Small-to-medium sized business owners, THIS IS FOR YOU! This conference is a MUST for your business to be successful in a socially-connected marketplace. Social Media Day will help you establish a solid foundation based on key principles, demonstrate why this is key to a brand’s success in today’s digital marketplace, show you how to prioritize your efforts for the best return and give you the tools you need to take the next steps.

Learn from the top marketing & business leaders sharing their social media insights from leading B2C companies. You’ll hear their key learnings, how they measure success, what hiccups they had along the way via their through real stories, humor and stories that tug at your heart. Keynotes & discussions will be on foundational principles, personal & business branding, creative content, telling your brand’s story, current media trends & best-practices of how to Go Social!

Lunch will be provided and Social Media Day tickets include a pass for all three days of the Northwest Women’s Show on March 2-4, 2012.

To get you even more excited take a look at the amazing speakers we have on deck:

Kathy Ireland, (@kathyireland) our keynote speaker, is a former model, actress, author and entrepreneur, Kathy Ireland is the CEO and designer of her eponymous brand product marketing company, Kathy Ireland Worldwide.  Kathy Ireland Worldwide® (kiWW®) is the design and marketing firm founded in 1993 by CEO and Chief Designer, Kathy Ireland. The mission statement of kiWW® is “…finding solutions for families, especially busy moms”™.

Mike Whitmore, (@mikewhitmore) is the President of Fresh Consulting based in Bellevue, WA. Fresh Consulting is an emerging business strategy consulting firm, delivering solutions utilizing Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 technology implementation, design, crowdsourcing models and best business practices involving collaboration technologies, social media, program and project management, mobile app development, website design and content creation.

Rod Brooks, (@NW_Mktg_Guy) has enjoyed tremendous success during his 3S year career in sales, marketing, and business development roles since graduating with a bachelor’s degree in communications from Washington State University in 1975. He is known for his vision, leadership, and ability to transform vision into effective corporate strategy and unique implementation plans. Rod has been the marketing force behind successful start-ups, emerging growth companies, and well established businesses such as Schuck’s Auto Supply, Egghead Software, WordPerfect Corporation, and Coinstar.

Jeff Dance, (@jeffdance) is one of the founders of Fresh Consulting.  Jeff has managed or advised several web-based businesses and led dozens of consulting projects, including Social Media and Enterprise 2.0 strategy projects, working with entrepreneurs to fortune 500 clients. Prior to founding Fresh Consulting, Jeff was a Strategy and Operations management consultant at Deloitte Consulting where he worked on projects across the nation and pioneered nationwide initiatives on the West Innovation team. Jeff is also a level 3 professional snowboard instructor who trains instructors part-time throughout the winter season to keep things “fresh”.

Heidi Miller, (@heidimiller) helps build engaged, passionate communities for companies, not for profits and entrepreneurs worldwide. Ms. Miller guides and trains entrepreneurs, corporations and not-for-profits to embrace social media and get involved via appropriate, strategized approaches, using new media tools such as podcasts Twitter, blogs, Facebook, Flickr and Vimeo. She has spoken to dozens of groups, including the Chicago Direct Marketing Association, graduate business classes and at Podcast and New Media Expo, on topics from high-level social media strategy to measurement to hands-on classes on using specific tools.

Founded in 2008, Waterbox has been creating water bottles made from steel, glass and BPA-free plastic with a unique twist: they are works of art. Each bottle is superbly encased by a hand-crafted design that is perfectly illuminated by the top-quality colors and materials that form its exterior. Waterboxco.com boasts an array of bottle styles with an eclectic collection of artistic creations to effectively quench your thirst while performing as an exceptional conversation piece. They provide a functional way for us to express our sense of style and stand out in a crowd.

I purchased my first Waterbox not to long ago and soon thereafter I quickly discovered that the lip of the bottle was cracked. My natural reaction as a waterholic was to purchase a new bottle to service my daily fix. However, I decided first to reach out to Waterbox via Facebook and was overwhelmed by the helpful result. They answered my post quickly and without hesitation sent a BRAND NEW Waterbox to my house. I was amazed by their fast response time and hassle-free customer service. Not only will I be buying more of their products, but I have become a Waterbox advocate for life.

This experience made me realize that small acts of authentic customer service goes a long way in the business world. Just like their creative artwork helped them stand out from the crowd, Waterbox’s attention to me helped them stand out from all the other options out there.  This is a good example of how a simple social Facebook post along with a quick response creates a lasting customer experience.  In today’s fast paced world of instant gratification, making the consumer feel that they are first priority is what creates repeat business.  Case and point, this inspired me to write a blog post about my customer experience.

Spotify is a cloud based service that allows people access to their 15 million song library, with the ability to develop playlists, share files as well as download mp3s.  Now, no matter where people are, they can access their customized playlists on Spotify’s cloud and download or share this data with other Spotify users.  The technological breakthrough is identified by Spotify’s seamless integration with user’s personal libraries and the ability to share files within your social network.

The company was founded in 2006 by Daniel Ek, former CTO of Stardoll, and Martin Lorentzon, co-founder of TradeDoubler.  After first obtaining European subscribers in 2008, Spotify has now spread to the United States during the summer of this year.  Spotify’s latest public subscription figure is over 11 million subscribers with over 1 million paying subscribers.

Sean Parker, the creator of Napster and investor of Spotify referred to the service as “the realization of a dream.”  The dream being the ability to share music files freely on the internet, while allowing the music industry to reap the economic benefits.  Now sharing files legally through Spotify is arguably more convenient to users than pirating files.  Spotify allows users limited free access to its cloud.  The user’s experience is monetized through Spotify’s paid subscription models and advertisements.  This means that users pay if they want the luxury of unlimited listening time, higher sound quality, mobile access, no advertising interruptions…etc.

Wondering what’s in store for the future of social music sharing?  Today, Spotify just made history by partnering with Facebook, debuting with Facebook’s latest revision of the site.  Spotify’s role is powering an app that allows for seamless music sharing on Facebook. When a Spotify user is listening to a song, that song is then automatically displayed in a live news-feed called a “ticker.”  As songs are linked on the “ticker,” fellow facebook users can not only see what their friends are enjoying, but actually listen to the song by playing it off Spotify’s cloud based music player.  With over 750 million users, this will dramatically increase Spotify’s exposure to the masses and redefine how the world shares media.  iTunes should be worried.

Spotify serves as a great example of what to expect from future cloud business models and how quickly the market can change with our fast pace of innovations.  Expect to find more companies that allows users to obtain, customize and share information freely while still being profitable.

We are in awe at the incredible innovators that surround us so we decided to highlight those hard-working brilliant minds in a blog post series called “Fresh Innovators.” By doing so we hope to not only showcase people who are doing great things but inspire others to do the same.

Here is a quick showcase of our 5 different video styles for Fresh Productions:

1. Digital Animation

2. Typography

3. Educational

4. Telling Your Story

5. Sketched Animation

With our wide range of video styles, customers really get to choose how they want to creatively express their business.  For most animation based videos, the turn around time is between 6 to 8 weeks for a 1 to 2 minute video.  Each video we do follows these six steps:

1. Concept – Talk with the client to determine the appropriate concept and marketing strategy for the video.

2. Script – Turning abstract ideas into concrete ones, we write out the script, turn to the client for suggested revisions.

3. Storyboard – We plot out how to visually personify the script through animation, including style, color, and smooth professional transitions.

4. Voice acting – Give your company a voice!  We audition countless voice actors until you find the voice that best represents you.

5. Animation/shooting – After all that planning, this is when we roll up our sleeves and begin the magic of video production.

6. Editing - We edit the footage together with the audio and are ready to post your marketing video online!

Let us know how we can help tell your story.  Call us today at Fresh Consulting 1.877.563.7374 or email us team@freshconsulting.com

What made ManageFlitter even more powerful, easy-to-use and simple was a FireFox Add-On that would bulk-select all the check-boxes on a website. Without the add-on I would have to click each box separately. Grrrr.

Everything worked just fine until FireFox updated to 4.0 (and now it’s at version 5.x) and the developers didn’t update the add-on. Grrrr again! Now ManageFlitter was too time-consuming to use

Enter Quora!, another new social engagement tool to connect legitimate people with legitimate knowledge. I posted this question on Quora.com – One of the Add-Ons for Firefox was a Check-all and it allowed a user to check all the check boxes on a website. Is there one for FF or Chrome?

A gent, Andy Warr, asked a simple question – Out of interest … what is your scenario?

I explained the situation above and what, to my surprise, but a couple days later Andy posted the following – It was an easy extension to write… it just took me a while to get around to doing it.

In response to my query Andy wrote a Google Chrome Extension that would provide the functionality that I missed!

Wow!  Why did he do it?

For starters, he’s a developer at Google. But, and this is more relative to the point, he doesn’t claim to be a “social media guru” or any other such terms, yet he engaged and responded to my humble question with a developed solution.  This is a perfect example and a case study of the power of social engagement on a great new platform of quality interactions.

I just had to share this small case study as I was, and still am, surprised almost daily at the power of the online medium in making connections and finding answers.  Thanks to Andy for helping me realize yet again why we’re in the business of helping companies leverage the best of the web.

*A word of caution on Twitter tools such as Manage Flitter–be careful with any of them as the Twitter Terms of Use have very specific language about what is and what is not allowed. I’ve know a few people that have had their accounts either muted or suspended for violation of the Terms. If you do use these tools, follow the directions as you would for taking over-the-counter meds and you should be fine.

Establishing a solid foundation for your development environment can really help you accomplish your projects quickly, as well as decrease the frustration and confusion that can occur along the way. Here are some tips and best practices that you can use in your own development environment.

1. Pick the right tool for the right job.

Just because the last 3 apps you wrote used .Net does not mean your 4th has to use it as well. Case in point: A few months ago I volunteered to renovate a really old site for a church. They were using Front Page/HTML and the person in charge was overwhelmed on how to maintain it and issues were occurring. My first though was to setup a CMS for them, and I picked an open sourced, .Net one with a lot of good reviews, that was perfect for medium/large organizations. I spent a week of dealing with hosting incompatibilities, learning a new CMS, and structuring a lot of templates and controls without much progress to show for it.

Then I took a step back and thought about things more. I realized that WordPress better suited their needs (simple page content with a feed for their blogs and sermon messages) was a lot easier to get running, and was a lot easier for them to update their posts with. I had things installed and running within the day and the rest of the content imported within a week. The right tool fit the right job and made everything a lot smoother to implement.

If you are wondering what tools are available on the web, check out CloudSurfing to find the right app for your needs.

2. Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

I’ve run into countless scenarios where the first decision that is made is to build system X without seeing if there is already an alternative out there. I’ve seen CMS systems built from scratch, often with fewer features and more bugs than something freely available. You have CMS systems like WordPress, PyroCMS, Joomla, Orchard, and Umbraco. You have languages such as .Net, Ruby on Rails, Python, Haskell, and F# to get sites and applications running. Even within those you have frameworks like MVC, MVVM, CodeIgniter, jQuery Mobile, Entity Framework, PDO, and DataMapper that help your application get developed even faster. My rule of thumb when approached with a new project is to gather the requirements and see what language/framework fits best to get the project up and running (see, I’m following my own point #1!!) If nothing fits well (which happens on occasion) then it is time to build something up from scratch, but I’d wager to say that it happens only 5% of the time. See the list of various programming languages.

3. Coding standards aren’t king. Consistency is.

I’ve been coding for about 10 years now professionally and I’ve seen nearly every type of coding standard (Pascal, Hungarian, Camel, Homegrown) there can be. Often enough you’ll run into people that have some REALLY strong opinions on the “right” coding standard. They will reach the point to which they will argue, rather vehemently, about their standard as the “one and perfect” standard by which all others fail. The important point is that coding standards were put in place to provide a consistent way to quickly analyze the code you are working. Being able to quickly analyze your variables and controls, so that you can see where a particular object might be giving you grief, is the ultimate objective. Having this consistency also helps when you bring a teammate on to help you with some code, because they can understand what the code is attempting to do without having to relearn everything. Ultimately it doesn’t matter WHAT standard you pick, as long as it is something everybody in your team adheres to and understands. See Language specific naming conventions to learn more.

4. Just like voting, document and communicate early and often.

Even when you have two seasoned programmers on the same team. There can be plenty of confusion as to what a given method is doing or why. More importantly, there’s a lot of miscommunication that can occur between the customer, the marketing team, and the programmers themselves when it comes to the details of a project, as outlined here. It’s key to keep good documentation of your application and the customers needs for future maintenance.

Keep pertinent “why” type comments in the code for a given loop or calculation. Keep a Wiki or other online documentation source to outline higher level structural organizations for a project. Use the comment system in your source control system to document changes to various points in code (bug fixes and enhancements). Most importantly, keep good phone or e-mail contact with your customer to make sure their needs are being met. I’ll admit that translating the “geek speak” to “business speak” can be the hardest barrier to overcome, but it is worth it when your customer feels confident that their needs are being met. Often I find having the customer outline their use case scenarios (I need to click button X and have it bring me a list of Y’s) work best. From there you can look at their use case scenarios and identify key data points (Y’s reside in table A and B) and business rules (we don’t pull records from table C because that is only for expired records). How Projects Really Work (version 1.5) illustrates the communication mismatch.

Find out which Wiki documentation solutions fits you the most:

5. Sanitize your data input and output.

Even with all the advanced frameworks and languages out there today, SQL Injection, XSS hijacking, and even simple HTML character escaping cause a lot of headaches on websites today. Some frameworks will do a good job at parameterizing your SQL queries, but some will not. It is important to look at your given framework and make sure to discover this and do the appropriate code modifications as needed. Every language/framework you work with will have a document on how to properly handle your database queries.

While it used to be common to trust your data coming out of the database, even your output can come under attack. One tactic of the ASPRox botnet virus was to attempt to read the system tables on a database, and thus gain access to all the database tables installed. In hosting scenarios where multiple sites were using the same database, site A may have been infected, but the virus spread itself through the database, so that site B was attempting to affect visitors to their site, because their tables had been corrupted too. Most languages provide an “escape HTML” type function that you can use to sanitize your output. See Bobby Tables for the illustration of problem.

6. Source control is your homeboy

It’s hard to think of a day when I WASN’T using source control, even for small side projects. When I was, I cringe in fear at what would happen if something happened to my primary machine where the code resided. Source control allows you a way to easily back up your code and even more importantly, be able to track your changes between updates and features added to your project. While source control might not seem necessary if you’re working by yourself on a project, the second another person is brought on to the project, or somebody else is to take over for you, source control proves it’s weight in gold. Source control proves even more valuable when you’re working in a telecommute environment or with colleagues that may be half way around the world. Source control will give you a great way to see the fine details of what has changed between various versions of your code, which can also help debug issues that have been introduced during a code change. There are lots of free source control options available, most notably SVN, git, and Mercurial. There are also paid systems like Vault and Team Foundation Server. Most bug tracking and ticket systems will also integrate with these source control systems, so you can link up your code changes with their relevant work items.

You can also find alternative source code management apps:

7. Personal organization and work load is important.

When you’re working on more than one project at the same time, or you have multiple requests getting thrown at your daily, keeping yourself organized becomes a priority. It is also important not to overload yourself with work. Jim Benson make a great observation that you can’t work at 100% capacity because you can’t effectively switch between your tasks to get them done. The trick is to find the balance of tasks that you can do simultaneously without losing your throughput. You also need to find a way to keep these tasks organized, as well as all the other ones that are waiting to be done.

A couple of years ago I stumbled upon something called the Personal Kanban. It’s modeled after the larger scale agile programming tool called the kanban board. It is a great way for you to organize your tasks, track the status of them (working on vs. complete vs. waiting to start). It also helps you limit your workload so that you don’t reach that 100% limit. This approach has really increased my productivity, because I keep myself from being overloaded with work and I can easily switch between tasks if something comes up that is more important. Recently I found an online tool called Kanbanery that will give you a free online personal Kanban board. I keep that up in my browser all day long to track my workload, in addition to sharing it with my colleague so he knows what I’m working on.

8. Take time out to learn.

“Never stop learning” is the motto they use in a lot of places and I firmly believe it. It’s easy to become completely consumed with the work you have for the day, that by the end of it you’re too tired to do anything else when you get home. Days turn into months, and months turn into years before you know it. Suddenly, everybody is talking about “Hot Tech Gamma” that has been out for a year now, generating a lot of hype, and you have no clue what it is. This hurts your personal development as a developer, as well as hurts the company you work for. I consider it my duty to bring fresh options to my boss for consideration when a new project comes up, and you should too.

My recommendation is to take a minimum of 3 hours out of your work week to research new technologies or even new tech news. You can do this all at once, or take roughly 30 minutes a day to read up on your favorite tech blogs or news outlets. You could even do something crazy like browse through questions on StackOverflow that intrigue you and learn things that way. If you’re working a typical 40 hours a week, this small investment will pay off big down the road when a problem arises or project comes up and you say, “Hey, I remember reading up about something last week that would fit perfectly for this!”

9. Have a hobby project

Sometimes the best way to learn is by doing. While you are writing a lot of code at your job, you might not get a chance to look into those new technologies that you’ve been reading about, because they’re too new, or there’s not enough known about them to implement in a major project. In addition, the more you code, the more you learn about your programming language, even if it’s the subtleties of the language. This is where a hobby project comes in handy. Finding a side project (like building an online database for your favorite collectible card game) gives you the opportunity to try out new technologies without the worry, limitations, or deadlines of your current job. You’ll also have an added enthusiasm to complete the project that you might not have with your current project at work.

There are also lots of open source sites that encourage contributions from the public, like GitHub, CodePlex, and Sourceforge. You can easily look through these sites for a project that excites you and start contributing. Plus you can add a little geek cred to your resume when you say “I helped update that feature” or “That’s my project I put out there for everybody to use.” More importantly, you’ll get more exposure to the development process you love to do.

10. Share the love, start a blog.

Finally, share your knowledge with other developers that are just starting or looking for answers. You can also use your blog to document those odd solutions (such as computing the haversine formula in your database) to which you may want to refer to later. More importantly, just as you’ve spent your time online, reading other blogs and resources to learn, you can pass that knowledge along to others that stumble across your blog. I was told once that the best way you can tell that you understand the code you’re writing is if you can explain it to others. The blog provides a great medium for you to do that as well. Take your existing code, or maybe some other code you found out on the Internet, and do more than just show how it works, but show why it works as well. Maybe there’s a clever trick in its calculations, or it fits a specific need by a customer. Being able to outline those things in a way that other developers can understand makes you a better developer as well.

Hopefully these tips inspire you to set a new (or rebooted) environment in which to develop in. Notice that a lot of these principles are interrelated. You could start your own blog, have a hobby project of creating some plugins for it, share those plugins on a code repository, and then document in your blog how and why they work. The knowledge you gained from those plugins might help a couple months down the road when your business wants to take the “social media” plunge and get a blog going on their site, with some custom features to it that your plugin would solve perfectly. In the end will make you a better software craftsman, and you (and your employer) will be better for it.

Fast forward one year to 2011 where we now have 10 people in our office (not counting contractors and our employees on client sites, which makes us ~20). Just about a month ago, we added a new programmer, Sean Patterson, to our Fresh team.  It was only a week ago Elisha noticed Sean’s birthday notification on Facebook, and he thought, “that’s a lot of July birthdays in our office”, until he clicked Sean’s profile and found out that his birthday is also on July 15th!

Elisha immediately wondered if Jeff was making key hiring decisions based on birth dates! No, Jeff didn’t know about this until Elisha wrote about this on his Facebook wall. Now there are 4 people in our office with same birthday in the group of 10.

We thought this is an very interesting phenomenon, and we decided to calculate the probability of this phenomena to see how interesting it was (yes we are all Geeks).  So our lead technologist, Steve Hulet, spent some time writing up the equations to find out the probability of 4 people sharing the same birthday in a group of 10, then spent some more time validating the answer by writing another equation to see if he could verify the number.  (see Math of one of the equations done below)

The answer Steve came up with is that the probability  of this happening is about 0.0004089% OR roughly about 1 in 245,000.

What does that mean?

• Elisha said: We must be Fresh
• Steve said: Our team is 1 in a (quarter) million!
• Jeff said: If you have a birthday on July 15th, please send your resume to team@freshconsulting.com.   All of our July 15th birthday team members are awesome!

[via Fresh Consulting]

Wikipedia is the first place to look and the last place to source by Fresh Consulting is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on work at FreshConsulting.com.

‘Copy’ and ‘Paste’ the following code to embed this infographic on your website: