Every year our community turns out to support the Boilermaker 15K Road Race, a race we helped turn into the nation’s largest in middle distance running. This amazing regional and national event holds a special place in our agency history, since we created the original logo and branding, and worked PR and promotions for the race for many years. Our client Saranac hosts the huge annual post-race party and is a founding sponsor. We’ve also worked on running event and product promotions for clients like adidas and the Boston Marathon, so running is part of our agency DNA.

We decided to make running more fun by giving away four iPod nanos along with Nike+, the running-to-music system from Nike that has turned into a worldwide phenomenon. That’s one nano for each quarter this coming year. With Nike+, a small chip fits into a custom-designed niche in compatible running shoe soles, and “talks” to your iPod nano, keeping beat with your natural rhythm as you run. It also stores your route, speed and other information to upload to Nike’s website, so you can keep track of your progress and share with friends (great motivation).

How can you win? If you’re currently on or join our email list, follow us on Twitter, or “Like” us on Facebook, you’re in the running! We’ll choose a winner at random from all our online friends, once each quarter throughout the year. That’s it! So make yourself a promise, get out there to run, and connect with us today using the buttons below.

Wondering how to sell product using social media? We suggest you take a page from Nike’s playbook, as our agency begins a little friendly competition by using Nike+ to train for Utica’s Boilermaker 15K Road Race.

Here is some data from recent runs. If you want to train with us or just spectate, you can track our progress on our Nike+ pages.
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Bernie and Ryan share 5 big ideas reinforced at the SXSW interactive conference.

This past week I had the chance to sit down with Rick Short, director of Marketing / Communications at Indium Corp. Rick has been blogging and using social media to help Indium build contacts and grow its business well before social was on the map. The conversation was so good, we had to break it up into parts. You can also connect with Rick by visiting his blog or following him on Twitter.

This will be the first in a series of interviews we’ll be conducting this year with folks who are leveraging the power of social networks as a part of their overall marketing strategy. Enjoy the videos. (more…)

Earlier today, Bernie Freytag, our creative director asked me if I had watched the President’s speech regarding Afghanistan last night. He noted that none of his friends on Facebook nor followers on Twitter had made any comments on it. I had to admit, though I too had watched it, I hadn’t seen a single word from my friends or followers as well. A few posts by a couple news sources but none of the actual humans I keep in my circle had uttered a word pro or against.

Since both Bernie and I were surprised that there was so little internet chatter about it, I immediately thought again to the liberal nature of Social Media. I assumed then that the President’s speech put liberal minded folks in a hard spot. That the usual banter that would follow a speech about an escalation of war had been stifled, not unlike how the Democrats in Congress have been forced to bite their tongues. On the one hand, many of them are anti-war. But they are also pro-Obama. So like me and many of my social network, we’re stuck. We want to support and believe in our President, but aren’t really sure sending more troops into that war zone is the answer. So we’re silent, or at least that’s what I thought. (more…)