2011 was an amazing year of learning and growing at Astek. In our industry things change pretty much daily, even hourly. We are lucky to work with so many forward-thinking clients and partners who understand that building real success in this market takes time, discipline, and communication. Oh yeah, and we think life’s too short not to have a little fun along the way.

Early in the year, Rachel and I attended SXSW Interactive, a top-tier conference for all things Web, mobile and social in Austin, TX. One of our top goals was to find the ideal social media management/monitoring/analytics platform with enterprise capabilities and agency pricing. We’ve met some talented people along the way with some pretty cool products, but there is a lot of room for growth in this space. We’ll be rolling out a new social media event product of our own in the coming weeks — stay tuned!

Supporting an ongoing effort to get more social at Astek, we started video recording the strange and mystical things that happen at Astek staff meetings. Here’s a glimpse:

In June, we kicked our relationship with SIPA up a notch and have worked since then to increase their social media efforts. It’s greatly rewarding to work with a group that understands social media are about creating relationships, and just like relationships in the “real world,” there is no easy button or shortcut.

Who is SIPA, you may ask? SIPA, the Specialized Information Publishers Association, is the international trade association dedicated to advancing the interests of commercial information providers (paid content) serving niche communities. These are primarily B2B trade journals, but members also include consumer-oriented Kiplinger and publishers serving other markets. There are numerous SIPs (specialized information publishers) out there serving all kinds of niche community information needs, whether or not they identify themselves with this group.

We’ve been SIPA members for years, teaching and learning along with top publishing talent, and in June we started managing social media for SIPA’s annual publishing conference in Washington, D.C. We applied what we learned at SXSW and other places along the way, creating a robust social media event experience. More recently, it seems like a dream that I was swimming in the Atlantic just a few short weeks ago following the SIPA Miami Publishing Marketing Conference, where we had four Astek team members speaking, learning, and helping.

At the Miami conference last year, I led a roundtable discussion on mobile publishing and met a publisher called The Medical Letter, who needed help building mobile apps on all major platforms (iPhone/iPad, Android, Blackberry). We worked diligently with them and our friends at FanWide to create cutting edge publishing apps and successfully launched the iPhone/iPad and Android versions. In the spirit of mutual learning and sharing, my client and I presented a webinar hosted by SIPA to inform other publishers about how to step into the mobile space.

In the four years I’ve been on Twitter, I’ve seen it grow from an esoteric geek-oriented communication platform to a widely adopted and ubiquitous brand imprint on websites everywhere. Yet many people I talk to still question its worth for driving revenue. As we’ve embraced Twitter as the ideal communication platform for events and conferences, I’ve noticed that finally people are able to grasp the potential for this simple, yet powerful medium for enhancing communication at an event and also bridging the communication gap between cyclical events in ways not before seen at this scale.

As we continue to connect the dots for publishers and other event promoters, we continue our decade-long focus on content management solutions facilitating the digital publishing revolution. Astek’s own CMS, Webany, is ideally suited for the Web-first editorial trend that continues to gain momentum. Basically, rather than thinking about getting your print publication onto the Web, publish in real-time on the Web and build your print publication from there.

We’re so excited that our lady, Webany, is growing up right in the middle of the dramatic shifts in the publishing industry, and is flexible enough to handle them. Haven’t been introduced yet? Just ask. We’d love to show you some of her newest features including robust digital rights management and the ability to export articles and other information directly to Adobe InDesign, the preeminent desktop publishing platform, via XML.

Reversing a publisher’s workflow is not a task to be taken lightly, so we lend our expertise to the process in addition to the technology, which is a combination that’s future-proofing editorial teams around the globe. As publishers figure out the moves that work for them along the way, we enjoy learning and teaching as we go. 2011 brought many clients to Webany, including Wiley Publishing, The Alter Group and Staff Management.

Contributing to our community is a core mission at Astek, so recently we were proud to launch a new brand and website for Promethean Theatre Ensemble, our 2011 Astek Grant recipient. Along the way, we greatly expanded the digital marketing program for The Chicago Dancing Festival and got new websites launched for The Jeanine Sheridan Foundation, DanceWorks Chicago and Chicago Human Rhythm Project (CHRP) as well. Yep, we like to move.

And last but not least is a particularly rewarding combination of app dev and do-gooding. This multi-year project with My25, which is partially funded by the USDA, has engaged Astek to help tackle the growing obesity epidemic in America. My25’s approach is to use software and community tools to encourage better eating through realistic meal-planning based on simple and proven plate portioning techniques. We designed a prototype for the next generation of the software and created this video to help with fund-raising (yes, we spent more time on this than the staff meeting video).

Thanks for being a part of our ongoing exploration and we look forward to connecting you with your goals in 2012!

 This post was featured in epiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other epiphany Articles 

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Andy Swindler Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Mobile, Social Media, Technology

Or, at least all of the electrons that form the cat videos and pornography zipping around it?

Impossible to calculate exactly but, like most bizarre science facts (the planet Saturn could float on water since it’s only 2/3 as dense, the national debt as a stack of pennies would stretch out of the solar system, etc.) this is entertaining because of the scales involved.

The guys who put this together are called VSauce and their YouTube channel has a lot of other interesting time-waster material.

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Tom Hickey Categories: Fun, General, Technology, Web

This month we are sharing things that inspire us. Personally, crafting is my passion and is a huge influence on my personal aesthetic. My work on various crafts has informed the way I look at form, function, materials and, yep, even web design.

And in the spirit of the season, I thought I’d share a simple craft project that is an olfactory delight – cloving oranges!

Over the weekend, we sat down to decorated some oranges with cloves for the Astek conference table. Now the whole office smells like Christmas! If you want to decorate your own oranges it is very easy. Here’s how we did it:

Simply take some oranges…

And a bowl of whole cloves (available with the spices in any grocery store)

Press the pointy end of the clove into the orange. Make patterns or images.

We couldn’t resist turning a green spot on one of the oranges into the Astek logo.

If you want to get really fancy you can take a zester or a tool like this v-shaped pumpkin carving tool and peel away just the top layer of skin for additional patterns and decor options.

Place in a pretty bowl and display where ever fragrant holiday cheer is appreciated. The best smells come for the first 48 hours, but display can be left for a week or more, though oranges may shrivel a bit after a few days. Enjoy!

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Fun, General, Green, How To

This month we’re writing about things that inspire us. In our digital world there are countless innovations, so I’m often inspired by new approaches to old problems.

I’ve noticed a shift in how local services are supplied to consumers and businesses. Until recently, websites vying for the holy grail of bringing local customers and service providers together used classified- or forum-type websites that allow service providers to post what they do generically. Customers were expected to sift through these listings or post what they needed and hope for the best. This paradigm is being uprooted due to rapid advances in Web and mobile technology that put the customer in charge.

The bottleneck of traditional marketing forced companies to create products and services they believed people need or want. Or in some extreme cases, companies created products they knew people didn’t need, and simply used their marketing prowess to convince people to buy their products anyway.

Small or independent service providers have largely followed suit, mimicking the marketing strategies and tactics that have restricted corporations to a limited number of products and services that can’t possibly cater to every daily need of billions of unique individuals.

Innovative local marketplaces now enable consumers to articulate exactly what they want or need at any given moment, typically via a GPS-enabled smartphone, and then leave it up to the service providers to find them and in some cases even duke it out for their business.

The wild increase in personal efficiency articulated by The New York Times is possible due to technology that enables people to tell companies what they want rather than the other way around. Now people of all walks of life make their own hours by doing exactly what people need when they need it for the amount they want to pay. This growing wave of independent providers avoid the waste and annoyance of casting wide nets with traditional marketing. This was a battle they’d never win against the corporations, so rather than keep trying they changed the rules of the game.

Here are a few that stand out:

Zaarly – Post what you want done and what you’re willing to pay. For instance, our own Tim McDonald who helped launch Zaarly tells the story of an Illinois man who needed help fishing his keys out of a storm sewer and got it done for $75.

TaskRabbit – “Do more. Live more. Be more.” People post what they need done and TaskRabbit-vetted service providers make offers to do the work, allowing the consumer to choose the best fit based on their criteria.

Agent Anything – Connects busy, hardworking people who need things done with college students looking to make money.

Will these resources help consumers focus on what they need rather than want? Not likely. It’s not hard to imagine dreaming up all kinds of random tasks you ask to have done, just to see if you can get them done for a small price. This is refreshing in a world over-crowded with group deals, coupons, and classified sites providing yet another place for service providers to sell their wares and creating confusion for consumers who don’t know where to begin.

This post was featured in epiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other epiphany Articles

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Mobile, Technology

Inspiration for ideas comes in many different forms, including: Observations while walking down the street, discovering a new product at the store, or hearing about an unusual experience on the nightly news. Inspiration for blog posts can come from any of these, but more often than not, most won’t be related to your business goals or objectives.

One of the best sources of inspiration for a blog post comes from reading other blog posts. You may ask, how does this help me if someone else has already written it? There are several ways.

1. Can you expand on their idea?
2. Do you have a different viewpoint?
3. Have you experienced a situation you can use as a case study?
4. If examples were given, are there others that develop into another story?
5. Does it remind you of a book your read that you can review?

These are just a few of the ideas that can come from reading someone else’s blog post. You should never copy someone else’s work. Always put your thoughts in your words. It’s ok to quote a piece of their content if you give proper attribution.  And if you do get direct inspiration from their blog, be sure to mention it in your blog post, including the authors name and title of the blog post with a link back to the original post.

What are some other sources of inspiration for blog content that you can think of? Did reading this post inspire a new idea for you?

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Tim McDonald Categories: General, How To

I was doing some news research at CNN.com and stumbled upon the latest and greatest (and greenest) idea I’ve seen lately: CleanPrint.

When you click the little print icon in the top right corner of the story page a CleanPrint window pops up. This window allows you to actually format & edit what you are printing!

Each as you roll over each paragraph, byline, headline, photo and even weblinks a red ‘x’ appears in place of your mouse pointer. If you click it that piece of content is removed. Futhermore there is a toolbar on the left side that allows you to do the following:

Remove photos Make font bigger/smaller Print with less ink Undo your last change Add a note on the page Export as a pdf

How awesome is that? And perhaps my favorite feature (albeit a vanity feature) is the ticker in the upper right corner that tells you how many pages of paper have been saved by using this feature.

And here’s even MORE good news…you can install it in your own browsers to use on all websites you browse! Based on my highly unofficial testing it does not seem to work on every webpage, but it does seem to work on almost all news/article sites. Installing it is super easy, just go to the CleanPrint website and drag the icon to your bookmarks folder and voila!

Happy printing! And even better; Happy not printing online ads ever again!!

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Sara Gorsky Categories: General

One of my favorite moments during a work conference was when I met up with a colleague for a meeting, and we both talked not about social media or technology – but books and BBC America. It was so rejuvenating after being inundated with the new ideas, opinions, and the latest and greatest. In fact, walking back to my hotel from that conversation, I had one of the best campaign ideas I had that entire month.

My takeaway: Don’t be afraid to let your outside inspiration influence your work.

This seems like common sense, but I have found myself feeling guilty when I just need a break from work and put it aside to read a novel or watch a movie. Yet I’m the one in meetings saying things like, “You know that scene in XYZ movie? That would be a perfect tie-in for this campaign for your product!”. My personal hobbies influence my work ideas constantly – and I feel the more that I let myself enjoy my hobbies, the stronger my work performance is.

My father had a similar suggestion when I was younger. I’d be doing homework and feeling overwhelmed with a certain subject matter. Dad would tell me to put it aside and do homework on another subject to let the other parts of my brain do some work for a bit. And it worked!

It’s a simple concept, but this little bit of acceptance of not “living and breathing” work, but rather just living and breathing and seeing how positively that affects your work is literally, quite an epiphany.

So with that being said, here is a  list of some of the things that inspire me to get outside of my social media box.

1. Fashion (runway shows, fashion magazines, fashion events, blogs and of course – shopping)
2. Anything BBC (from Dr. Who to Downton Abbey and all other Masterpiece Classic shows just make me happy)
3. Reading novels
4. Going to the movies (prefer foreign or independent films – anything in French is a given)
5. Going to my family’s lake house and doing nothing
6. Long walks
7. Listening to music

Now your turn! What are yours?

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Rachel Yeomans Categories: Fun, General