Ralph Whitbeck - Blog - BrandLogic

Why did Sci Fi choose the name SyFy?

Ralph Whitbeck — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:29:49 GMT

If you know me then you know that I am huge fan of the Sci Fi Channel, mainly for Battlestar Galactica. But three months ago they announced a rebranding and earlier this week they executed the name change.

Yesteday, I wrote about why they choose to rebrand on BrandLogic Dialogue:

CNN.com quotes Dave Howe, the president of Syfy, on the reasons why the channel needed the rebranding:

“We needed a unique and distinct brand name that we can own for the future, that works in the multiplatform, on-demand world,” he said, adding that “Sci Fi” isn’t a brand name, it’s “a genre name.”

“Syfy,” he said, “gives us a unique brand name.

“The last thing we want to do is alienate our core audience,” he added. With the new name, shows such as “Galactica” can be exposed to a wider audience, one not scared away by all that “Sci Fi” connotes (”space and aliens and the future,” in Howe’s words).

Howe continues on how the name was chosen:

“This was a two-year exercise,” he said. The new name, he says, needed to be usable all over the world in Internet URLs, brand extensions and merchandising, and “the only way to do that is to create an empty name.

“We explored them all,” he said. “We wanted a word that was uniquely ours,” while not straying too far from the sound of “Sci Fi.”

The post has spurred a good discussion on people's opinions of the name change even spurring a separate blog article from the Technology Viewer blog. What are your thoughts on the name change?

My BarCamp Buffalo Slides - Intro to jQuery

Ralph Whitbeck — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 20:39:45 GMT

Update:

Video of my presentation.

My BarCamp Buffalo Presentation - Intro to jQuery from Ralph Whitbeck on Vimeo.

Presentation to BarCamp Buffalo on 3/3/09. My slides can be found http://ralphwhitbeck.com/2009/03/03/MyBarCampBuffaloSlidesIntroToJQuery.aspx

Evolution of Brand Management (video)

Ralph Whitbeck — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 03:01:47 GMT

Great viral video on the dramatic shift in the marketing reality has been floating around on twitter the last few days. Video was developed by a German Ad Agency named Scholz & Friends.

This video highlights how important it is for your company to convey your brand seamlessly and in one voice. In this downmarket, now is the best time to invest in strengthening your brand and reinforcing the same voice from your employees. The services of BrandLogic along with our BrandEnsemble product will help you build your brand and effectively communicate to your employees the correct way to position your brand to your target market.

Contact BrandLogic today to learn more.

Finally Launched www.stjohns.edu

Ralph Whitbeck — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 03:42:56 GMT

Yesterday, we launched the project I've been working on since April. We've redesigned and upgraded St. John's Universities web site http://www.stjohns.edu

I sent out a note to my fellow team members today thanking them for a job well done I felt like sharing that note.

Team,

I just wanted to say thank you to everyone that put in long hours and maximum effort to see st. john's redesign to go live. It was a long and crater filled road. This is by far one of the biggest and longest projects I have ever worked on and it has provided me with a lot of new knowledge, skills and experience.

Some major accomplishments we were able to push through:

Went live with 4 sites. http://www.stjohns.edu, http://digest.stjohns.edu, we upgraded their Intranet to the latest ASP.NET framework and ported over and upgraded what is left of their old RedStormSports.com site that we are hosting as an archive.

4GB of data or 40,000 content pages had to be ported and or massaged into the new database schema. News and Events had to be striped out of EDU, Intranet and Digest and merged into one database.

10GB of images, PDF's and Video's had to be brought over and inserted into the 40,000 pages with their new designs.

Set-up 3 physical servers with 10 virtual machines running 4 web servers, 2 file servers, 2 database servers, domain controller and a Web Trends server. These were coordinated with IT, set-up, tested, stressed and verified to work before we put our code on and after.

The set-up of 25 themes (for the various colleges, schools and departments) that wanted to have their own unique presence in the site.

The set-up of 683 templates which are variations of 64 unique templates which display Home pages, landing pages, content, photo gallery, etc. in the www.stjohns.edu site alone. I haven't even done a count for the new News Engine Portal (digest).

3 designers all working together and in parallel to provide a fresh look and feel for every department, school and college.

5 developers working together to port, build, upgrade and maintain the code to make Brand Ensemble better for not only St. John's but for our future clients. Already [redacted], [redacted] and [redacted] are seeing some of these benefits.

There are many accomplishments, too many to name or remember in one sitting. But the most important accomplishment is that we came together as a team:

Larry, Anne-Marie, Katje: Thanks for being there for support and taking the brunt of the clients calls. I am thankful to have you in-between the client and the rest of the team.

Cheryl, Mary, Susan: Thanks for coming up with a fresh web 2.0 look and feel and something I am proud to show others and tell them I helped build. I hope the development team was able to bring your designs to light.

Ernie, Travis, Ravi, Anna: Ernie, Travis you guys were always there when I needed extra hands. You were willing to jump in and help out when needed even pulling a couple of all nighters with me and coming in on weekends. I am lucky to work with two talented programmers that I can go to when I am stuck on a problem with the knowledge that one of you will know the answer and if not will help me figure it out. You guys push me to be a better programmer.

Ravi, you really impressed me with your dedication and your SQL knowledge. Being able to assign you the data porting script and having to minimally oversee you was a great burden off my shoulders. You put in more off hour time then anyone on the team to get the project accomplished. I am still impressed at what you were able to accomplish.

Anna, you came into the project at just the right time. Having you work with us as an intern has been very refreshing. Your ability to pick this project up quickly and run with it was hugely beneficial. I am amazed at how dedicated you are at constantly nagging me for the next thing to work on and your ability to take what you were assigned and complete it with high quality and completeness. You are a huge asset to the team and I hope we are able to keep you around well after your co-op has ended.

Chuck, Brad: Chuck I think I've learned the most by working with you. You are very detailed oriented and thorough. I've learned many new skills in working on setting up the servers. I feel more experienced in working with SQL Server 2005 especially. I also have a new appreciation for Virtual Environments that we've begun to implement into our development environment. You are also a very dedicated person being available at all hours of the day and night.

Brad, you've helped me more then you know. You have this uncanny ability to keep everyone sane. You are very supportive and willing to jump in and get your hands dirty and help the team any way you can. This is very much appreciative and was in no way overlooked by your team members.

In the end this project wasn't perfect. There are many areas that could use reflection upon to improve the process going forward. We've already started this reflection by starting the discussion of standardizing the design specs that are created. Even though we've gone live the job isn't done yet as we need to polish and maintain.

Again, thank you all for your hard work and effort from one team member to the team.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

Ralph Whitbeck — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 02:38:56 GMT

I've had my head down and focused on this project at work since April/May. I've been working long hours and most weekends throughout the summer. This project has had it's ups and downs.

For instance, I am managing three other programmers right now who are all smarter then me and can focus on one thing at a time and crank out great code. I am also coordinating with two other designers to put together the final details that are needed in the design and to be able to deliver photoshop templates for the client to use to make content assets in the future. Finally, I am working with a outside vendor to coordinate the set up of the hardware the virtual server environment and the installed code base and database for the four sites we are migrating. Again, people that are way smarter then I to handle these tasks are making these taks more manageable.

That is the ups. The downs? Well I hit burn out back in July. I am on auto-pilot here. It's taking me a little longer to make decisions for people and don't even get me started on how long it takes me to program a simple template or control. Again, one of the major ups is that I have three great programmers that can focus. Right now my mind is mush.

I feel that the project is coming together nicely. We need to have the programming part done by October 1st and have it installed on the hardware then. Right now it's worrying about the details, testing the data port from the old schema and 2000 database to the new schema and the 2005 database, again another smart programmer worked part-time throughout the summer to build us the most complex SQL package I every seen to be able to port the data to our new database.

As we are getting towards the end I keep thinking about the vacation time I haven't used yet. I can't wait to be able to take them. I am also excited to start another project. It's been so long since I last worked on another project it'll be nice.

Any tips on how to survive long projects that are actually short on deadline deliverables? What about burn-out? Any tips for pushing through till a vacation can be had?

Book Review: "Smart & Gets Things Done" by Joel Spolsky

Ralph Whitbeck — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 04:03:37 GMT

I went into Borders the other night to look at books that I wanted to buy. I wasn't actually going to buy them but just wanted to see what books looked good and would pick them up on Amazon. Cause let's face it Borders charges full price for it's books Amazon doesn't.

Anyways, I ran across a book by Joel Spolsky called "Smart & Get Things Done". Now I know of Joel from the Stackoverflow podcast he is doing with Jeff Atwood. He is the founder of Fog Creek Software that makes the project management software FogBugz. Before that he worked for Microsoft and Juno Online Services. He was even a paratrooper in the Israeli Defense Forces (an interesting fact that I learned from the book).

The book is pretty small and short. It's 182 pages and I was able to read it cover-to-cover in a few hours in one sitting. This book is aimed at those who hire technical talent to their organization (aka Programmers). This affects me as I have recently been tasked with hiring co-ops for 6 month positions at BrandLogic. I have hired three people so far but I feel that I could learn quite a bit in the interview and selection process. I actually purchased the book from Borders that day because it was less the $20 ($16.99 at Borders, $11.55 at Amazon) and because I found it to be an easy read and it would be a great help to me going forward. I think this book would also be great to programmers who are about to head into the job market. This is a great insight into what hiring managers are looking for.

Joel goes through the whole gamut in hiring a developer. He starts out by outlining how one measures a great developer, defines where to find great developers, to what makes a developer happy. He then goes through the selection process with how to sort through the resumes to weeding out candidates with a phone interview. He gets into the details of the interview once you have a candidate that has passed through the selection process before it. Finally, Joel takes through the hiring process and talks briefly on how to fix suboptimal teams.

I felt that the book was direct and outlined the issues with hiring developers and talked about how the great developers are not on the market. Advertising for jobs in traditional job boards (Monster.com, Craigslist, etc.) is only going to bring out the desperate job seekers the great developers are going to seek out the exact job that they want. Getting resumes from the traditional methods is only going to bring in a lot of noise and lot of resumes that just don't fit.

So where do you find great developers? Joel states three ways to finding great developers: 1. Go to the mountain- Go to conferences where great developers will hang out and start conversations. WWDC for Apple Devs, PDC for Microsoft Devs, etc. Go to conferences where early adopters might hang out (Ruby on Rails, etc) and talk to them. 2. Internships - This is the method that BrandLogic employs. Being that 100% of our office is RIT graduates we also feel our duty to help fellow RIT students with achieving their credits to graduate. Anyways Joel's philosophy is that if you can bring in a student one, two years before they graduate and have them working in a summer internship it's like 6 months of an interview at the end of which you can thank them for their work and send them on their way or give them a offer in which you know exactly how they are going to work for you without anymore risk. And Finally the third way is to Build your own Community. Basically if you start a blog or are known to people in the blogosphere and have a community following then when it comes down to needing to fill a position and you post a comment on your blog about that you will seem to get a higher quality selection of resumes to pick from. Of course this is all easier said then done. The how to build a community and being able to attract people is all hit or miss and Joel alludes to that. It's not the easiest thing to do but if you can build a community it's a great resource to draw from.

Joel tries to define a developer in terms of how to make them happy and egger to work and thus more productive or be hired. He stats each developer needs his own private office. This will make them more productive. He goes into the reasons behind all of this. One point is that developers seem to get into a zone when developing and a private office will help them stay in that zone longer. Additionally he goes into the physical office, big monitors, Areon chairs, etc. But the important part and the piece I think we've really tried hard to encompass at BrandLogic is that the personality of developers has to be inline with everyone else. You can't hire jerks and think that people are going to be happy to work with jerks, even though he states Microsoft does just that. Ha!

Sorting out the resumes. Joel lays out his criteria for sorting out the good from the bad. Don't hire someone based on a resume but eliminate people based on their resume. Some criteria to look for Passion (look for evidence for passion to work with computers), Pickiness (look at their resume for glaring errors), English (can they communicate effectively in their resume, if not probably aren't going to communicate effectively in a team), Brains (high GPA or some other high honors [I disagree with this as it relates to our selection process at BrandLogic]), Selectivity (Has the applicant been though another selection process meaning did he make it into a school that only accepts 30% of it's applicants or something similar [again at BrandLogic we favor RIT and usually only advertise at RIT that this isn't an issue for us]), Hard-Core (ability to work in hard-core languages like Assembler etc. is seen as being better then working with Java or PHP [again I don't entirely agree with this statement, we look for someone with web programming experience so hard-core languages don't usually add to the experience desired for our needs]) and finally diversity (ability for new people to bring new ideas and ways of thinking to the table [I whole-heartily agree with this statement]).

After you've sorted through the resumes you need to weed through the resumes with a phone interview. This will save money as you can probably get eliminate many people by just talking to them. One example Joel gives is that after ten minutes he felt he couldn't stand listening to a candidate any longer. He was able to weed that person out and saved money on not having to bring him out. The benefits to a phone interview is that you can listen to what someone is saying without visual prejudices getting in the way.

The Interview. Joel works in NYC so for him he uses the city to entice his potential hires or if they don't work out in the interview at least use that experience to still leave an impression on that person. When they go home and tell their friends how awesome the place was and how awesome the interview was, their friends will apply next summer for that chance for the trip. This all goes back to how to find great developers. By using your interview as a way to get known virally it's another way to draw them in.

The interview needs to be a conversation and needs to have the applicant writing some kind of code. It doesn't matter what language the code is in or if it's right or wrong the purpose is to get the person talking to find out how they think, how are they going to solve a problem. If they make mistakes see if they catch them, ask them "Are you happy with this code?" and see if they catch their mistake. Even if they don't make a mistake it'll be great to see if they are confident to say yes it's perfect when you ask them if they are happy with their code. Don't dwell on the technicalities you should base your decision on whether the person is 1. smart and 2. can get things done.

Joel's company has many developers interview a person and usually has them come back with a HIRE or NO HIRE verdict within 15 minutes of the interview. One person usually can't decide their fate but once a certain number of people come back with NO HIRE the interview is over and they won't be hired.

The rest of the book goes into how to hire someone and how to deal with a team that might be poisoning the rest of the team. I'll leave those chapters to you to read. I think the dealing with a team chapter is just a brief insight into management but Joel gives his recommendation into other books you can pick up to help with project/team management.

I really enjoyed this book. It was easy to read and was clear and to the point. I have many ideas on how I can update and tweak our interview process at BrandLogic for future hires.

Help support this blog by purchasing this book from my Amazon link.

St. John's Signage Case study

Ralph Whitbeck — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 06:24:27 GMT

In my late night Google searching tonight I found a case study from ASI-Modulex the sign makers that we worked with a few years ago when we rebranded St. John's Universities interior and exterior wayfinding signs around campus.

"In partnership with BrandLogic, hundreds of directional decision points were identified across the two campuses then analyzed to create a wayfinding solution that improved the efficiency of the campus navigation."

I can only imagine the organization and planning that was needed to figure out the need, requirements and the plan to replace every single sign on campus. If you walk onto the campus you'll see what a momentous task this was.

“ASI-Modulex worked successfully with BrandLogic to implement the new logo design and wayfinding analysis for St. John’s University.”
Wynn Medinger
CEO, Creative Director
BrandLogic

In the end I think I only helped out by creating a Word template that was used by the Staff and Faculty to create their name plate for a slide in sign next to their door. Meaning they would use the Word template to print their name and title and the template would control the placement and font treatment. I thought this was it at first but this is a more permanent sign. Next time I go up to St. John's (possibly next month) I'll see if I can spot one of those name plate signs.

You can see BrandLogic's case study of the signs here. The mention of the signs is on the last slide and is part of the overall rebranding that we provided.