centre{source}
INTERACTIVE AGENCY
Company News
Miscellaneous
centre{source} Makes a BANG with the Monthly Interactive Mixer
In the fall of 2008, the Strategy team at centre{source} set out to create a plan for expanding the firm’s reach and involvement in the local Nashville Interactive Community. Over the course of a few months, a strategy was formed that involved looking inwardly for personal development opportunities and looking outwardly for ways to become more active and connected with community members. The cornerstone and most valuable component of this strategy has quickly become our practice of hosting a monthly mixer at the c{s} North Fourth office on the last Thursday of each month.
As the “hostess” and organizer of these events, I was initially unsure of what to expect as far as turnout and reception. As we geared up for the first mixer, held in January of 2009, I must have refreshed our Pingg invite list at least 50 times a day. As we got closer to D-Day and RSVPs began rolling in, I quickly realized that what we initially expected to be an event with attendance of around 30-40 was going to become much more!
Dream Big, Take Action: Ellie’s Run for Africa
The summer is here, which means that once again it is time for us to join forces to help out Ellie’s Run for Africa (ERFA), a 5k run and family fun day that raises awareness of and funding for Africans who struggle to meet basic needs such as health care, food, water, shelter, clothing and education. Since the first event in 2004, ERFA has raised over $155,000 and helped to put over 420 kids in school.
Our May Mixer and Our Golden Kraut and Silvery Bean Winners
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.
Interactive Real Estate
This week we launched the new www.fridrichandclark.com. For those of you not familiar with F&C (affectionately called by our team)…shame on you! For over 40 years they have been front runners in the Nashville real estate market.
For the past several years they have struggled to find an online identity. The site had become stale and hard to use. With this new site, it was our goal to place F&C back on the mantle where they belonged. It was clear that a traditional realty site would not suffice. For those of you familiar with real estate you might know of a tool called the “MLS.” This tool allows users to search for houses in middle Tennessee. It would have been easy enough to simply display the results that were associated with F&C through an API…but why do something simple?!!!
AuTube.tv
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.
Awesome Open Source Software
In preparation for my presentation (Try some Open Source…. Everybody’s doing it), I’ve compiled some of the best offerings in the land of OSS.
Utilities
Firefox (http://www.mozilla.com) - Browser
Azureus (http://azureus.sourceforge.net) - BitTorrent
FileZilla (http://www.FileZilla.com) - FTP Client
CLAMWIN (http://www.clamwin.com) - Open Source Anti-Virus
TightVNC (http://www.tightvnc.com) - Remote computer control
Winner of Excellence in Sales: Evan Owens
Before you begin to picture a door-to-door, truth-twisting, pushy and annoying sales guy, think again. Last week, I was honored to be named the top sales person in the Media and Advertising space. I have to admit that being called a sales person still irks me a bit.
When I first began at CentreSource, I demanded that the title on my business card be changed to “Solutions Consultant.” To this day, I have no clue what that actually means, but I would think it means I help people find opportunities and solve problems. In my effort to say something profound during the City Paper interview, I said, “We want to make sure we’re delivering the outcome the client wants, not just a list of deliverables.”
How Spray Paint, Sauerkraut, and Canned Beans Became Motivators
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.
Welcome to the team, Shaun Jackson!
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.
Two Futures and Social Media
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.
