Our favorite ambient cinematic electro-horror pop ensemble will perform Zontar, the Thing From Venus for the first time in its entirety at Martyrs tonight.

Terrible Spaceship’s audiovisual reinterpretation of Zontar, the Thing From Venus is based on a 1966 made-for-television creature feature, which is itself a remake of Roger Corman’s 1957 film It Conquered the World. These multiple degrees of separation, along with the forty-six years that have passed since the original Zontar graced the airwaves, gives Travis, James, Jeff, Zack and the rest of the Spaceship posse plenty of creative license to have fun with the material and bring horns, film clips, graphics, animation, and lab coats into the fray. Zontar is a must-see multimedia experience.

Tracking content marketing and social media performance remains an ongoing challenge for businesses small and large, but new tools can help make content creation, curation, and measurement easier.

Tim was recently at the 2nd Annual Content Marketing Retreat in Seattle and came back to the office talking about some new tools covered during the two day conference. Content marketing offers a wealth of opportunities for small and large businesses alike to compete in the world of search, but it can be fraught with ongoing challenges that range from resource management to software implementation, from keyword analysis to social media measurement and more. Writing blog posts is great, but how do you figure out how best to optimize your content, share it across networks, and measure its effectiveness?

Joy attended this month's Entreprenuers Unpluggd event and returned to work the next morning with gobs of insight to share with everyone, thanks to inspiring talks from the founders of 37signals, Eved and Centro.

Tuesday night I attended one of the most inspiring events I’ve ever been to. Entrepreneurs Unpluggd is an event series created by Stella Fayman, a member of the founding team at FeeFighters, and Tim Jahn, a local Chicago developer, to help (you guessed it) entrepreneurs find inspiration and gain insight into the success of other start-ups. While most events geared toward this type of audience can feel like a boring lecture with very few take-aways, Entrepreneurs Unpluggd events are more like an insightful conversation than anything. They are kept to a smaller audience, and speakers present without slides.

Google's newest merger of search and social is upon us, find out what this means for you.

On January 10, 2012, Google rolled out its latest endeavor to incorporate social aspects directly into its organic search results. This is nothing new to search engine results pages (SERPs), as Bing has been partnered with Facebook for some time now.  However, as the market share leader, Google’s announcement crystallizes the need for a comprehensive social strategy to complement search optimization efforts.

What started off as an end-of-year staff meeting evolved into a week-long string of educational sessions we have come to call ‘MightyCon.’

Our first annual MightyCon kicked off this week. The concept behind MightyCon was to use our own internal resources to knowledge share and to create stronger, more agile team members throughout each department. Mightycon 2011 featured guest speakers Pamela Meyer, Cesar Torres, Tai Palmgren and Tim Frick delivering insights and nuanced views on industry best practices.