Our support didn’t end there. On the day of the Mutt Strut xiik launched the Web site for the 2011 Indianapolis Poster Pooch Contest, a contest that will determine which Indianapolis-area dog will be the face of next year’s Mutt Strut.  Dogs are voted on by their human companions, who can log onto the site to vote for their favorites. The winning dog will be decided by having the most votes when the site closes at midnight on Friday, July 9.

Indianapolis-area residents can submit photos of their adorable pooch that can be voted on by the public. To register your pooch, you must make a minimum $5 donation and each vote is a $1 donation. Be prepared to enlist your friends and family to vote for your dog – the current leader has more than 300 votes. Have no fear, though, because voting is still open for several more weeks so there is plenty of time to get a rousing campaign for your pooch going. You can even use the site to solicit support from your friends and family by sending emails encouraging them to vote for your pooch.

And if you don’t have a pooch, surely you know someone who does, or you enjoy looking at photos of cute pooches. Log on today and find your favorite – you’ll be helping provide a second chance to the animals at the Humane Society of Indianapolis who dream of one day being a poster pooch (or kitty!).

Whether you want to show off your pooch, or see others’ favorite pets, we hope you join us in supporting this great cause.

The most notable additions are the full size mannequins that just so happened to grace us with their presence overnight a couple weeks ago. Our best guess is they ran away from Hollister because, let’s be honest, nobody can stand the smell of that place for more than 15 minutes. Their names are Xira [Zira] and Xahn [Zahn], but I have a feeling those names change every week since nobody can remember. No big deal – mannequins don’t have feelings.

Graffiti seems to be popping up more and more around the office and bathroom walls. Our front door sidewalk is tagged with the xiik logo and games of hangman make bathroom time even MORE fun. Give us chalk and you’ll be sure to see the 8-year-old in each of us. That is, all of us except Donny, who has a strong aversion to chalk.

So overall, we have just been making ourselves at home here and making it as fun and comfortable as possible. If you’re ever in the neighborhood, stop by and try to solve our latest hangman puzzle.

Not since 1972 has a hometown team been in the Final Four and man is Indianapolis pumped: fans have crowded Monument Circle for pep rallies, a giant blue “B” has been formed in the windows of the Indianapolis Power & Light building downtown, and yard signs line Meridian Street, their stakes in the soft spring soil.

Although references to the movie Hoosiers have been tired for some time now, it’s hard to not feel a twinge of goosebumps. After all, basketball is a hallowed institution here in Indiana.  Butler has long played a role in this tradition because its basketball arena, Hinkle Fieldhouse, was the largest basketball gym in the nation for several decades in the middle of the 20th century.

Tonight, Butler will hopefully make more history. In classic David v. Goliath fashion, Butler is taking on basketball behemoth Duke for the NCAA Championship.

In honor of our Butler Bulldogs, we present their fight song:

We’ll sing the Butler war song,
We’ll give a fighting cry;
We’ll fight the Butler battle–
Bulldogs ever do or die.
And in the glow of the victory firelight,
Hist’ry cannot deny
To add a page or two
For Butler’s fighting crew
Beneath the Hoosier sky.

The xiik geeks would like to congratulate the Bulldogs for making it this far in the tournament and wish them good luck against the Blue Devils tonight!

When a client or prospective client contacts xiik to develop a Web site, brochure or marketing campaign, one of our first questions is always going to be, “What do you want to accomplish?” We ask this because every company has different goals. It also helps us to learn more about a client. Often, but not always, a client may not have an end goal in mind, but just think they need “marketing.” However, marketing without a purpose is like trying to shoot a target in the dark. If you’re not sure what your goal should be, here are a few things to consider:

• The Status Quo: Think about your company from an outsider’s perspective. If staying objective is too hard to do, literally ask people (not employees!) what they know about you or your company. Do they know who you are and what you do? What you stand for? Is their perception of you positive or negative?

• The Goal: What do you want people to know about your company?

This is just the beginning of the strategy process. Although strategies may take some time and planning to develop, a solid strategy acts as a roadmap for achieving your goal(s). Just like a good coach won’t send his team into a game without an end goal (winning) and a series of plays to achieve the win, a good marketing firm won’t run a client through a gauntlet of marketing options without knowing the intended result. Anyone can shoot an arrow in the dark, but turning on a light always helps with hitting your target.

Evaluate Your Goals
How has your business changed in the last year? What’s 2010 going to look like for your industry? Do current sales meet your expectations? Are you making a compelling case for your product or service to a targeted enough audience? What have you learned? We all work hard every day to keep the little gears grinding, but it’s crucial to take a step back periodically to tweak your overall course. Sit down to restate what you want for 2010, assess what worked in 2009, and imagine how you can shake up those pieces that need more focused attention or an entirely new tactic.

Listen to Your Audience
The best source of advice is often those people you are looking to please the most: your clients. They can offer valuable clues to engage them if you’ll just listen. Now, listening doesn’t involve just our ears anymore; there are many tools marketers can use to better understand their audiences. If you haven’t already, install data metrics & tracking software like Google Analytics on your web site to audit geographic demographics and behavioral patterns of your site’s visitors. What pages keep your visitors’ attention the longest and where do most flee the site. Research tools like Quantcast can be leveraged to get an interesting picture of the internet trends for your target audience. And get on board with digital word-of-mouth by staying involved with social media sites.

Audit Your Methods of Communication
Remember when people used to just talk to each other? Like face-to-face? Yeah, well there’s an increasing number of ways to interact with your clients and the most successful efforts are those that integrate several modes of communication, proportionate to the habits of your target market. Your options these days are in-person, phone, HTML email, your website, ads on other Web sites, social media, and traditional forms of advertising like mailers, print ads, television, and radio. Do you have the right mix? Are the tools you’re using having effect? Are you cross-promoting (i.e. social media links in email blasts)? Is your website too content heavy? Consumers respond more to visually engaging experiences online rather than a page of text. Are there any opportunities to convert paragraphs into interactive media like video, slideshows, etc?

Rethink Your Budget
Some businesses think they should axe their marketing budgets when the economy goes south, but there are more responsible tactics to trimming expenses.  Strong, effective marketing campaigns don’t always mean dropping big bucks.  Consider the return on your investment, which is highly trackable these days. Strategically targeting and communicating with your audiences can help grow your business. Can you redirect resources from an underperforming activity to one that’s working? Is the underperforming activity failing because your approach is not quite right or because it’s simply not a smart way to reach your audience? Ask these questions before making cuts. And marketing cuts may be unavoidable, but the most critical imperative is for you to prioritize. It may take more planning, but as the economy rebounds, your business will have remained relevant and visible in the public eye. And you’ll outperform those less savvy competitors.

Be True to Yourself and Your Business
Be authentic. People are often smarter than we give them credit for and many can see through a false façade. We as consumers appreciate authentic, heart-felt communications. And in this digital age, anyone can try their hand at the latest new-fangled gadget or digital idea; but those who succeed in digital media approach it with careful planning, research and strategy. Does your brand adequately reflect your company’s values and culture? Avoid hyperbole. Sure, find the magic in your company’s story, but don’t over-promise and under-deliver. Good branding (and by extension, marketing) is about defining an identity and purpose of being that everyone can unabashedly embrace. Create an organization in 2010 that you, your employees, and your clients can all be proud of!

Our new creative office has changed significantly since then. We can’t even recognize the place now. Okay, that’s a stretch, but we really have done a lot to make it more inspiring to the creative brain. Everything from desk layout to our secret snack stash is a little piece of genius that we all take daily pride in. And as we’ve been adding more folks to the team, those snacks go faster and faster — not something I’m too fond of: Dang’nabbit, who drank the last Capri Sun and ate the last string cheese! Just kidding. The new staff additions are amazing, regardless of snack consumption.

And fear not, we still have Yoda watching over the office. He keeps us in line and productive. We’ve also geeked out the walls with a couple of film posters that you can see pictures of below. Finally, one of our favorite aspects of the office is the two walls painted with black chalkboard paint. We express our interactive natures by writing all over the walls like kids. Really nerdy kids. And one of those walls occupies the bathroom — we don’t waste a minute! Topher even went as far as writing a Thanksgiving message backwards on that wall that reflects correctly in the mirror so you could read it. How clever!

Our Geek Bar will continue to grow in such details that encourage new ideas and ways of thinking. Some of these additions may seem minor, but they go a long way to getting ourselves outside the proverbial box and letting folks have a sense of humor, which is always a creative place to be. How can your office benefit from a little more company culture?

For those of you who are wondering, ghost blogging isn’t the practice of dead souls opining via WordPress or Blogger, but rather when someone writes, edits or posts blogs on behalf of another person, entity or corporation. As someone who has ghosted for politicians and CEOs in the past, I was interested in hearing what other social media leaders think about the practice.

On the pro-ghost blogging side of the debate was Ryan Puckett, who handles editing content and posting on his father’s real estate blog. Puckett argued that the focus is the message, not the medium. He pointed out that spokesmen have existed for thousands of years – Aaron was Moses’ spokesman, after all.

Taking the opposing side was Raquel Richardson, who argued that the issue of authorship raised ethical quandaries when readers don’t know who is really writing posts.

Ghost blogging is not a cut and dry, black and white issue.  Generally, I think that as long as the credited author of the post reviews and approves that post, ghost blogging is acceptable. It’s much like having a speechwriter — ultimately, the speaker is responsible for the content of those statements. Of course, if you’re a writer like me, then maybe you want credit for what you’ve written.

So let’s continue the conversation. What do you think? Should ghost blogging be revealed? Is it ethical?

If you’re interested in watching the whole debate and Q&A session, please check out the recorded UStream. And make sure to check out Indy Social Media Breakfast on Facebook for updates on the next meeting!

Friday was a great treat for everyone from the Indianapolis office because we finally got to meet the new folks from Los Angeles. So, we of course prepared the office by drawing all over the walls with chalk. Okay, let me clarify: Topher let our inner-child out and decided to paint one of the walls with black chalkboard paint (see picture below). After lots of mingling, tasty noshes and board games at the Geek Bar (our new creative office), everyone headed to bed before the big day.

Saturday was a whole new experience for most of the group. The SPICE Challenge was a series of physical challenges that let us really build our lines of communication with each other and also problem solve in various ways. We were able to work through every challenge thrown at us. Sometimes we made it look easy, and when it wasn’t, we were inspired by the individual ways in which the group came together. Yes, there were those infamous trust falls you hear about! Every single team member braved the six-foot plunge. “I was very impressed by how well we worked together and how intelligent every member of our team is. After getting to know everyone I’m also very excited and confident about the future of xiik!” -Dave Gable, Web Developer, Indianapolis.

But how does this relate to the workplace? Why does a physical challenge like this bring together a company with team members operating out of four US cities with clients in six states?

It gave us all a chance to really learn about each other’s strengths and weaknesses and also to work together as a team in different scenarios other than our normal interactions. From the zip line to the trust falls, everything was empowering and very moving in its own unique way. “I was surprised at how well we did and at how naturally we were able to work together as a team, despite the fact that many of us had never worked in the same room as one another before.” -Aviva Mohilner, Business Development, Los Angeles.

And you can even loop its importance back to our clients: an experience like this helps us see how to build even better communication with them and understand how to handle hiccups that can arise in the process. Overall, everyone had a blast and can’t wait for our next retreat. How about wilderness survival? Anyone?

Since the Geek Bar transformation is going even better than planned (more to come later), we have decided to host some of the festivities here on Friday night to kick off the weekend. Good thing our new office can easily hold the xiik staff and leave room for obnoxiously acting out Scattergories. Let’s hear it for bonding through board games and pizza! Since we’re on the topic of board games, I am practically obligated to ask if you have ever played Balderdash. By far one of the most fun games out there! But I digress…

So, whereas Friday is an ice breaker for the new guys to meet some of the geeks they haven’t seen yet, Saturday is where it gets even better: Topher has signed us up to do the SPICE Challenge, a series of physical challenges that let you collaborate with your group and problem solve all while having a lot of fun. Sounds like my kind of thing! It doesn’t end there. This year, the SPICE Program added an extra activity called the Zip Line Canopy Tour, which is a 1.5 hour tour through treetops, giving us thrill-seekers and nature lovers the perfect adventure.

I’ve already been thinking about the next xiik retreat. Unfortunately, Topher doesn’t seem too convinced that flying the company to Rome to fight gladiator style in the Coliseum is really in our budget. I’ll keep working on it though.

I’m talking about those lovable little animals over at the Indianapolis Humane Society. Upon arrival, we immediately bribed them with a favorite human treat — Dunkin’ Donuts — so they would give us a behind-the-scenes tour of the place. Thankfully, they took the bait and agreed to let us see their inner workings. Long story short, we had a blast!

It had been a while since I visited a humane society and looked for animals, so it was a luxury being able to see all the hard work that goes into keeping the center afloat. Right away, it was apparent that those guys took extra special care of the animals, from the way they cleaned the cages to the amount of generous donors and volunteers on staff. They definitely keep to their mission statement: ˝Our vision is that all central Indiana animals are treated with dignity and respect and live free from cruelty, harm and neglect.˝ Those dogs and cats looked adorable. Not to mention super happy. I would’ve taken some puppies home with me if I wasn’t riding my motorcycle that morning. That sort of animal transportation is probably frowned upon.

Needless to say, Tristan (our guide) and the rest of the folks at the Indianapolis Humane Society were happy to see the people behind their marketing projects there for a visit. And for us, it was a welcome break from websites, search engine optimization and design to just relax and get to know our client a little better.

Plus, those donuts weren’t going to eat themselves!