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We just wrapped up work on a site that we did for Ocean Futures Society, a non-profit marine conservation and education organization. The group’s chairman and spokesman is Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of the legendary ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau. OFS serves as a “Voice for the Ocean” by communicating in all media the critical bond between people and the sea and the importance of wise environmental policy.

In our weekly Wednesday company meeting, we typically talk with each other about what we’ve learned in the last week and the projects we’re working on. This week, however, Nick threw us a bit of a curveball.

We split into two groups to answer a big question: where will the web be in 10 years? Each group was required to deliver 5 concepts. We talked for 15 minutes, and neither group was short on ideas. The hardest part was whittling it down.

It’s been an interesting year at CentreSource. Our focus this year has been mostly internal — we’ve been honing our internal processes and working closely with our now 20-person team to make our day-to-day as efficient as possible. We’re also learning from each other: we spend every day in peer meetings as a means to cross train each other and make sure that all the knowledge we’re gathering from every new client experience is shared with the team. In effect, we continue to raise our own bar every day — something that’s easy to say but harder to do, because the more the bar raises, the more we expect from ourselves.

Our May Interactive Mixer was a great time — amazing weather and another fantastic crowd. Nashville interactive events have been heating up as the weather gets warmer, so kudos to those faces who keep popping up at all these events. We love to see Nashville building such a strong, committed community of interactive experts; our mixers are designed to play a small part of that. And in the 5 months since we’ve started, we’ve met so many amazing people and learned so much from our beer and cupcake fueled conversations.

This week we launched a brand new site for another great cause. AuTube.tv — a project of the Dan Marino Foundation — focuses on building connectivity and community anyone either on the autism spectrum or in the autism community.  They call it an “issues-based social network” — it’s a unique concept in which each month a single topic is presented to the community, who then discusses the topic along with a panel of experts.

All Hail the Golden Kraut

Motivation can take many forms. At CentreSource, it takes the form of spray-painted canned food.

But first, a bit of backstory…

In 2008, we were the leading sponsor of Nashville’s Barcamp. We created a program for the day, acted as MCs, and designed some interactive games for what was a great day of speaking, learning, and networking. We forgot one thing, though, until the last minute: prizes for said games. So in desperation at the 11th hour, Nick grabbed the only free things in the house: two cans of spraypaint and two cans of canned food. And this begat the dumbest prizes ever — Golden Kraut and Silvery Beans.

This week, we’re happy for a few things: spring weather, some great new projects tearing through the dev department, and new team members. That’s right, this week we welcome Shaun Jackson to our team.

Shaun is a long-time friend of the firm — several of us have known Shaun for a while and respected his leadership skills and passion for interactive. Shaun actually comes to us from the other side: he’s been a client of CentreSource many times over as the Director of Online Marketing for Word Entertainment. He has the unique perspective of knowing our processes from the other side.

What a week!

We launched a new site this week for a great cause called The Two Futures Project — an organization is focused on nuclear abolition.

The Two Futures Project was one of those great projects in which everyone on the team — client included — was passionate about the idea and about what interactive could do for the cause.

In our Strategy session, we focused on developing meaningful ways that users could take action in a cause that seems immovable from an individuals perspective (it’s not like you can disarm the world’s nukes by switching light bulbs).  Our strategy aimed at on using the web to leverage the user’s voice. As a result, our Phase 1 includes a registration process designed to automate the process of writing letters to government officials. We integrated social networking tools to help the user spread the word through social networks. And we developed a “Make the Case” section that invites users to share their own YouTube videos offering their “30 second pitch” for why nuclear disarmament is necessary.

We’re proud to announce the launch of one of our new projects: the new Vaco.com.

Vaco – a Nashville-based recruiting, placement, and consulting firm — reached out to us in 2008 to help update their web presence and create a site that better serves their internal and external stakeholders. In the months since, we’ve worked closely with the Vaco team to develop an interactive strategy that delivers the outcome they desire.

Vaco introduced some new challenges in strategy development – namely, the service of multiple stakeholders balanced with a large network of internal stakeholders. Vaco is unique in that it offers nationwide service delivered through 27 local offices – each with it’s own unique skill set and culture. Ultimately, we wanted a strategy that would let each office express it’s strengths, while retaining a core functionality that applied to companies looking for talent and candidates looking for placement.

In 2008, I had the pleasure of working closely for over 6 months with the nation’s oldest college summer internship program, the Southwestern Company, on their interactive strategy. And what a great relationship – the Southwestern Company is full of passionate people and sharp minds. And most importantly, the whole team was very keen on learning how to leverage the web in order to introduce their unique summer sales internship to new college students across the US.

In these six months, we were able to accomplish a load of work. We launched SEVEN new web sites, each with a unique design, strategy, and focus on a specific stakeholder. We focused on social media and multimedia as a means to engage new users. We dug deep into Search Engine Optimization to learn how to “be seen” at the right time by more searchers.