Sano Agency is co-hosting the following event with the Producers Guild Of America New Media Council East on April 29 (6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.) at the County Theater in Doylestown. Find out more and register at pganmcdoylestown.eventbrite.com.

New Media in the Middle (Between Philly and NYC): Bucks County as Producer Hot-Bed

A Look at Who is Making New Media Happen in the Creative Exburbia North of Philly/West of New York

Long a refuge of New York advertising/media and theater executives,
and lately a latter-day artist colony, historic Bucks County, PA is home to producers who work in both Philadelphia and New York. The area is also thriving with a new breed of interactive producer who does business in and around Bucks County. From social media to broadband to mobile, these entrepreneurs are calling on a large cadre of design, production, and advertising talent to create a new kind of media hub in the area.

This session includes panelists who will examine benefits and challenges of being located outside major markets and discuss how to find and retain top new media talent and companies in and around
Philadelphia and New York.

Panelists:
David Pearson, publisher, Pearson Publishing (www.dtownmag.com and www.54mag.com)

David is independent magazine publisher whose dtown and 54 magazines focus on the people and places of Doylestown and New Hope respectively. Magazines like those David produces are among the thought leaders in bringing new marketing solutions to a hyper-local audience.

Blaine Graboyes, partner, Sano Agency (www.sanoagency.com)

Founding partner of Sano Agency, Blaine Graboyes is an award-winning media architect and accomplished producer and executive producer in design, production and development for transmedia. He brings his astute creative concept development to Sano’s diverse, global client base.

Ben Mack (www.ecomincubator.com)

A Harleysville resident, Ben spent 18 years working in corporate communications, working as a Senior Vice President for three global ad agencies, he now prefers to work with small eCommerce business owners. He is probably best known in marketing circles for his 1998 EFFIE from the American Marketing Association for Yomega, a high performance yo-yo once listed by People magazine as one of the “Top Trends.”

Jeremy Zorn, Vice President of Product Development, myYearbook (www.myyearbook.com)

Jeremy is Vice President of Product Development for New Hope-based myYearbook, a social network built around meeting new people and one of the 25 most trafficked sites in the U.S. Jeremy oversees a broad spectrum of product lines, including myYearbook’s social games, virtual economy, and stream communication engine.

Moderator:

Bob Kellagher, Chief Operating Officer- Interactive Media, Calkins
Media (www.phillyburbs.com)

As chief operating officer – interactive media for Bucks County-based Calkins Media, Bob is responsible for developing interactive businesses across the company’s newspaper and television markets in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Florida, and Alabama. He has held executive positions with Gannett, Capital Cities/ABC, and Knight Ridder.

Special Keynote from Gordon Borrell of Borrell Associates
Topic: Developing Effective Online Media Strategies

www.borrellassociates.com
Borrell Associates has emerged as the premiere source of primary research on interactive ad spending. An industry titan, Gordon will provide an extremely well informed outlook on the current advertising market and opportunities for media producers.

Location:
The County Theater, Doylestown, PA
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A networking session will follow the panel, at the Vine and Fig Tree Bistro, across the street from the theater.

Sano Agency is proud to announce the launch of RSSible, a project born from our belief that both mobile devices and hyperlocal content will dominate digital media in the coming years.

RSSible.com is a mashup of the best local RSS and Twitter feeds accessible from your mobile device. We’ve designed RSSible to be viewable on most mobile browsers, but it looks great on smart phones. RSSible is NOT an app. You don’t have to buy it, download it, or update it. It just works when you need it!

So far, we’ve released a version for Philadelphia at philly.rssible.com to test the waters, so your feedback is much appreciated. Hopefully, more cities will be coming soon. Follow RSSible on Twitter to find out when your city is added.

Venkatesh Rao, a researcher in the Xerox Innovation Group, had a great post on Mashable about conceptual metaphors and web innovation. Rao makes a observation that I never noticed:

“Consider these terms: page, scroll, file, folder, trash can, bookmark, inbox, email, desktop, library, archive and index. They are all part of the document metaphor, a superset of the ‘desktop’ metaphor.”

Because we see everything on the Internet as a document, “our conceptualization of the web still does not truly reflect its non-sequential, branching texture, created by hyperlinks.” Rao argues that if we can avoid the document metaphor, we can be truly innovative.

It’s definitely food for thought for us at Sano as we look for ways to move beyond the traditional website in the digital space.

Does social media provide a positive return on investment? Of course, we believe the answer is yes. Need some proof? This video does a great job of providing just that! (Thanks to Socialnomics for yet another great video.)

Play Games, Make a Difference! Hope Arcade is your place to enjoy all of your favorite free and paid, online and downloadable games, with one very big difference: 70 percent of all net profits from the Hope Arcade will be donated to the March of Dimes organization.

There will be all the great games that you have come to love: Bejeweled, Crosswords, Diner Dash, Party Planner, Sims, Mahjong, Mysterious Worlds, Zenerchi with more added every week. And while you play – you will be helping the March of Dimes continue in its mission of giving every baby a healthy start.

Techcrunch.com recently blogged about an upcoming report by Sysomos, a social media monitoring and analytics firm, that a full 77 percent of Facebook fan pages have less than 1,000 fans.

We aren’t surprised. Too often companies set up Facebook pages and expect the fans to come to them. It’s never that easy. Building a page is a small part of the process. It’s important to then use your page as a vehicle to communicate to your fans and customers. If you’re not active on your page everyday, you might as well not have it.

From Fort Greene:

Where’s my pancakes, read Rodney Bradford’s Facebook page, in a message typed on Saturday, Oct. 17, at 11:49 a.m., from a computer in his father’s apartment in Harlem.

At the time, the sentence, written in indecipherable street slang, was just another navel-gazing, cryptic Facebook status update — words that were gobbledygook to anyone besides Mr. Bradford.

But when Mr. Bradford, a skinny, short 19-year-old resident of the Farragut Houses, was arrested the next day as a suspect in a robbery, the words took on a level of importance that no one in their wildest dreams — least of all Mr. Bradford — could have imagined. They became his alibi.

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LivWorld is the online home for the Liv dolls: Sophie, Katie, Alexis and Daniela. These teenage figures aimed at pre-teen girls ages 5 and up have trend-setting styles and cool features, like easy to change wigs, 14 points of articulation so you can create lots of great poses, and real glass-like eyes that add to their amazing look! Just like the average teenager, the Liv girls are fun, funny  BFFs who each have distinct personalities, likes and dislikes.

At www.livworld.com you can hang out with the girls online and visit their online diaries, virtual closets, photo albums, webisodes and more.  All Liv dolls and accessory packs come with a unique site access codes, which all unlock additional play features online.

This line of realistic dolls are projected to be one of the hottest toys for kids during the 2009 holiday season.

This sounds like a joke, but apparently “Columbia Pictures and director David Fincher have set its core cast for “The Social Network,” the Aaron Sorkin-scripted drama about the formation of Facebook.”

And it stars Justin Timberlake? Wow.

Well, anything Aaron Sorkin writes is worth checking out.

Building on the fervid demand created by its incredibly engaging trading card game and entertaining animated show, Chaotic Drinks is releasing nutrient-infused, natural health beverages in the fall of 2009. Fueled with natural energy from green tea extract, and loaded with vitamins, antioxidants and functional herbs, Chaotic Beverages offer kids a great tasting, healthier alternative drink to meet their hydration needs.

And, of course, there will be codes on the cans which will allow consumers to play the game online.