Our Blog

“A Quote from the Universe”

“Every creative person, faces resistance when they are trying to create something good…The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be.” - Donald Miller

This year’s Capitalize on Illinois conference will focus on the CIO/CMO relationship and how both chiefs can work together for the good of the business. Ray Conrad, Chief Executive Officer at Tahoe Partners; Amy Widicus, Managing Director at Tahoe Partners; and Tanya Mena, Director Web Channel at Health Care Services Corporation (HCSC) will be presenting a case study titled, “Real World Experiences: The Evolving CIO and CMO Relationship.” I had an opportunity to sit down with Ray to get a glimpse into his perspective on the subject.

Every person affects 1000 other people over the course of their lifetime. At i.c.stars, we believe that a leader can affect 10,000 people. But when we start to think about how to understand the kinds of leadership we need in all of our communities, we start with a very simple question:

Does Everyone Have the Same Opportunities?

This week, I interviewed one of our main staff members, Brandies Dunagan. She is behind the scenes most of the time. But looking at the embedded infographic at the bottom of this post, which details the future of marketing agencies (especially the technology aspects of agencies), I knew it was the perfect time to thrust her out into the forefront.

“A Quote from the Universe”

“Do not think that love in order to be genuine has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired.” - Mother Teresa

The title of this blog post is a play on my favorite Ghostbusters quote.

Over the last several months we sought to understand how our clients twitter activities were performing. The catch here is that we didn’t just want to look at the traffic that gets driven back to their site. We wanted to understand what kind of clicks were generated for sharing 3rd party content. Our technical team was able to build a service to accomplish this (for geeks: they “unpack” twitter links (t.co links) into their underlying bit.ly’s, and then ask bit.ly for a click count).

Nonprofits are missing out on an incredible funding opportunity.

Corporations spend considerably more on marketing than on donations to nonprofits. What if corporate marketing dollars were aligned with your nonprofit organization’s passion?

I had the opportunity to sit down with Lance K. Russell to gain his insight on the state of technology in the not for profit sector. Lance K. Russell is an entrepreneur who founded and grew PointBridge into one of the top Microsoft consultancies in the United States, with nearly 100 employees and $20MM in annual revenue. He successfully sold the business in early 2012 to Perficient (NASDAQ: PRFT). He also led all marketing, finance, HR, recruiting and administration functions, and previously oversaw all sales and business development, including the relationship with Microsoft. He is currently serving on the boards of both The Cara Program and Chicago Tech Academy High School.

Can you share some insight about what you’ve learned about Disqus?

I’m going to be blogging about Disqus a lot. I think it’s the long sought-after missing piece of what we used to call “web 2.0”. We’ve had commenting capabilities on blogs for years. We’ve had discussion forums for even longer. Let’s be honest we have never had meaningful b2b conversations on either of them.

What are the simple steps to write great content for a website. From your experience what are some of the best practices to follow to write great content for a new website or an existing website?

Last week we were in our Kissmetrics reporting system, and we noticed that someone came to the blog by Googling, “The First Follower is What Turns a Lone Nut…” That line is from a video on TED that I had blogged about a couple of months back. I wondered, “How in the world did that query end up in my blog?”

13 nerds walk into a bar.

No, this is not the beginning of an epic joke. It’s the story of how one event was able to bring like-minded people together.

I recently submitted my answer to a question on “LinkedIn Answers” posted by a user named Jim. The question is asking if we are at a point where video is replacing written content on websites. Please view the thread here