Langley Center for New Media’s 2nd Annual Content Marketing Retreat will take place Thursday January 26, 2012 and Friday January 27, 2012 on Whidbey Island just north of Seattle.
The conference covers the entire life cycle of content marketing (see image at left), from strategy and creation to curation and measurement. Tim will give two presentations on best practices for analytics and measurement.
According to a recent study by the Custom Content Council with Roper Affairs, custom content helps build awareness, drives purchases and improves relationships with customers. The survey reveals:
How well-oiled are your content marketing efforts? If you find them a bit squeaky perhaps this is the right conference for you. You can register by clicking the button below.
Register for Content Marketing Retreat
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Our team is fun, passionate, creative, whip-smart….and growing!
We need someone who enjoys creating solutions for clients as well as co-workers, and who is eager to take a leadership role at our company.
The Experience Director will be responsible for ensuring that all design and technology solutions dovetail with, and reinforce, the client’s brand and marketing objectives. To that end, this position is equal parts client contact (particularly during the sales, discovery, and definition processes), high-level UX direction, and creative oversight and management. This includes branding, ID, media, marketing, and web-based projects.
The position will also entail guiding and collaborating with our creative teams on best practices for both internal and client-facing projects as well as other strategic company initiatives, many of which are driven by a passion for sustainability.
This is a great opportunity to join a culturally unique company with a talented and creative team of passionate individuals who want to build socially responsible business solutions. It is a contract-to-full-time position with a 90 day trial period. Compensation relative to experience. If you are an overseas or recruiting firm, don’t bother us. (Seriously!)
]]>Attend Wednesday’s Chicago Drupal Meetup Group (CDMUG) event to learn what’s new in the land of Drupal.
Bryan Zera will be presenting all the fun things you can do with Drupal’s Features Module.
One of the biggest challenges developers face when building Drupal sites collaboratively is managing version control for elements like views, taxonomies, content types and any content that’s stored inside the database. Enter the Features module, which allows you to package settings that are normally held in a database into a module file which can be version controlled using your favorite source code management tool.
Bryan will talk about how Features works, how it’s used to develop Drupal sites collaboratively at Mightybytes and what caveats you must watch out for when using it.
Here are the details for this event:
6:00 - Doors Open, Arrival, and Socialize
6:30 - Meetup Starts: Hello and Community Updates
6:45 - Presentation: David & Ryan - D7 @FieldMuseum
7:30 - Presentation: Kelly Meath - My First Module
8:00 - Break with Questions and Answers
8:15 - Presentation: Bryan Zera - Features Module
9:00 - Beer @Dick’s Last Resort (315 N Dearborn St)
Two of Mightybytes projects were selected by The International Academy of Visual Arts to receive 2011 W³ Awards.
The winning projects are:
Winning entries for The W³ Awards are selected by the International Academy of the Visual Arts. The IAVA oversees all judging and provides strategic direction for The W³ Awards judging. Less than 10% of all entries are selected as Gold Winners.
]]>Mightybytes is looking to add a smart, talented developer to our smart, talented posse of digital pros.
If you dream in PHP, Drupal or jQuery/jQTouch, we want to talk to you!
This developer at Mightybytes will work with project managers, information architects, and designers to bring the functional end of web projects to life.
We have a fun and flexible creative work environment that carries with it the usual challenges of any deadline-oriented business. We appreciate autonomy, mastery and creative thinking as well as good communication skills. And if you happen to have an appreciation for brewing beer, all the better!
This is an onsite or remote contract-to-full-time position with a 90 day trial period. Compensation relative to experience. If you are an overseas or recruiting firm, don’t bother us. (Seriously!)
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Mightybytes recently won three American Graphic Design Awards from Graphic Design USA magazine.
The projects recognized were:
Juried by Graphic Design USA magazine for nearly five decades, the American Graphic Design Awards recognizes outstanding achievement in graphic arts of all kinds: print, packaging, point-of-purchase, internet, interactive and motion graphics. It’s open to everyone in the community, attracting over 8,000 entries in this year’s contest. Only the top 15% are awarded, and we’re honored to be part of that crowd.
Nine previous Mightybytes projects have also earned these awards. For more information on Mightybytes’ industry recognition, check out our Awards page.
]]>Bike advocacy and biking for the planet are popular pastimes with our crew.
In May, Joy, Steve, and Tim biked the NYC to DC Climate Ride. In June, we participated in Active Transportation Alliance’s Bike to Work Week Challenge, winning with 100% participation. This Fall, Bryan, Bill and Tim are headed to California for a 320 mile excursion down the coast in the name of sustainable solutions and a green economy. They are raising funds for Climate Ride and need your help!
We each have different personal reasons for participating in Climate Ride but one thing is consistent: we believe in the organization and the great work it does.
“I believe in the principle of eating good food grown in a sustainable way. I believe in the principle of efficiency in transportation as manifest in biking. I believe in the principle of clean power. Climate Ride is about all these things and more, which is why I am raising money and tasking myself with this physical challenge.”
“I am volunteering for Climate Ride because I believe in the great work of the beneficiaries, especially Embarq, Green America, and ClimateCounts.org. At one point I applied for a job with 1% for the Planet as well. My experience so far with the people involved has been great. I have volunteered with numerous organizations and a lot of times have been let down on the day of the event. I am encouraged that Climate Ride is an organization that I want to continually be involved with. Also, after a personal health scare, I am committed to making cycling a larger part of my fitness activities.”
“If you ask me, we should all be doing what we can while we’re able to. I’m biking the Climate Ride California because I believe in the power we can have to impact the world when we all come together. I feel blessed to be young, healthy, driven, and totally capable of completing my second Climate Ride of the year. I’m raising money for the Active Transportation Alliance and the League of American Bicyclists, both of which are dedicated to providing safe, more efficient and sustainable methods of transportation including walking, biking and public transit. The ATA specifically is based in Chicagoland, focusing on safe routes to school, safer sidewalks, crash reduction, and more throughout our local community. John Lennon was right on. ‘Power to the People.’ We can do this!”
“For me this Climate Ride is embodied in four simple words: Keystone Tar Sands Pipeline. Tar sands are one of the biggest greenhouse gas offenders. The Alberta, Canada Tar Sands produce over 36 million tons of carbon dioxide per day, more than 1.3 million cars. There is currently one of the largest environmentally-driven civil disobedience acts going on at the White House right now to protest a pipeline which will bring tar sands oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, an area that still hasn’t recovered from last year’s BP oil spill. Take a look at this alarming video produced by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Josh Fox (Gasland):
According to Josh Fox’s video, this pipeline looks like it could potentially run through my hometown of Iron Mountain, Michigan and that is literally too close to home for me.
Plus, the Climate Ride experience is an amazing one. Five days of working hard, sharing, and learning while surrounded by a talented and incredible group of people makes for an outlook-changing endeavor.”
Climate Ride has expanded its list of beneficiaries from three in 2010 to twenty-seven in 2011, so there are more ways than ever to make a difference. More importantly, we can now raise money for a local cause! Chicago’s Active Transportation Alliance, an organization dedicated to making bicycling, walking and public transportation safe, convenient and fun in Chicago, is the ride’s newest beneficiary. ATA advocates for transportation that encourages and promotes safety, physical activity, health, recreation, social interaction, equity, environmental stewardship, and resource conservation.
Please consider making a donation at the link below. Every little bit makes a difference. Thank you.
Bryan, Bill, Tim and Joy
]]>Attend Tuesday’s Arts & Business Council’s workshop to learn how to improve your online marketing efforts through the use of social media and website analytics.
Online Marketing is not easy, especially if you don’t have methods to measure the performance of your marketing efforts. Installing Google Analytics or a paid analytics service to evaluate you website’s performance is a good start. But you can easily get buried under mounds of data if you don’t know what metrics are important to your business. And once you have data on these metrics, how do you use it?
At this workshop Tim will take an in-depth look at:
At this workshop you will learn how to measure and report on visitor interactions on your website and social media platforms. But more importantly you will learn how to go beyond mere reporting of data by pulling actionable insights from the numbers that will energize your marketing efforts and help you reach your business goals.
Here are the details for this workshop:
Download this presentation file:
Download ArtsBiz Council Presentation (2.4 MB PDF file)
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Check out this Monday’s AUG Chicago (Chicago Area Adobe Users Group) meeting for ideas on how to build business using your website, social media tools, and iterative measurement strategies.
Building a sweet site, setting up Facebook and Twitter profiles, even ranking well in search engines doesn’t mean a thing if customers aren’t lining up to buy your products or services. In this meeting, Tim will discuss how you can get these elements to work in tandem with one another to build business. The session will explore strategies behind creating and maintaining a successful online presence that includes optimized site performance, community engagement across social channels, and iterative measurement and analytics tactics to drive results. He will also use several case studies to show exactly how these elements work in tandem to help grow your business.
Success requires equal parts engagement, marketing, community management, measurement, content strategy, and of course a kick-ass web/mobile site. So whether you are a developer, designer, or manager, this presentation will give you some practical nuggets of information that you can use to improve the online performance of your business.
Here are the details on this session:
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Prior to launching into the full-fledged festivities of Andersonville Green Week, Mightybytes is co-sponsoring this documentary on eco-terrorism and the darker side of living green. Join us at Chicago Filmmakers on Friday, July 8th at 8:00 PM.
Marshall Curry’s documentary tells the story of the Earth Liberation Front’s (E.L.F.) Pacific Northwest sleeper cells whose malaise with public protest—and the police’s aggressive tactics—decided that traditional forms of peaceful protest and activism resulted in an inability to lead change and subsequently targeted private property as a way to economically sabotage companies the E.L.F. decided were destroying the environment.
Throughout the 1990s and into 2001, The E.L.F. burned down timber companies, slaugherhouses, S.U.V. dealerships and a $12 million ski lodge in Vail, Co. The E.L.F. also destroyed the Center for Urban Horticulture at the University of Washington due to a false belief that they were raising genetically engineered plants. All in all, this E.L.F. cell’s string of actions caused nearly $80 million in property damage. In March 2001 the American arm of the E.L.F. was designated as the country’s “No. 1 domestic terrorist threat” by the F.B.I.
The film focuses on Daniel McGowan, a seemingly gentle guy born in Brooklyn, NY and raised in Rockaway, Queens—whose dad’s was a New York cop—was a business major in college, and while working in corporate public relations saw a documentary about environmental destruction and afterwards went to work with a variety of environmental organizations in New York. It was in New York that McGowan realized that continued environmental destruction seemed imminent. McGowan says, “I engaged in the ‘representative democracy’ kind of activism, but my heart was never in it.”
McGowan subsequently moved to Eugene, OR and decided to take active engagement in the radical E.L.F. He says, “At some level, I thought it (E.L.F. actions) was effective. If I would have written a statement that I think genetic-engineered trees are bad and old-growth logging is bad and sent it to every media outlet in the counry, it wouldn’t have been paid attention to. There is something really strange about when you attach a statement to an arson it suddenly becomes newsworthy….it is like propaganda with teeth.”
McGowan was taken into custody in Brooklyn, NY in 2005 and brought to trial (back in Oregon) on charges of terrorism for his participation in E.L.F.-related arson plots. The government threatended McGowan with a maximum 335-year sentence. The film shows how a determined F.B.I. can pin the co-defendants against each other to bring down these suspected (though not formally charged) “terrorists.”
What would lead someone passionate about a cause to meddle with private property and potentially threaten the livelihood of innocent people instead of leading change nonviolently? Do crimes against property in which no one is killed or injured really constitute as acts of terrorism? See the film and share your thoughts! There will be a discussion immediately following the film.