Ruby, head of HR resting on the sofa. mmmm She keeps hiring her pals..

Dottie is 3 months old and rests right next to her boss Karen.

Daisy, a White Shepard lab mix - Jason our ACD's amazing dog. She is a joy to be around.

And introducing Oreo below. The newest addition to the family. She is interning with one of our summer interns. Hank.

Orio is a Havana Silk and is right at home with her pal Ruby who is sitting in her official office chair

At SmithGifford we have a policy that allows folks to bring there dogs to work whenever they want. It’s surprisingly peaceful and a huge help in the stress area.. Also not photographed are Emmit, and Banks. Who stayed home today.

What a difference a generation makes. Back in 1982 kids were:

• More likely to smoke cigarettes and smoke pot
• Less likely to practice safe sex
• More likely to have a driver’s license

If you’re a parent, do your kids have it better today than in 1982? Share your views?

China Poblano

A cool video made to run on The Cosmopolitan Hotel’s large, high-def screens promoting José André’s restaurant in Las Vegas.

Steal My ID

People pay attention when you take things away from them. This online effort promoted a fictitious company that offered to steal people’s identity for a fee when they had become too destitute to value it anymore.

Identity Guard “Mug Shots”

We did a whole series of quick, webcam-produced online vids to encourage current members to use their service more often, as well as explain the more advanced features of the product. Here are two. There are lots, lots more!

Apptix

CEO message to customers about merging with another company to provide better technical support and enhanced service.

Identity Guard TV

Instead of threatening people, we told them we were helping make the world a more trustworthy place.

SmithGifford is in it to win it–the Lottery, that is. We’ve got 10 SmithGifs out of the 19 employees  in the ticket pool. Bruce did the math over lunch. When we win big, each of us walks away with $29,300,000. With that money, we’ll buy new laptops so that we can work from home. Our new homes on private islands.

Our friends at Mashable today reported the results of some VERY preliminary research on the new Facebook timeline and its’ impact on brand pages. The upshot? The timeline gives brands a 46% lift in engagement. It’s early folks, and the survey sample cited in the research was very small so let’s not get carried away. But, the research indicated that engagement with videos and photos has actually increased by 65%. In the new timeline, images are much larger, so researchers are speculating that this is the reason why viewers are engaging more.

What’s the bottom line? Brands need to move to the new Facebook timeline by the end of this month if you don’t Facebook is going to make the move for you. So, you’ll need to have a roughly 800 pixel wide image that represents your brand uploaded to Facebook by then. Facebook calls it a “timeline cover image.” The image is 850 x 315 pixels. That’s a lot of quality real estate for your brand, and there are a few restrictions on what you can place in your timeline image.

My personal view is that you should develop a series of timeline images that can be changed throughout the year. Changing your timeline image often serves to bring people back in contact with your brand.

There are a lot of exciting changes with the Facebook timeline that go beyond the cover image. I’ll post more about that in subsequent posts. We’ll talk about the type of content you should be posting, as well as how often you should post.

Read the Mashable article about Facebook Timeline Research by Simply Measured.

I came across a brilliant article online at Forbes.com today – The Myth of Social Media Tactics versus the Reality of Social Business Strategies. Right on, right on, right on. The piece focuses on my main pet peeve when working with clients on social media projects. The sad reality is that most companies confuse tactics for strategy. They think that having a presence on Facebook or Twitter (or god-forbid Google+ or Pinterest) is somehow going to radically transform their business. That somehow by posting to their Facebook fan page or tweeting a couple of times a day is all you need to do. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Great companies (there are very few) actually do the planning first. They follow the advice in the article and create a social organization and social business. It’s pretty scary to do this. Because a social business actually empowers its employees to be social. Traditional managers have a really hard time with this.

According to the Forbes article, research shows that in terms of social media, “60% of today’s companies fall into the Ad Hoc stage, 30% in the Experimental stage, 9% in the Participating stage, and less than 1% fall into what we consider the Strategic Social Business stage.” It’s that pesky 1% again, but if you are a business this is the 1% you really want to be a part of.

Read how they did it. And call me, when you are ready to talk social media strategy instead of tactics. Anybody can create a Facebook fan page. Not everyone can create a social business.

Okay, so we’ve finally recovered from ADDYs and St. PADDYs Day last week and wanted to say Congratulations and Thank you to our clients, who helped us win BIG again this year.

ADDYs remain the American Advertising Federation’s big awards show of the year.   Gold winners get a chance to advance to regionals (and our regional District is big and competitive since it includes DC, Baltimore and NYC) and then a chance for fame and glory at the national ADDYs in May.

We are proud to say we won 16 total ADDYs, out of 27 entered (about 60% win rate for you math geeks)!  And they are a testament to the great work we’re doing across the board for a wide array of great clients… we won a Gold for Identity Guard’s “Steal My ID” video, as well as for the Lindsay Automotive “Blind Date” TV spot.

The perfectly wonderful “I’m Perfect” campaign for Melwood won five Silver ADDYs for TV and radio and the full campaign took home a Gold.

For National Geographic Museum, we won honors for three different projects:

America I Am, Anglo Saxon Hoard and the new work for National Geographic Live!

And we’re proud to say, one of our newest clients, China Poblano from the wonderful imagination and genius of José Andrés at ThinkFoodGroup won three ADDYs for the digital signage we created to showcase the restaurant at The Cosmopolitan Las Vegas.

Congrats to the amazing team at SmithGifford for all the great energy, talent and dedication you demonstrate every day.  And thank you to our clients, who give us the license to display such creativity on their behalf!

Today is March 14th, or as mathematicians like Bruce like to call it, 3.141592653589 day. Or as I like to call it, Pie day.

More info here:

http://www.piday.org/million.php