Ebb and Flow, Me, DDO, Random

Posted by admin | Posted on 16-04-2010

Category : Off The Cuff

Tags: , , ,

I love it when a plan comes together – Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith

While I was feeling up against a wall last post, since then, things have started to click into place. I’m connecting with fourteen of our Hoteliers for one project next week and one of our local arts and culture partners. All good things and mostly items I can’t yet mention publicly yet.

I have to admit, the art and culture groups and people I meet are always a very positive affair. Perhaps it’s why I am so fond of those facilities and organizations.

That said I’ve come across a new thorn in my side, one of the city’s conservatism that as a direct result of their political stance causes both the organization I work for and the city itself to lose out on what could have been a great opportunity.

Way to go city lap dogs.

But back to the positive, oh wait, no I don’t have much positive still, but rather than turn this post into a complete bitchfest I’ll change topics.

I’m not attractive. I found this out as I was sitting at the Tanq bar and a lady who is involved with the hair stylist conference this week comes up and tells the bar tender that she’ll pay him to be in the show as she is looking for attractive men to get their hair cut on stage. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise to me as I’m about 20lbs over weight and have recently cut my hair very short.

Besides having to deal with this stab to my ego, I find myself dateless for the Singing in the Rain Musical tomorrow night. Wife is busy and I have literally no one I can bring with me. Sigh, center, center solo…
In other news I began playing DDO, Dungeons and Dragons Online, as I’ve had no MMO to waste my time with, and found myself somewhat liking it. The micro-transactions I have ignored as they are geared towards players who want a quick push ahead of others, but they ultimately won’t matter later in the game (congrats on getting to level 4 before me or having a different looking character model).

I did do the first three quests, which unlocked the “hard” mode for each and allowed me to do them again on “hard” which as a Cleric War Priest doesn’t mean shit (I couldn’t go all the way easy mode with a human or elf cleric, so I did make it a Halfling, but still…). This weekend I should hit level 2…

I should mention that while this game is very control and graphically inferior to most other recent MMO’s like WoW and STO, it’s still manageable, fun, though since its DnD leveling actually means something. You don’t have 80 levels of grinding, but the difference between a level 1 and a level 2, or even 20 characters, much like in PnP DnD is drastically different. If you’ve ever played a D20 based game, you’ll know that at level 20 is when you enter “epic” levels and are somewhat of a demigod.

Only real gripe I have right now is that all my names were either not allowed or taken…

Taken: Diamond Greyus, Diamon Greyus, Cake Pony, Pony Cake

Not Allowed: Moist (either as a first or last name), Muffin (either as a first or last name)

I ended up on Thelanis as Moyst Mufin

Fuck you Turbine naming blockers.

  • Share/Bookmark

Marketing with no money

Posted by admin | Posted on 05-04-2010

Category : Content Producer, Marketing

Tags: , , , ,

With budget cuts and everyone trying to keep a buck in their hand I’ve been looking at various ways to promote businesses with little to no money involved.

Now the easiest thing is always going with the social media angle, a reTweet here for a mention or a cross post amongst Facebook pages, but I needed something that was going to draw in foot traffic to our downtown core. While social media can do this, our pages, and our partner pages, don’t have enough draw right now to really make a large movement happen yet. So what was I to do? I decided to try applying my same cross promoting social media plans to business scenarios and came up with the following two promotions.

The first promotion I had, which is still yet to be determined if it’s worked out or not, is a cross promotion I set up between Cryptic Studios, makers of the Star Trek Online game, and our Tech Museum, which has been featuring a Star Trek Exhibit. I started approaching the marketing department at Cryptic back in December, and our office heads here at Team San Jose. Through a long series of events it took until just a few weeks ago before I could get all of the decision makers together on a conference call. In the end Cryptic agreed to mention the Star Trek Exhibit to their player base in exchange for us letting them distribute STO game time flyers at the exhibit.

Hopefully we’ll see if we can’t drum up some business for the Tech, and maybe the MMO as well.

The second promotion isn’t so much a marketing promotion, but rather an opportunity for the city. We were recently approached by a company called Hear Planet, who has developed a phone application that allows users to listen to descriptions of places via their phone. Don’t know what something is, open the app and listen to the narrator tell you what the museum, club or store are all about. We’ve set it a partnership with them so that our entire database of businesses is being uploaded to them. While this doesn’t bring in a monetary value for us, it allows us to be one of the main providers of information for the city of San Jose, as well as make sure all of our venues and partners are getting listed.

I’m currently working on trying to get a city-wide event planned with Foursquare, but it’s yet to be seen if this will happen and I have a few other ideas I’d like to implement before the end of June. I’m hoping at some point during the next few months I’ll be able to follow up with this with some good news.

  • Share/Bookmark

Are you Hot or Not?

Posted by admin | Posted on 24-03-2010

Category : Content Producer

Tags: , ,

So in preparation for the new website I’m working on for TSJ, I’ve been asked to come up with a list of the four “Hot & Happening” places for Dining, Nightlife, Arts & Culture, Shopping, etc. They’ll ideally rotate every 30 days or so.

My first thought was that I needed to come up with a system to rank places. While I could go to Yelp and pick out the four highest rated places, I needed to experience each one for myself, as well as I need to see how the owners or managers interaction with us would be.

I start with pulling a list of the ten top places in each category from Yelp and as long as they have over 50 reviews. Anything under 50 makes me leery, though if it’s a new place, like six months old I’ll consider it. I then visit each one of these places as a patron, and I don’t mention who I am or what I am doing. I then go back about a week later on a different day and mention that I am, what I am doing and if I could meet with the manager or owner. It’s relevant to note that my reception is usually different once people know that I’m more than just a typical visitor.

I find the first time it’s very beneficial to ask other patrons or even the venues staff “so what’s been really popular downtown lately, it’s been a while since I’ve visited?” this question will give a lot of useful insight the first anonymous visit, though the second visit when I introduce myself will only give me a rundown of the current places activities and events. So it’s useless to ask this any other time, but on the first visit before you introduce yourself.

I then talk to the owner/manager and discuss cross promotion opportunities with them, as a non-profit everything we do is a free service, so I’m not selling anything to them, simply just offering an exchange of promoting them on our site in exchange for a link back to us or a onetime shout out on their social media feed. This part here is a bit interesting because it wouldn’t actually matter if these companies wanted nothing to do with us as it is TSJ’s job to promote the city of San Jose and therefore, you’re a sure in, even if you don’t want to work with us, we’ll list your business on our website and repost your events on our social media pages.

Now it’s time to pick the places for Hot & Happening…If a place gets three check marks I put them in the slot. If I have more than four places then I put which one I liked more in and save the other one for next month’s list. So how do my check marks work?

Check Mark 1: You have an average of 3.5+ Stars on Yelp. I find this to be very generous.

Check Mark 2: When I visited your venue the first time anonymously patrons were telling me they come here often or like the place rather than telling me “eh, it’s ok, it’s close by” or “I just came in and I don’t know if I’d come back” or, and I have heard this, “I don’t know why I come here, I hate this place, my friends make me go” – note: this goes the same for how the staff at the venue like or dislike the place too.

Check Mark 3: Did the manager/owner blow me off, not follow up or did he call me back, meet with me and listen to what I had to offer him?

Check Mark 4: Personal and Professional Bias. Ultimately the decision is mine alone to list a place on our website, and while I consider myself fair, if we have a business owner who is good friends with our CEO, or my boss, or even myself, I’ll probably nudge them in first before anyone else, provided they pass the first two Check Marks. At the same time, if a business has been bashing our company or has had an altercation with an employee, they may get bumped down, though honestly this hasn’t happened with anyone who has passed the Yelp and Visit marks.

So what now? We’re still a few months away, so all the ones I picked for this Hot & Happening may change shortly, but it at least gives me a good list to keep an eye on as I funnel in new or additional places to check out as we get closer to launch.

  • Share/Bookmark

The ebb and flow of content producing (part three)

Posted by admin | Posted on 26-01-2010

Category : Content Producer, Marketing

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

I wake up at 7:30 am and I’m grouchy. I hate mornings. But I’m up because I have a conference call at 8:30am with the east coast. I head into work and place in my call. We chat for an hour about case studies, what info I need, who I need it from, when I need it by and when it will go live.

A marketing department email goes out from my boss shortly after and this is my queue that I’ll need to send out my Social Media email later today, after his has had time to digest with everyone. I prepare my email, make sure my attachments and links are working and save the draft so it’s ready to go later on.

I hit up our Twitter and Facebook pages, making sure we have something going on today in our city I can post about. I also notice we’ve had some replies to us and so I respond. Next I log into our webmaster email and clear out 119 spam messages that made it through our filter, as well as add several more emails to our blocked sender list.

It’s nearing noon and there is a lunch meeting on Stress. I attend and learn some fun facts on nutrition, breathing, exercise and stress management. There is a good chance I won’t implement any of these things in my daily life as I long for the sweet embrace of death, but I’d like to think that someday I’ll have the time to do these things.

Back at my desk and I finish stuffing my face from the food at the meeting as I send out my email. Within minutes I have three people sending me questions. Most of it is useful, of course there is one that asks a question that if they had read my email they’d know the answer, but they didn’t. Still, I reply nicely with the answer to their inquiry. I respond to the others as well and then I prepare the text for my follow up email I will send out tomorrow when I get in. I also email some department heads with whom I’ll be meeting with over the next couple weeks to do Q&A sessions with.

I decide I want to pretty this up, and so I have a layout I have worked on in InDesign that I’ll need to copy my Word file into. Note: we typically send each other PDF’s with our emails internally because our mailboxes are small and everyone has gotten into the habit of saving the PDF’s in their personal folders to review later.

I have three follow up items on my desk, software packages I’m supposed to look over and then talk about with our office manager and PR department for photo management. Fortunately I have been given a write up on each from our UI Designers, but I take a look at each company’s website and product page and see what type of reviews I can dig up. I look through them all and jot down some notes that I’ll refer to in the meeting.

Next I need an article, I heard on the radio coming in to work that Jay-Z would be in town next month and so I work up an article on Hip Hop Across the Bay and talk about the Hyphy subgenre of Hip Hop and list some of the Bay Area artists such as E-40 and Too Short. I pass it along to our office manager for review and then my wife is calling me asking where I am. It’s 7pm and she wants to know when I’m coming home. I tell her “I’ll be home, when I get home” and hang up. It’s rude, but she knows better than to call asking this question when there isn’t a meaningful reason to ask.

I end up going through my revisions from pervious articles, update them, file them where they belong and organize my notes for tomorrow’s meeting. I check in with my own email and social media outlets to see if there is anything I need to respond too. It’s now a little after 8pm and I’m heading home.

  • Share/Bookmark

The ebb and flow of content producing (part deux)

Posted by admin | Posted on 20-01-2010

Category : Content Producer, Marketing

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

So what skill sets do you need to be a Content Producer? I view it as a jack-of-all-trades type of job and in no particular order here is my list…

Key Item One: Writing

On one hand you need to be able to write when asked about any subject, but this doesn’t mean you need to be Hemingway. As long as you can write the bulk of the content, other people in your department will be required to proof your work so you don’t need perfect grammar and spelling – though it helps and less people will laugh at your at work. Anyone who actually expects a Content Producer or any type of writer to proof their own work is doing it wrong and asking for slip ups as anyone, I don’t care how good you are, will make mistakes. You can have an editor who is also a writer and a writer who is also a good editor, but you can’t have them proof their own work.

Key Item Two: Research

This ties into the first part of writing, being able to write about any subject as you’re tasked with it. This really requires that you be able to do research, as you may not always be familiar with what you’re being asked to write about. If you’re asked to write about something and aren’t pulling up Google, Wikipedia or a binder of printouts from under your desk before writing about something you’re either already an expert on the subject or you’re faking it and going to get caught.

Key Item Three: Technology

While much of content producing is all about the writing you work closely enough with Graphic Designers, Web Developers and Social Media that you need to be familiar with their work and not just know that HTML is used in websites. You need to know what backend the company you are working on is using as this will help you to know what functions you can ask them to include. For example, I know that our development team is building our site using Drupal, and there was an issue where we were concerned about using 3rd party site feeds with profanity. Fortunately I found a free online resource that filters syndicated RSS feeds and the developers are building it into the site as a plug-in.

In the end my knowledge of CMS (Content Management Systems) such as Drupal and WordPress plays a decent role in my day to day tasks, even though I’m not necessarily coding anything myself in PHP or MySQL – I’m familiar with their functionality enough to know what I can ask for and expect it done quickly versus what would have to be built from scratch.

While it may not be essential, as you’ll more than likely have a web guy you can go to, having a working knowledge of HTML, PHP, ASP, and MySQL will help a lot. You don’t need the knowledge to build a database or a store from scratch, but it’ll help if you know how to edit meta tags on your own, add in widgets where they belong and all the little things that let your web people feel comfortable with you touching the site and not worried you’re going to break something.

It’s also important to know what Social Media platforms are out there and what will work best for your company. Just because Facebook is really popular doesn’t mean that your company may want to focus on a fan page on there. You need to be familiar with a lot of them and stay on top of trends to be able to justify to your teams about why one may be more worthwhile than another.

Key Item Four: Staying Current

To tag along with the last part my technology comments you need to stay current with technology and trends. This means checking in with sites like Slashdot and Mashable, among others, on a regular, almost daily, basis to stay up to date with current technology features.

Key Item Five: Design

While you’ll more than likely have a graphic designer to help you out, it’s a lot easier if you can be involved in the mockups for site UI and other site imagery as it’ll make it a lot easier when communicating with other artists if you can think like them as well as getting the exact look and feel you want incorporated to your site.

Key Item Six: Networking

While a lot of what I do requires me to be in front of a computer, or on my BlackBerry, there are times when I need to do an article on an event and this requires that I actually attend the event and talk to enough people that I can get some useful quotes or additional information. While you don’t need to be a social butterfly, you’ll want to at least be able to approach the people you need to and ask them what you want to know, or what your readers want to know.

In addition to this you need to be able to get yourself introduced to people who you need to talk to. For example, I’m currently working on a featured piece on Women Owned Businesses for our new site. While I only new one person who fit the description, she was kind enough to introduce me to four of her girlfriends who also own businesses and guess what, they each know someone else they can introduce me too as well.

Key Item Seven: Discipline

You need to be the type of person who is project orientated and will get your tasks completed ahead of time. Why ahead of time? Because someone up the later will always prioritize some article or project, ahead of your other tasks, that you won’t know about or be familiar with, without ever mentioning it to you ahead of time, and expect you to drop everything to get it completed now.

While being able to work from home and set your own hours is great, you do need to actually make sure you’re getting stuff done. People rarely tolerate mishaps when they don’t see you in the office often.

It’s worth mentioning that if you can’t get your tasks done from home, it may help to go into the office and work from there as I know a few people who just lose focus if they’re not glued to their seats.

Key Item Eight: Creativity

You have to be able to take vague concepts and develop them into a final product. For example, most of the time when someone asks me to do a specific article or column for their site I’m asked simply “Hey Mike, we need something to go here. We don’t have any ideas, so come up with something.” This means I need to look at the site I’m going to write for as well as the section this new article will go in and see what topics would fit. I then need to come up with a few ideas, research them, write about them and submit them back for review and if they choose one I’ll need to make sure I have some artwork ready to go, or at least to give them an idea of what they should do.

  • Share/Bookmark

The ebb and flow of content producing (part one)

Posted by admin | Posted on 19-01-2010

Category : Content Producer, Marketing

Tags: , , , ,

While this may come across as being vain, a lot of people have asked me what, exactly, it is I do as an Online Content Producer and what they should focus on at their jobs to move into this type of position and so I find myself writing about a day in the life of me. It’s a bit hefty so I’ve broken this into two parts. The first is a Day in the Life of Me, the second is what I think you should focus on if you want to get into this line of work.

Being someone who isn’t a morning person I wake up around 9am on Monday and arrive in the office around 10am. I make sure I log into our Twitter and Facebook pages, that while we haven’t made them public, I post updates on so that when they do launch a couple weeks before our new website release that they won’t look barren. I also stop by my personal social media outlets to report or link to anything I think is relevant to my own followers and friends, such as the Star Trek Exhibit or Avenue Q.

In my inbox is a bunch of Google Alerts I set up for our company. I look for anything I should forward to our Public Relations department or Sales Team. I also have an email from our web development team informing me of what website functions and sections they are building out this week. This is relevant to me as I’ll need to come up with content for these areas of the site.

The requirements are vague, a featured article section, a community page and sports venues among others. I then leave my desk to go grab some coffee and think about what I want to fill in these areas. When I arrive back I have three story ideas in my head for the articles I quickly jot down because I will forget them. I then go through some websites that compete directly with us or offer similar types of information, in either case I want to make sure that I’m not about to write about something that was already done, or if it is something that really needs to be talked about on our site that it’s done in a unique way.

So what do I come up with, San Jose Sharks, Technology and Golf. Keeping in mind that articles on our site run one to four paragraphs, as that’s the longest people really want to read online from a non-blog/non-news site, I pull up Wikipedia and after reading more than I ever wanted to know about the history of the San Jose Sharks, I work up a write-up that highlights a couple key facts mixed in with some of my fan boy commentary.

The next thing I do is start Google searching for local Golf Courses in my area and end up finding a great site that features user reviews and focuses on golfing in our area. I email the site owner asking if I can link to his site and how I’ll be linking to it. (Note: they don’t always respond this fast, but this particular one did) I get an email a little while later and he agrees, so I write up a one paragraph blurb about golfing in my area, drop some names of the prominent course and include a link to his site.

Now for technology, fortunately our company works with some rather interesting organizations that focus on Art & Technology. Having spoken with them and having previous write-ups on their organizations I take a look through my old files and check out the latest news on their website before I write-up what you could consider a brief advertorial of these organizations.

While I’ll need to add new articles each month, it’s not something I need to work on today. So now it’s on to the community page. I take a look at the prototype our developer has sent over and compare it with the UI design our front end developers are working on (yes we have two different developers). I realize that most of the items are dynamic pulls from feeds. Fortunately I had pulled together a list of over 40 local blog and corresponding twitter feeds a while back for another project so I’m able to incorporate most of these into the page. I do end up having to stop by Yelp and create some custom city feeds, but all things considered, this is the easiest page to set up. I then send an email to our developers making sure they’ll add a field or widget for allowing users to upload their photos and feeds.

By this time I’m a bit hungry and feeling a sense of accomplishment so I send off an email to one of the sales team members to see if they want to do a working lunch to talk about some of the sports related venues. He agrees and we go eat and talk about his clients, their needs and the venues he works with. They’re all very niche and I jot down the names of each on my phone.

I’m feeling tired after eating and so I head home and take a nap. After I wake up I go to my computer and begin Google Searching for the website of each of his venues. I copy and paste the About Us section into a Word document and print it out. I read it over and then I start to write a brief paragraph or two on each of the facilities and include a link to their sites.

I then take everything I’ve written for that day and email it to our proofing person; I also send a copy of the sports venues to the sales person I had lunch with so he can make sure his clients are correctly represented in the write-ups. Our proof person is also our departments Office Manager, so she’ll get back to me by tomorrow with any corrections or changes to the text. I usually try to get this all over to her by 6pm.

So my articles are written, but I’m going to need some imagery for these articles and sections. I send an email off to our graphics department asking for specific images that we have on file I think will fit well with the stories. For those that I know we don’t have images of, I go through my own image libraries at home, as well as, browse various stock art images online. Once I’ve found some that I like I include them in my folders with the articles. It’s important to note, that no matter what images I choose at some point the UI developers or our graphic designers may come up with something better, but I always need to have something ready to go just in case.

By now it’s around 8pm. I’m done with my tasks for today and the rest of the week will involve making updates to my articles, submitting them to our Marketing Director to ensure that they fit in with the rest of our website content and following up on any items I didn’t get a chance to finish. By the end of the week I’ll have the finals done and I’ll be ready for next week’s items. I’ll also have at least two meetings with either department heads or partners we work with who will want to ask me about writing an article on a specific topic related to them, which you almost always need to accept.

  • Share/Bookmark

A Path Less Followed

2

Posted by admin | Posted on 05-01-2010

Category : Off The Cuff

Tags: , , , ,

While strolling through various blogs online I came across this post from Jason Falls, a very successful and popular Marketing/Creative person. (Note: his post is from a year ago, so maybe he has changed his mind, didin’t find a follow up post to it though.)

That said, I found his article interesting and while his readers obviously agree with him, I just can’t help but feel odd about my own situation. I mean, I’m not a famous Marketing person. I’m not the worlds best Graphic Designer. I don’t have an art degree and I’m definitely not a Chris Brogan when it comes to Social Media. Yet, I manage to make what I do have work for me, and sometimes I get very, very lucky.

For some reason I’ve always been able to make things work that shouldn’t. For example, in September of 2009 I was working as a Marketing & Design Manager for Colliers International. The people were great, but after 8 years I felt like I wanted to really focus on my writing more, as well as delve deeper into Social Media and be more on the forefront of emerging technologies. For most people this would mean starting to network with people in these fields more or at the very least coming up with some type of three-step plan to success they outlined from a self-help book.

What did I do? I quit my job.

Three weeks notice, as I didn’t want to burn any bridges. I took about two weeks off to lounge around, and then I started sending out resumes, in Word format, with a generic cover letter and references attached. I hit up job postings on Craigslist and Backpage, while also updating my profiles on Monster, CareerBuilder and Dice. I’d get up in the morning around 9 am and until noon I would send out between 10 and 25 emails a day. I also posted some ads using VFlyer on various job boards promoting my Marketing and Design work.

I ended up with at least two interviews a week, and within a month I had a part-time marketing and social media consultant job, and another month later, a full time position with the city of San Jose as an Online Content producer – which is pretty much my dream job as it combines writing and Social Media. Don’t get me wrong though, I have done many things in my life where many circumstances and my own choices have caused me to fail miserably, and I even found myself in a bankruptcy, but failure and success both exist.

So what’s my point?

I don’t know if I have one really, at least I wouldn’t ever recommend to someone to take a chance like I did, but I guess part of me does want to let people out there know that you can follow your dreams and succeed. If nothing else, I do think that Social Media may help you get a job, if you’re currently laid off or looking to change career, I think you can take some time to work on your online networking skills and leverage that into a position.

So maybe you can take a chance, sometimes it won’t work out, and other times it will. I don’t believe in fate and I don’t believe in miracles, but I do believe in myself, and I think that’s a good start for everyone out there right now. Believe in yourself and make it happen, find the job you want to do and do it, and if it doesn’t exist, create the job yourself.

  • Share/Bookmark

Switch to our mobile site