new home buyers, create a contest around a room remodel, or a best family photo.  How about a best snowman contest.  It’s community goodwill and that’s the point.

Create a contest that reaches your audience, find a prize that creates incentive, make spreading the message simple, make voting addictive, add a offline conversational component by offering a campaign product (like buy the picture of your son’s snowman on a magnet), and voila, you have a campaign that captures an audience and brings them back.  When they are ready, you’ll be the company they need your product or service.

Politics – A new program we’ve joined forces with to test our application in the political space has some very interesting implications.  A great new documentary “By The People – The election of Barack Obama” provides insider accounts of the pandemonium that developed along the campaign road for our new president.  Produced by Ed Norton, it captures a clear picture of the emotion of the campaign trail, and it’s incredible.  A must watch, and a great case study on what components led into a successful campaign for the Obama group.

The interesting conversation in politics is the topic of how to make people care about an election, or a candidate.  Especially in local elections, no one really thinks about an election until the close to election day, and even then a very small percentage actually vote.  In local elections less than 10 percent typically come out to vote.  How do we capture that audience?  How do we understand and speak to their issues?  How do we communicate with them?  How do we let them spread the message?  How do we keep them engaged longer than that guy at the grocery store that asks if I’m registered to vote in San Diego?

Though it’s only one small component to a successful political website strategy, our voting and engagement technology can help open the door and start a conversation.  If you want to reach a target audience of 25-45 yr-old affluent women in a the San Diego area, try a home makeover or a garden photo contest.  If you want to reach Latin-Americans in Miami, try a favorite food, or family picnic contest.  The prize is a special lunch with you, their next local politician.

Sports – After helping launch a new campaign in partnership with Active, and the NBA/NCAA we got into the door with a few Sports franchises.  Our first major team campaign launch will be a major NFL team this month.  Some great questions here.  As an NFL team how do you get your fans to participate with the organization when they’re not watching a game?  What’s your objective with fans that come to the website?  How are new fans exposed to you?  How do offline, online and event marketing strategy work together?

Fan supported contests, especially ones that have real value because they bring the team spirit home (to a backyard BBQ for example), or to a tailgate party, create real viral engagement.  What if fans could submit photos of their favorite team spirit moment on an easy to use and addictive to play platform.  What if they were competing to win free tickets, and free team gear.  What if recognition were available to everyone that submitted ideas, like showcasing the best ranked photos on the megatron.  What if we captured 5,000 new fan photos every month, and fan’s emails to send them updates on voting and new promotions.  Would advertisers be interested in sponsoring a contest that captured that kind of data, and created one million votes per month or more?

It’s going to be an exciting 2010.

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My favorite part of Halloween is the lack of real identity that one holds on to on a daily basis. Sure it’s an opportunity for the button-down businessman to live his Brett Michaels fantasy for the day but there are more subtle identity-benders that make the night so interesting.

First, it is totally acceptable not to bother learning people’s real names; for those of us with poor passing memory, this is a life-saver. No longer do you need to worry if her name is Kristy, Christine, or Kristina. For the rest of the evening the spunky blonde can be known as Kate Gosselin.

Second, your identity for the evening is in the eye of the beholder. This year I was Ferret Boy (loosely based on an elementary-school friend. Plus an excuse to buy an awesome ferret shirt!) Apparently my rendition of Ferret Boy looks a lot like Napoleon Dynamite, Napoleon it is I guess.

My third point, (this is how this ties into a work blog) is that people’s Halloween characters tend to be a reaffirmation of their real-life character.

Landmark Events helped us to host a kick-ass party at the Pearl Hotel, about halfway through the evening we gathered those of us present for a team photo. Everyone was spot-on in their costume selection. The design girls wowed us with their creativity and superb execution. Eric made a 200 pound ex-MP look dainty with a set of DDs and a sheer white shirt. Both Jimmy and Pat slipped into costumes that looked so easy and natural they might not have been costumes (seriously Pat, the Peewee Herman get-up should not be that easy).

So… I guess this inadvertently relates to my last post. Want to know if your organization will be successful? Throw them a costume party and see who shows up- The more ridiculous the costumes the more successful the team.

IMG_0153

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My first post will be about trust. Not the most thrilling topic but a crucial element at a startup. I say this because in many ways trust is a very real assets at a start-up, it’s free and it can be used to create a very dynamic and productive work environment.

Admittedly, I’ve had my doubts about my role at the company and the company as a whole. Am I a valuable to the team? Do I fit in? What happens if the company doesn’t work out?

In the end there are only two questions that matter. And the answers are yes and yes. You are valuable to the team and you fit in great.

Resources at a startup are tight. You and the company are each other’s biggest investors— in this economy there is no shortage of talented, ambitious (and more experienced) help out there. Whenever doubts pop into your mind remind yourself that if the company is dedicating a portion of these coveted resources towards your salary, you are worth it or you wouldn’t be here. On the flip side, I am young, ambitious and underpaid. I give up short term income for invaluable training, a work environment that suits me perfectly and ultimately long term success. I believe in our co-founders, the business model and our product or I wouldn’t be here. With open and frank communication, ambition and focus a young entrepreneur in a startup can have as much job security as an OB/GYN or funeral director :)

Trust Fall

Trust Fall

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I just had the chance to be on a great panel discussing Social Media and Internet Marketing for Race Directors in Colorado this past weekend at the RACE Conference and Expo.

It was a pleasure to be on the panel with Robin Thurston and have Michael Aisner as our moderator.

Robin is the CEO of Map My Fitness which combined has over 1.4 million registered users among their three communities MapMyRun.com, MapMyWalk.com, and MapMyBike.com.

Micheal Aisner is the past owner of the Coors International Bicycle Classic and is Solar Eclipse Junkie. The Coors classic became the unofficial US national tour in the eighties and was the 4th largest bike ride in the world

RACE Conference Social Media and Internet Marketing Panel

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Simon Baer will be guest blogging on ‘Life of a Founder’ he is the youngest and newest member of the Artistic Hub team.

He started with the Sales team in May and has since moved to an operational role. His responsibilities cover everything from project management and CRM to cleaning the fridge. While Jimmy’s posts cover the life of a start up from a founder’s perspective, Simon’s posts will be written from his perspective; fresh out of college and thrown into the mix at a startup.

Success from Below!!

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One of the biggest things I’m a believer of is one on one meetings with key members of your team each week. When you are a start-up everyone is a key member and over time its your managers and directors.

You can have more impact in 3o minutes to 1 hour with a person than you can ever have over email or in a motivational/sales meeting.

“One on ones” as I call them should be given by every manager who ever wants to build a great team.

The goals for the meetings are:

  1. Give members of your team an open forum to vent when they are stressed
  2. Provide a special forum for training someone that makes them realize they are special and unique
  3. Provide a forum that you can correct a person’s work or behavior without making them feel insecure
  4. Most importantly, make time to teach a person and create value and goals in their position

One good hour with a person on your staff can make a huge impact in your business. I’m a big resistor to group and useless meetings, but meeting with someone to define their goals and objectives is invaluable.

The #1 thing most employees complain about is lack of direction and purpose.

Fill these and you will have a motivated and driven staff.

oneonone

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