Did you say breakfast? It’s ok if you did, although the answer I was looking for was family.

Back when I was still interviewing, I remember Chris telling me that most Carrots were not from New York City and thus, did not have any family members here. That is why, he said, it is important that Carrot Creative is a family. Since starting here, I have never doubted the absolute truth of this statement. My fellow Carrots quickly became my new New York family and despite being far from home, I’ve never once felt alone.

So in the spirit of family and the holidays and being just a tad bit sentimental, I asked my fellow Carrots to share some of their favorite holiday traditions & memories.

William: Over the holidays we make it a point to watch at least one of the Lord of the Rings movies, usually the Fellowship of the Ring. Then, every New Years eve (that I’m in town for) we have a giant feast of King Crab legs & other related seafood awesomeness before heading out!

Dan: My family gets naked and runs around the neighborhood singing Wilson Phillips songs, drunk. Wait, we’re posting these anonymously right?

Steve: Every Christmas Eve, after dinner, my entire family gathers around the TV, pops in the “Best of Will Farrel SNL” DVD, and watches Mark Jenson’s Family Christmas.

“What do you say, let’s get this party started!”

Kyle: When I wake up at my mother’s house, she makes us all wait at the top of the stairs (even when my room was in the basement). In the beginning it was just me, my two sisters, & our dog. Then my sisters starting having kids, and now there is me, my two sisters, their 4 kids, and two husbands which is far too many people to wait at the top of the stairs. While we’re waiting she’ll take pictures and say “WOW Santa came!” & we’re supposed to act surprised. After she’s gotten a sufficient amount of photos, we’re allowed to come down & open gifts.

After that, my sisters and their significant others will drive to my father’s house on the other side of town. He usually greets us at the stairs with the same “WOW Santa came!” talk. Each of us get handed 1 gift at a time as we sit around the tree while John Denver and the Muppet Christmas Album is playing. We open gifts in the order of our age, my older sister first, then my twin sister gets to open the next one (by two minutes). After all of the gifts are dealt, my father makes everyone breakfast; omeletes titled “Super Dee Dooper Alla Pee Hooper”.

Juliette: When I was little, maybe 2 or 3, my parents bought our first live Christmas tree for the house. I got so excited when it arrived that ran up to give it a hug. I quickly realized that hugging it was a bad idea because it wasn’t soft at all. Hours later, I was rushed to the emergency room covered in hives. It was that day that I learned I was allergic to Christmas.

Will: My favorite tradition is listening to Bing Crosby’s holiday albums with my family.

Adam: My favorite Katzenback Christmas tradition has to be that my Dad has mandated that everyone in attendance must wear a pair of Christmas/Holiday socks. With just shy of 30 Katzenbacks you get some wild sock/slipper combinations along with fierce competition for who has the best pair, but let’s not kid ourselves here. We all know who the winner is…

Kathryn: For the last 14 years, my Dad and I have made it a tradition to drive out to Virginia’s Horse Country for a day of father-daughter bonding, eating, and shopping. We drink hot toddies, talk about the year we’ve had, and end the day picking out ornaments at a German Christmas shop. This year, though, will be the start of a new tradition. Since my parents moved to Western New York we’ll still be battling the cold, but instead of horse country, we’ll be at Ralph Wilson Stadium on Christmas Eve for my first Buffalo Bills game. It will never replace the memories I have in Virginia, but the great thing about traditions is that it’s never too late to begin new ones as long as you’re with the ones you love.

Chris: Getting work done over the holiday break when the brats are gone and it’s quiet. Also, reading or catching up by the fireplace at my parents’ house. Also watching Star Wars.

Daniela: My mother is a little insane about the Holidays – especially Christmas and more specifically, the Christmas tree. She IS the mother in the John Roberts Christmas Tree video.

We’ve had the same fake tree since I was a little kid, and each year my mother would spend at least a solid week decorating it. This wasn’t a relaxing mellow activity either. Every day spent on decorations meant screaming, cursing, my mother on the floor sweating on the verge of tears, exclaiming this will be “the last year” she is doing this, that she hates the tree, etc. But each year – the day after Thanksgiving, she starts setting things up as always. My favorite memory is of the elaborate village she’d create underneath with fake snow, shops, people, a skating rink, and even a ski mountain with little skiers going down it. I’d sit on the floor and make up stories about the people living there and it would provide hours of entertainment for me (I had no friends). The village has now moved to the mantle place and while it may not be as intricate and detailed as when I was younger – the tree is still pretty impressive. Now that I am older, I appreciate how intense my mother gets around the holidays & decorating because it means I get to have these awesome memories & hilarious stories to tell for years to come. Oh and one weird thing me/my sister used to do every Christmas eve is play “bank” (as in, we were both bank tellers working at a bank) while watching Christmas Story.

Mike: One year my mom bought a fake tree. My brother and I came home and after some drinking, decided to go outside and cut down a real tree instead. We chose a 15 foot one, cut it down, dragged it inside the house, and decorated it. There were leaves and dirt everywhere. Maybe we were drunk, maybe the tree was lopsided, but the next morning the entire thing fell over. It is still my favorite tree.

Alexis: I like that my family has a big Christmas Eve dinner (even though we’re Jewish, shh).

Darryl: My favorite holiday tradition is drinking hot chocolate and eating Christmas cookies. And eating Christmas cookies. And eating cookies that are decorated for Christmas. Christmas cookies are the center of all that is good. Do you know where I can get some more Christmas cookies?

Jeff: Every Christmas Eve my whole family sits on the couch and my dad reads us “The Night Before Christmas”. It’s real cute.

Sunny: For at least 22 years (probably longer since my sister is older than me) my mom has let us open a single present (of her choosing) on Christmas Eve. It is always pajamas. My sister and I have probably owned more pairs of pajamas in our lives than any other human beings on this planet. That’s at least 38 pairs of pajamas between the two of us over the years. That’s obscene. The other part of the tradition is that my sister and I (and our mom) alway feign surprise when our gifts turn out to be (!) pajamas.

So, from all of us in the Carrot family, Happy Holidays!

This article is copyright © 2012 

And thus, Instacheer was born! Carrot designed and developed a website that pulls in holiday themed Instagram photos that fall in snowflakes over an animated snowy scape. You can easily toggle the various tags on and off. This way, if you have a hankering to only see photos of dogs dressed up as Rudolph, well… we wouldn’t dream of stopping you.

So check out Instacheer, share with the ones you love (and even ones you don’t love), and have a great holiday season from the Carrot Creative team!

This article is copyright © 2012 

And please remember to donate to the cause. Today is your last day!

A huge thanks to everyone who has supported our Movember team so far! See you next year!

This article is copyright © 2012 

Carrot Creative is participating in the month-long-moustache-growing-charity-event to help raise money for the fight against prostate cancer. Below are the before and after shots of our fine gentlemen. And please don’t forget to donate to the cause… you’ll be helping to save lives!

Adam Katzenback, Mr. Red Beard

Nick Perold, Mr. Moustache Gone and Soon to be Back Again

Bob Whitney, Mr. Had a Beard For Six Years and Just Shaved It For the First Time

Steve Badowski, Mr. Clean Shaven Until Today

Tony Briceno, Mr. Sometimes Scruff Turned Soon to be Moustache

Dan Sullivan, Mr. Sully Bear Goes Beardless

Will Hutson, Mr. Really Nice Beard and Apache Sweater

David Radparvar, Mr. Holstee Crew Moustache Rep

Please help us raise money for this amazing charity… and be sure to follow the blog for occasional “Here’s What the Moustache Crew Looks Like” check-ins!

This article is copyright © 2012 

Let’s face it — 404 pages may not always be a top priority, but for creative agencies it’s important to embrace the opportunity an error page presents. Beyond the obvious utility these pages provide, 404 pages are a great chance to showcase your agency’s personality, creative chops, and attention to detail. Whether it’s treated as an extension of your brand, or a playful easter egg, these once dull error pages are now considered to be one of the most creative ways to exemplify the nature of your agency and the people that work in your organization. Here’s a round up of 404 pages from a handful of the agencies in our field:

Carrot Creative First thing’s first — let us present what we believe to be the best use of the 404 page scenario. Naturally, this is our own agency

Barbarian Group Barbarian Group cycles through 80 or so odd and amusing (seemingly custom) images, creating a unique experience each time.

Big Spaceship The randomized background is a particularly nice touch (especially the bikes!), but the failed google search attempt at the bottom of the page shows a bit of neglect.

Big Bad Collab Sporting a throwback space-themed design, Big Bad Collab’s 404 page is nice, but doesn’t show the “Space Ghost” we were expecting…

Big Fuel Moderately underwhelming. Womp womp.

Blue Fountain Media Pac Man! Novel idea, but this might be taking away valuable time spent learning about the agency.

Breakfast Simple, humorous, and to the point. However, clicking the FAIL blog image shouldn’t direct users away from the site. That defeats the purpose!

Buddy Media Sterile and utilitarian. Less is more, or something like that… right?

Bully This is the best of both worlds — a cheeky message combined with useful internal links.

Carsonified Well designed and helpful. We applaud you.

Centresource Another well done 404 page containing a nice mix of quirky narrative and useful links.

Cuban Council A vintage  (and humorous) art directed error page consistant with their overall site theme. Links back to the homepage.

Deep Focus “Just drop in the site map and call it a day.”  Meh.

Flightpath  Well designed and user friendly, this is an excellent example of a 404 page.

Free Association Nicely composed, but all of the useful links are well below the fold. And we all know how important the fold is.

Freshthrills  Nice wordplay and art direction here. We’re fans.

Huge Straightforward. Although, we expected something more from Huge.

Ignite Social Media Not the most stunning design, but it gets the job done.

Jumping Jackrabbit Beautifully illustrated page with a parallax effect. This page is a delight to stumble upon even though he is cooking carrots. EEK.

Odopod Snarky, but still quite useful.

Space150 With no additional links, this error page relies on the main navigation for users to regain their bearings.

This article is copyright © 2012 

Amid the flurry of activities surrounding Internet Week New York (IWNY), Manhattan Ford will host a rooftop summer concert on Thursday, June 10^th, featuring a performance by Cobra Starship.  The performance is the flagship event for Ford, which is also launching www.fiestafunnel.com, an interactive tool for tracking the latest developments during IWNY, built by Carrot Creative.  All of this comes as the company fast approaches its June release date for the new Fiesta, a vehicle designed with the tech-savvy crowd in mind.

Experiencing IWNY with the Fiesta Funnel

Carrot Creative engineered the site to actively speak with the car’s core demographic – tech-savvy, socially active urbanites. The Fiesta Funnel aims to transcend Internet Week, setting the tone for the entire Ford Fiesta launch program. Fans can track any and all developments throughout IWNY at the website, www.fiestafunnel.com.  Led by Editor-in-Chief Kelly Will and Creative Director Greg Littley, eight Internet-savvy writers, bloggers and videographers were selected to staff this newsroom, covering the celebration of the city’s online community.  The list of contributors includes TMI Weekly’s Meghan Asha and Vibe Magazine’s Adrien Field as well as Mike Avila, Jermaine Miles, Dee Nuncio, Colin Murphy, Erin Wigger and Maria Diaz – all well-known Internet personalities.

With so many moving elements, the Fiesta team had high ambitions regarding the creation and social media reach of the site.  “Carrot Creative had the uncanny ability to bring the project goals to digital life. My partner (Kelly Will, Editor-in-Chief) and I were lead every step of the way with consistent attention and understanding to the needs of Ford. The FiestaFunnel could not be a fully functioning social media hub without the guidance from Carrot’s team,” says Greg Littley, Creative Director for Ford Fiesta.

Star-Studded Kickoff Event

Thursday’s exclusive event promises to be a star-studded hit, with a performance by hipster favorite Cobra Starship. Taking place on the rooftop of Manhattan Ford (7-10 PM), the concert will be live streamed through the Ford Fiesta USTREAM Channel, as well as being embedded on Ford’s Fiesta website. Fans may also access the video through fiestafunnel.com.

Featured at the event will of course be the car itself, along with “agents” from the Fiesta Movement – versions 1.0 and 2.0.  Launched in May 2009, the Fiesta Movement is a social media initiative designed to create excitement about the new Fiesta, putting the small car on the minds of thousands of people nationwide. Teams across the country were given a Fiesta, and have redefined the way the car is brought to market by interacting with consumers online and offline. Agents will be on hand to talk about their work thus far, in addition to showcasing their specially designed vehicles.

Fiesta Rollout

Going on sale this summer, the all-new Ford Fiesta features a vibrant design, sharp reflexes, and a global track record that will redefine U.S. small car customers’ expectations. With 15 class-exclusive technologies and projected best-in-class highway fuel economy of 40 mpg, Fiesta brings efficiency and convenience together in one package.

Fiesta is designed to be versatile, personal and adaptable. In fact, Fiesta will deliver best-in-class convenience and connectivity with Ford segment-exclusive SYNC^® voice-activated communications system, as well as an expressive color palette and available graphics.

Follow the Fiesta Movement:

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/fiestamovement

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fiestamovement

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/fordfiesta

Twitter: http://twitter.com/fordfiesta

About Ford Motor Company
Ford Motor Company, a global automotive industry leader based in Dearborn, Mich., manufactures or distributes automobiles across six continents. With about 176,000 employees and about 80 plants worldwide, the company’s automotive brands include Ford, Lincoln, Mercury and, until its sale, Volvo. The company provides financial services through Ford Motor Credit Company. For more information regarding Ford’s products, please visit www.ford.com.

Event beverage sponsor is WODKA.  For more information visit http://www.ilovewodka.com

This article is copyright © 2012 

At its very core, Facebook has set out to make it dead-pan simple to integrate Facebook all over the web (see: CNN.com, Yelp.com). So what does that mean for the way we surf the web? A lot. Allow me to explain…

Social Plugins
Facebook has released a suite of social plugins that make it amazingly simple to add contextual and social features to your existing website. Most prominent and perhaps effective example is the new “Like” plugin. Facebook has decided to make the “Like” it’s most central property, after of course, the user. By allowing the ability to Like almost any content on the web, Facebook aims to centralize user preferences and activity by allowing all users to Like content. An interesting aspect to the new web-wide Like is that “liked” content will now be part of your profile info, therefore using user actions to drive preferences, rather then profile forms.

Here’s a quick run-through of some other Social Plugins you will no doubt be encountering in your travels:

Activity Feed – An embeddable mini-feed of recent activity for your website. User’s friends show up first, then the rest of user activity, including shares and likes.

Comments – Not new to the Facebook bag of tricks, but now much easier to implement.  You can now add Facebook comments to your website or blog posts. This resembles posting to a User’s wall – with a nice checkbox to add published posts to the poster’s profile (say that five times fast).

Facepile – 
A really nice way to show potential users which of their friends have signed up for your website by showing a row of profile pictures.

Login with Faces – 
A single sign-on button. This combines a Facebook Connect like sign-in, while showing a version of Facepile to encourage engagement.

Recommendations – 
A nice embeddable widget that offers users recommendations on content. Signed out users see the most popular interactions with your website, while signed-in users get recommendations pulled from the interactions your friends have, allowing it to recommend content more intelligently.

The Open Graph – Get used to this term, Open Graph, because soon enough you will be hearing and seeing it all over. The Open Graph Protocol is Facebook’s attempt to create a seamless and semantic way to connect users and content all over the web. Now to a lot of people that doesn’t mean much – but soon enough you will see the impact such an ambitious protocol will have.

By connecting real-life content like celebrities, brands, products, movies (you know the stuff they have Facebook Pages for) to Facebook’s Open Graph – Facebook is able to make intelligent connections by studying user preferences and interactions. Furthermore, by promoting semantic indexing, using snazzy HTML5 style meta tags, Facebook is able to smoothly index what would normally be scattered all over the web, into clear contextual searches and relationships. The ability to add context to web content is incredibly powerful.  Contextually, it’s something many companies have worked towards (see: http://getglue.com/) but with Facebook’s influence – this will have a massive impact.

What does it all mean?

Facebook has become the party everyone wants an invitation to, and they’re charging at the door.  For one, it means you are going to see A LOT more of Facebook around the internet. The inherent value of Facebook’s social tools and ease of implementation makes it a great opportunity for content generators to create discussion and interaction. Of course, this doesn’t just benefit the content creators – but greatly helps Facebook’s reach around the web.

Facebook has always been able to make associations and hypertarget users through their friends, fans, and interests – but now, by positioning itself all over the web, Facebook can also make connections by the way you surf. Where Google indexes the world by what they are looking for, Facebook may soon be able to index the world once you get there (and know what your favorite band is too).

It’s a classic business model with a new-wave twist. Offer consumers something of such high value that they become evangelists, proliferate and repeat. In this man’s opinion, I can see this working towards a world-wide advertising platform. Imagine a world where ads are not only contextually accurate (see: Open Graph) but hyper-acute. It’s clear Facebook is positioning themselves with their influence and leverage to offer such unique data to the rest of the world. Who is the end user? Who are their friends? What are their interests? Where do they hang out online? These are all questions marketers strive to infer, but soon enough, Facebook will have the answers.

This article is copyright © 2012 

Recently I had the privilege of participating in a groundbreaking social media study underwritten by Cisco, spearheaded by one of my mentors, Dr. Neil Hair and sponsored by my Alma Mater,  Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and the University of Navarra. The comprehensive global study sought to better understand how consumer-based social media tools effect both interpersonal collaboration within a corporate setting and external communication with key stakeholders.

The direct impact of this study is not only a greater understanding of what sort of best practices have arisen in the advertising/PR industry but also how many firms actually have such policies. It’s fascinating to see how firms of different sizes and specialties leverage either embrace or choose to ignore the power of conversational messaging.

A quoted excerpt from the published report:

“At Carrot, we live and breathe social media. We work with our clients to build the best social media strategies that will help them meet their business goals and reach more customers. What we’re working to instill with our clients is the idea that information consumption is no longer a passive task. Instead, businesses need to take a proactive approach with their brand and demonstrate to customers that they are hearing and delivering on their needs, now and in the future.” – Maury Postal

Some additional highlights:

• Of the organizations interviewed, 75 percent identified social networks as the consumer-based social media tools they primarily use, while roughly 50 percent of the group also identified extensive use of microblogging.
• Only one in seven of the companies noted a formal process associated with adopting consumer-based social networking tools for business purposes, indicating that the potential risks associated with these tools in the enterprise are either overlooked or not well understood.
• Only one in five participants identified any policies in place concerning the use of consumer-based social networking technologies in the enterprise.

We at Carrot recognize the challenges that large organizations face when trying to implement an external facing social media campaign. Enacting a clear set of usage guidelines and content directives are key to any mass-scale digital communication initiative—something we’ve not only helped some of the largest organizations on the planet formulate and place into practice—but also take to heart internally. We pride ourselves on our interaction with every major mainstream social media tool as well as understanding the implications of having our people in the public eye—something any business, of any size needs to come to terms with in the modern age of always on, immersive media.

The full findings of the study are published here.

This article is copyright © 2012 

Here at Carrot Creative we’ve been getting a TON of résumés and it’s hard to keep track of all the amazing talent sending work in. But today, something different happened and we had to call it out.

Looking to get our attention? Here are some tips:

1. Send a themed box full of Carrot Cookies plus a thought out résumé to our office.

2. Receive oohs and aahs from the team. (Plus smiles all day with full stomachs)

3. Accept huge thank you from the Carrot Crew on the Carrot Blog.

To the person who sent us these, thank you and we’ll be calling you soon for an interview!

This article is copyright © 2012 

We’re excited here at Carrot Creative. 2009 has some big things coming up for us. (Stay tuned for them, of course we’ll let you know!)

To help get us in gear, I’ve asked the entire team to disclose their resolutions for the upcoming year.

Without further adieu…

Robert Gaafar, CEO

• Participate more in the NYC tech community, online and offline
• Get rid of the 10 foot pile of papers on my desk
• Establish a buzzword-free office. If anyone mentions a buzzword, they have to drop down and do 10 pushups. I’m not kidding.

Michael Germano, President & Creative Director

• Kick ass in everything I do. Social Media life. Personal life. Everything.

Chris Petescia, VP & Director of User Experience

• Update my personal website with complete relevance to my current portfolio and social media presences, likely with a blog as well.
• Design a new internet—even cooler than this. I can do it. Watch me.

Kristin Maverick, Director of Communications

• Communicate in 140 characters or less for half of my conversations during the day. Not just written, but verbal as well.
• Host a killer event introducing everyone to the awesome culture and company of Carrot Creative.

Kyle MacDonald, Senior Web Producer

• Build a new web app.
• Stop neglecting my RSS Reader.
• Double my Twitter Followers. Who am I kidding, TRIPLE.
• Get to more NY Tech Meetups.
• Wear Orange.
• Write the Great American Novel.

Maury Postal, Brand Manager

• Post more relevant links.
• Craft hard-hitting 140 character commentary on relevant events.
• Get 500 Twitter followers.
• Name drop like whoah.
• Learn to cook.

Sean Engelhardt, Art Director

• Actively seek out people to follow on twitter, but  be picky about which ones I choose based on how much value I’ll get out of it.
• Start a personal blog that I’ve had an idea  for over a year but keep putting off.

Steve Badowski, Jr. Creative

• Get in the habit of leaving comments on blog posts I read.
• Make the coolest Twitter background image the world has ever seen.

Christian Shaboo, Director of R&D

• Interact with the Twitter community more, as well as more actively engage others, whom are not yet a part of the Twittersphere, to join twitter.  Hear that? That means you.

Alvaro Bueno, Jr. Developer

• Get more involved in creative processes. I want to have more inspiration for the programming part.
• Go to more conferences, events and get involved in the NY industry.
• Learn flash.

This article is copyright © 2012