Q&A is our chance to get inside the head of some of our industry’s movers and shakers. In this installment, I interview Kyle Smitley, founder of environmentally-friendly childrens clothing company barley&birch. Her designs can be seen on the children of celebrity moms like Jessica Alba and Sheryl Crow.

PM: So in the interest of full disclosure…you’re a perfect interview for what you’re doing with b&b, but it doesn’t hurt that we’ve known each other for a long time. (Kyle and I are from the same small town in rural Ohio.) Do you want to sort of start out with the Reader’s Digest version of your background and what you’ve been up to in the time leading up to starting b&b?

KS: Well, I graduated from DePauw University with degrees in Philosophy and Environmental Geoscience and minors in Spanish and Chemistry. While there I was lucky enough to travel the world and work with a lot of great organizations helping others. After graduation, I took the LSAT while working in Washington D.C. and then got out to San Diego, where I surfed all day and dreamed up a business where I sold childrens clothing in order to fund the dozens of good causes with which I’d worked in Haiti and Central America.

The business was born as barley&birch and we opened our doors in February of 2009, in some of the darkest moments of the recession and right int he middle of my first year of law school. We had no money whatsoever, so we worked hard to get all the free press we could. I didn’t sleep for about 8 months of my life, I believe.

In November, I was named one of Inc. Magazines Top 30 Under 30, and by our first anniversary, we were selling in 30 retail stores, moving into larger office space, and revamping the website we’d quickly outgrown. We have funded 3 schools and a clinic in Haiti and El Salvador. We hope to see upwards of $1.5million in sales for 2010. We will be announcing a plethora of great partnerships and undertakings.

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Twitter has been a topic of conversation lately around the water cooler, for reason soon to be revealed. I think that it is interesting that the “I ate crispix for breakfast” meme is still around. I wanted to counter with just one of the many ways that I employ Twitter—professional development resource.

As someone who works in the web world, Twitter fits nicely in my tool kit. After all, it is folks like us that created the service that is currently winning the Webby People’s Voice battle for the entire internet. Twitter is a representation of what the web has become: real-time, democratic publishing platform and the finger on the pulse for the planet. I use Twitter in many ways, but one of my favorites is as an aggregator for the cutting edge in web design and development. Follow my workflow outline to see how I have put Twitter to work for me. Continue Reading →

We’ve been hearing a lot of discussion lately from folks looking to harness that Web 2.0 phenomenon known as “social media” to help promote their brand/business and generally gain exposure to the millions of people blogging/tweeting/yelping/facebooking/youtubing/what-have-ye. While we’re all for reaching out to clients and promoting transparent interactions between businesses and users, I often get the nagging sensation that some people are approaching social media the wrong way, and so are losing out on what it could and should be.

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Facebook has over 400 million active users. People are tweeting an average of  600 times a second. For those of us who are still wondering who the heck are using these services, the answer seems obvious: everyone…and their mother. These enormous user bases are mighty attractive to any marketing team out there, regardless of industry, and the race is on to translate these huge numbers into something more valuable that a database of a billion daily blurbs about what folks are having for breakfast.

Now, it may just be because I’m an English major and thus love the evolution of the English language, but to me one of the more interesting results of this attempt to leverage the social media masses is the appearance of the social media lexicon in mainstream advertisements. The earliest example I can think of regarding this meeting of words involves the 2007 AT&T ad for text plans:

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I like that our agency has a variety of clients. Some are big, some small. They come from different industries. Each client contact has a different job description. That variety helps keep our work fresh. But it also allows us to see how smart our clients are, each in their own ways. They know their business, customers and business goals like the back of their hands. The reason they hire us is because they value what we do, and what we do falls outside of their areas of expertise. I would like to think that we do a good job of forming partnerships with our clients, to become the means to extend their brand, their presence and their business goals to exciting new markets. I hope that we help them articulate their frustrations and aspirations to find unique and successful solutions for them. I hope this is the case, because the alternative scares the hell out of me. Continue Reading →

Curtis asked me to write about the “big crunch/big bang” of digital content distribution.  I think this is a wonderful topic, but not something I can address at the moment. I would like to do a fair bit of research and reflection before tackling the subject. In the meantime, here is something completely unrelated. A couple of weeks ago I swear I saw a post in the NASA twitter feed that contained a nasa.gov branded shortened URL. I have combed the hundreds of posts from that time period but can’t seem to find it; perhaps I imagined it. Maybe I am crazy… like a fox.

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A new study validates the concepts that we have been employing to help clients connect with journalists using social media. Check out our post “Reinventing the Online Newsroom” which focuses on a project for the American Bar Association.  This study by Cision reports that about two-thirds (65%) of journalists say they use blogs to research stories and more than half (52%) use microblogging sites like Twitter.  The big issue for journalists is credibility, and companies and associations can enhance their own standing and outreach by using these tools to be a reliable source of fresh content.

Last week we had a conference call with a client, one of the largest professional associations in the world. Twitter came up a few times and I couldn’t help be think of one of my favorite Twitter publishers, NASA. This led me to do some late night research on NASA’s Twitter strategy. What I found was interesting and thought others might find value in what I discovered. Continue Reading →

I have been highly impressed by the use of multimedia during the recent catastrophe in Haiti. News organizations and the public have relied on Twitter, blog posts, photo and video sharing sites for news and images from this earthquake ravaged country. CNN has compiled a list of organizations tweeting about the Haiti earthquake.

And social media has become a critical component of the international aid effort. The American Red Cross has set up a cell phone donation campaign, where individuals can text Haiti to 90999 to donate $10, which will then be included in their next cell phone bill

As a side note, the LA Times is featuring an interactive Flash earthquake feature that provides interesting background on the location of fault lines globally, the types of faults and the different types of earthquake waves

At Manning, we spend a lot of time trying to help our clients understand and navigate the rapidly changing media environment. Often times, this means encouraging them to take advantage of the explosion of ‘social media’. (I’m so sick of this term) The internet allows businesses and organizations to communicate in ways never before possible and to interact directly with their users, customers, etc. The benefits of this should be obvious. But convincing a business to throw out generations of conventional wisdom in favor of new models of customer service, marketing and PR can be an uphill battle.

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