Fact # 2 – I am a Partner at an agency that hearts social media. We effectively leverage it every day for our clients.

Fact # 3 – I am writing this piece knowing that it will be posted to our company’s blog and hope it will be spread quickly through social media.

Fact # 4 – Social media cannot do everything. As much as people in our circles think it can, I think it’s important to remember what it cannot do for us.

For example, social media cannot…

Shake someone’s hand.
Kiss you.
Sell to you.
Go on vacation with you.
Be ignored.
Replace your home life.
Be summed up in one sentence.
Be taught in a classroom (it must be practiced).
Mow your lawn.
Drink a shot with you.
Write its content.
Stop traffic.
Have lunch.
Call your mother.
Pick up your child.
Taste amazing.
Play 1st base on the company softball team.
Drive you to work.
Get your back.
Keep you warm.
Hold a door.
Help someone cross the street.
Give you a hug.
Smile.
Date your sister.

What do you think it can’t do?

-AJ Gerritson

Boston is a city steeped in history. Outsiders associate us with conservative values, understatement and bare-knuckle street politics.

What many fail to realize is that Boston is consistently on the forefront of innovation.

This is something I am incredibly proud of as a Bostonian. I believe the city’s current administration has done a tremendous job of pushing initiatives through behind the scenes and I know people will continue to be surprised at what is yet to come.

Here are some examples of how Boston’s leaders are pushing us to the forefront of innovation:

1. Economic Development – Our city boasts an organization called the Boston World Partnerships. This new, non-profit organization created by Mayor Thomas M. Menino, and run by Executive Director David McLaughlin, is a first of its kind. Its mission is to raise global awareness of Boston as one of the world’s foremost centers of intellectual capital and innovation, and to offer tremendous competitive advantages to growth-minded businesses. BWP is a public-private partnership with seed funding from P&G/The Gillette Company and the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

The BWP generates high-quality leads for economic growth. Each high-quality lead represents a specific, actionable opportunity to create jobs, attract a business, strengthen an existing Boston business, support entrepreneurship, or enhance workforce development.

To achieve these goals, BWP has created a global community of people who have ties to Boston’s economy, similar to an alumni organization. This network exists around an information-rich website and an array of social media tools, as well as events here and abroad where Boston professionals come together to share ideas, insights, and other resources.

2. Tourism – Do you want to explore Boston’s legendary waterfront, Fort Point area, or Public Garden? How about doing it on a self-guided iPod tour? That’s right, Boston is one of the first cities offering such an experience.

3. Green Initiatives – Have you ever seen a solar powered street sweeper? We got them. We also have solar powered trash compactors on many of our street corners.  Here’s a photo:

Our city is also the first in the nation to boast green building zoning codes that require all building to be built to LEED certified standards.

4. Education – Boston’s Mayor has led the charge for transforming how we educate our young people. He has done this by pushing for legislation that includes greater flexibility in the classroom including longer school days for arts, music, more sports, and greater partnerships with area institutions to facilitate more learning opportunities. One example is the number of hospitals in the city that are partnered with Boston’s Health Career Academy. This partnership helps young people interested in the growing healthcare field learn on-the-job skills. Our city has also created partnerships between 5 of our universities and our most challenged schools to help aid in educational development.

5. Community – Boston created an iPhone application called “Citizen’s Connect”. This was a first in the nation for service requests. The city didn’t stop there either. They put together a team that the mayor calls the “New Urban Mechanics” that works with different departments to help them redesign how service delivery can be more user friendly and efficient.

These are only some of the great things that make our city innovative. I would like to hear from my fellow Bostonians as to what they are proud of around town. I would also like to hear from people in other cities about the great innovations that makes their lives better.

Please share!

It was odd that eight bags of phone books were delivered to a building that has only two companies. I assumed that they must deliver books based upon the number of phone lines within the building (our small company has four phone lines), and started thinking about how many people in our business neighborhood were moving piles and piles of books just like me.

I write this post because I am really curious to see if anyone reading it uses paper phone books still and/or knows of a coworker, friend, or family member who does as well. If you do know someone who uses one (or, better, still advertises in one), I would hope you could share your comments with us.

- AJ Gerritson @ajgerritson

Commercial (or offset or lithography) printing: Colors are made up of four basic printing colors, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK or process colors). These colors are separated into dot patterns that when combined on paper create a full color image. A metal plate is made for each color with the dot pattern imaged on to it by a laser, the imaged area accepts ink and the non-imaged area resists ink.  First the plates are wrapped around cylinders in a printing press, inked and rolled onto another cylinder of softer material called the blanket. Next, the image is “offset” onto the blanket and rolled onto the paper.

Commercial printers can add some special touches such as varnishes, custom inks, die cuts, and just about any size and configuration you can imagine.

• Price: Very high price-per-piece for quantities under 1000 pieces. The more pieces you need, the cheaper it gets; you can pay just a few cents per piece when printing 10,000 or more.

• Quality: The best. You won’t get better quality printing than with a commercial printer. They have production managers who will work directly with you to make sure you get what you need, when you need it.

• Timing: Generally, give it a week. Depending on the amount of work on the floor they can be flexible with schedules to a point, but you won’t get an offset printed job back the next day.

• Best jobs to give them: Large corporate brochures, slick sales materials, books, packaging, quantities over 1000 pieces.

CMYK separations from left to right: The cyan separation, the magenta separation, the yellow separation, the black separation, the combined halftone pattern, and how the human eye would observe the combined halftone pattern from a sufficient distance.

Digital Printing: Many commercial printers will have a digital option available. The reputable printers will offer you this option, if your quantity is small enough to take advantage of the cost savings of digital printing.

Digital presses are either laser or inkjet. Laser printing involves lasering your image onto a light-sensitive surface making the image area able to attract or repel toner. The image is then transferred to paper and fused in place by a heating element. Inkjet shoots tiny droplets of ink onto paper to create an image. This process provides near-photographic quality images but is limited to certain types of paper. Your printing rep will recommend different solutions based on the type of image you’re printing.

Digital printing is great if: you are printing fewer than 1000 pieces, you’re not picky about paper, you have a job that prints on letter-sized or tabloid-size paper, you have a job that needs to be done quick, you need a job completed quickly because this type of job can be printed within hours. Short run digital also allows you to personalize each printed piece; Names and messages can be pulled from a database and laser printed onto each page. Studies have shown that response rates rise dramatically when direct mailings take advantage of mass customization.

• Price: Very reasonable for up to roughly 1000 pieces. If you print more the per-piece price is better going the commercial route.

• Quality: The technology advanced so much with digital printing that it is very close to offset quality. Limitations are on paper stock and size of the piece.

• Timing: Digital printing companies usually give you a three day turnaround, but if the job is time sensitive, they can get it done same day.

• Best jobs to give them: Short run projects that you need right away.

Desktop Printing: The technology behind your desktop printer is the same as you’ll find in the larger machines but you’ll run into problems with managing the job at the office. Co-workers wanting to use the printer, paper jams, alignment and registration issues, problems printing on two sides and collating and binding contribute to printing a large number of pieces off your desktop printer a nightmare. You are much better off sending it out – believe me I’ve been there and it’s not pretty.

• Price: Appears free until you add up all that expensive ink and paper you’re using up.

• Quality: Usually poor because copy paper will bleed, warp and not carry color well.

• Timing: The timing is right until you hit that first paper jam.

• Best jobs: For printing fewer than 50 sheets with minimal large color graphics and  basic staple, or 3-hole punch binding.

What about online print vendors? Be careful. There are great bargains to be had, but you really don’t know how reliable an online vendor is until you’ve used one. I would suggest using a few different online vendors for low priority jobs until you find one or two that have worked well for you. Online print vendors have good prices because they print in volume. They will gain a lot of jobs on one huge print run, limiting you to very few paper options and usually very long delivery times. Good luck finding anyone to talk to, if there’s a problem or you need to expedite shipping. There is usually no customer service person on your account and no flexibility to help meet your deadlines.

Price: Cheap! You’ll get inexpensive printing as compared to any of your brick-and-mortar printers, offset or digital.

Quality: It’s a crap shoot, if you find a few good resources guard them with your life. Whomever you use, you will be limited to paper stock and a long lead time.

Timing: Could be as long as three weeks depending on when in the vendor’s print cycle you submit your project.

Which do you prefer? Tell us your story below!

451 goes to Thompson Island!

Check out 451 Marketing’s pictures from the company outing to Thompson Island here! Leave your comments.

2008 was a landmark year for online video. Not only were 75% of the U.S. internet audience watching videos online, but the average online video viewer watched nearly four hours of online video per month. Hulu, one of the most popular sites for watching hit TV shows and movies online, launched in March. Now it’s hard for me to even imagine keeping up with my favorite TV shows without it. Tivo? Who needs it anymore? I can watch the latest “The Office” episode right on my laptop, anytime, and with limited commercial interruptions.

I had the opportunity to attend a MITX panel discussion a few weeks ago, entitled “Planning Your Online Video Strategy for 2009″. What inspired me most was the out-of-the-box solutions the panelists suggested. Online videos are much more than just an advertising venue concerned with logo placement and banner ads. Creating an online video is really about publishing, creative story-telling and engaging the viewer. Some of the most memorable videos of 2008 were either user-generated or created under relatively low budgets. Who can forget the chubby guy lip-synching to the “Numa Numa” song (a clip which later got used in a Weezer music video)? Or the “Where the Hell is Matt?” video of a man dancing across the world? And those are just two of hundreds of viral hits.

Dynamic videos, which have been under the radar until recently, will come full blast in 2009. You may have received a link during the presidential elections where the video plays out as if you were one of the candidates. Your name appears throughout the video on billboards, in the various news headlines seamlessly, and even tattoed on the lower back of an old lady.

By customizing videos in this manner, viewers will be more engaged in the story, and given the right technology, may even be able to drive how the story unfolds. To clarify, recall those decision-based storybooks where you flip to different pages depending on what you want the hero/heroine to do? Now picture that same user-driven approach within an interactive video, and you’ll catch a glimpse of what’s to come. No two viewers will experience the video the same. PermissionTV currently has a platform for creating these non-linear videos.

The MITX panel discussion also revolved around strategies for promoting your company’s videos on a blog, through social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.) and even through other videos. You really don’t need an uber-professional crew of cameramen and actors to get a video done – use the resources that you have in-house and try to get as many online videos out there as you can. [check out this successful low-budget video by HubSpot: "You Oughta Know Inbound Marketing"]

The more creative or funny you can be with the story, the better. I’d also steer clear of creating very obvious self-promotion videos. Online video viewers are very savvy and can smell an ad campaign from a mile away. Interestingly, major corporations like Gatorade, JCPenny and EA Sports, who all launched successful viral videos last year, did so with very minimal branding incorporated. Check out EA Sports’ video response to a glitch caught in their Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 game “Tiger Woods Walks on Water” as well as JCPenny’s “Beware of the Doghouse” video. Both are extremely well done, with little self-promotion – and more importantly – they’re fun to watch while getting the message across.

It’s just a matter of time before every household has an internet-enabled TV set, and once that time comes, you want to be on-board with your own series of cool online videos. So pull out your digital cameras, figure out your strategy – and Action!