Blog @ Percolate

In the spirit of NYC’s bike to work week, here’s some guidance around buying your first bike. Like most things you read on the internet, please take this with a grain of salt, but know that I’ve been riding a bike to work for about 7 years (5 in SF and 2 in NY).

First of all, get excited!

Riding a bike is incredibly freeing. What used to be a 45 minute G train ride from Williamsburg to Prospect Park is now a 25 minute cruise with plenty of scenic brownstones in between. And with the immutable presence of fried chicken in this town, we could all benefit from more exercise.

$$$?

But aren’t bikes expensive? Not really! Depending on whether you want a used or new bike, you can find yourself a reliable steed in the range of $500. If you consider a monthly metro pass is $116 or even the cost of owning and maintaining a car (gulp!), bikes offer incredible value.

Buying a Bike

Option one – go analog (also known as, support your local bike shop):

Physically going into a bike shop and actually checking out the models is a great way to get to know what you like and see what’s out there. Bicycling.com recommends calling two or three different shops to get a sense of the styles and brands they carry in advance to save time. You can also get a sense of how amenable the shops are to first-time bike owners. 

Two bike shops I’ve found to be very good are Velo in the East Village and Bicycle Habitat in Soho. Even if you don’t end up buying your bike there, you can patronize these shops by picking up a light, or a lock there.

For a great first commuter bike, I recommend going single speed. New York is relatively flat, and single speed bikes are easy to maintain with less moving parts to break or have stolen. A bike with a flip-flop hub will enable you to switch to fixed gear. Even if you have greater aspirations of going from being commuter to a proper cyclist, the single speed will carry you through many a long ride up the Westside Highway or around Prospect Park.

Option two – the Internet:

Once you begin to familiarize yourself with brands, you can read up on various reviews. Bike forums are chock full of information and personal feedback around different brands so its easy to start to learn how models stack up in terms of quality. 

For example, in reading up on a frame I was considering, I learned that an online retailer (Performance) had a house brand that was more affordable and getting great reviews.

Option two and a half – Craigslist is your friend:

Once have an understanding of what brands are good and pricing, you can take a much more targeted approach to your Craigslist search. For someone on a budget, Craigslist can be a great path to getting value. Just understand like anything else from Craiglist, caveat emptor.

The Gear

In my experience – some of the most important factors that play in when owning a good commuter bike are having a good comfortable seat, good wheels and durable tires (saving the headache of a flat).

For seats I really like the Fizik Arione, but everyone’s ‘seats’ are different. You can always go the route of the classic Brooks saddle, but don’t forget the not so classic Nylon chain to help keep it from being stolen.

As far as helmets, my number one recommendation is to wear one. After that, buy something comfortable and not too expensive, because that way you can lock it to your bike without feeling nervous. Giro makes a nice range at accessible prices and if you are looking for something more urban check out Bern.

Comfortable sneakers with a hard rubber sole like Vans, Superga or Chrome will do you right. If you’re aiming for a bit of a higher rung on the style ladder, maybe a good wedge sole will catch the discerning lense of The Sartorialist

Overall – Get a bike you like, that feels good to ride and you’ll be excited to hop on in the morning, or after a long day of work.

So, I’ve Bought a Bike. Now What?

My Go to Streets for Navigating Manhattan are:

North: 1st ave, 6th ave & 8th ave

South: 2nd ave, Broadway & 9th ave

West: Spring Street , 9th St. & 21st St.

East: Grand St, Stanton St., Bleecker St. & 20th St.

A PDF of the 2013 Bike Map for New York can be found here.

Tips & Tricks?

Don’t be a jerk. Running red lights into oncoming traffic, darting in front of pedestrians and riding the wrong way is a fast path to getting hit, or at the least bad karma. And don’t get frustrated with salmon, those impatient cyclists or even roller bladers who feel the need to go the wrong way in the bike lanes.

Sandwiches:

Reward your new purchase by riding to Ferdinando’s in Red Hook and having their focaccia sandwich. It’s not easy to get to by subway and you’ll never look at ricotta cheese the same way again.

–
There are no shortage of jaywalkers, double parked delivery vans, and errant food carts to complicate your ride, but if you ride with respect and keep aware of your surroundings, you’ll do great and have a blast. Now get out there and enjoy yourself!

Questions? Say hi on Twitter. I’m @brosbeshow.

I have always been fascinated by why some startups succeed and others fail. Many companies have similar ideas about how they want to solve a specific problem, but usually, only one, maybe two come out on top. Do they execute better or faster than everyone else? Do they have smarter people working for them? Or, did they do something unique with the culture early to set the standard?

In my opinion, the best thing any startup can do is establish a culture early that inspires everyone in the company to believe in one mission and pushes employees to succeed.

I co-founded a technology company in NYC and helped guide the growth of that culture. Anyone that has been a founder of a company can attest to certain things being lost in the commotion of daily work or areas where they felt they might have neglected as the company grows. One of the most important indicators of a successful company is culture: Do people love coming to work every day? At my startup, I was so focused on building a successful business that in hindsight, I could have done a better job contributing to building the culture.

At Percolate, Noah and James’ commitment to culture starts from day one. Our entire team believes in one common goal: Re-define digital marketing and communication. As Jim Collins, best-selling author of Good to Great and Built to Last says, “Commit to a set of core values that you will want to build your enterprise on…for 100 years.”

Building culture takes constant iteration and a willingness to fail and try again. Each Monday morning, both the product and business teams meet to set strategic goals for the week. We all then support each other in reaching those goals, and once Friday comes around, we celebrate our weekly ‘Wins’ with an all-hands meeting. This structure is an important contributor to building teamwork.

That teamwork is extended to new employees when they’re assigned a “Percolator” who acts as their mentor for the first few weeks to get them up and running. It’s present in our recently formed Percolate clubs to align similar interests inside the company like: art and culture; winter sports; bread baking; running; and yoga.  And, it’s present as we build our internal knowledge network, Barista, that both Greg and Noah discussed in previous posts.

Percolate has given me the unique opportunity to experience the growth of culture at a startup from the employee perspective after seeing it as a founder. Does our culture sound like something you’d want to contribute to? We’re hiring.

Part of the Percolate engineering team attended this year’s PyCon, held in (comparatively) sunny Santa Clara, CA. Attending the conference was an enjoyable, productive experience for us; it gave us a chance to think about the direction of our system and development practices outside of the frenzy of everyday development. Not to mention it was nice to relax in warm spring weather over a few beers.

Many good talks were given, and the hallways were abuzz with enthusiastic creators.

Relaxing after a “long day” of conferencing

“Readability counts.”

Of the many topics that were discussed at the conference, there was one theme that resonated strongly with me: the community’s focus on clarity and simplicity in the language. In particular, Raymond Hettinger gave a number of good talks that promoted using Python language built-ins to simplify the expression of ideas in code.

Let’s take a fairly contrived (but illustrative) example. In Java, if I want to sum the squares of a list of integers, I’ll probably write something like

public Integer sumSquares(List list) {
    Integer sum = 0;
    for (Integer i:list)
        sum = sum + (i * i);
    return sum;
}

The same idea expressed in idiomatic Python would read:

def sum_squares(alist):
    return sum(i ** 2 for i in alist)

I don’t mean to pick on Java here; it’s a language I admire for many reasons. That said, the relative readability of Python is a big win. Less boilerplate for the eye to parse means quicker comprehension. Logical omissions or faults are more easily identified, which decreases bugs and time spent reviewing. A clearer language facilitates more frequent deploys.

The contrast above might not strike you as being significant, but if you consider magnifying that kind of difference to web applications that are thick lattices of complex business logic, the contrast goes from pedantic to essential. I won’t sell old news, though; this subject has been well covered.

Hettinger also mentioned exciting additions to the standard library in Python 3 that will help make commonly-expressed ideas concise. For example, take the way we’d disregard an exception in Python 2.7:

try:
    content = f.read()
except IOError:
    pass

versus a built-in context manager in Python 3.3:

with ignored(IOError):
    content = f.read()

Pretty nice, huh? There’s nothing like being in a big room of people who get excited about this sort of stuff.

@raymondh delivering the goods.

One of the things I enjoyed most about the talks at PyCon was watching core developers negotiate the balance between language simplicity and convenience. Any additional “conveniences,” by necessity, introduce added complexity to the language. But if no conveniences are ever introduced, the result is overly-verbose, stiff code. Python’s leaders do an impressive job of managing trade-offs in this department.

“One– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.”

So, readable code helps us build Percolate quickly and safely. But the speakers at PyCon weren’t just concerned with simple syntax: they also discussed conceptual simplicity. Oft quoted documents included the sometimes-cryptic but profound Zen of Python and PEP8, the canonical source of style.

We’ve found PEP8 in particular to be a huge aid as the size of our engineering team grows. Many other environments I’ve worked in have been wrought with argument and frustration around proper code formatting; Python provides a standard. This encourages a uniform, consistent presentation and allows us to avoid many style-related arguments by appealing to a neutral document. This kind of standardization allows us to use automated tools that ensure new code is easy to read.

“Flat is better than nested.”

One of the most exciting parts of the conference for me was hearing Guido Van Rossum, Python’s Benevolent Dictator for Life, discuss his work on the new asynchronous framework Tulip. This project seeks to combat the hairy problem of asynchronous execution with a mechanism called coroutines. It is Guido’s attempt to unify a few disparate approaches in the Python ecosystem into a standard, consistent way within Python.

Almost every experience I’ve had with callbacks as a solution to an asynchronous problem has resulted in deeply-nested code that seems more difficult than necessary to trace through. The result is often lengthy debugging sessions. Guido’s approach with coroutines is exciting because it is an augmentation of Python’s flat function calls (prefix a “yield from” to the call), so we can read through code in a consistent way, independent of concurrency.

“Simple is better than complex.”

Percolate as a tool has many of the same aims that Python does, namely simplicity and effectiveness. Our trip to PyCon reminded me that there is huge value in studying the tools that we admire as we construct our own.

Building a thoughtful technology company takes many minds. Last week we brought together the entire Percolate company to brainstorm the next iteration of Percolate’s software.

Our product manager Stacy and lead designer Dom organized the session and set the stage for how we should be thinking about the future of Percolate.

Having grown almost threefold in size since the last company-wide brainstorming, Dom walked everyone through the evolution of Percolate since day 1.

This brought newbies and veterans alike up to speed on how we got to where we are today and how what we’ve learned along the way might inform future plans for Percolate.

Before diving into the actual brainstorming of the new product, we were asked to forget everything we knew about Percolate to date. So as not to bias our ideas for new features and functionality, Dom and Stacy outlined the following criteria for brainstorming 4.0:

1. Forget everything
2. Think in workflows
3. Sketch (Actions, Flows, Interfaces, States)
4. How might we create the most amazing version?
5. Have fun

We then broke into groups, sketched out individual ideas channeling a little Percolate Pictionary, presented those to the group and then assembled the best ones to present to the entire company.

I came out of the 4.0 brainstorming session with a few key take-aways for building an awesome technology platform:

• Create an environment that sifts out the best ideas: During the brainstorming session our time limitations forced us to prioritize what was most important. Our short 10-minute bursts of brainstorming forced us to focus on the most critical features for our given challenge.
• More inputs lead to better outputs: Involving the entire company helped us to crowdsource the best ideas for Percolate 4.0.
• Designing to build a culture and community: Getting Percolators to wear a designer’s hat for a day brought everyone together in a unique way. Each person had a say in the company’s future and had an opportunity to exercise their talents in new and different ways.

If joining us sounds like an awesome idea, get in touch or check out our jobs page.

Each basketball player who’s made it to the NBA/WNBA has been ‘the star’ for a portion of their career. I include portion because these young men and women were likely the centerpiece of their high school or college team. That status likely changed once they made it to the highest levels of basketball where there are 14 other ‘stars’ on the roster.

The great equalizer in NBA/WNBA isn’t height. It’s humility. Would you be able to accept your new role on a team of all-stars? How would you adjust after spending most of your developing life being told you’re the best only to suddenly be the second or third option off the bench? That’s the reality these players are facing.

One of my all-time favorite players, Chauncy Billups, is one example of someone whose years of hard work, right timing and a new team propelled him from role player to NBA All-Star. But, before becoming a five-time All-Star and 2004 Finals MVP, Billups was a NBA journeyman playing for five teams in his first five years.

I’ve followed Billups since he was in high school, watched him play at the University of Colorado and was excited when the Boston Celtics took him 3rd overall in the 1997 draft. But, things didn’t work out like he, or the Celtics, imagined. They shipped him off in a trade and he remained on the wrong teams until he joined the Detroit Pistons in 2002.

It all began to change once in Detroit. He was surrounded by equally hungry and talented teammates and had a visionary coach who saw the team’s potential to disrupt the Western Conferences domination from 1999-2003. And disrupt they would: Billups and his teammates in Detroit won the championship in 2004 and returned to the Finals in 2005.

We think about teams everyday at Percolate and over the last many months, we’ve attracted some incredibly talented individuals. Their backgrounds are diverse, and include banking, journalism, the art world, a major social network and recent college graduates, to name just a few. But everyone who joins Percolate, whatever their background, has one thing in common: he or she bought into our vision to redefine the future of digital marketing. And every single person at Percolate is doing his or her part to make this an incredible place to work.

Good news is we’re still hiring. We have 14 job openings. If you’re interested in joining our team, please get in touch because unlike the NBA/WNBA, you can choose where you play…

On Friday, the teams at Percolate – business and product – assembled for #hackpercolate 2013.

Nourished by a delicious and healthy breakfast and raring to go, we divvied up into teams to work on projects ranging from a mobile site to a dashboard view of key metrics in Percolate to an internal website that showed the occupancy state of the bathroom. Yes, you read that correctly and can read the dedicated post for how well that went.

Dispatch from Team Aroma (Arduino Light)

Team Aroma started with the bare materials of Arduino and ended with a product that shows – via LED smiley face –  1. when a client logs in and 2. when a client post is published via Percolate. Erik taught Sarah, Song, and Max to solder, which was key to connecting the circuits so that the display would work. Meanwhile, JOB and Luke worked on programming for the Arduino device (after Max did the original Arduino set-up), enabling it to communicate with the server and display a corresponding bitmap image. On the back end for the server, Danny checked for new posts and logins with Max’s help.

Great news, the team’s prototype worked on the first try–boom! Currently, we are trying to be fancy and get usernames to scroll that will correspond to the login. Sarah christened this project with the name “Aroma.” Erin also made an excellent presentation to showoff everyone’s hardwork. And, in the end, JOB cleaned up our mess. Thank you sir.

Dispatch from Team Perco-Users

The Perco-user team was comprised of two developers, one designer and five business folks with a shared goal of making it easier for all Percolate employees to understand the frequency of client usage.  Peter, an account manager at Percolate, tracks and analyzes client usage data daily.  He knows this information like the back of his hand.  However, Percolators in other functions don’t have easy access to this data.  Our goal was to fix that. We set out to build an internal dashboard that easily communicates software usage.  The ultimate objective is to understand client behavior to improve our product.

We began the brainstorm to find a balance between business need, creativity and product feasibility.  Once we had the general concept, each discipline got to work. With a framework for the dashboard, we needed to understand how to best represent the data to keep it easily consumable.  We decided it should be represented in two forms; an aggregate snapshot of all business, and a detailed breakout of each client.

In the end, the output was a blend of our unique perspectives from across the business. Now, everyone can understand software usage and work together – product and business – to get clients Percolating to their full potential.  Because the more you Percolate, the happier you are!

And, a very special thanks to Kate Whitlow for her fantastic and healthy catering services.

As a startup grows, so does the bathroom line.

Percolate has outgrown our office space, so the mention of Arduino technology during Hack Day kick-off quickly birthed an idea. We can build a way to check if the bathroom’s vacant from the comfort of your desk.

When Team Bathroom assembled–near the bathroom, of course–the first move was out the door. A shopping trip was in order.

At Canal Alarm Devices, the team picked up magnetic sensors to detect when the bathroom door opens.

Say hi everybody! From left above: April, Percolate office manager; Ian W, ops; Erik, mathematician; and Noah, co-founder and head of product.

There was a moment of reflection on Canal Street: How is this going to work exactly? The magnets tell a website if the toliet was vacant or occupied, if the door is open or closed. Visit a website to see and, if the door is closed, put your name–better yet, your Twitter handle–in the queue. When it’s your turn, you receive a tweet.

Then it was time to execute. Back at the office, April learned to code for the first time.

And Ian and Erik got to programming the Arduino.

Clearly, more field trips were eventually in order.

Meanwhile Brand Strategists Kunur and Jo selected the Twitter handle @PercolateWC and eventually wrangled a designer, Erin, for a crash-course in wireframing.

It took a bit of time for Kunur and Jo to find the wireframing templates.

At lunch, the team got a visit from Noah’s wife Leila. Clearly the Twitter bathroom reporter idea was born years ago: At Naked Communications, back when Twitter was first taking off, Noah sat near the loo and kept the office informed: “available,” “not available,” “hold off, someone took a while in there.”

Soon enough, Ian got the hardware working. Kunur, otherwise useless in these situations, put it on Vine.

And a working prototype was born in one working day. Awesome job Team Bathroom and on-the-fly recruits Doug and James OB.

After Greg’s post on curiosity and communication the other day I thought it was worth digging a little deeper into Barista, our internal communication tool, which Greg introduced at the end of his post.

Like Greg, for a long time I’ve been fascinated by serendipity as a business driver. It started when I used to work for an agency called Naked Communications that was well-known for sitting around one big table. It struck me that this table allowed us to move quickly because we were all in a constant state of ambient awareness. Of course overhearing others’ conversations can sometimes be distracting, it also frequently leads to solutions you didn’t know were possible. What I realized at that point was that while most people identify communication as the major challenge as company’s scale, it’s actually serendipity.

Since starting Percolate I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we do this. Greg pointed out some of the ways (process, documentation, small office, all-hands meetings), but I also felt like there was an opportunity to build tools to help us solve for more serendipity as we continue to grow (in December of 2010 we were 0, December of 2012 we were 7 and December of 2013 we were 30). That’s where Barista came from.

The idea is simple: Anyone can ask a question and direct it for answering to anyone else in the company. You can also subscribe to a question to get new answers as they emerge.

In addition questions can be “verified” by the admins, which means it’s an official company answer.

Where the power (and serendipity) comes in is from the “magic search” which looks for unique words as you search and shows you additional questions asked about that.

Like everything else here, this is a work in progress and we have lots more plans for where it will go in the future. But we’re excited about Barista and it fits into our belief that a product company needs to think about how to build products everywhere. It also speaks to our desire to try to keep building new things that are tangentially related to the product but drive value inside the company. To do these things we often bring in outside developers so as not to take focus off the core product and it’s led to a bunch of important tools we now use on a daily basis.

We’ll be talking more about Barista in the future, but wanted to show off our new toy.

What can be learned from a long walk? Teamwork.

The Bell Labs research facility in Murray Hill, New Jersey, home to some of the greatest minds, innovations and products of the 20th century was built in 1941.

The facility was designed with a 700 foot hallway connecting the research departments to each other and to the cafeteria. Why a 700 foot long hallway? Because Frank Jewett and Mervin Kelly at Bell Labs knew a longer walk between offices would increase the likelihood co-workers from different disciplines would pass, chat, and collaborate. They also knew communication was important for innovation and improvement, which is why they also adopted a strict open door policy for researchers, regardless of their level or seniority, encouraging entering and asking questions.

What can a team of 15 or even 40 learn from the Bell Labs model which had to accommodate 3,000 – 4,000 researchers? Well, there is a prevalent myth at small companies, particularly startups, as they grow that things were better “back in the day”. “Oh the good old days of working late into the night and doing it the hard way!” The truth is, it wasn’t better back then. As you grow the work gets better, more focused, and (for certain things) easier. Growth means there is a bigger team to rely on; more collective talent, more brain power, more heads for collaboration, more solutions and more hours back in the day. Stop to look around as you grow, there are probably more amazing people around than last year.

But one thing does change, and I’d argue this is the reason fast-growing companies yearn for the past. That thing is communication.

The challenge as companies grow is they require more physical space, and this often puts a real, literal distance between employees and teams. The entire company can no longer lean in at 9 PM and ask “how did we do today”? Teams get bigger and more specialized, decisions are made by teams, not by the company as a whole over lunch or in a rental car on the way to a meeting. So how do you keep the small, collaborative, intimate feel without adding a 700 foot hallway to the bathroom? Build systems which encourage, embrace and create value in cross team communications (particularly with the new guy).

Introducing Percolate

At Percolate we are building systems now to ensure we continue to maintain our open, questioning culture whether we have eight people or 3,000 sprawling across several international offices. In January we launched our first internal product to help solve this: Barista.

Barista was built to encourage all staff to ask and answer questions about Percolate, technologies, best practices, the neighborhood around the office, anything in fact. Anyone can ask and anyone can answer. Each question can be tagged with topics which can be subscribed to, you can even tag a question with an individual you feel may be best to answer it. The team also thought through asking questions well, as you write a new question we prompt you with similar questions which were previously asked; perhaps you’re not alone in wondering who painted our bathroom signs (Answer: Erik Dies).

As you grow communication is key, more so than an impressive reception area or a pool table; the systems real and digital that encourage communication, questions and curiosity ultimately matter more. Barista is the first step towards realizing our own 700 foot hallway and open door policy, but in a digital format that provides value to the whole organization and not just those in earshot of a good idea discussed over lunch.

If you’re interested in Bell Labs, I highly recommend Jon Gertner’s ‘The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation’

Monday marked a day that many who live on the internet have had on their calendars for months, Community Manager Appreciation Day.

It’s the little things that make a community manager’s job worthwhile and on the fourth Monday of January 2013, those little things transformed into a flowing river of appreciation if you followed the Twitter hashtag #CMAD.

Percolate celebrated community managers by hosting #SPEAKEASY #CMAD. A mix of brands, platforms and agencies presented their learnings on community building and social to a room full of eager community managers.  

If you weren’t able to join us or want to review the presentations once more, we’ve archived the slides below with links and brief descriptions of the presenters and their presentations.

Noah Brier, Percolate co-founder, presented the Evolution of Social Content.
Summary: The endless information ‘stream’ which has proliferated across social channels means that no one thing defines a brand anymore. Social platforms are mirrors reflecting consumer attention in real time, and good content lives at the intersection of brand message and cultural relevance.

Keith Cowing from LinkedIn presented marketing solutions for brands on the LinkedIn platform.
Summary: LinkedIn has evolved from being “who I am at work” to a much broader personalized professional content source. In fact, LinkedIn content creates five times the activity that job postings do. LinkedIn’s newest features, like LinkedIn Today, Groups, Slideshare and Network Updates, all aim at bringing the platform towards recognition as a community for professional content.

Tyler Fonda, Strategy Director at Gotham Inc., presented on the learnings of Denny’s social strategy “Cats and Babies.”
Summary: To create content, community managers and all social publishers need to optimize through experimentation: the risk is simply too low not to (no one will view the content). Gotham was able to experiment with content creation for its client, Denny’s, by creating memes around cats and babies. Here, and on other campaigns, Gotham has successfully used memes as trojan horses for getting into people’s facebook feeds.

Danielle Strle of Tumblr presented “why Tumblr should be your brand’s social hub”.
Summary: Tumblr is a special platform because brands can post anything they want and customize the look and feel. Many brands are seeing unmatched longevity and engagement around their content on Tumblr and the best examples of brands using the platform are available at http://brands.tumblr.com/.

Adam Sandler of American Express presented on how they’re building a community from scratch.
Summary: While a community is united around a certain shared interest, a social network is defined by shared existing relationships. The purpose of Amex’s OPEN Forum was to create a community of thought-leaders to drive “engagement, endorsement, and loyalty” around topics relevant to small businesses and entrepreneurs.

Jon Lombardo of GE presented on “How General Electric became a content company”.
Summary: GE has fascinating social content across virtually all the platforms and they achieved this by knowing their context, thinking about why people share and letting go of the brand (kind of). The result has been increased engagement and content creation across all their social presences.

Jennifer Stalzer of MasterCard talked about the evolution of their corporate newsroom.
Summary: Corporate Communications is currently at the intersection of content and code. In its strategy for building its own corporate newsroom, MasterCard focused on integrating its various social channels, curating content to fuel conversations around context, and creating content with third-party validation. For Mastercard, content creation is never a “one n’ done” process, and MasterCard uses the Percolate Brew to syndicate its content around owned media, bringing new relevancy to dated stock media content.

Matthew Murray of Getty Images showed how brands can co-create with Getty Images. To view please enter your email and password Percolate2013.
Summary: Getty Images now provides brands with a digital, rights-free multimedia library to assist in the content creation process.

Kristin Maverick of The Barbarian Group discussed how Pepsi NEXT and TaskRabbit tested the boundaries of community sampling in their latest campaign.
Summary: To introduce Pepsi NEXT on digital channels, the Barbarian Group partnered with an up-and-coming startup called TaskRabbit, an online marketplace for users to outsource their simple errands and tasks to local trustworthy people. Select contest winners outsourced their errands/tasks for an hour and spent their newfound extra time sampling Pepsi’s new low-sugar product.

Jack Pollock of IPG Media Labs talked about how they’re employees are signals for innovation externally.
Summary: Building an internal community within your own company can be difficult, yet it relies on bringing together technology, content, and audience and avoiding the challenge of diversification. IPG Media Labs consists of 60 thought-leaders across five continents vetting potential media technologies for use at scale.

After a day full of information sharing, Noah concluded with the following threads for the audience to consider: the evolving role of the community manager; the proliferation of new platforms; the diversification of social media presence; how brands are turning user-experiences into user-generated content; and how the industry has moved away from talk of ‘influence’.

Did you attend the event? Let us know your thoughts.

Thanks again to those who attended, presented and our friends, partner and sponsor Tumblr for helping make #SPEAKEASY #CMAD a success. We’re looking forward to doing it again next year and we’ll be post details for the next #SPEAKEASY community manager happy hour soon.