POWERSHiFTER

POWERSHiFTER 2.0

JP Holecka — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 21:42:39 +0000

Version 1.0 of our site over stayed it’s welcome longer than I ever thought possible. We have been working on our 2.0 site since late last year. In fact we just celebrated the wireframes 1st birthday. Kidding aside, the reason for the delay is because we have been busy with exciting new client work. Most of our new work never even made the pages of the 1.0 version of the site’s portfolio page because, we thought 2.0 completion was just around the corner.

The directive to our sr. developer was to make it pixel perfect, something he does every time anyway, and make the backend so easy to update that we could task either our parents or an intern to do it. I am happy to announce that he did both. Not only did he nail the visual handed to him by the art director, he also customized the CMS so that 95% of the site could be updated without a single line of code being manually altered. The reason for the direction was two fold, firstly this is what we would deliver to our clients, and secondly so many digital agency sites are poorly cobbled together quickly between client projects and it’s too hard for anyone other than the busy agency developer to update.

We are extremely proud of our new site and know that it better reflects who were are as an agency. Please explore the site and feel free to let us know what you think in the comments below.

New digs, new places to eat

JP Holecka — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 11:15:28 +0000

We have physically moved offices to our new building on the edge of Gastown. Some claim it to actually be Gastown but that is not correct, Gastown is further to the north. Our new office is in the historic Dominion Building that was at one time the tallest building in the Commonwealth. I was reluctant to head back over to this side of town after spending many years at other agencies here, but I have to admit it’s finally changing for the better. We have great places to eat and hairy hipsters that serve up coffee just the way I like it, strong and with plenty of attitude. I mentioned that we are physically in our new digs but not fully moved in yet as our order of furniture is not arriving until April 20th. So it’s cardboard boxes and milk crates for a little while longer I am afraid. We should be fully moved in by the end of the month and may even have a little open house to celebrate the expansion.

Please take note of our new address: 310-207 West Hastings Street Vancouver.

Photo: rommy ghaly

TELUS revamps the Community Section of about.telus.com

JP Holecka — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 00:19:13 +0000

In the late spring of this year TELUS came to us with the request to completely revamp their Community website. The existing site was hard to navigate and important information about TELUS community involvement, programs and donations were not being showcased well at all. Not that it was the fault of the site’s design per say, but rather the business objectives and content had changed substantially since the last major overhaul. TELUS is much more active in the community and funds hundreds of community programs across Canada as well as emergency relief in places like Haiti and Pakistan. In fact they were named Most Outstanding Philanthropic Corporationglobally this year. With that kind of commitment to giving they needed a site to both showcase the programs but to also give charities easier access to applying for the funding. Our goal was to achieve both objectives while updating the branding that the site had not kept pace with.

Our team completely re-wired the information architecture into four main sections. 1) Philosophy, 2) Community Investment, 3) Team TELUS Cares, and 4)Funding Application form. Prior to our design, new sections would get “bolted on” in odd locations because the site’s architecture was not designed to capture the community program holistically. With the four new global sections we knew that all current and future content would be able to find a logical home in the site that was not be a force fit.

One of the key problems of the existing site was that there were all of these great programs being funded by TELUS that was not being percolated to the top or home page for users to see….well there was no real home page in the last design to begin with to be honest. The new homepage now has a large current events carousel that showcases big projects and initiatives very clearly and in the well known TELUS brand of large images, short headlines and summary copy. The cool part of the carousel is the hidden funding map that is just behind the large revolving slides. When you click the Funding Map button an interactive Google map is takes center stage on the homepage and a showcase of TELUS community projects from coast to coast is revealed. Users can quickly browse the projects and then click into the bigger story right from the map. Site users no longer have to root through many levels to dig into the funding showcases.

The four sections of the new site are now more logical and will always be able to absorb new content organically. There were two main areas that were not showcasing the way TELUS funds programs. Both the Community Boards and TELUS Ambassadors were not only buried but were just giant dumps of heavy copy that users would have to wade through. Each Community Board and local Ambassadors group were given there own landing and project pages. Now each team could showcase the project with text and images. There was substantial weight added to presence that they had on the site. Both of these groups really are on the front lines when it comes to actively working with either local community funding or in the case of the TELUS Ambassadors working directly as volunteers.

The other main goal for the new site design was to give community groups and charities easier access to TELUS funding for projects. A new prominent global driver was added to the site so that no matter where the site user was they always had a quick way to apply for funding. We also changed the funding pages to be a stepped process so that applicants would have to walk through a gated pre-application area. This was done to reduce the error rate in funding applications. The old site design let applicants jump right to the application form bypassing the funding guidelines resulting in a large number of errors in the application process. The new design looks to reduce this substantially.

The biggest challenge for us with the Community site as the fact that it was not on a content management system and all 400+ pages [ 200+ English and 200+ French] needed to be delivered in flat html….we utilized a Ruby on Rails compiler and some markdown to make the process a little easier, non the less it was quite the Herculaneum effort for the dev team.

This is not a dump and run exercise either for the site. Our team is moving right into phase II and ongoing site updates. We are assisting TELUS in a content program that will help them manage all of the stakeholders to provide timely and important updates to the site, so that it will continue to grow and showcase the latest ways in which TELUS “Gives where it Lives”

New corporate photos for Ryan and Myself.

JP Holecka — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 05:44:06 +0000

We have been in need of some decent photos for a few months now, so I bit the bullet last week and hired Nordica Photography to shoot Ryan and myself. We set up a nice little route here in Yaletown that would give us the best in variety in scenes and backgrounds. Want to know one of the hardest things to do? Well trying to get the two of us to look naturally happy in front of a camera would be up there I suspect. Thanks to the guys at Nordica for the great shoot, we are legit now and have the photos to prove it.

Powershifter’s New Addition

JP Holecka — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 13:00:00 +0000

I would like to take this time to announce that our agency has grown just a little bit more this month. It is my absolute pleasure to welcome Ryan McCormick to the team in the newly created position of Director of Integrated Production. Ryan is an industry veteran that has successfully produced award winning work while at both Blast Radius and Tribal DDB. Ryan’s experience producing both digital and broadcast for such brands as Clorox, BC Dairy, BC Tourism, Boston Pizza, EA, PBS and many others.

Ryan’s roll here will be to produce all digital projects that we are engaged with. He will also continue to develop our professional network of contractors and partners that are hired to execute the work. Ryan will draw on his existing large network of professionals and seek out new ones that will add to the breadth of Powershifter offerings.

More quick facts on Ryan:

Lives on an island in his quest to shatter the myth that no man is an island.
Uses almost 6 gigs of tethered data on his iPhone monthly commuting from that island.
Dad to 3 lovely girls that keep him pretty busy while not at the office.
Caused quite the stir with the co-invention of luggage stickers for The Cheeky.com
Gets more done in a day than most do in a week.

We are scheduled for some corporate shots in the coming weeks and will reveal what this mystery super producer looks like when they are done.

Blog Post UpdateCrowd sourced editorial staff for everyone.

JP Holecka — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 06:00:00 +0000

In February of 2009 I blogged about the fact that Twitter was becoming more and more a crowdsourced news editoral application for me. In the post I reviewed how I was using Twitter more as a way to source content and less about conversation.

Let me break it down:

I create a Twitter account.
Then I start to search for, and follow people with similar interests either personally or professionally. Or if you are like me, both.
Download an application like TweetDeck that allows you to group the people you are following into categories. using Twitter lists, not unlike sections of an newspaper; News, Sports and Entertainment, Technology etc.
In each of these sections I follow people that are either experts in their field or have a passion for athe topic of interest. Either way the posts will be relevant.
Now what do all of these people that you are following Twitter do all day? Well they post stuff. They post links to articles in newspapers and blogs, videos, music [http://blip.fm/all] and much, much more.
Breaking stories are now hitting Twitter first and I no longer have to wait for the old world media publishing systems latency to get the stories quickly.
The topics that are trending and are important globally can be easily viewed right in TweetDeck’s trending cloud tag.
Now because I have selected people based on similar interests and passions, the content that is posted, is for the most part ,very relevant to me. The Twitter base becomes my very own editorial staff picking only the best of the best and then posting it to your Twitterstream.
Now add the NYTimes, CBC, Fox News, NPR and CNN into your Twitterstream and you have it all the topics and news covered.

Since that post I believe that I have tweeted about 10,000 or so times. I guess I was a little off on the conversation part. Now for an update on how this has progressed over the last 1.5 years. There is no question that in recent weeks my outbound and conversational habits on Twitter have dropped substantially.

This is due in part for a few reasons. The first is that the agency has gotten very, very busy and there really is less time to converse with others in social networks. Second was the discovery of a very cool, but simplistic, Twitter app called Twittertim.es. Twitter Times is then linked to your Twitter account via it’s oath and then spiders all of the people that you are following. The application crawls your list and then pulls all of the great content, pictures and all, that is being posted in your stream. The page looks nothing like a Twitter stream and resembles an online news or magazine site. The app then weighs the importance of the tweeted links by the frequency that it is posted and re-tweeted by those that you follow. This is the crowdsourced editorial staff that I referred to in the past. Only this time around their commentary is diminished and the posted content is made more important. Sure the “postees” are listed at the bottom of each story but their conversational tweets are removed. As your day fills up with important activities it’s nice to be able to get the hyper relevant content, from those you follow, without being sucked in to the conversation.

Now let’s step that up even further with the announcement of the new iPad app called Flipboard. The application looks very much like a magazine but all of the content, like Twitter Times, is from your social networks. This time they have included all of the links in your Facebook, Flickr and other social feeds. In fact the crowdsourcing is upped in power but the fact that you can subscribe to user generated Twitter lists to create categories.If you look at the preview video below you can get a pretty good sense of how it works and how gorgeous it really is. I must admit that I was holding out for the second generation iPad until I saw this app. I consume a ton of social contributed media from the people I follow and would love to be able to take it with me and to view it in a much better UI.

Flipboard is not the first iPad app that is based on this concept and I suspect won’t be the last. The talented folks over at Teehan + Lax have a very cool looking iPad app called TweetMag that is soon to be released as well. There is now a race on and this is where I think social is really going in the next few years. I think this is bigger than geo-location apps to be honest. People really do want to know what your reading more than they want to know where you are reading.

Top Ten Advertisers for Q1 2010

JP Holecka — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 06:00:00 +0000

Top Ten Advertisers (Q1 2010)
*Rank*	*Company*	*Jan – Mar 2010 ($Mil)*	*Jan – Mar 2009($Mil)*	*% Change*
1	Procter & Gamble Co	$772.6	$656.5	17.7%
2	AT&T Inc	$576.4	$455.0	26.7%
3	General Motors Corp	$533.7	$415.5	28.5%
4	Verizon Communications Inc	$517.2	$569.1	-9.1%
5	Pfizer Inc	$396.4	$271.1	46.2%
6	News Corp	$366.8	$340.4	7.8%
7	Johnson & Johnson	$344.1	$390.3	-11.8%
8	Time Warner Inc	$304.3	$265.3	14.7%
9	Walt Disney Co	$267.6	$303.6	-11.8%
10	General Electric Co	$264.6	$261.3	1.3%
	TOTAL	$4,343.9	$3,928.0	10.6%
Source: Kantar Media, May 2010

Getting Down to Business!

JP Holecka — Tue, 11 May 2010 06:00:00 +0000

I was quite flattered to be profiled in Business in Vancouver Magazine last week. It was a real hit with the friends and family on my social networks when I posted it. Kidding aside, the timing could not have been better to be honest. We have been working non stop now for quite some time and it feels good to see that we are getting a little visability for it. There is also something very tactile with being in a print magazine. In our digital work space we forget that there is a tangible world of print. I scanned it to make sure that the wrinkles and 150 dpi where not lost on the viewers here on the blog. You can see the entire ‘newsprinty’ profile by clicking the details link.

I would also like to thank my lovely wife for snapping the awesome shot.

Less is more – Powershifter Shifts to Mini Cards

JP Holecka — Mon, 03 May 2010 06:00:00 +0000

With a new Yaletown agency address came the requirement for new business cards. So when I was cleaning out my office drawer I found an old box of Moo Mini Cards that I used personally. I thought that these could be the solution I was looking for. The response when I handed the little cards out personally was always the same. That of wonderment and affection. Those are emotions that I would love to have associated with the brand. They are also very Web 2.0 like us and as new employees come into the fold we could order them up easy peasy. That said they are so cost effective that even contractors could get a set. Couple that with the cool key chain case and it was a no brainer.

So with that I present to you the new POWERSHiFTER mini cards. [Cool black case sold separately].

In social media should you choose personal or corporate branding?

JP Holecka — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 06:00:00 +0000

The question arose the other night on Twitter, about user @bradinator retiring his personal persona account and focusing more energy on his corporate wine brand’s Twitter account @Blackcloudwine. The question put forward was: “Is he committing social capital suicide by doing so and if so why would he do such a thing?”. I have been wrestling with the same issue with my agency’s @powershifter account vs. my personal @jaypiddy account, so I thought I would wrestle it out here on the PS Blog. Is the personal brand more important than the corporate brand, is it the other way around or do they share equality in the equation? The answer may be clear to those that are born of the web and social media especially who are themselves “the brand”. If you are by definition a primarily a blogger then for all intensive purposes that is your “product” That means you engage users at a very personal level in social media and one might say that they are equal to the brand. The personas are the brands and are so intwined with the writing of the blogs and the Twitter posts it’s hard to separate the two.

That is not the case for such things as packaged goods and or large service oriented companies. Those that are born brand first as is the case for the vast majority of brands and companies in the social media space must keep the brand first in the minds of it’s customers. As much as a personal touch or the collective voice maybe important elements behind the brand touching the consumer in thoughtful and memorable ways, it is important to place the brand 1st and foremost.

Look at the top brands in social media today. Jet Blue, Dell, Starbucks, Whole Foods and WestJet just to name a few. They are all very personable and have clearly communicated as a group of people behind the brand that actually do care, but they do not place themselves before the brand. When I think of Zappos I have no idea what the names of the great people that helped me with customer care issues, and if I was not an in the advertising industry I would not be able to name Tony Hsieh as the CEO. Most of the Zappos customers only know the brand by name.

So back to @bradinator vs @Blackcloudwine for a few minutes here. What are the risks of abandoning the personal brand? As @paulrickett points out that 60% of those who follow @bradinator do not follow @Blackcloudwine so at first glance one might say that is a bad choice to abandon the personal account considering how often @bradinator tweets about his Blackcloud Wine. But that would be a very simplified view of the situation. @bradinator’s personal account is very irreverent and has collected a huge following for that very reason. What if those 2030 followers could care less about wine and follow him just for his personal commentary? Then even if he could transfer his social capital over to the @Blackcloudwine account then it would be worthless. If 909 followers of @Blackcloudwine have a higher propensity to love wine and buy more wine and were attracted to that account due to the winecentric tweets in the first place then the smaller more qualified numbers are much more valuable. I will admit that I did not take the time to attempt to measure the quality of the @Blackcloudwine wine followers but I will bet that most are more interested in wine that on his other account.

Social media is just like traditional advertising when it comes to influence. It’s not the number of eyeballs that count but rather the quality and relevance of those that follow you and your posts, tweets and feeds. Just because you have a follow count of thousands upon thousands on Twitter, your blog or Facebook page does not mean that you can market just anything to your potentially unqualified followers. Hell if it was a shear numbers game then why not just head over to fiverr.com and pay the five bucks to the literally hundreds of people offering to place your message or ad in their Twitter streams of 10′s of thousands of followers. I’ll tell you why. Proof that the clickthrough rate on those unqualified posts are incredibly low. All you need to do is pay one of the social media influencers a “fiverr” and then hand them over a message with a bit.ly or ow.ly link and watch your clickthrough rate. I will bet you that you will get fewer then 10 clicks on your highly un-targeted campaign. I am not saying that big numbers of followers don’t work but they need to be qualified. Sure we may lead tribes but if I started to push Tampex branded tampons to my Twitter followers I am sure my tribe would not buy what I was selling.

Here is another reason that the personal brand in social media may not be the right way to grow your brand…scaling with grace and authenticity. We have seen what happens when a personal brand does not scale well due to the fact that there is a finite amount of you [personal brand] to go around. Usually when a personal brand takes off there is the need to automate the posts and tweets etc. That is usually done by way of hiring assistants to do the work for the personal brand…that’s not very transparent now is it and can blow up quickly. When you choose to support a branded account the ability to authentically scale the brand is much easier to do. Sure it’s through the same process of distributing the communication through others like assistants or social brand managers. The difference is that each manager can be identified as an individual behind a brand.

On an account that our agency set up for a customer we have three different people that tweet on behalf of the brand and are demarked by the “^” charachter and their initials. This clearly identifies that there is more than one person managing the account and if need be others can be added with out the feeling that there is any misrepresentation of the branded tweets.

So I ask the question again. Is it social capital suicide or just the death of another Twitter ID? Or is it just the birth of another one that may suit the brand better and in the end move more product and connect with it’s customers in a much more authentic way?