At Traction we believe that "everything is interactive." Taking that to heart, the creative team had some old-school interactive fun, inspired by Adam Kleinberg's SXSW presentation: "7 reasons why your employees hate you." Pretending that our boss was an evil tyrant, we xeroxed photos of Adam and took turns defacing enhancing them with a variety of mediums such as ink, pencil, and collage. Imaginary retribution never felt this good.

Finally...someone cuts through the social media buzz and reveals our deeper motivations.

(Courtesy of Despair, Inc.)

This Sunday, I'll be moderating a "core conversation" at the SXSW Conference in Austin, TX. The idea behind these sessions is to add order to the chaos of all the fantastic conversations going on in the halls and corridors of SXSW by scheduling moderated sessions around specific topics of interest.

Mine will be on company culture and management. More specifically, "7 reasons your employees hate you."

Below, I've reposted the article I wrote for iMediaConnection last year that inspired my speaker submission. I hope you find it insightful and would love your feedback in comments.

The initial process of getting Capistrano running was unclear when using WordPress, so I figured I should share what I learned. After playing with it for a while I found it very easy to work with and quite clearly documented behind the scenes. What follows are a few things I’ve learned along the way.

If you work on WordPress projects, especially in teams, read on for some tips on setting up your projects in a Subversion repository to make version management, installation configuration, and WordPress upgrades smooth and painless.

On January 3, 2011 David Friedman posted a pretty grand idea. Crowdfund a mission to put a monolith on the Moon. This would be an ultimate scale nerdy prank. But it set bells off in my head. Why not create fine art in space? And what form would it take?

I've gotten a number of questions in response to my article on Mashable about How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile. Most seem to be about how to access the various admin tools, so I thought I'd post some screen shots here to answer them.

Traction's Creative Director, Theo Fanning, had the opportunity to share some of his views on advertising, media, mobile and more at DIGIDAY: ON MEDIA and DIGIDAY: MOBILE.

Needless to say, some of his comments were insightful, polarizing and occasionally charmingly incoherent.

Watch the panel discussions and judge the carnage for yourself:

As I mentioned in my last post, I attended several industry events last week. One of them was a BtoB Magazine "NetMarketing Breakfast." I've attended several of these in the past and the format is always the same: a panel three or four senior marketers each present some of the innovative marketing efforts they are are doing with their brands and then take questions. 

Except this time something was different: the innovative marketing efforts presented were all essentially the same.

Smells like a trend to me...

On Thursday February 17th, 2011 at 14:30 hours, Traction hosted its very own Battledecks competition. (Part of our Learning Phase series.) For luddites unfamiliar with the game made popular at SXSW, "Battledecks is a fast-paced blood sport involving Keynote slides the contestants have never seen before. Each contestant has to get through the most devastating, despair-ridden, filthy slides ever projected within a confined space."* Sounds fun, right?