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.

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.

Joe’s page / Ryan’s page

Download Video Podcast

Bernie and Ryan share 5 big ideas reinforced at the SXSW interactive conference.

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.

Part I – Connections to Contact

How is your business implementing social as part of its overall marketing or communications strategy? Leave us a comment.

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.

The flaw in my assumption is that just because we’re not hearing it, doesn’t mean it’s not happening. A few quick twitter searches and I found plenty of agreement, anger, outrage etc. regarding last night’s speech. Of course there was. But despite this being obvious to me now, the fact that my narrow focus of Social Media wasn’t talking about it, doesn’t mean it’s not happening. So then I looked up Rush Limbaugh @limbaugh which didn’t help. He’s got 50,000 followers and 0 tweets. Next up, @foxnews but still, very little debate at all. So where is all of this debate coming from? Well, to my delight it’s coming from regular people.

This made me think about the nature of Social Media and how your self-made group of influencers might taint your view of what the world is actually talking about. There’s a phenomenon that takes place when you get your news from Social Media and use it to attempt to gauge what people are talking about. The whole basis of SM is that we are all social creatures. We naturally are attracted to people like us, and people that like us. Hence we join groups. It’s always been this way from the beginning of man, we now just have the technology to find people like us hundreds of thousands of miles away, and interact with them in real time.

So the lesson learned here is that though Social Media is a great way to view the world, be careful that your view isn’t distorted by the company you keep. To paraphrase the Godfather, “Don’t just keep your friends close, also keep your enemies closer.” Make room in your social network for unlike-minded people. In fact, embrace the people that disagree with you — that make you think. That way liberals like me won’t have to follow @foxnews to keep my outlook “Fair and Balanced.”