Self-serve(ing): Best of Boston® iPhone App
August 6, 2010 by Anita Tandon · View Comments
We’ve got a lot of foodies over here at Holland-Mark, which means that every meal decision is a big one. Whether it was the ponderous process of sorting through user reviews or skepticism about the source content, we decided something needed to be done. And thus our first technology innovation was born – the Best of Boston® iPhone app.
Working with our friends at Boston magazine, we developed an iPhone application that allows consumers to search and access content from the magazine’s highly regarded annual Best of Boston® issues. Best of Boston® is the go-to resource for the expert-selected winners in over 70 categories, from suits to sushi.
Through the app, you can access Best of Boston® winners from the last five years, searching by location, keyword, and category. You can even share what you find and save your favorites.
It simply and effectively gets you what you want: the best from the people that know what’s best. Whether you’re a tourist or a local, it’s ideal for navigating Boston.
We developed the app as part of our newly formed Venture Branding practice, spearheaded by partner Mike Troiano. The Venture Branding model has two facets: we have great ideas and take them to market or others have great ideas and we help take them to market.
Our work with Boston magazine on the Best of Boston® iPhone app is an example of the former; our work with Chris Lohring on the creation of Notch Session Ales, an example of the latter. Whichever way it works, we get to play with smart people and create viable brands and businesses. What could be better?
If you want to check out the Best of Boston® iPhone app (just in time for the weekend), click here. And let us know what you think.
Helping Start-ups Tell Their Story
August 3, 2010 by Mike Troiano · View Comments
MassChallenge is a great program to encourage the development of start-ups in Massachusetts, and we’ve been involved with it from the beginning. A couple of weeks ago they asked us to pull together some kind of workshop to help contestants tell their stories more effectively, and we’re going to start the two-week program today.
A start-up is a kind of passionate hypothesis, put forward by true believers with the conviction to work long hours in service to a vision. Entrepreneurship, for me anyway, is the process of corrupting that vision with the external reality… adjusting it to the inevitable successes and failures along the way, sometimes ending up in a place very different from the one you set out for.
Because of this, selling is the most important thing a start-up does. Selling grounds you in reality, shapes your vision, and — in the best case — extends your runway. Unlike marketing, selling adapts in real time. Every sales meeting should end with reflection on what worked and what didn’t in your story, evolving your pitch deck the way a stand-up comedian refines his material.
There’s a turning point in the life of most successful start-ups, though, where the rate of this iteration drops sharply. It’s the point at which you “find the button,” meaning you begin to get confirmation from the market that you are indeed solving a problem the world will pay you to solve.
It’s at that point your marketing needs to grow up. You need the courage to dump the cluttered, clumsy, and uncommitted appeals that have given you the flexibility you needed in the first phase. You need to adopt the clear, compelling, and concise messaging you’ll need to be successful in the next one.
Our One Simple Thing™ offering is all about helping brands achieve this clarity of message. Here’s how I’m going to explain it to the MassChallenge finalists today…
Annual Corporate Challenge T-Shirt
June 28, 2010 by Mike Troiano · View Comments
We’re big fans of the Corporate Challenge, and long-time participants in it. Each year we try to put something clever together for our team t-shirt, and this year we thought we’d point to our newfound status among the top 3 most Twitter-followed agencies in Boston.
The shirts:
“Pass me and I’ll twitpic your ass to our 5,122 followers.”
Related articles by Zemanta
- The Top Runners In The JP Morgan Corporate Challenge Race (JPM, GS, MS, CS) (businessinsider.com)
- Racing Along the Park With JPMorgan Chase (dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com)
FutureM is here.
June 18, 2010 by Anita Tandon · View Comments
Like you, we’ve all been to one too many marketing events … and yet, we still have the feeling we are missing out on something. We’re constantly scanning any number of event calendars and wondering if that event last night was it. But it always feels like there are too many people doing too many things in too many places to keep up … and we just wish we could figure out the big picture.
It got us thinking — along with our friends and colleagues at MITX — that there had to be a way to stage a meeting of the marketing minds that would go beyond talk. And so, between cocktails and panels and whiteboards, FutureM was born. Slated for October 4-8th, FutureM is a week-long collaborative conference on the vision for marketing in Massachusetts through an intersection of people and ideas and inspiration. It’s a chance to hear about the latest in marketing, technology, and design– together. And if the thought of nonstop keynotes scares you as much as it scares us, fear not: FutureM includes panels, roundtables, summits, parties, meet-ups, and more, because the best ideas rarely get created around a podium. We can’t wait. Check out the rumblings of the future here.
In the meantime, we wanted to share the opportunity to be a part of FutureM. If you have a topic, technology, team, or even a question that can help define what’s next for marketing, submit an event idea. So get creative and join us at the future here.
Related articles by Zemanta
- It’s Time to Tackle the Unlearning Challenge (scalableintimacy.com)
A New Notch in the Beer Market
April 23, 2010 by Mike Troiano · View Comments
Chris Lohring is, in the local parlance, “a wicked cool kid.” A longtime consumer brand guy and FOH-M, Chris was also a co-founder of Tremont Brewery, and is a beer snob like many of us at the agency.
A few months back he and Chris Colbert were having a conversation about a category Chris L. felt was about to take off in America, the category of session beers.
Session beers are so named because they’re built for a session at the local pub. Low alcohol but full flavored, they’re the one beer to have when you’re having more than two. Quoting Martyn Cornell’s great Zythophile blog:
“I love session beers. I love the way they make a good evening down the pub with friends even better. What makes a good session beer is a combination of restraint, satisfaction and ‘moreishness.’ Like the ideal companions around a pub table, a great session beer will not dominate the occasion and demand attention; at the same time its contribution, while never obtrusive, will be welcome, satisfying and pleasurable; and yet, though each glass satisfies, like each story in the night’s long craic, the best session beers will still leave you wishing for one more pint, to carry on the pleasure.”
Brewing a good session beer is tricky, because getting just the right balance of alcohol and flavor requires some vigilance over the brewing process, and a practiced hand at the barrel. Chris Lohring – having two such hands – came to us with his vision for the first 
great American session ale, and the product of his labors in a pair of re-used but properly chilled dark quart bottles. He asked our help in building the brand around “the liquid.” We signed up on the spot.
After assembling a message model in record time, including a One Simple Thing™ that was pretty straightforward (“Session”), we kicked around some brand names before finding one that said everything we needed to say: “Notch.” From there we worked up some creative treatments for the mark, then labels, then a web front-end, etc., all culminating in the brand identity you see at right.
Meanwhile, Chris focused on perfecting the recipe and timing for Notch, and on securing the right production and distribution partners. He worked the content marketing channels on his blog, Twitter, and Facebook, telling the stories of both session beer and the birth of Notch. Together we chose Boston’s SlowFest as the perfect venue to bring our creation to the public, and tonight is the big night.
Every client is special, and every project has something in it that you can bring a little bit of yourself to. But, speaking for the whole agency, Notch feels like our baby almost as much as it’s our good friend Chris Lohring’s. Bringing his vision to life and to the world has been a real privilege and a lot of fun for all of us, and we wish him and this brilliantly crafted tipple the win they so richly deserve.
Please join us to celebrate tonight with an ice cold Notch at the SlowFest VIP event…
Related articles by Zemanta
- Drinking in Boston: No Beer Fools Here (bostonist.com)
- Beer with Dinner: The Basics of Pairing Beer and Food Beer Sessions (thekitchn.com)
- Berkshire pub guide: The Hobgoblin in Reading, Berkshire (telegraph.co.uk)
- What I Did on St. Patrick’s Day (beer.gunaxin.com)
- Brewery Spotlight: Blue Point (beer.gunaxin.com)
Scalable Intimacy in Politics
March 31, 2010 by Mike Troiano · View Comments
I live in Sudbury, a dreamy little hamlet about 20 miles west of Boston. It’s very nice; we like it a lot.
Sudbury has the highest concentration of households with school-aged children of any town in Massachusetts, which makes for a very family-oriented town, and also puts a lot of focus on the quality of our schools. Each year the town sets a budget and struggles to live within it – like most towns, families, and people I know. When it can’t, the Town Fathers propose an “override,” meaning a right to raise taxes to cover expenses of the town over and above those that were budgeted.
Each year the proponents of this tax use the same slogan for this override: “Support Sudbury!” Each year they say that to maintain our first-class schools, fire, and police, we need to reach into our pockets and give a little more for the team.
Since 1999 the good people of Sudbury have “Supported Sudbury,” and this well-intended philanthropy has led to a series of challenges for the town well documented in this video highlighting some rather daunting facts and figures.
Anyhoo… I’ve had just about enough of this. And I met a like-minded denizen of the town, Bob Haarde, who’d decided to run for Selectman, and do something about it.
I met Bob for dinner at the local hangout, and we talked about how I might be able to help his campaign through the addition of a social marketing program. I offered to help, but told Bob that in the end, the program would succeed or fail not based on my talents, but based on his willingness to contribute substantive content to the channel, and to engage with the people drawn to that content. I agreed to get him started, and he agreed to create and post three pieces of original content to the system in the next 72 hours. This was important since time was short… the election was a week and a half away.
That night at my kitchen table I created and customized accounts for him on Posterous and Twitter, connecting them to each other and to a Facebook Fan Page I created from within Bob’s own Facebook account. I took the Posterous e-mail and sent it to him, with instructions to publish whatever he wanted to share with voters, described in a casual and personal way, along with whatever anecdotes he cared to share about the journey of a regular guy into his first elective office.
He began to do so, and after he’d added three or four posts I began following our fellow Sudbury-ites on Twitter, and sharing the page with my own local friends on Facebook. By the election this week – 10 days after they launched – we’d amassed 25 Twitter followers and 60 Facebook fans, collectively connected to hundreds more. The Posterous entries were being published to both channels, and being viewed natively between 50 and 100 times.
Bob Haarde is now Sudbury’s newest Selectman. He has the seeds of a coalition to deliver on his campaign promise (“Cut waste, not teachers.”), and a direct and ready channel to the network of local voters that got him elected.
And he won by 36 votes.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=a3e09506-8e28-47f3-b24e-0fd1d96c4ec2)
