jflateman / February 22, 2010, 10:21 am
Who would have ever thought that after a few attempts at making your own home/office brew that we could sit down with our team, identify a client that we would LOVE to work with and then WIN them? Brooklyn Brewery, with its headquarters in Williamsburg Brooklyn, has just signed Blenderbox to be their 2010 Digital Agency of Record. Brooklyn Brewery was started in 1987 By Steve Hindy and distributes a number of their signature brews in 14 countries and growing. Blenderbox welcomes the opportunity to work with such a well known and respected brand. With it’s identity instilled by Milton Glaser, best know for his I Love New York campaign, Brooklyn Brewery will be a great brand to add to the Blenderbox client Roster. We look forward to some inspiring brainstorming sessions catalyzed by a Brooklyn Lager or Cookie Jar Porter!
Jason / August 11, 2009, 6:00 pm
We are in the professional services industry and our bottom line is directly tied to accurately estimating and tracking the hours of work that our resources spend on a project. I’m sure I’m not alone in struggling with the perennial problem of getting our team to “enter their time.” We use a home-grown system called “Homefry” which is integrated with Quickbooks and helps us track everyone’s time against particular job codes.
Everyone has different habits for keeping track of their time—some people jot down their time on a notebook and enter it all in at the end of the day or end of the week. Others use virtual post-its on their desktop, and others use their outlook calendar. Most people, do not enter time as they go, and as a result most people are always behind and trying to catch up on their time entry. This makes accurately reporting on budget vs. actual for various projects very difficult.
A few years ago I heard of an agency that made people sing “I’m a little teapot” whenever someone showed up late for a meeting. In that vein, I decided it was time to implement an incentive, something from the negative reinforcement camp (I don’t think a reward for most up-to-date time would work).
Introducing the Public Shame 2000. We purchased this device from Karaoke.com a few weeks ago, and the mere threat of having to perform karaoke (sober) in front of the entire office during our Tuesday morning staff meetings has been enough to nip this problem in the bud once and for all. I’m pleased to report that everyone’s time has been consistently up-to-date since the day we introduced this machine.
We have yet to turn on this machine, however, I’m sure that day will come at the next after hours office party.
Heather / May 29, 2009, 1:13 pm
Earlier this week, Blenderbox CEO and Co-Founder Jason Jeffries presented at the Brooklyn Business Summit on the importance of good customer relations.
Created by the Brooklyn Business Center, the Brooklyn Business Summit is dedicated to providing a “progressive venue and agenda for small business owners and entrepreneurs looking to become small business owners”. After building three successful businesses, Jason has gained extensive insight into creating and maintaining quality relationships with his clients and customers, insight that he shared with 50 small business owners at Wednesday’s Customer Satisfaction & Retention workshop.
Cutting through the traditional Customer Relation jargon, Jason mapped out a simple and effective guide to securing customer satisfaction using a modified version of the “Blenderbox method” — Listen, Think, Create, Deliver. By listening to your customer’s needs and desires, making your service memorable, and maintaining a personal involvement in your company’s client relationships, you can positively shape the perception of your company and generate quality business leads.
The message is simple, should business owners wish to embrace it: listening to what your clients have to say about your methods and addressing these critiques in your process is always the most effective way to keep your clients happy and your business booming.
While the next Brooklyn Business Summit has yet to be scheduled, video of Jason’s presentation will be available on their site soon, so keep checking back for more details.
Nathan / October 3, 2008, 8:53 am
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/archaeopteryx-bowkett
Giles Bowkett’s presentation from the RubyFringe conference has been getting a lot of attention lately, with good reason. InfoQ calls it a “highly politicized call to action in a career-defining presentation that is raucously hilarious yet unnerving in its practicality”. The initial demo of Archaeopteryx, in which Giles DJs using nothing but TextMate and Ruby is interesting, but the real action starts when he gets into a discussion of the empowerment of being on the fringe.
Matt / July 29, 2008, 12:38 pm
I came across a great metaphor describing why multivariate testing of ad campaign landing pages (with a tool such as Google Website Optimizer) makes for a much more effective use of the money in an advertising budget.
The traditional way to do this is as follows:
- Agree campaign budget
- Build and sign off creatives (PPC ads, key words/phrases, landing page, offer details)
- Take a sack of money
- Move to top of building
- Shake money out of sack
- Sit back and hope
The better way to do this:
- Agree budget
- Brainstorm all the things we’d like to test (buttons, text, call to action msgs etc.)
- Take 5% of budget and finalise *multiples* of these elements to test
- Spend the 5% sending traffic to a multi-variate test
- Find the ideal creative (based on conversion data)
- Put this live
- Spend the other 95% of the budget
Jason / June 27, 2008, 10:10 am
Jason Jeffries, Blenderbox CEO, was a featured panelist discussing web marketing and social media for a Small Business Networking Event sponsored by the Alliance for Downtown New York.
The Panel was moderated by Peter Shankman, and also featured Robert Hordt, Managing Editor of Crain’s New York Business and Charlotte Eichna, Executive Editor of Our Town and West Side Spirit, part of Manhattan Media.
Matt / June 25, 2008, 12:32 pm
Khoi Vinh on getting good ideas out faster by collaborating closely:
TimesPeople is the result of a tight collaboration between a small team of our technologists and designers and, for a new feature on our site, they managed to launch it in something like record time. It was actually a lot of fun bringing it to life, but the really important thing is the try-it-and-see approach that drove it. Rather than spend months and millions on creating the ‘perfect’ social networking addition to our site, we decided to take a good idea and get it out as quickly as possible. It’s certainly not perfect, but we’re hoping to learn as much as we can about how social networking makes sense in the Times environment.
From “People Wanted” (subtraction.com)
Matt / January 24, 2008, 12:22 pm
This looks like a good one to add to your RSS reader.
The CMS Myth strongly believes in the power of web CMS to be a key enabler for achieving online success. We recommend and deliver web CMS systems every day. Done right, a web CMS can be the nucleus of your web strategy and lift up all of your online marketing initiatives.
Yet for every “market leading” CMS, for every brilliant online strategy and web application, there’s a misguided effort or an ill-conceived approach ready to derail your web initiative. The goal of The CMS Myth is to help you avoid those landmines.
A couple of recent posts from their blog:
Found via InfoDesign
