Today I’m feeling as giddy as a schoolgirl. Why, because today I get to officially announce two new members of our Portland staff.

Dan Blaker officially joins our team as our Project Manager, becoming the third Portland based member of our team. Dan’s going to be starting on our project with UGreekRow, as well as being our resident musicologist in the Portland office. Dan and Micheal now get to officially fight it out over who the best DJ is at Intrigo.

We couldn’t be more excited about having Dan join our team. His experience, talent, and personality are perfect fits, and attest again to why we love Portland and its people so much. Not to mention, Dan become the first ever Dad to be a part of the Intrigo team!

Also big news is another member of our Tucson team, Fadi Chalfoun, has officially announced he’s moving to Portland with us. Fadi had worked as a developer for us throughout his college career, and will now be joining us full time in the Portland office. He’s already done a ton of work on projects such as On Demand Safety, and soon to be launched projects Notehall and Casa Video. Expect to see him tagging along with us as we begin our migration this summer. By the way, Guillaume’s move is now only about two weeks away. The office is starting to fill up, and we couldn’t be happier about it.

People of Portland prepare yourselves, here we come!

In my book, RFPs are evil. I know that’s a big generalization, but I normally avoid responding and actively pursuing any contracts that are solicited in this manner. To me, the RFP process is antiquated and broken, and also neglects what we at Intrigo do well as well as companies should be doing anyway. My experience with RFP seeking companies has lead me to this belief, they should go away. Here’s why I feel this way:

RFP=Inflexibility

An RFP tells me that you and your company has already figured out the exact project, budget, and timeframe in mind. Kudos to you for doing your research and working to understand the project that you’re looking to have. However, our entire philosophy at Intrigo is based upon collaborative partnerships with the people and companies we work with. The talent that we have shuts down when they aren’t allowed to challenge and grow. It’s the reason why our projects turn out the way that they do, and the reason why we have had the success that we have.

I can also tell you that I have never worked on a project where the scope hasn’t changed throughout the course of development. There’s always growth, new challenges, new markets, new competitors, new technology, and we intentionally attempt to build flexibility into our projects to account for changes and challenges in development. When you are strictly locked into an RFP and specific proposal, you can’t really change on the fly.

RFP=Competing on Price

This is the part that I find especially disconcerting as a service provider. Fluctuations in service levels, quality, and a host of other factors tend to get ignored when an RFP goes out. Most business say, this is what we need, who can do it the most cost effectively. Many times this isn’t the case, and you’re curious in hearing approaches from a few different companies, but standardizing it to such a point does not allow you as a business to really engage the companies you are planning on working with, or to see their individual creativity and passion.

That’s why my advice to companies looking for service providers such as Intrigo is this, make real contacts and have real discussions about what your goals are. Then see which companies meet up with your goals and culture the best. Standardizing the solution before you decide on a provider leaves you with little of value to differentiate upon.

13 months ago, a client asked about SEO. 1 month ago, a client asked about SEO. Intrigo gathered 27 new clients in that twelve month window, none asked for SEO, and it was wonderful. This article (hopefully) addresses why (plus some)?

Background:
For many years, I worked in the, (keyword) “non-profit consumer credit counseling” industry. Starting as a small company of three, (keyword) “debt consolidation counselors,” and myself, we decided, early on, to generate our OWN leads. I remember sitting down, with my boss, and hearing “$100K to generate organic leads should be adequate.”

FYI: You should hate leads. These are nasty little one sheets ($12-$35 each) that have all your personal information so “debt counselors” can call you at work, soccer games, dinner, on dates, but before 9pm.

Leads convert at different rates. Some companies sold leads ($25-$30) that converted at 12%. Most sold $15 leads that converted at 4-6%. A good counselor would go through 12-15 leads per day. So with an expectation of generating 36-45 leads with high conversion, I started spending money. I optimized, built out high PR inboard links, dined with search engine folk, submitted to directories, wrote hundreds of “keyword rich” content pages, etc. Six months later, our company was number three for the keyword; “non-profit credit counseling.”
The metrics were decent too. For only $35K (no pay per click) I was generating almost 50 leads per day that saw 25% conversion. Between our own lead generation and discovering a new, high converting, low priced lead source, the company grew to 65 counselors in ONE year. This increased the lead demand to over 700 per day. My SEO accomplishments paled in comparison to our new needs.

Eventually, after spending much more moola on SEO, I learned some very basic, but incredibly valuable lessons. These have proven to be great metaphors for Intrigo’s growth.

Lessons Learned:
First and foremost, build a good site. As I recently told a client, “Think of a billboard with a two sentence title, paragraph tag line, placed every 500 feet along a beautifully landscaped road on your drive to work.” The search engines love quality content and concisely accurate summaries of the content. They HATE the inverse (lots of nothing). And if you do things they hate, they reward you with poor rankings.

Blogs and wikis show up in so many search results because they survive solely on there delicious content. You want people to pull your RSS feed. Even more, you want a site that influences users to comment and interact. But you NEED good content and by this I mean, write content that is interesting, lacks clutter, and says EXACTLY what you want.

I “suspect” that search engines are companies who compete with one another. Yahoo versus Google. So as any good natured, intelligent company, you try to maintain a quality of service that supersedes that of your competitor. You go to search engines to search for something you may know little about. The quicker you find quality results for that ambiguous query, the more likely you will return again. Google and Yahoo compete on the quality of their results. So why would a fully “optimized” site filled with unnecessary (key)words and pages upon pages of meaningless content ever be ranked (well) by either? Beat’s me.

First, create a QUALITY site. THEN get people to talk about it.
You need authorities talking about your site. By talk, I mean link. And by link, I mean descriptively link. If my dietitian mother tells a friend about Intrigo, that’s dandy, but if Sun Microsystems tells their investor base about Intrigo’s usability niche, that’s a BIT better. To rank well, you need respected people, relevant to your site’s purpose talking about your site. I’ve seen a lot of companies spend a lot of money to “persuade” individuals to talk. But, if you have a purposeful site that helps someone with something, people will naturally talk.

BOTTOMLINE: There is NO magic. Just good sites.
This article’s (real) purpose was to illustrate Intrigo’s trade secret: it’s people (Intrigees). We are as ethnically diverse as we are skilled. Our talent, all IN-HOUSE, comes from France, Chile, Korea, Egypt, and of course the US. We have HCI gurus that work with our graphic designers and marketers who all work with our web developers who are all coordinated by some UI inclined project managers that show our testers who eventually make everything friendly for everyone. Our architects wait for questions. Every Intrigee works on every project.

Good development is about understanding EVERYTHING that makes a product sustainably succeed. We hired at least one of everything to work on our team. Our sites and applications are search engine compliant because they are coded perfectly. The interfaces are simple and need no tutorials. And our client’s users actually adopt them. We love working with startups because the applications we develop must be adopted. If they don’t, our clients are penniless to pay us.

So when a client asked me last month if we do SEO, I responded, “We’ll build you something that’s useful; well.”

Kind of a long title I know, but I thought it would be really good to start a conversation about the future of social networking.  Now that Facebook, Myspace, and LinkedIn have become a huge part of the daily lives of the majority of Americans, it appears that most of us early adopters are leaving, opting to use other services for our communication, like Twitter. I can personally say that this is definitely the case for me, where I tweet at least 5 times a day, and only check Facebook when I get the occasional message from one of my friends.

First things first, Twitter is a social network

Amongst the conversation about decentralizing Twitter so we no longer have to deal with their down time, I came across this really interesting article about why decentralizing Twitter wouldn’t work. The main point that I found so interesting was Twitter existing as a social network, but rather being based around your profile the way that Facebook is, it’s completely based around your quick thought blasts.  This means that I, as a follower of my friends, get a much quicker, and more complete view of my friends. If you follow me for example, you could very easily get a picture of what I do and who I am.  Plus, there’s no pressure to conform to anything, no guidelines for interaction.  It’s just your thoughts, right or wrong, funny or not, professional or not. That’s pretty darn cool, and why I find myself using Twitter more and more each day.  It’s simply a better communication platform than any other social network has provided.

That being said, Facebook and Myspace are not going anywhere

Despite the fact I haven’t looked at Myspace in like, ever, it still gets 74% of social network traffic. Now Myspace’s numbers are decreasing, but Facebook is still getting more traffic and more applications.  But that increase in applications is a big reason for the loss of a lot of the early adopters that Myspace suffered when Facebook launch, most applications do nothing more than turning up the noise.  Sure, a song in someone’s profile is fun for about five minutes, and then the song is over, and the next time you check a profile it’s just annoying.  And that’s the problem, the “just for fun” applications that spread the most quickly serve mostly as spam and noise.

What can Facebook do that Twitter Can’t?

The answer is simple, and leads to the way that Facebook applications can be made to be useful, context. A person’s friends, and more importantly the large amount of profile information that users work tirelessly to fill out can provide a context in which communication can be made more effective.

For example, does anyone actually want to be marketed to?

Yes, when they’re looking for the product that you’re marketing.  When I’m looking for a new car, I want to hear about cars.

All of that information is already waiting within someone’s profile, and when you enhance that with their friends information and input, the context of the communication, you have a formula for building something of value through the Facebook application.

Use the context to make something Useful

This seems to be the hardest part, because useful doesn’t always translate into really high viral growth, and most applications haven’t started to think of how they can make a user’s life better through the use of the application. That simple question will lead to better applications and a better user experience overall

So, in short, Twitter is now my preferred social network and communication platform, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.  However, I’m not ready to give up on Facebook and it’s users yet. Just because someone hasn’t used the context to create value yet, doesn’t mean that it can’t be done.  In fact, I’m positive that it will be done.

Think I’m crazy? Leave some comments below, this is a conversation I’d love to continue to have.

Just found this article about UGreekRow listed on azbiz.com.

Glad to see our clients getting a little love from the local media, and we’re really happy about some of the work that we’ve being doing with them.  Currently in development, UGreekRow will offer not only job searching capabilities for its users, but some really cool operational tools for organizations.

Not to mention, Intrigo is proud to be working with Portland Super Design Company Pixelmatrix Design and its owner Josh Pyles for design of the UGreekRow site.

We’ll keep you updated as we get further along in the project, and congrats to the guys at UGreekRow!!

After hearing about Eric and Nathan’s experience at Bar Camp, I started my morning read. Today I started with a little tidbit from Silicon Florist which got me pumped. This usually happens when I read about how great Portland is.

Sidenote: Understand that Intrigo’s expansion and eventual move to Portland is the riskiest endeavor we’ve tried. Moving employees, duplicating infrastructure, adding more rent, and the yada yada made it a (go and get a football mouth piece to keep me from grinding my teeth to the gum line) riskixiting (risky:exciting) experience. Six month’s later: I’m pumped. And this city keeps pumping.

…and pumping. Since Intrigo has moved offices to Portland, the substantial amount of tech resources to both pull and contribute to trumps any other city I’ve been intimate with. Portland is an enabler, connector, grower, and supporter of it’s business residents. I can’t say this about Tucson or any other (unnamed) cities.

To delve further, we are a company that doesn’t advertise. We require word of mouth to succeed. We actively choose to be noncompetitive while stressing collaboration with typical competitors. In Tucson, we collaborate with ONE company (www.anchorwave.com) because there is only ONE company. So when Nathan and I calculated that ONE company was one more than zero companies, we sought a new city. If you want to dominate the $2-6K, poorly designed Tucson website business, close up shop, convince a mediocre designer to move, and move to T-town. While monopolization sounds simple, your company and it’s employees will lack the innovation and tech community interaction needed to be sustainable. I must stress, there is success in any other city (including Tucson), but in Portland, a business’ people find fulfillment. And it’s all about people. Those Portland igniters we’ve recently collaborated with demonstrate a business climate foreign and uncomfortable to many in our industry. But that climate is what we need and it’s what the web has and will become.

Recently Facebook released their own personal guide to using Facebook as a venue for viral marketing. You can check out their work here, but I think their work was a little bit skewed to focus using Facebook ads.  While that’s completely understandable, considering that’s their business plan, all of us at Intrigo still think that there are many ways for businesses to utilize Facebook, and most business have yet to really tap into it.

The biggest benefit of marketing through Facebook is the automatic generation of word of mouth via the News Feed. This means that any interaction a person has with your brand gets blasted to every single one of their friends. The challenge, as a business, is to give potential customers and Facebook users a reason to interact with your brand on Facebook.  The easiest way to do this is by playing up the psychographic aspects of your brand in your Facebook interactions.

The psychographic elements of your company are the elements of your company that you want people to identify with. Essentially, it’s the personality of your company.  In order to have successful marketing via Facebook, you need to create a “face” and personality for your company that people can become “friends” with. This type of relationship is easy to see with lifestyle brands, things such as clothing companies, restaraunts, and clubs that really play on psychographics for their marketing plan. For example, I wear lululemon clothes because I enjoy yoga and pilates, and that lifestyle. As a Facebook user, I would become a fan of lululemon to tell all my friends about this part of myself.  Or, I really believe in the OpenID movement, and I want to become a fan of Vidoop so my friends know about the work they’re doing.

In order to best market on Facebook and other social media, you need to create your company’s personality. Whether it’s a cause such as being green, a lifestyle, or a culture, personalities are what people can best identify with in a social environment.  Then you can connect with customers that have the same personality, and best suited to you as a company.

I had a really interesting conversation recently with one of our clients regarding communications with customers. We were discussing the need to blog, and the need to utilize the large number of emails from interested customers they had collected.  They asked a very good question, asking what it is that they should be writing about. Thankfully I had Dawn Foster’s great post about corporate blogging tips to show them, but they initially didn’t see the real beauty in blogging for your company, activating a conversation with your customers.

The bad news is that as a start-up or small business, your existence is defined by the lack of budget that you often face. One of the biggest manifestations of this challenge is the need to be creative and selective in the way that you market. But the advantage that you have is that you’re now in the era of web 2.0. Social applications and connections are one of the defining pieces of the growth of web 2.0. Applications and tools such as blogging, Facebook, Twitter, and a host of others are designed for users to comment, interact and talk. That means that you as a business can use these applications to comment, interact, and talk about you and your company.  So use them! Open yourself up to your customers and talk about what you’re doing. Get their feedback, get their comments. Then interact with your customers when you can. Post to them, thank them, make them feel a part of your company. Truly word of mouth at its best!

The concern that our clients had about this process was a lack of message control. Opening yourself up means allowing your customers to say whatever they want. Saying whatever they think generally isn’t what your corporate script says. But as a small business, you need to set your customers free and let them be the salesforce you don’t have.

Take a look at the success Barack Obama has had literally turning the users of his website into a nationwide network of campaign volunteers. Or the success Starbucks has had with mystarbucksidea.com. The point is that you shouldn’t be reluctant about being a part of these conversations. Your customers often know what you do and how you do it better than you do. Most importantly, their experience with you and your products can be extremely valuable as endorsements.

So, how do you do it.

Message Control 2.0 - Give your customers something to talk about. Open up and talk about what you’re working on. Ask them questions about how they used your products. Get them to tell you how you did, and what caused them to feel that way about you. But get them talking on your terms with your discussion points. You’re able to get great feedback on things that customers like and dislike, and things that they need from new launches. The Starbucks and Obama sites are great examples of this, where both companies were able to control and start the conversation, but let go of what resulted from the conversation.

Give your customers a reason to care - Now this part is a little easier if you’re Obama or Starbucks, you know, something that people are addicted to, but you can do it. You’re looking at one of the ways right now, giving out good information in your communications. Customers are far less interested in corporate schill than we would like them to be, but they are interested in solutions. And hey, you’ve built a business around helping to solve a problem that someone has, so talk about how to fix it.  Your users will appreciate it, and continue to check it. Plus you can give them a forum to discuss what issues they face, and you can get new ideas directly from them.

Don’t be afraid of putting your brand in the hands of your customers. Worst case scenario you get great feedback on what you’re doing wrong.

The Intrigo Team is proud to sponsor BarCamp Portland.  Starting Saturday, May 3, Portland’s tech community will be gathering at CubeSpace for an open forum where we can get together to share and learn.  All of us at Intrigo are excited about the opportunity to meet all of the interesting folks, and being a part of the amazing tech community in Portland. 

Make sure you get a chance to come to the event, and say hi to the Intrigo Team while you’re there!

At Intrigo, we pride ourselves on challenging our clients to strengthen their ideas and business plans, and this often involves brainstorming ideas that we think can supplement the work that our clients have already done. It’s part of what has made us successful over the past two years, but it also can lead to some challenges.  That’s because new ideas generally beget more new ideas. To borrow from IBM’s commercials, when you spend all your time “idea-ating”, you don’t actually get anything done.

As an emerging business, your focus and determination are everything.  Being an entrepenuer means working at least twice as hard as someone working for an established company.  You generally have a list of to-dos, with more added to that list than gets accomplished each day.  And while it’s incredibly important to keep honing your strategy and your ideas, you can’t ever lose focus on the reason why you started out in the first place. To give you an example, one of our current clients is working on a social utility whose major market is college students. We suggested the idea of building a Facebook application in order to more quickly generate their user base, and to try to counteract the competition of Facebook. Well in the course of our presentation, we went through a number of the most used Facebook apps, talked about the reasons why they were successful, and why Intrigo thought their business model could translate onto Facebook.

Well, two meetings later they came back with ideas for four new Facebook applications, none of which had any real connection to their initial business model.  They had momentarily lost their focus, and had they continued down this path they would have partially crippled their ability to pursue their initial plan and model.

This group is one that is under intense pressure and scrutiny from their investment group, which happens to be one that has not invested in their type of company before.  Thus the investors are somewhat fearful of the business model, especially the Twitter like model of building a user base first, building a revenue model second.  Thus when Facebook presented itself as another area for growth and possible revenues, they shifted their focus onto Facebook and its opportunities, rather than continuing their focus on their actual business that they had actual investors for.

So, here are the lessons to be learned from this.

1. Write your mission and goals as soon as you can. Memorize them, recite them to yourself throughout the day. You started your business because you have a passion for it, and what you’re trying to do. Make sure you remember that.

2. As an entrepenuer, you only have so much time throughout the day. It’s an immense challenge to build your company, don’t distract yourself from your goals.

3. When you come up with an idea, ask yourself whether or not it fits your goals. If it doesn’t, put it on the back burner for a little while. If it’s a good idea you can come back to it. Just don’t try to launch two companies at the same time.

4. Don’t be ruled by fear. You started your business because you believed in it. Don’t allow pressure to lead you astray from your mission. Believe in it, work hard, that’s what gives you the best chance to succeed.

Being a start-up is never as easy as you would like it to be. Don’t forget that, and don’t ever forget the reasons why you started in the first place. That passion and inspiration are the only things that can carry you through the tough times and on to the pathway to success.

*In case you are wondering, we’re currently in the process of starting to develop one of those Facebook applications for our client. We worked it into a promotional tool and feature of their current application, so we’re working to build it as a new piece of their model.  But I think that’s a whole other blog post.