Strange, I used to attend...
Aaron Clay
Strange, I used to attend Tony watching parties & now I'm watching Baseball being all up on ESPN.
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Austin, Texas
(512) 814-8882
I'm the Marketing and PR guy for Amy's Ice Creams. I am Apple enthusiast and I especially focus on making stuff by removing the hurdles technology throws at us.
Huge practitioner of Getting Things Done. I like to practice writing on this site and you'll see a lot of mistakes. Spelling and Grammar and I are on a trial separation.
Glitter and Glamour
Fashion and Fame
are not words I would use to describe me.
Strange, I used to attend Tony watching parties & now I'm watching Baseball being all up on ESPN.
Sharing great moments with your audience is a great way to start engagement. However, our current workflows require a "high-end" camera, a fast computer and high speed internet connection. Right? WRONG! I highly recommend you revamp your workflow thanks to the app, Camera+.
Camera+ boast a ton great features like Touch Focus & Exposure, Shooting Grid, multiple shooting modes, filters and borders and a new feature called "Clarity" which automatically process your image for the best possible result. All of these features enable you to capture a great photo quickly and let you share it with your community, instantly.
Perfect for events & promotions. Get people engaged and curious with great looking photos on the go.
Here's a picture I took at a small press event for FIAT Austin.
Notice the first picture is dark and you can't see the people speaking.
Using the "Clarity" feature on Camera+ I get a much more useable photo that I can share.
While the app has individual users in mind with sharing straight to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr you the professional have two options for sharing photos.
I use email and email it to the Posterous Blog which autoposts it out to the correct accounts on Flickr, Facebook and Twitter. It's fast, it's simple and the pictures can look great.
As an added bonus, if you have the Camera Connection Kit you can suck those photos into iPad and use a service look HootSuite to post it out to your community.
Check out Camera+ on the iOS App Store. It's on Sale now for $.99
iPhone
- Apps to capture & report events
- Camera+
This has been cross post via The PR Mactitioner; a blog covering Marketing & Public Relations work using the tools in the Apple ecosystem.
The piece below is a writing sample from an internal employee newsletter. Some of the contents may have change to protect the innocent. Our goal with the newsletter is to reach a young audience trying to grasp the fundamentals of the Great Game of Business.
Great Game Fundamentals - Keepers of Time
Time Keeping In The HuddleAfter all, numbers are simply a way of telling stories about people. -- Jack Stack, The Great Game of Business
In your huddles, a time keeper works with the group to assign time limits to each topic, helps the facilitator keep the huddle moving by reminding everyone how much time is granted for a subject, and asks the group to make changes if a topic needs a lengthier discussion.
Here’s a common example, for the next 5 minutes your huddle is discussing ways to increase sales. The group decides on passing out crush’n cards in cow suits. The line owner is worried about weather and everyone discusses different solutions.
The timekeeper informs the group, “We’ve been talking about promotion ideas for about 4 minutes. Do we want continue the weather conversation beyond our 5 minutes?”
The timekeeper kept the group focused on the subject and informed them of the elapsed time. This can help your huddle make informed decision quickly, increase participation and may even accelerate the meeting’s pace.
Jack Stack has a great book that explains his approach to Open Book Financing and Management and you can get it on Amazon.
THE GREAT GAME
Monkeys On Your Back
You've heard the expression, “Monkey on your back,” right? It's the origin of our company’s Monkeys (or Zombies) but what is a monkey? Let's explore a huddle and see how to identify and use a monkey. For example, you mention that the store is getting complaints regarding the cleanliness of the widgets.
Your huddles makes a line on the board to get fewer complaints by cleaning the widgets more often and assigns a line owner. Then you realize and say, “We don't have gloves to clean with. We need to get more cleaning gloves!”
This is a monkey, it's an action that needs to happen to make the line work. You then continue, “Since I?m closing tonight, I'll call “gloves” in with our nightly inventory.” That's your monkey. The note-taker will write it down and the line owner will follow up to make sure the gloves arrive at your store with the next delivery!
This is my first draft of a flow chart showing how I used Posterous Auto-Post service to automate the distribution of stuff I like to share across the web. Missing a lot of critical pieces but it’s starting to take shape.
I've found that I have three posting contexts.
Professional focused simply means that I'm writing for a particular blog The Mactitioner or company and I want to cross post to my “branded” sites. Fu.
I can't make you a better PR practitioner, but I hope this site sheds light on the power sitting behind the apple logo. The power behind the Mac permits anyone to create [digital] content easier than ever. Services, Automator & AppleScript can automate mundane tasks and enables you to focus on one thing: artful & purposeful communication.
I believe:
We're just scratching the surface. Creativity exists outside of Photoshop & Microsoft Word so clean off that desktop, organize your folders innovation awaits!
I'm new to the whole notion of open book management concept. The company I work for, Amy's Ice Creams, practices open-book management and The Great Game of Business. I've begun reading the book of the same name by Jack Stack.
Standouts from the introduction:
...[the] idea is to create an environment in which people can continuously learn & grow.
After all, numbers are simply a way of telling stories about people, as well as a means of keeping score.
I can't stop thinking about examples of how true this is. The artist in me wonders what art would be like told through the story of numbers. I fear, for myself, the truth that it may reveal and am I ready to accept that truth. No.
*Just a few notes I wanted to share.
I'm trying to decide between Tumblr and Posterous. Why? I am moving away from Wordpres as a blog and want to use www.aaronmclay.com as a Business Card type site w/ a link to my "blog." Let's list the pro's and cons for each shall we?
Posterous - Pros
Tumblr - Pros
Right now I'm leaning towards Tumblr because of all the cool features but, Autopost and comments are a high priority. I can solve both of those problems but they won't be easy. I'm going to start with Tumblr and see where I go. More soon.
Love,
Aaron
I finally got around to watching Leo Laport's MacWorld Keynote. Leo has some amazing insights into the current state of mass media. If anyone is into Market, Advertising or content creation you definitely need to check this out.
I specifically like his statement at 15m 25s where he says:
What advertisers are starting to realize is that they can't come to an audience as a salesman...a pitchman. They have to come to the audience as a member of the community. An equal member of the community.
*I should mention that the quality is subpar as someone was recording this using their cellphone camera and the Qik software. The content is well worth the listen until and IF MacWorld puts his keynote up on higher quality.
This is how much of nerd I am. I was off from work and I got so into the WWDC 2008 Stevenote that I had 6 Blogs Open, Twitter and 2 live feeds including TwitLive.Tv. /Sigh.