Spice Rack - Paprika Blog

Creative, Fresno - Video interview from Dead in 60 Years

James — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Category: Around Town | Tags: alisa creative fresno deadin60 video

The guys from Dead in 60 Years came to Creative Fresno's February Blender to meet "fellow creative types." One of those creatives happened to be Alisa.

Posted Friday, February 11, 2011

James Collier is chief strategist for Paprika Studios, exploring ways to utilize emerging technologies. He writes about community, social media, and random observations.

A recap of how the community came together in 2010

James — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 21:53:26 +0000

Category: Year in Review! | Tags: fighting hunger frebby awards fresno google fiber yayfresno

I'm driving back to Fresno from a Christmas in Louisiana, catching up on local blogs. It's that time of year when everyone looks back at the last 12 months, outlining highlights and memorable moments. One post I find particular interesting is the Beehive's 2010 Rewind: Favorite controversy?.

Thinking through many of "controversies" that I've ~~egged on~~ witnessed this year, I am reminded of all the times that our community came together for a cause. This was the year that Fresno rallied. A few examples:

I want my Google Fiber
Remember the Google Fiber for Fresno campaign? It started as a grassroots effort; after only a few weeks more than 11,000 Fresnans spoke in one voice saying, "We want our Google Fiber." The creatives that formalized messaging for the effort later received a Frebby Award for their work.
#YayFresno
If you're not on Twitter, you missed this one, but earlier this year a group of twenty-to-thirty-somethings with a shared antipathy for Fresno created a Twitter account to mock the community. I'll admit: it was funny, at first. Then it became obnoxious, and quickly moved to absurd, picking on individuals. In response, a group of tweeters (myself included) began grouping pro-Fresno messages with the "yayfresno" hashtag, which is still being used—in fact, you can now buy a #YAYFRESNO button at Twee Boutique. The parody account was eventually deleted.
Fighting Hunger, one "like" at a time
Walmart's "competition" for $1,000,000 to feed families in need has inspired tens of thousands of Fresnans to take a very simple action: a click or a comment on Facebook. From the start, Fresno has taken a lead position in the tally of supporters, and no matter the outcome at the end of today, the campaign has proven that we have an active online community. I hope that we can continue to bring attention to the food needs of our region long into the new year.

Admittedly, I've been tied to each of these, so I'll call this a personal list. What did I miss? How else has the community rallied this year?

Posted Friday, December 31, 2010

James Collier is chief strategist for Paprika Studios, exploring ways to utilize emerging technologies. He writes about community, social media, and random observations.

Twitter for Small Businesses - CBS 47 Special Report

James — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Category: Social Media | Tags: cbs 47 small business social media Twitter

Several weeks ago CBS 47 interviewed several local businesses to explore how Twitter can be used to benefit small businesses; the "special report" aired on Monday, and is embedded below. Interviewees include Cafe Corazon, Imad Naffa (who we now acknowledge as "Twitter King") and our own Alisa Manjarrez.

From the story:

In this tough economy, some businesses are turning to social media to help boost their bottom line. In fact, here in the Valley some are using twitter not only make new friends but to grow their business at the same time.

» Read the full story over at CB747.tv

Posted Thursday, November 18, 2010

James Collier is chief strategist for Paprika Studios, exploring ways to utilize emerging technologies. He writes about community, social media, and random observations.

Summary of posts and information for the 2010 Frebby Awards

James — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 20:17:56 +0000

Category: Frebby Awards | Tags: frebbys video

Today's the big day.

The Frebby Awards are going down tonight, September 23, 2010 at The Downtown Club.

If you're still wondering, "What's the big deal? Should I go to this thing?" don't take our word for it. Here's a list of people who have staked personal reputation to tell you how awesome this is going to be:

Alex Tavlian, The Daily Dues - Gearing up for the Frebby Awards
Zara Arboleda, CBS 47 - Word of the Day: "Frebby!"
Portnoy Media Group - What the Frebby?
Mike Oz, The Fresno Bee - Nominate your local web faves for a Frebby
The Business Journal - Fresno web awards still seeking nominations
Natali Carrera, The Thinking Blonde - Fresno Friday: The Frebbys!
Alex Tavlian, The Daily Dues - The Daily Dues Show: The Fast and the Frebbylicious
Jenny Toste, CBS 47 - Frebbys- These are the FUN people to party with...!
Alisa Manjarrez (okay, she's biased) - Do the "Frebby"
Bethan Clough, The Fresno Bee - Frebby awards debut in Fresno
Mike Scott, CBS 47 - Ready for the Frebbys?

Did we miss anyone? Well, you get the point.

To help set the mood, we're catching up on two Frebby Faces videos. Enjoy.

This first one features copy writer extraordinaire Conlan Spangler. It's kinda funny...if you know him.

This next one is a bit more serious. Throughout this series, we've featured various people who work specifically on the web. Multi Marketing Corp is an award-winning agency that recognizes the importance of collaboration with firms who live and breath the best online practices. These are the types of firms that make the Fresno region even stronger - utilizing local expertise for local, national, and international clients.

Posted Thursday, September 23, 2010

James Collier is chief strategist for Paprika Studios, exploring ways to utilize emerging technologies. He writes about community, social media, and random observations.

Frebby Faces: Fresno Grizzlies

James — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 23:49:22 +0000

Category: Frebby Awards | Tags: frebby fridays fresno grizzlies videos

It's Friday. It's almost 5:00. So, here's a video featuring the marketing team from the Fresno Grizzlies. (It kind of looks like we can't hold the camera steady, but we blame the wind.)

These guys are incredibly creative, and have helped to make the local web entertaining. See below for one example: a video from Parker da Bear's I Hate the Offseason series. You may also recall a little event not too long ago called The Great Fresno Tweetup (2).

Posted Friday, September 10, 2010

James Collier is chief strategist for Paprika Studios, exploring ways to utilize emerging technologies. He writes about community, social media, and random observations.

Frebby Faces: Irma Olguin

James — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 22:42:51 +0000

Category: Frebby Awards | Tags:

Up next in the Frebby Faces series: Irma Olguin of Geekwise. You may know her as Irms.

Irma and the folks over at the Central Valley Business Incubator have been working to showcase the geeks in town—the coders that lock themselves away, building, programming, innovating. Here, Irma talks about a web and mobile application showcase she helped to organize—you know, 59 Days of Code.

(Side note: this was shot on an iPhone. Booyah!)

Posted Friday, August 27, 2010

James Collier is chief strategist for Paprika Studios, exploring ways to utilize emerging technologies. He writes about community, social media, and random observations.

Hundred10 kicks off a series of videos for the upcoming Frebby Awards

James — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 22:42:38 +0000

Category: Frebby Awards | Tags:

It's no surprise that we're fond of the team over at Hundred10 Design—they opened up ~~a closet~~ office space for us, after all, and have been a partner on many projects, including TasteFresno. Layne and John have been a sounding board for Frebby-related ideas since those ideas started flowing, and they set a high bar for design (see here for examples).

You can meet the boys (and Steph) in the video below. They talk about bacon.

We have a few more of these in the works, featuring local web professionals, so stay tuned. Nomination and registration details are coming...we promise!

Posted Tuesday, August 24, 2010

James Collier is chief strategist for Paprika Studios, exploring ways to utilize emerging technologies. He writes about community, social media, and random observations.

Initial details about the inaugural Frebby Awards

James — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 23:36:36 +0000

Category: Paprika Projects | Tags: events frebby awards

Fresno smells great (metaphorically speaking).¹

(Awkward pause.)

There's energy downtown (we're here, after all). A new crop of creatives has taken root (ag reference FTW!), and is doing cool stuff. Let's face it: this town is starting to smell pretty darn good.

Earlier this summer, we celebrated geeky-ness with 59 Days of Code. And there have been a few knowledge-work-inspired awards presentations sprinkled throughout the community, but none (to date) that focus on the web. Since that's our playground, we at Paprika Studios have been busy organizing an annual event to celebrate the best of the web, locally. It's called the Frebby Awards.

The Frebbys (it's okay to call them that) are a recognition of individuals, businesses and organizations utilizing the web in innovative, effective ways. The inaugural event will take place next month on September 23—save the date!

Here's the thing: we need you to tell us who's doing what well, and why. (If that doesn't make sense, check out the categories below. We've focused them on what people do online.)

We'll be launching the full Frebbys site soon, and you'll be able to nominate then. For now, we're asking you to start thinking, and to let us know if you have questions or comments. Oh, one last thing: If you feel particularly fond of a specific category and want to sponsor it for $150, now is your chance! Email Alisa for further information. Other partnership ideas are welcome, as well.

Footnotes
¹ This opening sentence was brought to you by Conlan. He's a copywriter, and he encourages you to pay him to write things for you.

Frebby Awards - Categories

The following categories outline actions—things that can be done using the web. Nominations will tell a story of individuals, teams and creative firms who have set a standard for providing services that enable others to do one of the following:

Inspiring (Inspiration)
The web allows for sharing, and it's often used to gather ideas. It can also be used to tug on the heartstrings, and appeal to our emotions. This award highlights a person or business that inspires others—through a website, or portfolio, or perhaps through the content they publish.
Selling (Commerce)
Businesses need to sell, whether they provide a product, service, or combination of the two. This award acknowledges those who've either found creative ways to use the web in order to loosen customers' wallets, or who have followed best practices and realized exceptional results.
Communicating (Communication)
The web is a communication channel—we're communicating every time we publish, or email, or tweet, or google. This award acknowledges a person, organization or business that does this extremely well. Maybe their blog tells a unique story. Or their email campaigns keep you connected to a product. Or…well, they know how to talk.
Eliciting action (Action)
Having a web presence is great, but a test of influence is action. This award highlights an organization or individual that is really good at getting people to do something—attend an event or support a cause, for example.
Connecting (Connection)
Many of us use the web to connect to others, but often that's facilitated by a product—or website—that provides the introduction. This award celebrates community, and highlights a person or business that uses the web to bring others together.
Educating and informing (Informational)
If you're online regularly, you've likely looked for sources of news and information to keep you up to speed on current affairs (defined loosely). This award acknowledges that source of information—an individual or organization that provides something new and noteworthy, using the web.

Sometimes, we don't know how something is used, we just know we like it. For that reason, we've also created an award for a Frebby Favorite.

Questions?

Leave them in the comments, and we'll make sure the answers are clear when the full Frebbys site launches!

Posted Friday, August 13, 2010

James Collier is chief strategist for Paprika Studios, exploring ways to utilize emerging technologies. He writes about community, social media, and random observations.

Managing your social graph - getting around the office firewall

James — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 21:09:41 +0000

Category: Social Media | Tags: access corporate use facebook policy Twitter

I should probably keep this for my personal blog, but I just learned of another local company blocking access to social media sites, and that always gets me a little worked up.

I get that Twitter, Facebook and similar sites can be a distraction, and I've fallen victim to mindless clicking myself, but I'm not convinced that productivity increases when people are chained to a desk and isolated from the things that naturally draw their attention.

Where there's a will...

If you're sitting at the office, distracted by a lack of access to Facebook (or just about any site, for that matter), have no fear. The web is smarter than your IT department.

When you visit a website, the request is coming from your computer (yes, I know you know that). But if you call me and ask me to pull up the same site, the request is now coming from my computer. So if a site is blocked at the office, it's time to phone a friend.

Google, that is. (Please don't call me to do this.)

...there's a way

Google has this handy tool called Google Translate, which pulls up a website and allows you to manipulate its language. If you ask Google to translate a site, you're not visiting that site, you're still visiting Google.

Here's the trick: On the Google Translate homepage, type in your destination, and set the language FROM Spanish TO English. The page that's returned may be grayed out, with a Google header at the top, but clicking in the main window should remove this. You should be able to browse freely from here—if you look at the URL of the page, though, you'll see that you're still just googling.

Go ahead, give it a try.

PS: I learned this trick from a high schooler, whose school blocked YouTube from library computers.

Posted Thursday, July 29, 2010

James Collier is chief strategist for Paprika Studios, exploring ways to utilize emerging technologies. He writes about community, social media, and random observations.

New office for Paprika Studios

James — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 05:25:08 +0000

Category: News & Announcements | Tags: business downtown excitement! moving

It's official: Paprika Studios is now a downtown business. Friday, I stocked up on new furniture from IKEA, and I completed the move from Fig Garden Village to our new space at Iron Bird Lofts over the weekend.

Having our own office is quite exciting, but it's bittersweet, as it means leaving the crew at Hundred10—we've shared space in their office since April of 2009. We'll miss the camaraderie, though we plan to continue collaborating.

In setting up the studio, we kind of knew what we wanted, but our talents are focused on the web and communication, so to help define the space we enlisted the help from our friends and now-nearby-neighbors over at Spacio Design. Renderings and a nifty fly-through are below.

So far, we've stuck to the plan, with the exception of paint colors; we're also missing a conference table, but that can come later. If you're near the cafe (next door) this week, stop by, and see for yourself!

I told you it was nifty!

A view from the front door. Come on on!

The walls won't be this dark, but you get the idea.

The over-head view. Yes, I really do want a red couch.

Posted Sunday, July 18, 2010

James Collier is chief strategist for Paprika Studios, exploring ways to utilize emerging technologies. He writes about community, social media, and random observations.