For the past five years, the Junior Achievement of Central Indiana has sought to identify the Best and Brightest young professionals within ten industry categories. The annual Indy’s Best & Brightest awards luncheon was held yesterday to honor the 100 finalists selected and name the top person in each category.

We are pleased to announce that our very own David Cain was named Indy’s Best & Brightest in the Technology industry.  This is a well-deserved honor for him and one that underscores the impact he has made within MediaSauce and for all of our clients and strategic partners.  Congrats, David!

People make companies successful. That’s why we continually seek out the most talented, passionate people to join our team. While we understand the importance of this, it’s always encouraging when others recognize it, too.

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Join us for a special event to learn about our digital strategy process that dozens of clients have already used to better integrate the web into their operations to increase revenues and decrease costs.  Limited space available for breakfast and lunch sessions on Oct. 9, 14, and 16.

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We had a great time with everyone who attended The Event Gap: Taking Your Event from Adequate to Amazing.  About 100 attendees representing a wide variety of for-profit and non-profit organizations gathered to learn how to combine big thinking and social media to achieve amazing results.

After a lively networking breakfast, Sarah Robbins, our very own social media rock star, framed the entire day’s conversation by comparing the typical event with what’s possible using existing and emerging technologies.  Throughout her presentation, audience members used laser pointers to indicate how their events performed in comparison to what’s possible.  Staying true to form, Sarah used an innovative presentation format to “fly” us thru the dueling timelines.  See a simulation of the presentation for yourself here (or view the high resolution version on YouTube): more

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This is going to be a short post but I absolutely loved this tool, www.websitegrader.com.

Check it out, use it and then come back and we’ll go through all the cool stuff that is in it.

There’s also another free tool for ranking your website.

Being found on the net is getting harder and harder – you need to have this SEO stuff down.

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As one of the presenting sponsors of this year’s ISC Corporate Challenge, we take great pride in our unbroken winning streak of the annual Spirit Award.  For those familiar with this field day for grown-ups, the Corporate Challenge is a great bonding experience with co-workers as you battle against teams from other companies.  Events range from running to tug-o-war to golf ball chipping.

We have never let our collective lack of athletic abilities keep us from having lots of fun.  In fact, we think the Spirit Award was created out of pity for us, since we bring so much positive energy and come nowhere close to claiming the coveted championship trophy.   This year, however, we have a secret weapon for total domination that we’ve hidden on the website we created for the event. more

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We have a great group of talented, passionate people here at MediaSauce. As you would imagine, many of us are passionate about art and self-expression. That passion shows in our work and the endeavors we pursue outside of working hours.

A great example is what Jim Clinger, creative director/local arts impresario, and his friends at Primary Colours have done by creating Art vs. Art.  This is a unique art competition featuring side-by-side face-offs between same-day created paintings.  The winner is determined by audience vote; the loser faces the “Wheel of Death” unless someone’s generous purchase can save the painting from a ruinous fate. more

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For those of you haven’t been following the story since the start of September, Butler University is on the hunt to recover the only two costumes of Butler Blue, the school mascot, that were stolen.  All the major news outlets picked up the story and the school is offering a $550 reward (odd number, right? – it started at $100) for the safe return of the costumes.

While I don’t know the black market prices for mid-major conference costumed mascots, I do know plenty of kids and adults who will miss his presence this Fall.  One student likened the news of not having Butler Blue at Homecoming to the same tragedy as not having Santa Claus at Christmas.

Being a Butler basketball fan and a friend of the school’s Web 2.0 admissions star, Brad Ward, I decided to send a little encouragement his way to do something about it.  We both maintain a consistent presence on Twitter, so I sent him a challenge on September 6: “So what’s your social media solution for recovering the stolen Bulldog costumes?”  While I’m sure he was already formulating a plan, I didn’t want him to think his adoring public expected anything less from him.

He responded in spades, using the real life bulldog mascot, Butler II, as the spokesdog.  For the record, Butler II keeps a blog and has his own Twitter account as part of the admissions social media plan (you’d be amazed at how popular he is).

Seeing an opportunity to help and garner attention for the school in the admissions realm, Brad crafted a plan to do both.  Here’s the strategy he used:
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Last week, Sarah Robbins and I were in Rochester, NY, for the American Association of State and Local History (AASLH) 2008 annual conference. We presented a 1/2 day workshop on Web 2.0 and how museums, historical societies, and other historical organizations can leverage social media.  Here are the slides:

I love history and preparing for the conference made me realize how much more alive history can be with digital and social media.  Knowing how much our past drives our present, the human race can gain much from understanding it better.  With the digital and social media tools at our disposal today, anyone with Internet access can experience the past better and derive more insight from it.

As we got into the second half of our workshop, we switched to the user-generated content (UGC) approach to generate examples of the principles we were teaching.  We had 28 people in the workshop representing 20 different organizations.  Here are some of the cool examples that came out of our joint explorations: more

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Any tool intended to facilitate community formation and/or user-generated content must have an eye toward flexible development goals. Youtube may have been created to host a wide variety of video content but if the mass of users slowly shift toward contributing only content on a specific topic Youtube must be willing to tune their own goals for development and growth to suit the purposes that their users hve decided are important. The usage patterns of the majority must trump even the loftiest goal of the tool creator or the tool will be abandoned in favor of one better suited to what users want.

The agility of direction is key to survival in a world where technologies come and go faster than the lastest MTV-driven fashion fads. So rather than marketing to some target demographic, smart UGC companies, ie ones who want to survive the ebb and flow of a fickle user base, must instead market and cater to the users they already have. They, in turn, will utilize the service and become your best advertising. Yes, rather than advertising to new users, I’m suggesting that these companies must instead learn to market to their existing users. But what does a user-driven company look like? How do you function, plan, and grow when your mission statement is simply to continually become whatever your users seem to think you are? Who’s in charge here? more

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It’s been about nine months since I started blogging.  I had heard about blogs for a while prior to starting (how could you not working at MediaSauce?), but didn’t really understand why I would need to blog.

After spending a little time with Sarah Robbins, our Director of Emerging Technologies, I discovered that blogging was a natural extension of what I was already doing – having conversations with people who wanted to learn more about what I had to say.  She even showed me how easy it was to set up a blog and add new posts.  If I knew how to type, I could do it.

Now after 50+ blog posts on this blog, ten posts on my personal blog about fatherhood, and creating a number of different social communities, I can tell you why people blog – they care. more

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