Our very own, Jonathan Anderstrom, will be speaking at the “BMA: Helping B2B Marketers Create More Impact Online,” Tuesday, May 15 at the Metropolitan Ballroom in Golden Valley. During the presentation, Jonathan will be discussing the philosophy and principles behind the transition from an information web to a social web and share practical suggestions on how you can begin taking action.

Joining Jonathan will be Paul Unglaub from Entellus Medical and Dan Platt from Tennant Corp.  They will be a panel to discuss how a website is no longer brochureware but is rather a dynamic way to communicate with new and existing customers.   Be prepared to learn about how to run a website in 17 languages with the click of a button and how to distribute technical documentation to iPads around the nation with a simple sync.  Hear about successful case studies involving real companies and solving real problems and using digital channels to enhance the way that business is done.

Following the panel will be an hour long working session to work on each person’s own social profile.  Don’t miss out on the premiere of this not-quite-yet sold out event!

To learn more or to register for this event, visit http://www.bmaminnesota.org/page/show/455123-may-2012-event

@AlahnaAnderson

***UPDATE ***
A special shout out to Drew at our client Automated Logic. He was able to solve this problem in 6 hours! Good job Drew! We put together a little victory package for Drew:

Last week, employees of Creed Interactive gathered to surprise Jonathan Anderstrom, co-founder of Creed Interactive as they celebrated the five-year anniversary of Creed Interactive. Jonathan (who thought was attending a client meeting) was very surprised as he walked into a room full of balloons, cake and delicious food.

Jonathan and Stacy launched Creed Interactive in early 2007. Creed has increased revenues to 20 to 50 percent year-over-year and attracted some of the Twin Cities’ most recognizable brands, businesses and institutions – including the Minnesota Wild, St. Paul Saints, Slumberland Furniture, Warners’ Stellian and University of Minnesota.

As much as we want to pat ourselves on the back, it really comes down to our valued clients.  Without them, we would have never made it this far!

@AlahnaAnderson

Alahna Anderson has joined Creed Interactive as an Associate Digital Project Manager. Anderson has more than five years of digital marketing experience in CPG brands, healthcare and hospitality while working with companies such as: Hormel Foods, Jennie-O Turkey Store, Essentia Health and Black Bear Casino.

Prior to Creed, Anderson worked with BBDO Minneapolis and Russell Herder, which helped her foster her expertise of project management, analytics and account management.  In addition to these talents, Anderson’s special interests in online marketing, social media and digital strategy will help Creed Interactive provide a more well rounded digital services offering to current and future clients.

Anderson earned a bachelor’s degree in English and Art History from Saint Cloud State University and her personal interests include fostering and caring for the Pit Bull breed, fishing and (of course) learning about everything digital.

@AlahnaAnderson

Creed is proud to announce the launching of Innova Recording’s new Drupal site, Innova.mu.  The site was designed and developed by Creed Interactive, with heavy collaboration from Innova and its staff.

Innova Recordings was initially founded by American Composers Forum, and Innova has seen their own label’s catalog grow from 70 to over 400 titles.  The artists that they support are unique in and of themselves, prompting a unique website design as well as some very unique functionality.

One of the unique things about Innova, is that their artists are “classified” (if you can call it that) outside of the realm that one would normally think for music.  It was certainly a challenge for Creed’s designer, but it could not be ignored as it is one of the key definers for the men and women record through the Innova label.  This translated into a series of filters and sorting tools that can be found on the Catalog page of the new site (below).

The artist modules on this page also are different lengths, thus further breaking the mindset that each artist at Innova is similar.

The new Innova site, while being completely controlled by Innova and its staff also has an element of artist generated content.  As part of the design of the site, each artist gets his or her own page that has some common elements, but then also allows an artist to provide documents, social media feeds and videos into their page.  A prime example of this is Philip Blackburn’s “Ghostly Psalms” page which incorporates links, documents, and twitter, youtube, and facebook feeds.

Creed and Innova are both very pleased with how the site has turned out, not only giving Innova a fresh new site but also ensuring that it can be maintained and sustained by its Drupal content management system.

Editors note: This is the personal opinion of Jonathan Anderstrom.

The mega coupon clipping giant Groupon has made headlines several times lately. First with a big IPO and most recently with a less then stellar earnings report. Groupon rode the coat tails of social media glory and timed their IPO at just the right time. But, sad to say, Groupon is doomed. I said this to myself right after the IPO and immediately started to research how to short sell a stock. Sad to say, getting set up to short sell a stock is really complicated and I gave up quickly. But not before I came up with 4 reasons on why Groupon is doomed to fail.

1.) No barrier of entry for competitors.

Daily Deals, Living Social, Google Offers. Ring any bells? Owned by the Pioneer Press, Amazon, and Google respectively. Cost to develop these systems? About $5. Competition to Groupon from each of these is serious in our local Minneapolis / St. Paul markets. Being a web design shop, we can crank out a Groupon-like system very quickly and inexpensively. In fact, we already have. The system we created is actually better functionality than Groupons. But the market is so saturated already, it doesn’t really stand a chance in the market. And, it didn’t really cost that much to create. I’d be happy to share the site with anyone who is interested. You can see what I’m saying for yourself.

2.) Groupon loses money.

The company generated a net loss of $275 million in 2011. Competitor LivingSocial lost $558 million last year. If Creed lost $275 million dollars doing web design last year, I don’t think any investors would be too keen on investing in us. If the dot com boom taught us anything, it was that tech companies that don’t make money… don’t make investors money either.

3.) Groupon presses retailers too hard.

Talking to some clients that are retailers that have been approached by Groupon, there is a graveyard of Groupon horror stories among the retail community. Groupon tries to get a retailer to cut prices in half. Then, they try to get the retailer to split all revenue from the deal 50 / 50. So, the proposal to the retailer is to sell the goods or services for 25% of the normal price. I don’t know many retailers that have over 75% margin on every dollar they sell. So Groupon is asking the retailer to take a steep loss on all sales. I’m sure they promise the retailer repeat business but how much is that really worth in order to take that steep of a loss on the front end.

4.) The business life cycle is already mature.

Each business has a life cycle and needs to reinvent itself. Groupon seems to have already got most of America signed up for the deals it has to offer. But I think America has some coupon fatigue setting in. A 30-something male can only take so many offers for a weekend spa special that one has to drive an hour to redeem. It seems that Groupon could tailor the offers much better with some simple web development algorithms. Even a beginner web designer could probably put something together for this that is better than what Groupon has to make offers relevant. The online offer industry is already past the peak of saturation, in my opinion.

So, this all leads me back to my initial conundrum. How do I short sell Groupon and double the $100 that I have to invest?

DESCRIPTION

This is a chance to break out of the big agency slow lane, escape roles that limit your participation and be truly involved with clients, teams and the projects on which we collaborate. In addition to project management and account management you will impact strategy and win new business. Forget layers of management – this position reports directly to the President, works directly with our other designers and developers doing the work, and just as directly with our clients.

RESPONSIBILITIES

- Give direction to a team of designers and developers.
- Direct client projects from inception to completion.
- Manage budgets, timelines, client deliverables, and contractors.
- Maintain organization, using tools like BaseCamp, status meetings, time tracking software, and technology platforms.
- Make process decisions including job numbers, flow charts, and documentation.
- Perform quality assurance testing on assigned projects and initiate and manage bug tracking on sites.
- Manage projects to achieve client satisfaction and profitability.

EXPERIENCE REQUIRENTS

- A bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience.
- Strong problem solving and self-management skills.
- Experience in an agency environment is a plus.
- A technically savvy mindset and ability to learn and adapt quickly to projects.
- Knowledge of interactive project lifecycles and processes.
- Knowledge of quality assurance processes related to interactive project development.
- Proficient in Microsoft Office Suite and Adobe Creative Suite.

Think you might want to join us? Here are 5 things that are different when you work at Creed.

1.) A true chance to make a difference

At Creed, you can truly make a difference. Being a growing web design and development shop we keep things fresh and new allowing each team member to contribute in a fashion that makes a difference. You can work directly with clients without layers of management or bureaucracy. You can collaborate with team members and choose what technologies to use to write your code. You can work on new and interesting projects that our client’s will greatly benefit from. And, you can help contribute to the Creed dream to help make our group what you’d want it to be.

2.) Working with mad-crazy talented people

When we started Creed, we went out to find all the most talented web designers and web developers that we have ever worked with. And, we asked them to join us. Many of them did, and we get to work with the most talented people we have ever worked with every day. We not only want talent, but we also encourage growth and ambition, so much so that when one of our web developers was having a challenge he couldn’t quite solve, he applied to a Stanford data-mining program, got in and is now working with the smartest people in the world to solve this unique challenge. Our designers have a resume of all the best ad agencies and web design shops in town and puts together PSD files for development cleanly laid out with roll-over states and everything. But we don’t let pedigree or accomplishments go to our head. We try to bring a collaborative spirit to all of our work and are approachable and willing to help each other out with some of our best conversations happening over happy hour after work.

3.) Work from home 3 days a week

Yeah, you read it right. We currently only come in to the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Those days are devoted to collaboration and team communication. As long as you make yourself available, the rest of the time you can work where ever you are most comfortable — at home, a coffee shop, or out at the lake. We are a group of people that like to get things done in an efficient and open environment. Why deal with extra layers of management and red tape if you don’t have to? Work in a process that is tailored to our clients and our own preferences.

4.) Learn and grow in new skill sets

By collaborating with our team, you can learn and grow in your skill set. We try to make it a point to attend conferences and training opportunities as we can and have a modest budget set aside to do so. By having lead developers and supporting developers on projects, you can be assigned as a supporting developer on a project that is a technology that you’d like to learn more about and can have a real live person to ask questions to. We like to take on interesting projects too — e-commerce, CMS, custom web apps, data algorithms, new JQuery and HTML5 sites, Drupal installs, and things that haven’t been done before.

5.) Be a real person

We like to work hard but we also like to have balance in our lives. Weekends should be for spending time with family and friends, not to be burned through at the office. We bring our dogs to work — how is that for balance? We make an intentional effort to respect and value each of our team members and want to take care of them. Grab a free pop and snack in our kitchenette during a break in the action. Spend some time choosing the best health insurance plan for you and your family and we’ll pick up the tab. Work remotely on an overseas trip for a week and tack on a vacation afterwards. Have your cell phone bill picked up by us. We value our team and want to allow our team members to be real people. We are hiring for an interactive project manager. We are looking for a good communicator who takes pride in his or her work and who would enjoy working with host of technologies.

Send resume and salary requirements to info[at]creedinteractive.com

This January, three individuals on the web design and development teams at Creed Interactive received promotions.

Brendan Alexander received a promotion to Senior Developer after having excelled in both PHP and .NET code last year.

Grant Hultgren was promoted to Senior Client Service and Project Manager having many successful site launches under his belt.

Dave Salmela received a promotion to the top position in the web development group to be the vice-president of technology after several years of successfully running Creed’s largest development projects.

Congratulations to these 3 very talented individuals on very well deserved promotions!

For a complete list, and links, of the ideas presented, please visit the EventBrite invite here and scroll down to see a short description of each of the ideas presented as well as a link to more info.  Tech.MN also recorded all the presentations, which can be viewed here.

There were two presentations that did stand out to all of us that attended from Creed, which we’ll briefly speak to.

First, was Red Stamp (www.redstamp.com) which not only solidified the growing movement away from hard copy paper products by replacing them with electronic counterparts, but they also presented the most well defined app and it was easy to see the financial viability of their business plan.  The app allows you to create and personalize a large number of very templated, and not so templated, cards for all occasions.  It integrates seamlessly into Facebook (very helpful for mass mailings and for remembering a friend’s birthday) and makes customizing a personal card to a friend easy even when you’re on the go.  The app is easy to use, intuitive and free so check it out today.

The other presentation that was particularly intriguing was actually built and presented by someone who did come contract work for Creed last year (insert the shameless plug here).  Unfortunately, he encountered some technical difficulties during his presentation but his site is up and running, so we encourage you to check out his 7 day free trial at www.fitbolt.com.  The site and tool gives you great (and unintrusive) ideas for little exercises and stretches that will keep you healthy even if you’re sitting at a desk for 6-8 hours per day.  It can also be taught based on your gender and based on the rating you give each exercise you encounter.

These are just 2 of the 9 presentations that were given last night, and there were some other great ideas out there.  Creed hopes to participate at Minnedemo at some point, but it has proven again to be a great event for those looking to see creative interactive solutions that are being thought up locally.