Archive for June 2011

The SmallBox Manifesto!

Posted by sara

Jun

2011

One of the projects we worked on as we holed up for Factory Week was writing the SmallBox Manifesto. Several months ago when we did the 5 words experiment, we began exploring questions like:

What kind of company are we?
Why do our clients choose us?
How do we describe ourselves and the work we do?

All of the deep thinking was meant to inform our manifesto. After much internal discussion and wordsmithing, we’re ready to set it free into the wide world. You can see the manifesto in a visual format on our site here, or read the full copy below. We’d love your feedback!

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The SmallBox Manifesto

We are passionate about web marketing because we know it works. We love to solve problems and believe that finding the right solution requires diligent curiosity and creativity. We do our best work when we partner with other believers. Collaboration and team work are in our DNA. We lead with listening, understanding and then recommending.

Vision

To be the most effective web marketing team anywhere. To stay small while offering big solutions. To have two virtual lines outside the door of our Broad Ripple offices. In one line we have every ideal SmallBox client waiting to get on our schedule. In the other line we have every perfect SmallBox employee waiting for an opening on the team.

Mission

To provide effective solutions for worthy businesses and organizations. To provide ourselves with meaningful work in a fun, collaborative environment. To pursue and realize our own ideas whenever possible. To have a positive impact in our community with a focus on music, arts and culture.

Who we are

We are a team that loves solving problems. We look to grow everything we touch. We believe that work is life and life is work, and there is no need to separate them. We believe in beer Fridays. We believe everyone should take regular, real vacations. We believe work doesn’t have to be stressful. We know we do our best work when we are focused, loose and having fun. We all come from different backgrounds and we love what each person brings to our culture. Together we form a unique, creative whole.

How we work

We play well with others. We thrive on interaction with our clients, partners and with each other. Our goal is to create a “fail safe” environment at SmallBox. A place where great people can try to do big things, knowing that everyone has their back. When we fail, we learn, adjust and keep moving. We look for passion, focus and a sense of urgency in our team members. Momentum cannot be overvalued. Trust must be continually earned. Quality is fixed, quantity is the variable. Expectations are routinely set and then reset as needed. We don’t avoid hard conversations and all of us hold each team member accountable.

What we do

We use the web to grow businesses and organizations. The special sauce is how we get our results. This starts with really getting to know our clients. This means understanding their fundamentals — what they are selling or providing, who their audiences are and what actions they want them to take. Then we make recommendations based on years of experience and expertise. We are solutions agnostic in the sense that we look to recommend the right solutions, not just our solutions.

Our Name

Why call a company SmallBox? What’s up with that? Ok, here’s the deal. Back in late 2005 when our CEO, Jeb Banner, was thinking of what to call his new business, he took a walk. Jeb, a certified music lover, brought along his iPod for the walk. He started thinking about how his entire music collection could fit in this, uh, small box. He thought about how his phone, even in 2005, was more powerful than the super computers of 30 years ago. This is where everything is going — smaller, faster, better. He envisioned an agile team with low overhead that could do impressive and effective Web design, development and marketing work — SmallBox.

Core Values

Creativity – To solve any problem you need creativity. You have to pull that big idea out of the clouds, pitch it, defend it, change it and then realize it. Every marketing problem requires creative problem solving. Even the most common ones.

Results – We are a results-focused business. We know that is why our clients have come to work with us and that is why they stay with us — we get them results. We simply don’t take on projects if we aren’t confident we can create results.

Collaboration – We are a collaborative team. We work well with others and enjoy partnering with clients and agencies. We hold each other accountable with a focus on constant improvement and growth. Creativity lays the foundation, collaboration builds out the solution.

Community – We are fiercely passionate about Broad Ripple and our fair city of Indianapolis. Community involvement and giving back are ingrained in our business. In particular, we want to see Broad Ripple become a hub for web and tech companies.

Fun – Not a day goes by that we don’t make each other laugh and we think that’s one of the best things about working together. That, and Beer Fridays.

Curiosity – We believe in diligent and persistent curiosity. Curiosity means going the extra mile on a gut feeling, uncovering an opportunity. Everyone at SmallBox, from intern to CEO, knows they can, and should, ask “why?” whenever they feel the need.

Growth – Bob Dylan said it best: “He not busy being born is busy dying”. We believe in constant, continual growth. SmallBox is populated with lifelong growers. We will never be finished.

Reflecting on Factory Week

Posted by Jeb

Jun

2011

2
Comments

Filed Under: Culture SmallBox

If you haven’t heard about Factory Week you can learn more about it at www.factoryweek.com or just look some posts on this blog. In essence we took the entire company off premise for a week to work on internal projects. Don’t worry, we let our clients know well in advance and took care of anything urgent that came up during the week.

High level summary of Factory Week: it was awesome.

Will we do it again? Yes, every 6 months is the plan.

What were the goals going into Factory Week? 3 goals- get stuff done, build the team and create some buzz for SmallBox.

Did you accomplish these goals? Yes.

We went into Factory Week with 10 projects. These projects had been submitted, pitched and voted on by the team. Some of these projects are completely internal (re-organize and clean up our document templates) and others will be launching soon (our fun little social web app 5 Words).

Although we wish we could have “launched” more of the projects at the end of the week we quickly accepted that getting stuff started was a real victory. Planning is always the hard part. Sure, we only finished a few projects that week, but the unfinished projects will be easier to fit in around client work now that the path has been cleared.

We also realized that in our attempt to take some time off to work on ideas and possibly create some products that we may have created a product in Factory Week. Maybe Factory Week is a product itself? Why not facilitate Factory Weeks for other organizations? We are looking to explore this idea after our next Factory Week in December. Would love to hear your thoughts on this idea.

I threw a wrap party at my house Friday night. As we all talked about the week I could sense how much we had moved the team needle. In between beers, cannonballs and backflips we all discussed what a great experience it had been. It felt like the last day of camp even though we would all be seeing each other Monday. I kept thinking- man, I’m really lucky to be working with all these great people!

Looking back after a couple weeks I do feel we have created and sustained new ways of thinking and collaborating. We forged new synapses in the hive mind. I am confident that the trust level between the team increased dramatically. We are more willing to hold each other accountable, ask hard questions and have heated debates without worrying about hurt feelings.

I realize our gains will be tested and some will be lost. I’m ok with that. But I think we will look back and say “well that was before Factory Week.” It was a game changer and we can’t wait for the next one.

So it begins…

Posted by sara

Jun

2011

0
Comments

Filed Under: Culture

SmallBox has officially kicked off Factory Week!
What’s Factory Week you ask? Read Jeb’s post for the full scoop.

Please follow our progress on twitter @factoryweek and on factoryweek.com.

Slingshot SEO + SmallBox: “Wax Offsite, Wax Onsite”

Posted by thomas

Jun

2011

5
Comments

Filed Under: Everything Else

Turning to Gold

I was watching ‘Art & Copy’ last night, an interesting documentary by PBS. There’s a section about how Bill Birnbach revolutionized the advertising industry at the end of the 1950′s, dominating the market. Here are a few quotes from former employees.

Mary Wells: You would tell people you worked at Birnbach and people looked at you as if you’d suddenly turned to gold.

How did he do it?

Jim Durfee: Bill Birnbach added an entirely new creative force to advertising by putting the art-director in the same room as the copywriter… Birnbach said ‘Hey, art director, meet copywriter; copywriter, meet art director. You guys work it out together.’

The moral of the Birnbach story is that close-collaboration, and the seamless interpenetration of different parts of the marketing process leads to exponentially accelerated efficiencies.

In other words: teamwork works.

Listening to the story of Birnbach made me think about how my two favorite companies in Indianapolis work together. They’re my favorite companies because they both write my paychecks. That is to say, I work for them. They are successful, in part, because they work for each other.

Slingshot SEO & SmallBox Web Designs

Slingshot and SmallBox kicked off another joint-effort to deliver digital relevance for one of the deserving brands on SmallBox’s client-roster yesterday. Having the special distinction of being the only person so far who is simultaneously employed by both companies, I thought I’d write a post about their long and fruitful relationship today.

SmallBox and Slingshot showed up on the Indianapolis scene at about the same time, and we’ve been collaborating since the beginning. We almost think of ourselves as being sister-companies. Or blood-brothers. Blood sisters? At any rate…

Specializing in different areas, Slingshot and SmallBox realized early on that collaborating would be more helpful to both of us—and to our clinets—than competing. Nothing wrong with competition, but in this case collaboration has catalyzed growth for both of us. Working full-time at Slingshot while contracting at SmallBox, I am sort of a special beneficiary of this happy complementarity.

‘Wax Onsite, Wax Offsite’: The Yin & Yang of Search Engine Optimization

We all remember this classic scene from Karate Kid:

The same principles apply to Search Engine Optimization, with some modification: wax onsite, wax offsite, repeat…

So: there’s offsite Search Engine Optimization and onsite Search Engine Optimization—two different pieces of the marketing puzzle. A robust internet marketing plan will usually include both, usually with some Pay Per Click, Social Media Marketing, and ongoing Conversion Rate Optimization thrown in. Your marketing strategy is like your stock portfolio: pretty much everyone will agree that you should diversify your portfolio.

Each prong of your marketing strategy will feed into, and enhance all the others. SmallBox is a company that’s specialized in—among other things—managing and leveraging the interplay between all aspects of your marketing portfolio, and executing most parts of it, including the all-important foundation: building a great website.

Slingshot SEO is a company that’s specialized in one aspect of the marketing process: offsite SEO. This is the part of your portfolio is, to some extent, the wiliest. But it’s also one of the most important components, and the most difficult to execute effectively while multi-tasking. While the proportions always sway back and forth, offsite indicators of relevance remain one of the key ranking factors for search engines, especially for your most competitive keywords.

Offsite SEO eats up time and effort and consumes the attention. That’s why Slingshot SEO specializes in this area: so that company’s like SmallBox can devote their human resources to where they’ll be most effective. Slingshot fills a whitespace in the internet marketing industry by focusing on the trickiest aspect of the puzzle. That’s why SmallBox is always glad to partner with Slingshot. Slingshot’s definitely distinguished themselves as the best-in-breed in the offsite arena, so when SmallBox enters into a joint effort with Slingshot they can breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that everything is in good hands, and is under control.

And Slingshot is always glad to return the favor, by sending SmallBox clients who need to invest in a robust, and diversified marketing portfolio before and/or during the time that they’re rolling out their offsite campaign.

But our partnership goes deeper than referrals. It’s kind of like vertically integrated manufacturing. Or like producing an opera. Jacques Ibert, the 19^th century French composer, once said that he dreamed of “a collaboration that would finally be total, where the librettist would think like a composer and the composer would know how to think like a librettist.” Strip out the terms composer and librettist, and replace them with onsite and offsite SEO and—you get the point.

Slingshot SEO and SmallBox look forward to many more years of partnership and collaboration. And I look forward to many more years feeding at both troughs.

Cloud Computing: necessary evil or just evil?

Posted by Justin Shimp

Jun

2011

4
Comments

Filed Under: Everything Else

Apple is announcing its iCloud service on June 6th (next week) bringing yet another big tech company into cloud services for consumers.

The main advantage of cloud-based services is the ability to access your data and files anywhere, and on any device you own. Everything from personal financial data on sites like mint.com to storing your digital music library is fair game on the cloud. Sounds great, right? Sign me up!

What could possibly go wrong? If you’d have asked me two years ago if moving to the cloud was the right direction, I would have told you yes, it is a great idea. Today, I am not as convinced. This change in perspective is mainly judged on the recent breaches of security with cloud network services.

First there was Amazon, shutting down many web services (thankfully not Netflix!). And then Sony’s Playstation Network crumbled into dust, rumors of users’ personal data being set out in the wild turned to a harsh reality with Sony offering identity theft protection to its vast network of users.

But wait..how does this happen and who has access to my information? Despite all of the convenience of the cloud, there’s no denying taking advantage of it means giving up a certain amount of control over your own data. Also, what happens when we come to depend on cloud services and unexpected outages occur?

Raising these questions leads to more complicated answers. Sony spent a lot of time restoring services to their customers, but even as I write this there are still concerns that they haven’t fully fixed the problem.

I am skeptical when I see more companies jumping onto the cloud. I personally don’t think it’s the right idea to push everything into servers all around the world, without being able to physically point to your information. At least not for very sensitive information. Personally, I have websites that I own and maintain in the cloud and its a wonderful service that works great. My issue is more concerned with highly sensitive personal information being passed around so easily nowadays.

The future is here certainly, but companies need to take extra special care before rolling out cloud services. I hope most will take care to bulletproof them as much as possible, instead of trying to beat other companies to the punch.

Did Apple take these concerns to heart before they decided to jump on the cloud bandwagon? I hope so. If not, we have some growing pains ahead for us for the future of protecting personal information in this highly connected world we now live in.

How do you feel about cloud services? Is it crucial for progress? Do you feel comfortable putting your personal files and data on the cloud?