Joint Eco-Venture: 3EcoBees
3EcoBees.com is a joint venture between us and Ambiendura, an environmental consultancy, that began a few months ago, and has now started taking on a life of its own.
The project is a collaboration aimed at developing and promoting green and sustainable projects in the region of the Algarve and hopefully across the country, for both tourists and locals in the area of eco-tourism, eco-investments and eco-lifestyle.
The project started with talks about how great it would be to have a green region, to suddenly everything sprouting like wild fire.
We will be introducing the project at the Feira Nacional de Parques Naturais e Ambiente in Olhão, held from July 24th to 27th. We’re looking to work with businesses actively engaged in developing green, sustainable products and services in the Algarve and Portugal.
We’re also quite conscious of greenwashing and that is not our intention, our goal to encourage businesses to be green and help them connect to where they can get more information and support. In addition, 3EcoBees, will help promote those that are already green, and support investments both from national and international sources to continue developing sustainable projects in Portugal. So if you’re in one of those areas, we would love to hear from you.
In preparation for the fair, we got working on our logo, icon, blog and holding page. We’re all working hard get the project ready, so for now the 3ecobees website is on hold, until our designer and doodler extraordinaire can take time away from other client projects. In the meantime, I took my marketing hat off and put on my web design cap, to fill in.
We have to say a big ‘THANK YOU’ to all the companies that are working with us and sending their information and products, and a special thanks to the 3EcoBees intern, Susanna a.k.a. “HelperBee”, for all her hard work so far. She’s been great and we couldn’t have gotten organized in time without her help - thanks Susanna!
Your User’s Experience. Who’s Watching?
Silly usability mistakes have a tendency to sneak up on even reputable sites like Tumblr.com.
If you offer a service online, hire or appoint a user-experience stickler whose role would be to review your website’s key customer touch points. Create a checklist, make sure error messages are warmly delivered and accompanied with additional direction. And please, try not to leave your customers hanging after you’ve given them the red font.
A simple link: “Forgot your password?” could solve this.
Surely there are bigger usability violations committed on the web. Picking on Tumblr just happened to be convenient at the time of writing. This little violation should not be used against Tumblr - after-all, one can argue the “blue log in” does the trick.
The Dynamics and Intelligence of Creativity
When do we start being creative, where does it come from and how important is it to our future? This is an important issue affecting us more than we realize, and a question that’s finally getting due attention.
Wikipedia’s definition of creativity - Creativity (or “creativeness”) is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts.
Unfortunately, until now ‘creativity’ for the most part, has been considered a cheap commodity relegated to dreamers, and believed to only gain real value after an artists death, but thanks to the last decade of technological change, the currency of creativity may just be on its way up.
Creativity surrounds us in every day things from cars to cutlery - in what we do, see, use, eat, read, how we communicate, move and even how we feel; but how often do we take this powerful force seriously? The technology, communications and environment we live in today, have all pushed us to look at our world differently, and now maybe for the first time in history, we’re becoming cognizant that our survival is based on, and needs human creativity to flourish.
We are all born creative, giving us the ability to solve problems and innovate the world around us, it is also the only element that remains to tell our story when we are gone, the key to our human heritage. The proof that we existed and contributed from mind to matter, this has been proven time and again, from wall carvings and pyramids to the medicine and technology we use today. So what are we doing to encourage and support this precious and limitless asset, today and the future? Here is a fascinating perspective on this gift, and how we educate ourselves out of one of our most dynamic and collaborative survival tools.
[TEDTALKS SIRKENROBINSON_high.flv]
The creativity and humor Sir Ken Robinson used to present this topic, is a quiet affirmation of the powerful and captivating connection we have to creativity even with just the spoken word. A human talent that resonates deep and can truly make a difference in how we live, listen, interact and perceive the world around us.
Robinson’s talk delivers an invaluable lesson - for people and economies to flourish, creativity needs to be encouraged, supported and respected in its many dynamic forms, and we need to appreciate the human potential in its entirety, rather than focus solely on wringing out more academics.
It’s the creative genius in us all, and what we bring to fruition that makes our world interesting - through design, art, music, dance, food, language and technology to name a few, it’s in everything we do. Creativity evolves our cultures and enriches our lives with depth, diversity and passion, making what we can accomplish limitless. If you stop to think for a moment, everything that surrounds us today, was once just a ‘creative’ idea. Can you imagine the world we would live in, if we actually focused on cultivating human creativity instead of depressing it?
Why I’ll never read another business book …
I like to read business books. Maybe “like” is an understatement. My joy of reading has led me to many things like knowledge and a wider perspective, it also propelled me to take speed reading, so I could read even more…
But lately, I’m disappointed to say, I’ve found business books getting a tad bit boring, and I’m getting less value from reading them. To get myself back on track, I’ve decided:
- Never read another business book that’s authored by a service company from beginning to end. From my experience, a large number of these books tend to pitch the services or expertise offered by the company, and seldom provide value I can apply and practice right away.
- If the book is highly reviewed or recommended, I’ll make sure to check the authors profile. If the profile starts with a company plug, I’ll be sure to think twice before adding it to my ‘must read’ collection.
- Take Seth’s advice on how to read a business book.
- Read more non-business books to fuel my creativity… i.e. drawing on the right side of the brain and Chip Kid
That reminds me, maybe it’s a good time to join other bookworms on LibraryThing.com
Portuguese Wines the next big thing?
Although most Portuguese wine makers are too busy making wine, to really care what’s happening online, latest news from at least one wine expert is, “it’s a great time to be a Portuguese wine maker”.
When the most influential voice in the wine industry says, “Portuguese wines are the next big thing”, maybe we should at least take notice. Maybe, just maybe, he hasn’t had to many glasses and he knows what he’s talking about.
Arguably, no one knows the “wine 2.0″ industry better than Gary Vaynerchuk - of “Wine Library”, with his gritty charm, and the power of social media, like twitter and video blogging, to successfully turn the families 4 million wine shop, into a 50 million a year business, in less than 3 years. Appearances on popular talk shows, plus invitations to speak at Google, Facebook and Internet Stardom, Gary Vaynerchuk seems to just be getting started.
Impressed by Portuguese wine quality and value, Gary has not been shy about touting our wines and loudly pronouncing “Portuguese wines are going to be big!” His reasoning - great quality and great value, or as he likes to call it “the thunder” - a bottle that costs $10, but really tastes like $50.
If he’s right, and he knows wines, the BIG question is “when”. So, when will Portuguese wines break into new markets? Well, at the moment one key challenge is lack of visibility and branding. Unfortunately, only a handful of Portuguese wine makers are currently using new marketing strategies, or the power of the web to build a competitive and effective web strategies and brands.
But things are changing - thanks to the likes of Ryan and Gaberiella Opaz from Catavino. This dynamic duo are certainly creating buzz in the Spanish and Portuguese wine scene, with their know-how of social media tools like blogging, twitter and social wine discovery sites, and slowly re-humanizing the world of “wine snob” into something more digestible.
Eddie and I finally got to meet the Opaz’s and excited to hear their efforts are starting to pay off with wine makers.
So this looks like a good opportunity to share a few ideas on how Portuguese Wine Producers can work towards bringing more attention to the country:
Continue reading the rest of this article…
In Control of your Brand?
Marketers want to feel they’re in control of their brands. But customers show us that’s not how the game is played anymore. Regardless on the volume of advertising and brand positioning, at the end of the day, customers will perceive your brand based on their own experience and world view.
Still think you’re in control? Then take a look at the Brand Tags Game – the basic idea of the game is that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, however you position your brand, other’s will perceive it differently.
Here are just five (5) of many interesting trends from Brand Tags:
- Twitter “useless”… but don’t tell that to Pistachio
- Taco Bell “diarrhea”
- Apple “innovation”
- Hilton Hotel “Paris Hilton”
- London 2012 Olympics “Ugly”
Here are more trends.
At the end of day, what we can learn from this, a brand can’t just own one, but according to Seth “there’s no reason why you can’t build a micro one, a local one, a brand that’s magical for a smaller group of people”.
solo’izing
Big Kudos to Stephanie Booth for a well organized Going-Solo Conference this past Friday- if you missed the event and are thinking about becoming a “Soloist” in the near future, you should definitely check out the joys and tribulations of being a freelancer with presentations by:
Martin Roell, Stowe Boyd, Suw Charman, Dennis Howlett, and a good panel discussion for setting your rates.
A lot has been written and captured about the conference – you can get caught up with all the day’s events, here.
Even our very own Chief Smarty Pants “Eddie” got caught on tape, along with our new friend Nuno.
Next conference we have our eyes on is reboot in Denmark. Hope to see you there.
going-solo conference
On May 15th, Eddie and I, along with Andre, we’ll be traveling north to Geneva for the one day Going-Solo conference – “focused on the new web” for freelancers and small business owners.
This will be the conference’s first year and is organized by Stephanie Booth, and promises to be a full day of meeting and interacting with interesting people like: Stowe Boyd, Laura (Pistachio), Nuno Barreto, Kevin Marks, and others.
If you’re planning to be there and like to connect, leave us a comment below. You can also connect with Eddie here and myself here.
See you there!
8 Green Marketing Ideas for Your Business
In the spirit of Earth day, we’re going to look at how small to med-size businesses can make a commitment to environment and create a competitive advantage in their market place.
Everywhere your turn, there’s talk about the environment and how businesses need to be socially responsible to minimize their impact on the environment. Finally, the earth we take so much from is going to be getting some payback.
So, can a business lower its negative impact, grow and think green all at once?
There’s plenty of skepticism, but there’s also proof that ‘Thinking Green’ in business is not only good for the environment, but for business as well. Here are some easy to implement green marketing ideas your business can embrace: Continue reading the rest of this article…
8 Examples of “Coming Soon Pages”
We have several new projects under the hood here at Chama, and since each are in development mode, we decided to put our own “coming soon pages” for a few of them, instead of the standard default domain “holding” pages.
There are many advantages to having a proper “coming soon page”, the main reason is for their search engine friendliness. Since a domain’s age is one of the many factors Google uses in its algorithms, a coming soon page is a good way to mark your presence early on, while you’re working on your site behind the scene. It also looks better and more professional than the cookie cutter holding page. (And note we’re not referring to the dot com under construction holding pages)
A few other reasons to use “coming soon pages”:
* builds trust with almighty Google
* creates buzz … i.e. in the case of silverbackapp.com
* gets volunteers to help you beta test the site/app
* allows early birds to sign up for an email alert when the project goes live
So now your convinced and ready to see some great examples of “coming soon” pages, right? Well not so fast, we did some digging and sorry to say, there isn’t a much out there. This may in part, be due to the fact there’s no place to archive these pages, so all this “coming soon” inspiration may just be falling into a digital black hole. But alas, necessity is the mother of invention so we’ve put together this starter post, and created a public Flickr Group to serve as creative juice for all, and in hopes designers and creative types will share their best examples.
Continue reading the rest of this article…
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- Joint Eco-Venture: 3EcoBees
- Your User’s Experience. Who’s Watching?
- The Dynamics and Intelligence of Creativity
- Why I’ll never read another business book …
- Portuguese Wines the next big thing?
- In Control of your Brand?
- solo’izing
- going-solo conference
- 8 Green Marketing Ideas for Your Business
- 8 Examples of “Coming Soon Pages”
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