Monthly Archives: March 2010
Anca Micheti | Critical Mass Calgary
Cultural theorists, from Michael Foucault to Judith Butler, have said it a long time ago: identity is not fixed and determined by demographics, but fluid and multifaceted. It is, to a certain extent, what we want it to be. It is a performance we put on for the world.
Social media makes this identity performance easier than ever. With more than 400 million active Facebook users and 73.5 million visitors to Twitter each month, it has allowed us to become content producers and consequently public performers of our identities. Every digital imprint we leave on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr, every blog post, review or tag is an opportunity for identity play. And who’s to say that each and all of these performances are not “the real me,” even if they’re not necessarily consistent with each other, and maybe each paints only a partial picture of who I “really” am. (more…)
Emily Bontje | Critical Mass Calgary
I have learned more in the past 10 weeks as a Critical Mass intern than I have learned in 4 years of university. This is not your typical internship. I have never once been asked to make a pot of coffee or pick up dry-cleaning. My job does not consist of merely shadowing senior employees or of acting as a fly on the wall in meetings (although that can be really interesting!). I was thrown into the business head-first and told to swim. The result is that I have had opportunities to personally lead meetings with our clients, participate in high-level account planning, attend executive presentations on the future direction of CM, meet the president and CEO, and be part of a team that’s doing something BIG! Here are some of the highlights from last week:
Monday: Start of a new week. Free breakfast in the Bistro every morning. Assist in the orientation for one of our new Account Managers who will be moving to Nashville at the end of the week. Get caught up from the weekend, because with a big product launch coming, people never stop working! Collect updates from the Project Managers on all open projects to prepare for the weekly client status meeting. Afternoon meeting with VP’s and team leads to discuss a huge new project I will be managing to enable cross-office integration.
Tuesday: Track down images and files for the client–client requests are top priority. Handle 9-1-1 calls for the impending site launch. Free Italian lunch buffet because the executive team is in town…mmm. Weekly Status Meeting with client, have to make sure all project deliverables are buttoned up and requests are responded to immediately. Fiscal year is coming to a close, so we need to make sure everything is organized, completed, signed, billed, and filed by the end of the month. All with 3 major projects going live at the same time.
Wednesday: Presentation from executive management on the 3-year plan for Critical Mass. Presidents and CEO chat openly about our work, offices, accounts, growth, and new pitches. Definitely not your typical corporate spiel… and no sign of a recession here! 60-100 people hired by September. And the best part? They want fresh new talent! Finish off with beer and chips in the Bistro. Leave pretty darn excited and call my friend to tell her to apply. Up until 2:30 am to assist with a client deliverable. Really feel part of the agency life now!
Adam Bracegirdle | Critical Mass Calgary
This year marked my second at the SXSW interactive festival and it’s escalation was palpable. As one firmly rooted in the cerebral, esoteric environs of the creative department, I was expected by many to attend those “creative” sessions in which my peers debate, among other things, the value of the word press theme, or typography on the web. Although important work, I found conversations on the future of my medium to be a far more tantalizing proposition this time around. With that in mind I siphoned a rather crowded schedule down to a multitude of unfamiliar topics ranging from scaled multi-touch platforms to the economics of high quality content creation online. Much to my delight I found something compelling in nearly every one short of a distant few (some were vain attempts at self marketing rather then an argument of any substance. I haven’t the appetite for that.). After a short while, in fact from the very first of my lectures, I began to notice a pervading thought in nearly every talk I attended.
Convergence seemed to be on the minds of every eminent social guru and internet famous CEO at the conference. Wary as I am of the dreaded interactive meme, I could not help but feel that convergence wasn’t just another passing interweb buzzword. It seemed to permeate every lecture regardless of bent. Hardware discussions would invariably turn to talk of real-time repositories that could be accessed from anywhere; hardware as we know it becoming usurped by its more powerful, cloud-based counterpart. And although I suppose one could say that it’s an obvious (and dated) example of where convergence is headed, the example becomes substantive when watching a mob of displeased technophiles assault Mark Cuban, chairman of HDNet, demanding access to a`la carte content at a whim, from anywhere.
Talk of convergence extended well out of the traditional confines of platform and hardware though. Point in case, “social” was a virtual non-event this year as it has become almost totally ubiquitous; no longer considered a back channel for passive content. The emergence of the front channel was happening before us at SXSW as Twitter blew up during the keynotes with a frenzy of discussion, valuable or not, and location based services like Gowalla begin to provide tangible value in finding anything from Migas for breakfast 
to the best dive bar in Texas. I found myself at one point wondering if I was the only one in my lecture becoming confused by the direction of the conversation, only to find that several others were tweeting from within the room and getting informed responses from the moderator, in real-time. The convergence of channels is happening rapidly in these circles as the term “multi-channel” exits the lexicon and is replaced simply by “interaction”.
Natalie Prout | Critical Mass London
Having the ability to identify your target market and market to them responsibly is an increasingly forgotten rule of thumb within online marketing. Far too often brands want to jump on the proverbial bandwagon and embrace the hottest, coolest techniques/technologies to gain praise by demonstrating how hip and happening they are. What they don’t realise however, is that most of the time in doing this, they end up damaging the opinion their existing fans have of them, or are missing them entirely.
The biggest hurdle you face in targeting your online efforts is honestly answering the following questions:
1. Who are our consumers?
2. Why do they love our brand?
3. Where do they congregate?
4. How can we communicate with them without irritating them?
The last thing most people want is to be constantly bombarded by irrelevant and overly enthusiastic brands bothering them in their online communities and safe havens. And I’m not just talking about social networks.
Picture this: you’re having a romantic meal for two in a dimly lit romantic restaurant with your significant other when all of a sudden a 10 piece brass band parades over to your table to loudly serenade you. Inappropriate? Yes. Intrusive? Absolutely. Kind of makes you hate 10 piece brass bands? Definitely.
Now, how is that any less annoying then flooding someone’s Twitter dashboard with 15-20 tweets all in quick succession of each other? It’s not really. It’s just as annoying. And on Twitter, you can simply ‘unfollow’ the perpetrator, which is a lot easier then chasing people away from your table in a restaurant.
You should already know the answers to Points 1 and 2 (as you should know your brand if you intent to market it). So skipping straight to the more misunderstood questions of 3 and 4 – let’s talk about the importance of understanding where our fans congregate and how we should communicate with them?
Last week a very special group of people accompanied our executive team to Las Vegas for a few days of fun and relaxation. All in the name of recognizing a “job extraordinarily done” and to welcome the newest member of the most exclusive club @criticalmass–the CMVP Club, consisting of our CMVP Of The Year winners.
Who is a CMVP?
Initiated seven years ago, the peer nominated CMVP program recognizes one person each month for their contribution to CM’s vision.
A CMVP embodies the very essence of Critical Mass. They are:
Driven.
Real.
Committed.
Inspired.
Winners are highly valued team members, driven by creativity and problem solving. They are reliable, trustworthy and display extraordinary initiative in everything they do. CMVPs constantly go above and beyond their job description to make our company better, often inspiring us to do more and find a better way.
CMVPs breathe digital— they are always learning and are never satisfied.
Our twelve 2009 nominees for CMVP of the Year come from several disciplines: Project Management, Technology, Human Resources, Business Development, Creative, Account Management, Marketing Science and Insight & Planning- showing us that rock stars exist everywhere and having a team full of such people is how extraordinary experiences are bred.
Vegas Baby!
For the last few years we’ve taken the nominees to Las Vegas for an exclusive—and might I add, epic–trip.
Shopping the strip, relaxing at swank spas, gambling, golfing and consuming gourmet food and copious amounts of alcohol are a few of the ways our CMVPs are pampered. The details, well we can’t tell you exactly what went on. You know the drill… It happened in Vegas. We do know that this elite club returned back to their families and teams on Friday, very tired but recharged through their adventures. Among them the freshly named 2009 CMVP of the Year.
So who won?
We’ll be announcing that publicly next month at the CMMYs, our annual awards show that celebrates our best work of the previous year. We can only promise that it won’t really be a surprise. Anyone would agree that this person has earned the honor.
Stay tuned…
I’ll get this out of the way right now: I had a great time at SXSW. I found it interesting, inspiring and as it was aptly put by CNN.com – “Spring Break for Geeks.” Austin has more bars and live music venues packed into a 4 block area than anywhere else I have ever been.
This could easily be mistaken as a crowded concert at any Spring Break locale. Daytona Beach, Cancun, Key West? Nope. The Austin 'Geek' crowd at SxSW 2010.
More to the point though, what did I learn?
For every good panel you attend, there will be an average panel you will attend. Thankfully, attending a great panel (and there is at least one of those per day) more than makes up for that. Interaction with an audience and showing a
genuine interest in being in front of a group commands their attention. This was something that I thought made these panels “great.” Gary Vaynerchuk and Dan Roam were two speakers I saw who did this.
Gary Vaynerchuk
My biggest personal takeaway happened on Monday while I was there. I went to Gary Vaynerchuk’s session, and was thoroughly entertained. He had one point that really stuck out to me: Being at SXSW means you are way out in front of everyone else as far as knowing what is new and what is going on in the industry and on the internet.
That was interesting, but it didn’t really resonate until later that evening…
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