Our First Company Off-Site Meeting - Giving Thanks and Looking Ahead

Rather than close our eyes and fall back, we'd rather open them wide and leap forward!

On Monday, Sept 20th and Tuesday, Sept 21st, the Gang from Y INTERACT went off-site to Montauk, Long Island for a series of team strategy sessions, as well as a reset/restart for the year ahead. It was also an opportunity to say an enormous "Thank You" to the team for all of their hard work, energy and enthusiasm over the last year - especially needed these days as Y INTERACT, like everyone else, navigates through the rough waters of the economy.

If you have ever done a company off-site before, you may remember that they often tend to involve trust, or team building, exercises: fold your arms, close your eyes and fall back into the group. (See right: from VH1's Best Week Ever). I didn't want that. I wanted our meetings to be about working sessions, goals and deliverables. So, I put together a schedule that was pretty straightforward - mornings were split into two sessions that ran until late lunchtime, leaving everyone the afternoons to do his or her own thing. There were four sessions:

Day One
- Rebranding Y INTERACT
- 2011: Y INTERACT's 10th Anniversary

Day Two
- Social Media
- FCS Race for Kids 2011

Here's a summary of what we discussed:

DAY ONE
2011 will be a very important year for Y INTERACT since we will be celebrating our 10th year in business. We will start the festivities with our annual Chinese New Year party in February 2011, which next year will also double as our 10th anniversary celebration. 2011 will also include a number of events scheduled over the course of the year - museum/gallery tours, continuing our social media panel+reception series, and other opportunities to connect, offline, with our clients, prospects, business partners and friends of the studio.

For our 10th anniversary, we will also introduce a new Y INTERACT brand identity. We like our current logo and it has served us well for the last nine and a half years, but it's time to re-think it and construct an identity that will take Y INTERACT into the NEXT 10 years (the next 100 years!) To that end, we made our Day One meetings a working session. With laptops in hand, everyone was given a concept brief + two hours to brainstorm ideas. At the session midpoint, we reviewed, discussed the plusses/minuses of each, and proceeded to Round II.

I'm excited to say that everyone came up with fantastic concepts that we are continuing to explore, and plan to have a new logo, website + collateral (letterhead, business cards, social channels, etc) rolled out just in time for the holidays.

For dinner that night, we bar-b-qued on the terrace and, in true team spirit, everyone had his or her task (some make the salad, others cleaned up, and I even managed to work the grill without burning the house down!)

DAY TWO
Social media is a continually evolving landscape. We were fortunate to have Rikin Diwan, friend of the studio and digital strategist, on hand as our guest to provide us with some extremely insightful tips for promoting ourselves, as well as our clients, via the social channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and our blog. One of the big take-aways from this session was a new "Divide and Conquer" social media strategy for Y INTERACT. By the time we wrapped Day Two, everyone had administrative access to our social sites and moving forward, web 2.0 promotion will be 25% of four people's jobs, rather than 100% of one person's (I learned that tip from the social media panel we sponsored last spring.)

Our social media conversation dove-tailed quite neatly into our final session: the FCS Race for Kids. As longtime supporter and sponsor of this children's charity fundraiser, we wanted to dedicate a session to it. Specifically, how to raise the promotional bar on this event (January 6-9, 2011 in Stowe, VT) via the creative services that we provide. What came out of it was an entire communications map. Starting in October and running through January 2011, our plan will include updates and enhancements to the website, new video content, an improved event information kit, timetable for weekly email distribution, and guidelines for multi-channel promotion: website, email, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter (NEW! @fcsraceforkids), print and online advertising. We are very excited about it, so keep an eye out for what we will be rolling out over the months to come!

In addition to the four morning sessions, I also made a point of getting one-on-one time with each member of the team to thank everyone, individually, for their contributions to the group, check in on how everyone is feeling, discuss their work, strengths, development, and see how we can make the next 12 months even better than the last.

By the time the Gang boarded the Hampton Jitney back to NYC, everyone walked away with solid work under our belt - logo concepts to build on, calendar map to mark our 10th anniversary, a social media Plan of Attack, and a Race for Kids media strategy - that we've got the next couple of months to deliver against. Even more so, we all walked away motivated, inspired and invigorated for what's to come over the remainder of 2010, 2011, and beyond.

No "falling into each other" trust exercises required!

Ahmed Yearwood
Owner/Founder
Y INTERACT

Follow me on Twitter: @ahmedley (my personal posts) or @YINTERACT (our studio posts)

A Great Small Business Solution for Low Budget Website Projects – Students rather than Studios

You get quality work at a fraction of the cost. They get valuable work experience.

I'm often approached by small businesses and startups regarding mega-affordable options for custom website design – not a generic template site like those offered by companies such as Intuit, GoDaddy and the myriad of web hosting companies. And I often come back with the same bit of advice: “Look for a design student.”

As the academic term kicks into high gear, students are back on campus, and many are looking for part-time employment opportunities to gain solid, client-driven work experience, as well as make a few bucks. At Y INTERACT, we often hire students to intern in our studio during the academic year, as well as during the summer months. Being in New York City, we've got the luxury of having top design schools such as Parsons, Pratt, School of Visual Arts, and the Cooper Union from which we can recruit talent. But even if you're not in the NYC area, many colleges that offer design degrees have pools of students to choose from. These days, many schools use the College Central Network as their career services online tool, while others use their own proprietary systems. I've had great experiences with types of sites – they're easy to set up and manage job postings, and in the future if you choose to go back to the site, it's quite simple to re-post an available position.

The biggest advantage of hiring design students is that you get the opportunity to recruit young men and women who possess the vision, creative skill AND technical expertise needed to complete the job – whether it's a website, graphic design project, animation, or other – as well as the youthful energy to get the job done. Additionally, because they're students, they'll only charge a fraction of what a studio would charge.

Here are a couple of guidelines to follow when exploring working with a design student:

1. Start your search early. Just like shopping for anything, the early birds get the worms. The real Jedi Masters (the most diligent and talented students) tend to be the first to search for jobs, as well as the first to get nabbed by employers. Within just a few weeks, the cream of the crop will find opportunities, leaving you with tier-two talents.
2. Pay them. Call/Email career service offices and ask what's the going rate for internships. Whatever it is, just pay it. It's not a ton of money and nobody likes to work for free, no matter what they say during an interview.
3. Recognize that your project, although important, is not their first priority. You're also competing with class, academic deadlines, social life, etc. If your project is super-duper time sensitive and urgent, you may want to consider a full-time freelancer, or a design studio. And as exam period approaches, you can forget about getting anything from them until testing is done. As long as you're aware of the basics of their academic schedule, you'll be fine.
4. Although a student may be extremely talented, they may be professionally rough around the edges. This is understandable since he/she may not have a ton (if any) real world work experience. Opportunities to provide guidance and advice tend to be welcome. Remember, they're getting just as much out of the situation (a few bucks, experience and portfolio work), as you are (a low cost alternative). If your student is working off-site, twice a week or weekly status calls or meetings can be useful to keep things on track. Establish a solid set of deliverables, and set a realistic timetable.
5. For all of the reasons above, students are great for smaller scale projects with shorter timetables. If your timetable is anything over a couple of months, or for large-scale projects, you may want to explore other options.
6. For interns, think of what you can offer to entice a student that they cannot get elsewhere. For example, at Y INTERACT, we're always looking for top talents. Being talented, we know they can go anywhere they want, so our proposition is a summer of real client-driven work that can go into their portfolios, vs. spending three months retouching photos in a large media company, or fetching coffee for some Ad Agency Muckety-Muck.
7. MOST IMPORANT: Once your project is wrapped, make sure you get all source material from your designer. I'll repeat this one since it's a constant error that small business owners make:

MAKE SURE YOU GET ALL SOURCE MATERIAL FROM YOUR DESIGNER

In the case of a website gig, make sure you get (on a CD/DVD/Flash drive or other) all HTML files, Photoshop (.PSD) and/or Illustrator (.AI) files, Flash (.SWF) files, etc. For print projects, get your PSDs, AIs, and InDesign/Quark files. Also important: for online projects, make sure you GET ALL WEBSITE ACCESS credentials (registrar company, host company, all usernames, passwords, etc). Even if you continue working together, at some point when your student transitions to the Next Adventure in their life (summer internship at BBDO, Fall semester in Florence, graduation, etc) you can easily switch to the next designer without a major search and discovery process.

Keeping the above points in mind will help you successfully find a student to design and construct brilliant, compelling media with a startup/small business budget.

Ahmed Yearwood
Owner/Founder
Y INTERACT

Follow me on Twitter: @ahmedley (my personal posts) or @YINTERACT (our studio posts)

Are “Social Media Consultants” (ca. 2010) the New “Web Designers” (ca. 2000)?

Every other person who follows me on Twitter these days describes themselves as “Social Media Consultants” or “Social Media Experts”. I’m guessing this is for one of two reasons:

1) They really are. After all, in a world of billions, it’s not hard to imagine that a few thousand social media consultants/experts have popped up since the rise of social media (the trend formerly known as “Web 2.0”).
Or
2) Are “Social Media Consultants” today what “Web Designers” were ten years ago?

Allow me to explain:

I remember 10 years ago when the Dot.Bomb bubble exploded and left a lot of egg on a lot of faces. It also left a lot of people unemployed. Along with the overall slump in the economy at the time, there was a rise in people who referred to themselves as web designers. I’d rather refer to them as “Dummies Guide Web Designers,” since they tended to be people who had lost their employment situation (or were recent graduates), owned a Web Design for Dummies book, a computer and an Internet connection and SHAZAAM! they’re a web designer. These men and women are certainly still around, although I think their numbers may have diminished…

Is that what’s currently going on with social media? Of course there are tried and true Social Media Jedi Knights out there (I’m fortunate enough to know some of them) but are many of today’s social media consultants the True Experts, or simply more of the Dummies Guide variety, like what web designers were around the year 2000?

I guess, over the next couple of years, we’ll find out. By which time, another Dummies Guide Expert du Jour will be on the rise!

Just wondering…

Ahmed Yearwood
Owner/Founder
Y INTERACT
Follow me on Twitter (@ahmedley – my personal posts) or (@YINTERACT – our studio posts)