Over the last year Kaitlin Villanova and I have worked hard to grow and extend the Digital DUMBO brand to match the exponential size of the monthly networking event. As you may have noticed, last week we officially rolled out the new brand identity for Digital DUMBO across our web presence and collateral.  Surprisingly, this is actually the third iteration of our logo. It seems as if our logo evolves in tandem with the evolution of the Digital DUMBO community.

Over the past year this evolution has taken place in many different forms. We’ve had the opportunity to showcase some amazingly innovative and creative companies at our monthly events in interesting ways such as arm wrestling, sumo wresting, ugly holiday sweaters, and bingo. We hosted a career fair. We participated in and helped plan programming for the DUMBO Arts Festival. All of these accomplishments were made possible because of ideas brought to the table by members of our community.

These accomplishments have led to growth in the size of our community and in new partnerships. This growth has pushed forward our logo as well. The new logo designed by Carrot Creative’s talented team was created to be more dynamic and more iconic than our previous brand, without completely abandoning the color palette and aesthetics of our original identity. The love mark depicts our two D’s, but also creates a face, humanizing our brand and serving as a representation of the community that Digital DUMBO is built upon. We also made a point to allow for a logo that could be utilized by other cities as we continue to explore ways to grow beyond New York, using the format and philosophies of our event to help grow stronger digital communities elsewhere.

The past few months have served as excellent building blocks for the future. We realize that there are many things that we can do better in order to be a better matchmaker for the community. Two areas that we are focusing on in the near term is the creation of the Digital DUMBO Workshop Series and in improving DigitalDUMBO.com. We hope that the Workshop Series will provide high value educational programming to our community in a more focused setting. For our website, we’re exploring ways in which we can create a more vibrant community online to complement our offline community.

We hope that our new logo marks a turning point not only in the design of our brand, but in our efforts to be even better at building a strong digital community that fosters economic activity for all.

We hope to see you at the next event!

This article is copyright © 2012 

Photo by Michael Sheedy

Last week I had the (over)enthusiastic pleasure to attend FITC’s 2011 Toronto event, which I won a ticket to from the awesome people over at ActiveDen / ActiveTuts / Envato – thanks again! FITC has been community of creativity and inspiration for just about ten years, something I’ve always wanted to attend since I first heard about it but haven’t had the chance til now. The speakers are as diverse as the topics, and my only regret was that I didn’t clone myself so I could attend every presentation.

If you’ve never been to FITC you’re missing out. It’s definitely not a typical ‘conference’ that you’d expect your job would send you to. Throughout the event this year (themed as a retro movie theater), there was free popcorn, cotton candy, coffee, tea, swag, and a healthy selection of brews at the open bar. You’ll meet strategists, headhunters, developers, designers, creatives, and everyone between. Experience is not a limiter either; among the crowd are famous seasoned designers and young students, the only requirement to attend is passion. It was awesome to see some RIT representation: students, graduates, and one of my professors from my alumni were attending. I also met @ekculbertson, a talented RIT student we’re bringing on for a summer internship! The exhibitions had a lot of cool stuff and interesting people – I think the crowd favorite was a large display table where you draw your own character on a card and battle it against other people’s creations!

Adobe had a major presence at the event, not only with their numerous speakers but with their contributions to the environment, discussions, and content. Their people were lots of fun and clearly loved their jobs. Their CS5.5 release was pretty cool as well, and they handed out free trials of it to anyone that brought their laptop. The new subscription model is also a smart move, and looks like it could help smaller companies and freelancers a lot – cheap per-month solutions if you don’t want to shell out for a copy of the master suite. Project Edge was really intriguing as well, and their prototype demonstrations shows a lot of ingenuity – also a lot of features that I hope they plan to implement in to a future version of Flash. I will definitely be keeping up with their other lab projects.

It was great seeing our neighbor Jamie Kosoy of Big Spaceship give The Most Awesomest Talk Ever. He captured the culture and pure awesomeness that agencies in Dumbo represent. We love bringing our silly ideas to life and encourage each other to explore and create. If you haven’t seen The Most Awesomest Thing Ever definitely give it a go!

Some memorable speakers that I took to heart were Mikko Haapoja, Mike Chambers, Doug Winnie, Bradley Munkowitz, Seb Lee-Delisle, Ryan Stewart, Kyle Cooper, and Matt Rix. I think Rix’s presentation was especially interesting, he talked about how he created Trainyard in his free time, marketed it on his own, and shared some of his process work and how he tackled certain challenges. He gave me the inspiration to not let my prototypes get lost on the back burners.

Carrot recognizes the importance of events like these and was happy to send me – and I was happy to attend! I’m sorry if we didn’t get a chance to talk, hopefully next time I’ll be able to stay for the job-a-thon! You can always apply to Carrot at http://carrotcreative.com/careers/ – we’re actively searching for those exceptional people that are passionate about what they do. Thanks to everyone I met, I had a blast!

This article is copyright © 2012 

Full details can be found here including a form to register for a specific time to come down to the park and donate. Members of the Carrot Crew will be there along with reps from the other companies sponsoring. Snacks will also be provided and if needed, I’m sure one of the Carrot Crew members will gladly hold your hand if you’re nervous about needles.

Spread the word and see you there!

If you have any questions, please contact: Dorothy McGivney (646) 402-5943 – contact@jauntsetter.org

This article is copyright © 2012 

There are more ways to bringing out your personality within your online profile. Facebook Fan Pages are a GREAT start to this. We love Facebook Fan Pages here at >carrot creative and I can promise you there will be more posts about this topic.

If you check out my Facebook page, you can tell that I like sushi, baseball, chardonnay and Dave Matthews Band. Sure, there are many OTHER things I like, but you already know  a little more about me than “she has a blog and a Twitter.”

Looking at this from a marketers perspective, brands need to have a strong presence on these Facebook Fan Pages. If I have a favorite type of perfume that I use every day, what’s stopping me from showing that off and adding that to my Facebook page? In fact, from writing this post I found that Burberry London is ON Facebook and I can become a fan of the brand. Now people know that I like this type of perfume.(And yes, that’s why I smell so good.)

When Facebook rolled out the new Fan Page redesign, PR people everywhere did a happy dance. An integrated place to push out a brand and everything that goes into it? Here we go! Mashable wrote up a great outline on these pages and how marketers will need to get involved when designing these out. We’ve had the opportunity to work with this for a bunch of brands already and the opportunity to really engage with your brands fans on these are amazing. The easy ways to share the content (there is a SUGGEST PAGE button—easy!) and have the content show up immediately in your news feed provides for a quick jumpstart to your viral campaign. There’s no reason to not be doing this.

So, brands—make sure you’re out there on these Fan Pages. Users are looking to add a bit more personality to their online identity. People are proud to say they eat Carl’s Jr. hamburgers any chance they get. They enjoy saying they watch Lost or wear Nike sneakers. Make it available for them and start bringing these fans to a place where you can interact with them directly.

What do you think? Do you build out your online presence on Facebook? Are you a fan of brands and objects?

This article is copyright © 2012 

Twitter is an interesting space. A space where you can connect with new people,post random thoughts, blah blah…we know we know. But, I’m really interested and grateful for this community and the constant feedback they provide.

For example. Yesterday, I was in the mood to hear some music that gets me pumped up for a big negotiation we have. We have a LOT going on here and YES I am an excited person, but I wanted to add my own personal soundtrack. So, where do I find my songs? Cue to Twitter. I posted this tweet. A simple one. Just asking for some songs to keep me going. Within 10 minutes I received over 30 responses to songs. From “Chariots of Fire” to Britney Spears, Rammstein to Queen—I had them all. And you know what? I listened to them ALL.

We’ve blogged before about the unique ways Twitter works when a community is passionate about something and willing to offer content. People like adding their two cents about things they like, things they’re interested in and things they don’t mind sharing. But people also provide insightful suggestions and commentary. Feedback that helps take a conversation or thought to the next level.

This holds true when thinking about brands and presence on social media as well. Suggestion is a powerful tool. It allows people to get the satisfaction of helping someone while at the same time allowing a glimpse into a person’s style. This is only exaggerated on something open like Twitter because it allowed everyone to show that they are willing to provide help to the community and the type of style that person has. Many brands are doing it. Engaging with the community and asking for feedback. This past weekend brand reps were involved in the Twitter conversation to hear what everyone was saying about their ads, responding to questions and discussing what worked and what didn’t.

It’s a great thing to see and we can’t wait to get more involved in these types of conversations.

Special shout out thanks to those who responded:

@akeats @katherine925 @alexandergordon @bicoastalite @thoughtfarmer @MaryMassey @bellanyc1 @fbihop @davidaimi @LenKendall @littlemavs @claynewton @ceonyc @borismsilver @steketee & @Tucson_Cowgirl

Oh, and my favorite song that was suggested? “Swagger Like Us” by TI from @steketee. Thanks!

This article is copyright © 2012 

Andy Sernovitz, contributing writer for the Smart Blog on Social Media has a great take on this and who he think should be running the social media world: PR executives. As Andy says, “PR executives make the best social media executives. There is a similar mindset. Traditional media relations requires finding the right influencers, building trust, and sharing credible, relevant stories. Translating those actions to social media — replacing reporters with the bigger community — is exactly how to run a great social media program.”

In one way, I obviously agree with Andy. Yes, I am a PR person now working on social media campaigns so it’s definitely refreshing to see the industry encouraging PR to manage these new objectives. In my opinion, PR people have the upper hand when it comes to getting social media. We’re ahead of the game (disclosure: this is for some PR folks, obviously there are the strays that don’t do this well.) We follow (or try to follow) the rules that make social media successful. And we listen to what is going on around us.

We also fit into the overall scheme of social media methodology:

-Conversation- We have them all day every day. With reporters. Clients. You name it. It’s how we work. With social media, the key to a successful campaign is continuing the conversation. For us, it’s just an extension of what we do.

-Community- Like Andy says, we’re used to finding the right influencers and building a trust with them. We choose wisely who should hear the news and determine how best to announce an important newsworthy piece to the public. We create our own level of influencers within this community.

-Collaboration- We work together to form relationships. While many think that PR people just pitch out a story and hope for the best, many of the talented flacks actually take the time to feedback ideas with a reporter and collaborate on their needs to determine what story angle will work.

But, as social media has changed the way we think, the traditional PR agency will also need to adapt to the new ways of handling these social media requests. While PR may be the right man for the job right now, it’s also important for PR to include others to help get it done. From partnerships with other specialists to new technologies and advancements emerging everyday,  the acceptance of all things changing will only help create successful outcomes and ensure social media success.

So there is my take. Will this change? Like everything else lately, of course. It will evolve. There’s an opportunity for many people to get involved in social media. What do you think???

This article is copyright © 2012 

Last night I had the privilege of being a panel member for the Social Media and Presidential Elections Conference at the Samsung Experience on Columbus Circle. I wanted to thank the organizers: NY:MIEG, E.Factor and CBSAC/NY for putting on a smart and engaging affair. I liked seeing how all the different panel members were using social media to influence and inform everyday people about important political issues.

Ellis Henican did a great job moderating the event, everything flowed smoothly and the packed audience was interested from start to finish. It was interesting to see how the folks at 23/6 are using humor to offer an alternative view on the political scene.

I also really enjoyed the Samsung experience, which, for someone with ADD was the most visually stimulating experience of my life.

I was happy to see a spirited Q&A session and loved hearing how Rachel Sterne was using citizen journalism to combat the major news outlets. I was also interested to hear what Howard Greenstein is doing to advise influential organizations on the wonders of social media.

Thanks again to all the event organizers, I encourage more people to participate in the next panel and look forward to participating in the next event.

Photo Credits: Howard Greenstein

This article is copyright © 2012 

For the last couple years, >carrot has used Blog Action Day to highlight one of the many initiatives we take in order to do good in our office and in our world. However, this year we would like to take this opportunity to highlight the work of some fellow bloggers whom have inspired us to join their cause in ending poverty in the world while bettering ourselves personally.

The formula for Train For Humanity is simple:
getting fit + social media + blogging = social good.

Train for Humanity is a group of three bloggers whom have realized the power of social media as an important tool in raising awareness and funds for humanitarian projects all around the world. Beginning only a few months ago with its pilot program for Darfur Peace and Development projects, Train for Humanity involves bloggers from around the world by getting them to train for competitive running, swimming, biking, triathlons and other events all while blogging about training and event results.

What started as my own personal interest in the project as a running enthusiast soon became conversation around the office, and thus >carrot is thrilled to be some of the first members to join the Train for Humanity project. Once the program launches in the next few months, we will continue to update our training results as well as indicate which events we will be competing in. Hopefully, you will join us in our training, or at the very least, will help support this great cause to eradicate poverty by donating your time and resources to betting the initiative.

This article is copyright © 2012 

The Brooklyn Paper recently reported that Spike Lee is making moves to the 6th floor of our awesome building in DUMBO. We are on the 3rd floor of 55 Washington St… so we basically have become cooler overnight. Our CEO- Robert Gaafar- is already projecting exponential growth in sales and awesomeness for the remainder of our fiscal year. Meanwhile, the rest of us are going to have to play it cool and hope for casual elevator high-fives when we’re in need of a sweetness pick-me-up. Does Spike Lee play Wii? I bet he does.

(Credit to Maury Postal for the find!)

This article is copyright © 2012 

One of the most respected names in business publishing has asked me to speak at their worldwide Direct Marketers Forum this coming March. Direct Marketing International Magazine is “the only publication which has the global reach among international direct and interactive marketing professionals. Now in its third decade, DMI was the first magazine to be printed in the UK for direct marketers – so not only is it unique, it is also truly original!”

This exciting opportunity is a great way to stay informed about marketing activities around the globe and to find out how my European counterparts are using the Social-Web in powerful new ways.

I am very excited to travel and share to an international audience our Social Media tactics. 2009 IDI Marketers Forum “International Direct & Interactive” will make stops in New York, London, Singapore, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Brussels, & Budapest.

Find out more here.

This article is copyright © 2012