Greeting Earthlings– Happy Earth Day!

Today, worldwide events demonstrate support for environmental awareness and protection. Projectline endeavors to make every day Earth Day by creating an eco-friendly environment. This includes purchasing products from companies that monitor their environmental impact, serving organic and locally sourced foods, encouraging green commuting, leasing office space that is energy efficient, and sponsoring a Green Team.

Every year, in honor of Earth Day, we also join the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance’s Lake Washington Kayak Cleanup.

In addition to the support of my Projectline family, as a Senior Marketing and Communications Project Manager at Microsoft Research, I have the privilege to work on different projects that help address some of the world’s most urgent challenges. Microsoft Research collaborates with the world’s top academic researchers and institutions to develop technologies that fuel data-intensive scientific research. One area of focus is earth, energy and environment.

Some Microsoft Research projects that help accelerate insight in the environmental and earth sciences include eco-testing a building before it’s built and using technology to help fight forest fires. That’s just a few examples of technology doing good (green) work.

In light of Earth Day, I wanted to share my excitement about a new tool that’s intended to better understand Latin America’s ecology and help protect threatened species. That new tool is LiveANDES (Advanced Network for the Distribution of Endangered Species). It’s developed by a partnership among researchers at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, the LACCIR (Latin American and Caribbean Collaborative ICT Research) Virtual Institute, and Microsoft Research.

LiveANDES is designed to collect, house, and analyze data about Latin America’s wildlife—data that could prove vital to the preservation of the region’s rich but increasingly threatened biodiversity, which has suffered grievously from loss of habitat and climate change. The platform is designed to store and parse data points about Latin America’s wildlife, including photographs, audio and video recordings, and location and sighting data. Researchers use the data stored in the tool to identify species living in Latin America, where they live today, and elements that may be threatening their future.

Ignacio Casas, Executive Director of LACCIR, explains that LiveANDES integrates with the fourth paradigm, a foundational concept of eScience, in which data-intensive computing facilitates scientific discovery. LiveANDES is designed to make parsing the huge volumes of data recorded manageable for researchers. In addition, LiveANDES can help red-list assessment for endangered species and improve information for illegal trafficking of wildlife species. LiveANDES can be developed for every ecological region or country around the world in a bottom up way.

For more information, check out the LiveANDES project page or visit the Microsoft Research Connections Blog. And to get involved with Projectline’s support of the Lake Washington clean-up or other volunteer events, email ivolunteer@projectlineinc.com.

 

Good content travels well. That’s one way to sum up the conversation from a recent Content Strategy Seattle meetup, which Projectline hosted at its offices in Smith Tower.

In her book titled Content Everywhere, which fed our group’s discussion, author Sara Wachter-Boettcher lays out a methodology for shaping and paring down content so that it is more modular and flexible.

More flexible content is the starting point for a better user experience, regardless of how it’s viewed. Your readers expect to be able to enjoy your content on their tablet, their smartphone, their PC—whatever’s in reach when you catch their attention. Taking a flexible approach to content means you don’t have to anticipate every device your content may acquire in its travels. Instead, it’s built from the ground up to respond to the device it lands on.

Wachter-Boettcher asserts that content modeling is an essential first step in this process. Its purpose is to unpack the core elements of any piece of content, analyze them, and make decisions about their relative importance in delivering the intended message. The output of this exercise is what Wachter-Boettcher calls modular content, “chunks” that are ready to travel.

It turns out that converting blocks of text and images built for a single medium into intelligible bits ready for display on any device is no small task. Immediately, it raises all sorts of challenging questions about what to save and what to scrap. And then, of course, there’s the task of getting this appropriately designated content into a software system where it can be searched, sorted, coded, and sent off to wherever it needs to go.

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You have probably heard the term crowdsourcing, but maybe you’re still not sure of what it is or who is using it. At this year’s PSAMA MarketMix, we got a tour of the crowdsourcing landscape from Mike Reeder, VP of Account Planning & Strategy at Possible, Seattle, and Jennifer Chiu, the author of Roll with Jen, voted 2011 Best Food Blog of Western Washington by Evening Magazine.

If you’re not familiar with crowdsourcing, think of it as a way to invite customers to participate in your company, whether it be providing feedback, ideas, or straight-up cash funding.

Now you’d probably think crowdsourcing is a great resource for individuals or small companies looking for funding or just a little extra support. But big and small companies alike are using crowdsourcing. Companies as traditional as an electrical supply company in Ohio and as innovative as the X Prize Foundation, for example, have used crowdsourcing to fuel product development.

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How do you position customer reference programs with key reference targets? This question was posed to a panel of reference professionals from organizations including Intel, Citrix, Oracle, and Responsys at the recent Summit on Customer Engagement in Redwood City, California.

Their answer was simple. You don’t pose them as “programs” or something they have to “join.” When the panelists asked if anyone in the audience was still doing this, 99% of the audience did not raise their hands. However, in several sessions I attended over two days, it was evident that many reference professionals in fact were still inviting customers to join their customer reference programs.

If you’re unfamiliar with customer reference programs, they work to cultivate customers who are excited to promote your business through engagement in content and activities that support sales and marketing initiatives. This year’s summit focused on “Customer References and the New Marketing.” Sessions and discussions explored new trends in marketing and the ever-important role of reference programs.

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Every year, Projectline sends a notable contingent of marketers to the Puget Sound American Marketing Association’s annual conference. And every year, we come back loaded with ideas and enthusiasm, as this post from last year’s event attests.

This year is no exception—if you’re going to MarketMix 2013, keep an eye out for these and other Projectliners. Here’s what we’re looking forward to this year:

Molly Dee Anderson, Senior Writer: As I worked on Big Data week for Microsoft, I’m eager to hear what the marketing world is saying about big data. I’m interested in the meta-issues related to harnessing big data—and the meta-results that can be realized.

Heather Belliveau, Senior Manager: I hope to hear about the new trends toward modern storytelling as part of our content strategy.

Lisa Sullivan, Marketing Manager: This will be my fifth consecutive year attending MarketMix and I always leave feeling so inspired to bring what I have learned back to my work as a consultant and project manager. My passion lies in advertising and creative so I plan to attend some breakout sessions on related topics and take some key learnings back to Projectline’s creative team.

Sandra Sullivan, Marketing Consultant: I am most looking forward to the keynotes—it can often be the most catalyzing to hear what thought leaders in the marketing industry have to say and it often inspires “ahead of the curve” thinking (at least for the next week). I’m especially anxious to hear Ekaterina Walter’s keynote. It’s not about convincing people that social is a relevant tool anymore; it’s about how to keep agile and be sure you are applying [the right kind of] strategy to your social media tactics.

Are you planning to go to MarketMix 2013? If so, what do you hope to bring back?

 

If one word sums up Projectline, I would say it is “collaboration”—with our clients, community, and colleagues. Great examples of the latter come from our internal social network (I will let you guess which platform we use…). Here’s a recent example of a thread:

Norm Bowler: In the age of social media, are press releases obsolete? I’d like to hear your opinions. My label is mostly B2C marketing, but soliciting feature coverage and album reviews from web and print outlets is B2B, and my primary approach has been press releases delivered via email. What should I be doing in addition / instead?

Sandra Sullivan: Hi Norm! My client talks about how “the press release is not dead” quite a bit. Here’s an article she shared recently that might give you more food for thought… it’s still one tool in the arsenal, and we have to decide if it’s the *right* one given our goals.

Ish Fuseini: Add elbo.ws to your WP site. Release your music on your website first then follow up with SoundCloud, Bandcamp, etc… You could create a separate page for each artist, follow the same formula and have the links circulating between all artists and the label page. An interesting way to generate more buzz is to invite other artists/producers to do renditions of different songs from your labels by providing stems. You can also try MusicMoz. Here’s another blog post on the elbo.ws site that I found to be informative: http://blog.elbo.ws/about/getting-started-artists-labels-pro.

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Welcome to the Projectline Weekly Roundup. We know that the week can move pretty fast. Since Fridays sometimes offer a chance for a breather, we wanted to share links to some of the articles we liked this week. As always, we’d love to get your take, so feel free to leave a comment or chat us up on Twitter. Happy reading and have a great weekend!

Business Intelligence
Augmenting the Data Warehouse—This quick article presents five common cases of big data usage at companies. They are outlined as data exploration, customer analysis, data expansion, security, and operational analysis. I have a feeling that most big data projects fall into at least one of these buckets if not more.

Mobility and Real-Time Dashboards Will Make Business Intelligence More Pervasive in 2013—Mobile isn’t just how people are doing business, but also where business intelligence is headed. The ability to process data on a tablet while on the go will soon be very common. The author also makes the argument for real-time dashboards and the impact they will have on businesses.

Gartner: Business Intelligence Spending Has a Steady Outlook—Business intelligence is an area that will see continued growth, according to Gartner. With the production of data moving at record paces, the BI over top of it will give smart businesses insight into exactly what’s happening.

Marketing
SlideShare: The Quiet Giant Of Content Marketing—SlideShare has been around for a number of years, but it seems to continually gain steam. These days when I’m doing research I almost always visit SlideShare and do a quick search. Is it a part of your content strategy?