We do a lot of networking. I mean, A LOT. Naturally, after a spending half your day frantically organizing business cards and realizing that networking is replacing your social nightlife, you start to find the events and organizations that are truly worth going to.

Here’s a shout-out from the heart to Boston World Partnerships.

Few organizations in Boston that we’ve experienced bring the diversity of people together you find at BWP events. It’s not just mass crowds of service providers, startups, or those fancy corporate people. It’s a healthy mix of everybody brought together with a common cause – to keep Boston cool enough to dissuade you from moving to San Francisco. While they can’t [yet] change the weather, they are on a mission to help you grow your business and get people working together on raising the bar in Boston.

I like the range of events in terms of intimacy. You do have the large, free-for-all networking events, which are great for getting into the scene and meeting lots of people, and they also have smaller gatherings like strategy sessions for startups which allow members and connectors to have more relaxed and helpful conversations with each other. The focus isn’t to just meet more people and collect business cards, BWP brings those together who are enthusiastic about working with other people grow businesses here.

And every once in a while, they have a hot event at a cool Boston venue. Next Tuesday, they’re celebrating their one-year anniversary at the Liberty Hotel with some wildly successful speakers and an awesome guest list.

We’ll be there.

- Matt Boynton

We’re excited to be sponsoring the MIT100K Business Plan Competition and have the opportunity to help the winner boost their web presence, which can help an early-stage startup have an edge when seeking more funding or funding their first customers.

Why is this important?

Having a well-designed site gives you cred. A good first impression and delivering your message effectively to initial customers (think: early adopters) or investors is key when you may not yet have a whole lot else to show for yourselves yet. When you’re featured in Mass High Tech’s “Startups to Watch” you want that traffic to convert into initial sales, inquiries, or investors, and for your design to have a positive effect with these initial visitors.

If you’re developing and selling a web application, it’s better to show what your first customers can expect to see and get them excited about it, rather than having a “coming soon page”. Even screenshots and a quick tour of your application can do wonders when it comes to converting initial customers even if you haven’t built out your application yet. In fact, this is a good way to test the viability of your web business without going into heavy development right off the bat. We call the initial mockups of an application rapid prototyping.

When you launch your initial site you should build a blog to start your search and social media marketing by developing online thought leadership and traffic to your site. Even if your business isn’t ready for launch yet, it’s important to have an excited group of primary customers who you can rely upon for beta testing or initial sales, as well as being able to update the investment and entrepreneurship community on how things are going for you. Visibility and maintaining interest from the different audiences is vital to gaining traction.

We met one of our clients RetireLife at the Babson business plan competition – here’s RetireLife founder and CEO Megan Shea’s take on the subject:

“By creating your web presence early on in your startup you can begin to understand customer preferences and ways they use the site to define and optimize your message as you scale the business – we have taken our learning from the past year coupled with the UI expertise of Fresh Tilled Soil to completely redesign our website to make it more user-friendly and fit for our target audience” – Megan Shea, RetireLife

We love talking about this. You can find us at the MIT100K semi-finals this Thursday or get in touch with Matt Boynton

At Fresh Tilled Soil, we have been overwhelmed with the amount of local events we see on a daily basis in-and-around the Boston area that are geared towards entrepreneurs, business professionals and business start-ups… so why not share these events with you?

If you are available on February 2, 2010 at 8 am (registration starts at 7:30 am) you might want to check out the following event: Katie Paine will be hosting a breakfast seminar to discuss the facets of measuring your social media campaigns. Katie will help you define several measurable objectives This event will be located at the Foley Hoag Emerging Enterprise Center, 1000 Winter St., Waltham MA.

Far to often business owners find themselves in quite a dilemma: knowing that they want to incorporate social media into their more traditional marketing approaches, but don’t necessarily understand how to measure the success/failure of these campaigns in relation to their business. Definitely a great resource for anyone who owns their own business or works in a business environment where measuring social media is important.

Learn more about the event and sign-up here (members $40 and non-members $80): http://socialmedia100202.eventbrite.com/

We had the pleasure of attending the 2009 TEDMED Conference last week in San Diego and were absolutely inspired by the variety of speakers & topics as well as the opportunity to reflect on how science, technology and medicine have intersected to suggest a different future. The following are a few reflections looking back on the themes and presentations:

• Researchers can now re-create organs using DNA from samples of organ tissue applied to a ’scaffold’ that shapes the replacement organ but then disintegrates within several weeks. Imagine needing a transplant and being able to use your own tissue samples to create one in a lab in short order before your procedure.
• Nutrition and exercise still and will always have a major part to play in the prevention of disease. A no-brainer seemingly, but the frequency of this theme throughout the talks was a poignant reminder. For further insight, check out What the World Eats.
• Changing techniques in educating children, focusing on prevention and evolving the way we approach geriatric care will be important for a healthier life cycle. Making healthier behavior more fun was also a theme that we hope to see realized in education and health care in the coming years.
• Screening your genes is now a viable and relatively affordable solution that helps you understand what elevated health risks you face. Speaker Anne Wojcicki described the story behind 23andme.com and offered attendees a free account. Navigenics also provided a similar, competitive solution focused on screening your DNA to empower you to take stronger preventative measures against disease you run higher risk for.
• Being able to visualize disease and bodily functions is key for many people to quickly and easily understand them. Visual communicator Alexander Tsiaras gave a demo of TheVisualMd.com and PatientsLikeMe.com founder Jamie Heywood showed the audience how effective it was to pool data from a community of people sharing the metrics and symptoms of their disease. In fact, their data was more effective and far easier to understand that a recent clinical study.
• Human life spans may become significantly longer as a result of the technologies focused to combat disease, leaving many unanswered questions about population, resources, quality of life, etc. Speakers Aubrey de Grey and David Sinclair actually consider aging a disease and believe that with cellular maintenance and a modified diet, people can live dramatically longer.
• Shifting the paradigm of healthcare from large, expensive hospital centers toward smaller clinical centers as well as the home will be instrumental in making it more affordable. In the future, smaller neighborhood clinics and centers equipped with Nurse Practitioners offering primary care can allow for more affordable, effective care leaving surgical specialists to oversee more complicated procedures. CVS’ Minute Clinic was just one example. At home, advances in robotics and even common sense solutions like improving the clarity of prescription drug containers will provide seniors with more independence later in life.
• “Not everything that counts can be measured.” A famous Einstein quote provided ground for speakers like Dean Ornish, Deepak Chopra, Aimee Mullins and others who reminded us that positivity, motivation, collaboration, community, consciousness and love have a lot to do with health. There was a general feeling that while researchers and technologists have made amazing discoveries, the “silo” approach to advancement needs to be revolutionized to include different types of thinkers working together.

Registration is already open for the 2010 Conference for those who wish to attend.

Our clients and development partners, Janeiro Digital, have just launched their new site. The site is built entirely on WordPress giving them amazing control over the content across all areas of the site. I really like the simplicity of the design and layout (thanks Kristy!). What makes this project interesting for both us and the client is that because of the flexibility of WordPress, and the associated plug-ins, we could create a full-enabled CMS driven site with a totally custom design in just a few short weeks.

Blu Homes has been featured in the WeLoveWP.com WordPress website gallery. To read more about this visit my recent blog post, Latest CMS Design Featured on WeLoveWP.com.

Last week I was at the Abedeen Chief Marketing Officer Conference. Some of the speakers included the CMO’s of Walmart.com and Wells Fargo, VP’s of Marketing from Levi’s and HP’s personal computing division and the Chief Business Development Officer from Kodak. If you want to know what CMO’s are worried about in 2008 it’s social media, web analytics and making CRM simpler.

For the majority of CMO’s social media is a black hole and their attempts to leverage it have been problematic. As one speaker pointed out, the analog is that many of these marketing organizations are trying to do the same thing they have done for years – be the one’s in control of the conversation. It’s similar to early websites. Before we really understood web interaction early websites just looked like brochures that had been scanned and hosted online. Most social media attempts are trying to put the website tactics to work in a place that’s far more dynamic and fluid.

The question we should be asking ourselves is Peter Drucker’s favorite, "If we were not already doing it this way, is this the way we would do it?" Walmart.com’s Cathy Halligan was refreshingly honest when she admitted that they are not sure what social media means to their 130,000,000 weekly customers yet. What she does know is that the reviews and comments on the product sections are slowly creating conversations between customers. This ‘conversation-in-the-aisle’ is the Holy Grail for Halligan because it drives loyalty and community.

For companies like Walmart.com, Best Buy and Levis there is a direct, and fast growing, correlation between online research and buying behavior. In 2007 all retailers saw a massive spike in purchases directly influenced by online research. According to Halligan’s presentation data some $603 billion in purchases were first researched online.

What’s really interesting is that this researching behavior is moving away from friends and family sources to online options like blogs, product review sites, and user generated product and service reports.

The good news for web designers and marketers like us is that web marketing is definitely the most important area of spending and development for all companies. That said, the hard part is knowing how to position yourself on the web. If you’re Levi’s you combine reality TV and online design competitions to create a community. Patrice Varni, Levi’s CMO, partnered with Bravo’s Project Runway to create an innovative campaign. Even then, Levi has failed to see beyond the initial campaign and their follow up has been simply to gather email addresses. What they do with those email addresses remains to be see. More spam? Let’s hope not.

One of the outstanding campaigns we heard about was HP’s "31 Days of the Dragon", which combined the blog business develop skills of Buzz Corps with some unsold inventory to come up with a blog author driven promotion. The campaign succeeded in driving serious traffic, comments and sales of the laptop in question.

Others are also seeing increases in revenue directly related to web analytics learnings. Stephan Chase, from Marriott International, says that a deep understanding and application of their web analytics data has been so influential on bottom line improvements that he calls data "the next big creative".

My illustrated (partial) notes from the conference are here if you’d like to check them out.

The Center For Digital Imaging Arts (CDIA) is bringing in big photographic talent with vast knowledge to make some noise in the Boston digital art and photography community. First up is Julieanne Kost : Adobe Systems’ leading evangelist and educator and Matthew Jordan Smith : a Microsoft Icon of Imaging specializing in fashion and celebrity (seen on America’s Next Top Model). 

The topic of Julieanne & Matthew’s  talk will be " Layering/compositing in photoshop CS4 + fashion portraiture".

The event will be held at the CDIA’s campus in Waltham, MA at 274 Moody Street, Studio C on Monday, October 27th, from 6:30-9:30pm. The fee is $15 for CDIA students and alumni  and $45 for the rest of us. For more information and registration go to www.cdiabu.com/bigshots

If you have not been to the one day course Presenting Data and Information taught by Professor Edward Tufte here is your chance. He is visiting Boston again on November 17, 18 & 19th.

Topics covered in this one-day course include:

• fundamental strategies of analytical design
• evaluating evidence used in presentations
• statistical data: tables, graphics, and semi-graphics
• business, scientific, research, and financial presentations
• complexity and clarity
• effective presentations: on paper and in person
• interface design
• use of PowerPoint, video, overheads, and handouts
• credibility of presentations
• multi-media, internet, and websites
• animation and scientific visualizations

The fee for the one-day course is $380 per person. This fee includes all four books Visual Explanations, Envisioning Information, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and Beautiful Evidence

The one-day course meets from 10.00 am to 4.30 pm.

On November 16 – 19 , in San Fransisco , California Adobe MAX 2008 will bring together thousands of forward-thinking designers, developers, and business decision makers to shape the future of our industry. If you have not signed up it is a great time.Don’t miss this opportunity to connect with other designers, Discover new technologies and inspire other creative minds.

Click here to register.