iStrategyLabs - A Social Experiential Agency » Interactive Strategy

Honest Cities: A Tasty Social Experiment Unlike Any You’ve Seen

corbett3000 — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 09:00:23 +0000

When the much loved organic beverage company Honest Tea asked us what we could do to bring their Honest Cities experiment to the social web we saw a world of opportunity. Actually…we saw a map…of the good ol’ US-of-A. The details of what is one of the most intricate social experiential campaigns we have been a part of is as follows after the recap videos:

UPDATED – Behind the scenes look at the Honest War Room and Honest Cities recap videos:

1. Pop-up stores have been setup in 12 cities around the country where passersby could steal an Honest Tea, or put a dollar in a box to pay for one. Locations included: NYC (Foley Square), Boston (Prudential Center), Philadelphia (Love Park), DC (Dupont Circle), Atlanta (Centennial Olympic Park), Miami (CocoWalk), Cincinnati (Fountain Square), Chicago (Grant Park), Dallas (Pegasus Plaza), Seattle (Alki Beach Coastal Surf Boutique), SF (Justin Herman Plaza), and LA (West Hollywood)

2. Each Honest Store has a hidden camera streaming live video to honestcities.com all with dedicated Ustream.TV channels recording all the action.

3. The Honest Tea field team is equipped with a cross-platform mobile app that we built to enable them to record a tally of buys vs. steals at each pop-up, and also mark time-code in the streaming video with ‘interesting’ to make video recapping easier later on.

4. We built out a web and mobile-optimized microsite at honestcities.com to enable visitors to toggle between city video streams, see the real-time HONESTy Tracker measuring all city honesty levels and let them play along by making their own HONESTy choices

5. Web users have their own chance to be HONEST by liking the Honest Tea Facebook Page and grab a coupon, or they can be disHONEST and just take the coupon and run. These actions drive our real-time measurement of the Web HONESTY — whose geo-specific data has been crafted into an Honest API (application programming interface) that will allow Honest Tea and interested developers to mash up the honesty data collected during the campaign.

6. Outside of design and web/application development we’re in the midst of executing a comprehensive social promotion strategy that could very well melt our servers. Stay tuned and visit honestcities.com to grab a coupon while supplies last!

Infographic: What Do College Students Like on Facebook?

DJ Saul — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 18:00:23 +0000

While the average college student may be fueled by energy drinks, pizza, gadgets, and partying — which brands do they actually prefer? As a follow up to our last Facebook analytics post, we did some digging into what the 4 million+ college students on Facebook “Like” across various categories. Better yet, as brands pour more and more money into social ads — this gives us a snapshot of who’s getting their money’s worth, and who isn’t. All numbers shown express the total users you can target using Facebook Social Ads – not the number of likes of a brand page. Enjoy :)

Pinkberry Swirls into DC

Audrey Matthias — Mon, 16 May 2011 16:02:26 +0000

In the heart of DC’s Golden Triangle, at 1213 Connecticut Ave., Pinkberry opened its door for a Grand Opening Party on Cinco de Mayo. Thousands of fans patiently awaited Pinkberry’s arrival and gathered to stand in line for more than 2 hours to grab their free fro-yo.

We hosted a VIP party @ Current Sushi with Pinkberry, CEO, Ron Graves, complete with Pinkberry infused cocktails @ Dirty Martini.

As we’ve worked to open the second Pinkberry in the DC region we’ve heard two things over and over:

1) “I LOVE Pinkberry”

2) “Finally!”

And trust me, we feel ya. In the midst of cupcake wars and fro-yo knock-offs, Pinkberry is like a shining light in the dark battle of DC food wars (I know I know, I am totally biased but when you’ve tasted as much fro-yo as I have you definitely notice the difference in quality. Call me a fro-yo lover with an extra soft spot for Pinkberry and I’ll tag this post as #ShamelessClientLove).

If you’re interested to see what happened at the big opening, check out the following videos for a recaps:

As a digital experiential agency, we love to promote social activations at events and this was no different. Here are a few things we included at this opening:

Facebook: We customized 5,000 ping pong balls, donated to the charities of two George Washington University sororities and sent them out on campus, in Dupont circle, in Farragut Square and all over DC. Each ping pong ball directed finders back to our Facebook Event Page, which explained that if you brought the ball back the night of the opening, you could win a Pinkberry customized iPad2!
FourSquare: We built our very own social gaming display: Pinkberry Social Revealer. The objective: drive engagement via a fun interactive game. Step 1) Check in on Foursquare during the event 2) Grab your physical Social VIP badge 3) Come back in May with a friend and your badge and your mini is on us!

Next up, we’re taking Pinkberry to the suburbs. More news of that to come soon!

Also, check out our photos from the Onomonmedia photo booth. Here are a few of my personal favorites:

Sign up for an Invite to Join Personal and Choose to Own Your Data

corbett3000 — Sun, 15 May 2011 14:05:33 +0000

How many times have you forgotten your bank, insurance, or loan details? Had to explain to a house guest how to get to your apartment? Sent friends recommendations for your favorite restaurants? Imagine all that information could be easily accessibly in a secure location.

DC based start-up Personal (request a beta invite) will help you do just that.

We’ve been having a lot of fun creating animations, video testimonials, and web design work for them over the past few months. Take a look and let us know what you think!

Personal How To Animation:

Jon Dudas, former head of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office testimonial:

Personal Bumper Animation:

Home Page Design:

ISL 4.0: New Hires, Events, Products, and Work

corbett3000 — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 15:37:29 +0000

I always thought iStrategyLabs moved fast. It’s faster than me now. I can’t keep up – and as the CEO all I can do is get out of the way/help create the architecture of the amazing-ness unfolding. I don’t expect you to keep up either, but if you want to try, spend some time poking around these links and let me know what you think it the comments. Here’s what’s going on:

We’ve hired 4 new people in 4 weeks and 6 in the last few months – doubling the team. We’ll probably double again by year end. New team members are highlighted in detail below. We’re still hiring (and looking for interns)!
Our client work has exploded. With new animations, big festivals, a bunch of store openings for Pinkberry and other retailers, a crazy data visualization project for Volkswagen, and social innovation projects with One Economy and the National Building Museum – I’m amazed that the team now works on roughly 40 projects at a time, delivering excellence every day.
Our little Apps for Democracy experiment is now in 31 countries and cities.
We’ve added a 3rd floor of space in Dupont Circle to accommodate current requirements, and last us for at least another year.
We’ve always believed in investing in our community more than investing in ourselves. Today, we’re doing more for creatives, technologists, entrepreneurs and citizens than we ever have. If you want to see what relentless passion looks like in person come to startupXLR8R, angelXLR8R, ideaXLR8R, DC Tech Meetup, mCitizenSummit, Awesome Foundation Launch Party or DCWEEK and see why we spend nearly half of our time building communities rather than the iStrategyLabs bank account. Our full public calendar is here and embedded at the end of this post.
At any given point in time an iStrategyLabs team member is either in the air, on stage, or running around some foreign country or city doing something cool. Checkout our iStrategyLabs Mobile tumbr blog which we post to only from our mobile devices. There’s some really cool stuff in there from all over the globe. We’ve been using it just to keep up with each others’ day to day.

Updated Capabilities and Work:

iStrategyLabs Capabilities and Case Studies

Core-team additions:

Brandon Minow, Director of Social Experience

At iStrategyLabs, Brandon focuses on creating engagement strategies that transcend the digital and physical worlds. As a former aide to President Clinton, Brandon brings a wealth of experience in political consulting and large-scale event production, having produced events with audiences as large as 250,000 people – most recently producing the Rally to Restore Sanity for Comedy Central. In his projects, Brandon finds unique ways to merge the physical and digital worlds to create one of a kind experiences for clients and their targeted audiences.

Brandon is also the co-founder of The Monument Music & Arts Festival, a charitable music venture that seeks to empower musicians and their fans to become agents of social change.

Bonnie Shaw, Director of Social Innovation

Bonnie is an expert at making meaningful connection between people, place, technology and play. As Director of Social Innovation at iStrategyLabs, she brings a delightfully playful perspective with a background in city design and participatory planning, game and adventure design and online organizing and community building. Bonnie holds degrees in Landscape Architecture, Planning and Design, and a Masters in Urban Design, and offers almost 10 years of international experience in design and strategy, campaign implementation and events, and project management in local grounded and global online engagement projects.

Bonnie founded the global photographic treasure hunt and community engagement game Snap-Shot-City – a ground breaking integrated technology event played by 1000’s of people in cities around the world. She currently acts as the Dean of the DC chapter of The Awesome Foundation, providing $1000 micro-grants every month for awesome projects, is the Engagement Specialist for BYO consulting [http://BYOconsulting.com], and regularly presents on civic innovation, online/offline community engagement, serious gaming, and digital storytelling at conferences around the world.

Zach Saale, Creative Strategist

Zach is a Creative Strategist who concentrates on supporting the tech infrastructure of client campaigns, social experiences, and products developed by iStrategyLabs. With a background in web development, graphic design and hardware, he’s able to execute complex implementations that require knowing exactly what tech to deploy in any situation. Zach joins iStrategyLabs from his most recent employer – Apple – where he learned that perfection is an achievable and noble goal. When not at the lab you can find Zach blogging about beer, adding to his movie collection, or playing video games.

Jon Long, Creative Technologist

Jon is a creative technologist who specializes in walking the line between visual design, information architecture, and user interface development. Having designed and coded for sites serving anywhere from 20 visitors to 20 million, he’s most excited by the potential of great design to help people navigate tough problems in simple ways.

Jon loves bringing great experiences to life through standards-based web development, and helps others to do the same as a part-time instructor at Boston University’s Center for Digital Imaging Arts. When he’s not perched behind the keyboard, Jon enjoys all manner of comics, live music, and exploring DC on two wheels.

McKee Floyd, Creative Strategist

As a former Capitol Hill staffer and owner of D.C.’s first pop-up bakery, McKee brings an array of public policy savvy, entrepreneurial know-how, culinary confidence, and a passion for wowing crowds of consumers to her work with iStrategyLab’s clients. McKee understands how to leverage buzz-generating techniques to do everything from building a brand from the ground up to empowering communities toward social change.

McKee graduated from the University of St. Andrews with a Masters in International Relations and her bakery, Whoops!, was featured in NBC Channel 4, Roll Call, Mid City Paper, Metrocurean, and the DCist. When not baking up digital+experiential work for ISL, McKee works as a freelance food, nightlife and music reviewer for AOL City’s Best and blogs for DC’s on-line music destination All Things Go.

katie Lancos, Creative Strategist

With a combined background in graphic design, web development, and event management, Katie brings a lot to the table in her core role as a creative strategist. Her holistic approach to clients, collaborators, and projects is fueled by her unique skill set, a passion for all things digital and social, and a compulsion to consume the latest web trends.

Katie graduated from Notre Dame with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in graphic design and is currently studying part-time at Georgetown University getting her Masters in Public Relations with an emphasis in digital communications.

iStrategyLabs Public Calendar:

If you want to keep up with some of the events we do, subscribe to this calendar which is embedded here.

The Sweetlife Festival: Social Experience Design for One Sweet Show

mckeefloyd — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 14:37:26 +0000

Updated – checkout the recap video:

Updated – checkout Sweetlife Documentary Trailer:

If you live in DC, you’ve probably been to sweetgreen, the mid-Atlantic based eco-friendly restaurant group that leads the national charge in sourcing delicious local and organic ingredients with an underlying commitment to their community. In fact, their Dupont Circle location is right across from the iStrategyLabs office and their founding team has become fast friends and clients of ours.

What you, and the rest of country probably also heard this morning is that sweetgreen will be extending this commitment to their community out of their restaurants and onto the lawn of the Merriweather Post Pavilion this April 30th at the Sweetlife Festival.

Guess who is headlining? The Strokes.

When sweetgreen approached us to be the social marketing agency for the festival we sprang immediately into action, by planning all manner of social experiences for the event as well as developing a striking brand identity for the sweetlife festival – bringing together all the components of the brand sweetgreen has worked so lovingly to define. This includes a commitment to eating and living local, lowering your carbon footprint and environmental impact, and living life to the fullest with flavorful music.

We then designed and developed a microsite to not only announce the festival and the crazy exciting headliner, but also to serve as a platform to deliver this awesome new brand to the digital world for years to come.

If you visit the sweetgreen facebook page you’ll see a custom tab carrying a sweepstakes campaign. Enter your e-mail and you’re automatically entered into a sweepstakes. You love it because you get a chance to win backstage passes and tickets to the festival as well as cool sweetgreen swag.

Stay tuned for more news on the festival including the announcement of the rest of the line-up and some crazy cool digital+experiential activations to help you live the sweetlife at Merriweather Post Pavilion on April 30.

And by all means go sign up for that presale code NOW. You won’t want to miss this!

FaceBowl: A Trash Talking Social Ads Battle

Katie Lancos — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 21:19:53 +0000

Shortcut: Visit Facebowl.us to Like which team you want to win the Super Bowl. Tweet this site.

On February 6th, the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers will go head-to-head in Super Bowl XLV. As that timeless date approaches, buzz around these two competing teams grows (compared to mentions of our beloved Redskins, the Steelers and Packers are clearly no match).

We decided to commemorate this time of year by producing FaceBowl.us, a Facebook Like + in-page chat mashup that let’s you vote on which team you want winning the big game. As if the simple fact of asserting your team’s online dominance isn’t enough incentive to rally your crew and vote, iStrategyLabs will also run $500 worth of Facebook Ads to mock the team with the least amount of votes. Classy, right?

Visit Facebowl.us to Like which team you want to win the Superbowl. Tweet this site.

Now we know the Packers and the Steelers aren’t big rivals, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be some good trash-talking this year. According to our research, both teams have plenty of rivals to tap into. For Green Bay, we have the Minnesota Vikings and the Chicago Bears. And Pittsburgh? the Cleveland Browns and the Baltimore Ravens.

Of course all football fans are aware of these rivalries, but are these really true, or just accepted as fact? We pulled up some interesting numbers to backup these traditional rivalries.

Looking at search volume for each team, states containing rival cities are at the top of the list:

And apparently people also like to highlight their disdain for their rivals on their Facebook profiles:

No matter where your allegiances lie, we Americans love to celebrate by gathering around a flat screen, eatin’ wings, drinking beer, and cheering for our favorite team – or against the one we hate.

Be sure to cast your vote at FaceBowl.us and let your voice be heard now – or you will surely be taunted later. We promise.

2011 Facebook Demographics and Statistics – Including Federal Employees and Gays in the Military

corbett3000 — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 04:25:19 +0000

Forgive me but I tried to go for the longest post title in history. We’ve been granularly tracking Facebook’s growth since October 2007, which at the time it had a mere 20 million US users. Today it has over 146 million US based users. The following data shows the growth rates of various userbases in Facebook over the one year period from 1/4/2010 to 1/4/2011. All data comes directly from Facebook’s Social Ads system:

Key takeaways:

According to e-Marketer, there are 206.2 million US internet users. That means 71.2% of the US web audience is on Facebook.
The 18-24 (college) demographic grew the fastest at 74% in one year.
Perhaps Facebook’s new “Like” structure drove this metric, but liking “Drugs” is up 1131.9% this year.

I thought it would be interesting to get exact counts of Facebook users based on their specific employment. Seeing as that iStrategyLabs is based in DC it only made sense to check out how our Federal friends were during on “the Facebook”. The data is broken out nationally and by if the employee is based in DC. Also, due to the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell – I was curious to see how many of our armed forces personel were openly looking for same sex hookups. Keep in mind, the general US Facebook population is 2.01% gay (full report on Gays on Facebook is here). Here goes nothing:

Digital + Experiential + Peer-to-Peer: Marketing American Eagle on Campus

DJ Saul — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:12:30 +0000

We’re constantly beating the drum about mashing up the digital and physical worlds to create experiences that people love and can’t stop talking about. In fact, USA TODAY recently wrote a great article highlighting our work with American Eagle Outfitters and Youth Marketing Connection.

Our American Eagle Outfitters work has been a great case-study for how the dangerously successful mix of physical + digital can pack a huge punch, especially on a college campus when students are involved. From dropping hundreds of AE branded ping pong balls all over campuses, to “Flip Flop Fridays” and plenty of product give-aways, we’re engaging students where they live, work and play. The campaign is anchored by campus-specific AE Student Union Facebook pages (Boston University Example), and teams of brand ambassadors who are influentials on their own campuses.

The result: getting “Liked” by over 10% of a student Facebook population on multiple campuses across the country. That translates to in-store sales though some methods we won’t talk about specifically here. If you’re curious about this campaign, or how we approach digital + physical take a look at the videos below, write a comment or get in touch!

Facebook Demographics and Statistics Report June 2010 – Privacy Concerns Don't Stop Growth

corbett3000 — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 14:04:09 +0000

I’ve been wondering if the recent backlash related to Facebook’s privacy settings would hurt the service. Over the past 5 months at least, it has not.

Facebook continues to grow and this addition of our Facebook Demographics and Statistics report shows growth across all ages:

Key insights:

So far this year, Facebook’s US user base has grown by 21.8 % (22,474,900 users)
The strongest growth remains in the 55+ segement at 35.3% (3,443,460 users)
This time Chicago is seeing a growth spurt – almost doubling in 5 months
Facebook’s Privacy issues are not causing account cancellations en-mass

Refer to “Facebook Demographics and Statistics Report 2010 – 145% Growth in 1 Year” for a full look at 2009.

Facebook Gay Men and Lesbian Statistics – Pakistan and Washington DC Standout

corbett3000 — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 16:25:37 +0000

At iStrategyLabs we’re fascinated with hyper-targeting marketing campaigns using social advertising. These client campaigns have been some of our most successful to date. Our “Facebook Demographics and Statistics Reports” has been written about in articles and covered on the radio/tv hundreds of times around the world. So, in our relentless pursuit for granular information regarding people on the web, and spurred by a conversation with some folks at the Human Rights Campaign we thought it might be interesting to analyze the gay and lesbian population counts on Facebook globally.

Analysis of sexual preferences for Facebook users in the United States

Key insights:

Number of US gay males on Facebook: 457,960 or .4% of all US Facebook users
Number of US lesbians on Facebook: 1,768,780 or 1.6% of all US Facebook users
Highest number of gay males of any age is 27,640 at 19 years of age
Highest number of lesbians of any age is 102,800 at 19 years of age
The highest percentage of gay male US Facebook users is 1.72% at age 21
The highest percentage of lesbian US Facebook users is 2.34% at age 22
Total sample size is 111,281,280 users with 65.6 not reporting a sexual preference

Analysis of sexual preferences for Facebook users in US cities and foreign countries

Key insights:

New York City has the highest gay male user count at 20,960, representing .94% of New York Facebook users
New York City has the highest lesbian user count at 55,500*, representing 1.66% of New York Facebook users
Washington DC has the highest percentage of gay men using Facebook at 1.20%
Second only to New York City, Los Angles has the largest homosexual population on Facebook

*Washington DC’s lesbian Facebook user count is so high (128,280) it is questionable

The UK has the greatest number of gay men on Facebook at 131,800 users outside of the US – .6% of the UK user base (compared to 457,960 or .4% of all US Facebook users)
Pakistan has the highest percentage of gay male users at 2.0%, 5 times that of the US
The Philippines has the largest lesbian user count at 842,540, a full 6.66% of users in that country

About the data:

All data was collected using Facebook’s Social Ads platform – this data is elective, meaning users volunteer this information and are not required to provide it. A full excel spreadsheet of this information can be downloaded at Scribd:Facebook Gay Statistics 2010

Apps for the Army – a first of its kind app dev contest for .mil

corbett3000 — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 20:06:00 +0000

Disclaimer: iStrategyLabs does not represent the views and options of the US Army. The views and options contained in this post are to be taken solely as those of Peter Corbett, CEO, iStrategyLabs.

Disclaimer: iStrategyLabs does not represent the views and opinions of the US Army. The views and opinions contained in this post are to be taken solely as those of Peter Corbett, CEO, iStrategyLabs.

Ever since we launched Apps for Democracy for DC’s Office of the CTO back in September 2008 the world has been a-buzz with “Apps for” contests. We recently released a guide for how to create your own in order to make this kind of innovation method more accessible to people around the world. There are now about a dozen of these innovation contests being run by cities, national governments and various non-profits.

Today I’m happy to announce a new Apps initiative – one which iStrategyLabs has been contracted to create with the Army’s CIO/G6. A special thank you goes out to Tim O’Reilly – who envisioned this program and served as an advisor/connector to make it happen. Below you’ll find full details from the Army’s official media advisory (download as .DOC), and a summary is as follows:

A media and bloggers’ roundtable will take place March 3 at 1:30 pm in the Pentagon, Room 1E462. Lieutenant General Jeffery Sorenson (Army CIO) will discuss Apps for the Army and take questions. To attend the roundtable in person, or if you plan to call in, please contact: Ms. Ashley McCall-Washington at 703-614-1649 or ashley.mccall1@us.army.mil
The competition runs from March 1st to May 15st 2010
There are 40 employee cash awards totaling $30,000 for mobile and web apps
Only 100 initial teams can participate
Awards will be announced in June, with public demonstrations at LandWarNet
Registration forms and other details can be found on AKO: http://www.army.mil/ciog6/armyapps
Forge.mil will serve as a collaborative software repository
RACE – a cloud based development sandbox will be provided. Participants can access a Windows server, Linux server and mobile app emulation software for Android and Blackberry. iPhone apps will need to be developed outside of RACE.
MilBook’s Apps for the Army group will serve as the core collaboration space for all participants
If you’re on twitter, use the hashtag #apps4army to follow the conversation

Video Overview of Apps for the Army:

Apps for the Army Logo & Banner:

Full text of the media release:

Army Launches Software Application Development Challenge “Apps for the Army”

The Pentagon, Arlington, VA (March 1^st, 2010) – Today the Army announced its first internal applications development challenge, dubbed Apps for the Army or A4A. Open to all Soldiers and Department of the Army civilians, A4A offers Army personnel the opportunity to demonstrate their software development skills and creativity. In return, the Army hopes to improve its current capabilities or to add new ones – all through the ingenuity of its people.

“We’re building a culture of collaboration among our Army community to encourage smarter, better and faster technical solutions to meet operational needs,” said Army Chief Information Officer/G-6 Lt. Gen. Jeff Sorenson.

“Soldiers and Army civilians will be creating new mobile and web applications of value for their peers—tools that enhance warfighting effectiveness and business productivity today,” Sorenson said. “And, we’re rewarding their innovation with recognition and cash.”

Participation in A4A is limited to the first 100 Army personnel (active duty, Army Reserve and Army National Guard on active duty, and civilians) who enroll. Teamwork is encouraged but not required. The Army will recognize the top submissions at the LandWarNet Conference in August 2010. Winners will receive monetary awards; the total cash pool is $30,000.

A4A applications may tackle any aspect of Army IT – distributed training, battle command, career management, continuing education, or news and information distribution, for example. A4A will further deviate from traditional development practices by utilizing the latest in collaborative development media.

“Apps for the Army features an innovative cloud computing service for participants to use during software creation,” Sorenson noted. “This is key because it eliminates the constraints of hardware provisioning prior to prototype evaluation.”

The service, provided by the Defense Information Systems Agency and known as the Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE), offers access to on-demand virtual Windows and Linux development environments. Participants will be able to pursue Web application development using all available programming languages supported by Windows Server and the Linux, Apache, MYSQL and PHP (LAMP) frameworks. They also will be able to build emulated Blackberry, iPhone and Android applications.

Forge.mil will serve as the collaborative software repository for competing teams. The tools inherent in milBook and AKO will facilitate the cross-pollination of ideas, problems and solutions relevant to the Apps for the Army initiative.

The registration form, rules and instructions are located at the Apps for the Army Web site on the AKO portal: http://www.army.mil/ciog6/armyapps. Rolling registration begins March 1, 2010. Apps must be submitted by May 15, 2010. Questions can be addressed to CIO/G6ArmyApps@conus.army.mil.

A media and bloggers’ roundtable will take place March 3 at 1:30 pm in the Pentagon, Room 1E462. To attend the roundtable in person, or if you plan to call in, please contact: Ms. Ashley McCall-Washington at 703-614-1649 or ashley.mccall1@us.army.mil

For general media inquiries, please contact: Margaret McBride, 703-693-3067, margaret.mcbride@us.army.mil.

Big Ideas Big Action (BIBA) Presentations and Photos

corbett3000 — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 01:36:15 +0000

I fully intended to provide a detailed recap of the BIBA experience – but alas, Frank Gruber has done such a good job in this post I don’t really see the point. Below you’ll find the presentations from the conference, along with links to posts and pictures. Our own full videos of each talk will be live shortly.

Photos:

Photo Set 1 (Courtesy Barry & Heidi Page)

Photo Set 2 (Courtesy Jen Consalvo)

Photo Set 3 (Courtesy Jen Consalvo)

Photo Set 4 (Courtesy Kathleen Smith)

Photo Set 5 (Courtesy Nick Witmoyer)

Posts:

http://cjnblog.squarespace.com/blog/2010/2/4/big-ideas-big-action.html

http://ericaamerica.com/2010/02/03/big-ideas-big-action-capital-ideation/ [Video]

http://blog.mydailylesson.com/?p=107

Presentations and Videos:

BIBA Presentation: Any Carvin, Sr. Social Media Strategist, NPR

BIBA Presentation: Philippa Hughes

BIBA Presentation: Peter Corbett – “Ideation and Concepting Techniques to Help You Conquer the World”

BIBA Presentation: Mark Drapeau, Director of Innovative Social Engagement, Microsoft

BIBA Presentation: Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO of LivingSocial

BIBA Presentation: Steve Moore, CEO, WDCEP

10 Tools in 10 Minutes to Help You CRUSH-IT at Marketing

corbett3000 — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 18:07:49 +0000

I gave the following presentation at the StartupScramble put on by Ashoka’s Youth Venture. I hope it’s useful to budding entrepreneurs and business students who are looking for some smart ways to garner insights on the web that feed back into your marketing efforts.

10 Tools in 10 Minutes to Help You CRUSH-IT at Marketing

Big Ideas, Big Action. Say hello to BIBA!

corbett3000 — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 04:14:04 +0000

In keeping with the iStrategyLabs tradition of doing things differently, we decided to create a conference to help people generate new ideas, and bring them to life with others who can help. This is the kind of thing we do for our clients/ourselves everyday – and we want to teach you how to do it too.

A deeper explanation follows, but if you’re running short on time, here are the short cuts:

Download the Overview PDF
Visit the BIBA website (hand crafted by @zbgoodwin and @skeevis)

So…the details:

What is BIBA?

BIBA (Big Ideas Big Action) is a conference – soft of. Sure, technically BIBA is a conference. But it’s way more than that. BIBA is a place for big brains to explore big ideas and plan for big action. It’s one day you won’t want to miss.

Who is behind BIBA?

BIBA was created by iStrategyLabs for the sole purpose of helping people understand how to create new and important ideas and bring them to life. BIBA is co-hosted by FedScoop – a full-service government media and marketing company, specializing in government IT.

Who are the sponsors?

BIBA has been made possible by the generosity of our platinum sponsors Intel, Microsoft, and Citrix. Other sponsorship tiers are available. Please contact dj@istrategylabs.com for more details.

What else should I know?

The participants at BIBA will help you build something new, or refresh something old. You can attend, but you must share ideas and plan for doing something that matters.
You will leave excited, invigorated, and connected to a group of people that will support your .com, .gov, and/or .org initiative. This is an event that will help train you to think creatively, generate new ideas for your business/organization, and bring those ideas to life.

How do I register and what is the cost?
You can register to attend at http://biba.eventbrite.com. Government employees can attend for free (valid .gov or .mil email address required upon registration). 50 tickets will be available for $100. The remaining tickets will be $250. There are 265 tickets available.

What’s the format?

The Morning

The morning of BIBA is meant to teach and inspire you. You’ll hear about some “Big Ideas in the Wild” – these are stories of real doers who’ve brought something new to life and changed the world. You’ll also learn how Ideation (the act of creating ideas) works, and how to take raw ideas and shape them into robust concepts. The idea-focused sessions will be followed by “Big Action Planning” sessions meant to help provide insight into project planning, budgeting, and management approaches for digital and physical projects.

Lastly, participants from Intel and Microsoft will share with us their own internal innovation methods that help their companies remain at the forefront of the tech industry. By lunch time, you’ll be jumping out of your seat, ready to start sketching your ideas, concepts, and action plans with fellow BIBA participants.

The Afternoon

This is where the rubber meets the road. We’re going to split the massive and elegant Woolly Mammoth Theatre space into distinct sectors where participants focused on .com, .org/.edu, or .gov initiatives can collaborate together. You’ll also use a sticker to indicate if you’re generally an ‘idea generator’ or ‘idea needer’ – this method will let people find one another to help them think through specific issues and build new ideas, concepts, and action plans.

Mid-afternoon, you’ll check back in with the group in the main theatre – presenting initial concepts and connecting with new collaborators who will help you during the rest of the conference, and beyond. By 5pm, we’ll be a bit exhausted, but those ready for a second wind will venture out into Chinatown for happy hour and/or to grab a bite to eat.

What’s the schedule and roster of speakers?

ReThink Fundraising – A Webinar For Building Your Own Online Fundraising Strategy

DJ Saul — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:00:00 +0000

We recently hosted a webinar showcasing some easy ways to build a cohesive strategy for online fundraising using some fresh tools & tech. Each presenter spoke for 10 minutes, and answered a few questions afterwords. This is essential for non-profits, associations, or anyone looking for innovative ways to raise money for a cause or campaign!

ReThink Fundraising from iStrategyLabs on Vimeo.

1) AddThis by Clearspring: “The hands down easiest way to make your content social online”

2) Giv.to / Contribune: “The smart way to multiply your fundraiser power over social networks”

3) Razoo: “The free way to find, mobilize and connect with donors”

ReThink Fundraising Webinar: October 23rd

DJ Saul — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:04:08 +0000

We have been having a lot of conversations recently with people who are looking to take their online fundraising to the next level with some fresh tools & tech. So- we thought it would be fun to host a webinar showcasing some easy ways to build a cohesive strategy. Each presentation will be a maximum of 10 minutes, with time for Q & A at the end.

1) Giv.to / Contribune: “The smart way to multiply your fundraiser power over social networks”

2) Razoo: “The free way to find, mobilize and connect with donors”

3) AddThis by Clearspring: “The hands down easiest way to make your content social online”

Call it fundraising 2.0, or call it a good way to spend an hour this Friday – either way we hope you can join us!

We Live in Public – A Film About The Exciting Perils of Life-Streaming

corbett3000 — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 17:39:36 +0000

We recently got a call from our good friends at Clearspring (@Thorpus in lookin’ at you), asking if we were interested in building a widget for a fascinating independent film called We Live in Public. Ondi Timoner (Director) and her team just won a “Sundance Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary” – we figured this had to rock!

First a quote and then I’ll let the trailer speak for itself:

“The experiment descended into an orgiastic party. And just as quickly into hell, as the volunteers began to experience emotional meltdown. ‘All the most hard-core artists were in there, they thought they could beat the system, they’d been through crazier stuff,’ ” -Ondi Timoner

Not only have I not seen the movie yet, but Zach and Zvi have been toiling away on the aforementioned widget, so there’s been a lot of talk around the lab about WLIP…I hear my curiosity will be satisfied shortly since Ondi hooked us up with a screener that’s floating around the lab now.

If you find yourself in need of a shiny new widget for your blog, social profile, or Vista/OSX desktop, just click the share link on the widget and you’re good to go:

Social Media Marketing at the NASDAQ MarketSite

corbett3000 — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:38:05 +0000

When people ask me what iStrategyLabs does I usually say the following:

“We bring communities together online and off, adding value to them in order to stimulate word of mouth in an authentic and relevant way.” So how does that actually play out?

With the example of NASDAQ, we painstakingly integrated streaming financial data into the StockTwits community (something these traders thrive on) and presented them with the opportunity of a lifetime – to ring the closing bell at NASDAQ MarketSite in Time Square through a Twitter based contest.

Here’s the video recap:

We’ll be following this up with another terrific opportunity for traders to get together with NASDAQ at the MarketSite. Stay tuned and follow the @DataJunkies if you want to learn more.

2009 Facebook Adoption Report: 36.5% for Universities vs. 5.5% for Community Colleges

DJ Saul — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:38:07 +0000

In our last post, we showed how the ‘declining’ Facebook numbers of the college-aged can be explained by removing their school affiliations after graduation, (rather than an act of frustration now that Mom and Dad are friending them!). We thought it might be interesting to look at the actual Facebook usage on the biggest campuses in the country. We used Facebook Social Ads to crunch the numbers on the top 150 Universities and top 50 Community Colleges with the highest enrollment. Download the full data set here in XLS format.

There’s a striking difference between the average % of students on Facebook from a State/Private Universities verse Community Colleges.

Source: Facebook’s Social Ads Platform & StateUniversity.com

Top 10 Campuses with the Highest Facebook Adoption: State/Private vs Community College

Source: Facebook’s Social Ads Platform & StateUniversity.com
Contact: DJ@istrategylabs.com

Key Insights:

1) There is a massive gap between Facebook adoption at State/Private Universities and at Community Colleges, even with similar enrollment numbers.
2) There are only 19 schools with over 50% of their students using Facebook
3) Even the school with the highest Facebook adoption (what’s up JMU!) ..is still coming in below 70%

Of course, there are reasons for these figures to be lower than expected. You don’t need a .edu email address to register a Facebook account anymore, so we could be missing a chunk of students. Additionally, Facebook is no longer requiring students to join a school network.

If Facebook’s Social Ads system is not correcting for this through IP targeting or some other method, marketers are not able to accurately target the college population. As an agency that focuses on youth marketing every day, it’s concerning that our industry/clients assume Facebook captures this entire population – it’ just not the case.

At best, we’re able to reach 2/3 of a college population on a campus like JMU. On average, as we’ve shown, you can only reach about 1/3!