We recently ordered some new business cards. Business cards are one of those staple items needed when meeting people in the wild. It ensures that each party can continue to interact at a later date. Pretty textbook stuff right? Sure. However, the way we do business, especially in the ‘Net biz is ever changing and evolving. It wasn’t long ago you’d hand each other your mobile phones and enter yourself into the other’s speed dial. Just recently I met some people at a conference and they simply asked me for my Twitter handle; they added me right on the spot via their iPhone.
Yet, the business card endures. It’s tangible, promotes your brand, and will someday endear you to someone when they fold it up and use it to level a wobbly table.
The new Collective Detective cards are smaller than the originals. We opted for the more tree-friendly and compact MiniCards from Moo — plus c’mon, they’re cool. On the back, in addition to the tried and true company logo, name, email address, phone number, http://www.collectivedetective.com URL, and personal site link, we’ve added something simple, yet useful at the bottom:
“@username on many online communities”
In my case: “@quixado on many online communities.”
The online versions of the small “us” that is CD exist and are reachable in many more places than just the Collective Detective site or a personal blog. Each community is another opportunity for outreach and engagement with the people met online and offline. Simply putting a link to a Twitter or LinkedIn profile is limiting; listing every social site one belongs to is excessive. So we thought this was a happy medium: provide the standard contact information and extend the invitation to find and reach us elsewhere.
A small and simple thing we’re trying and that we wanted to share with you. Something you might consider for your own cards in 2009.
Happy New Year from Collective Detective!
- byline:
- Josh Babetski
- December 31st, 2008
- categories:
- Collective Detective
So, we’ve been busy working on lots of things, but I’m spending the day getting caught up on a few paperwork and administrative to do items. One “to do” was to share with you some recent mail, both electronic and postal:
Traces of Hope
We received an email from one of the organizers of an interactive project called “Traces of Hope” by the British Red Cross. The experience is designed to help bring awareness to conflict zones around the world, in this case Uganda.
I wrote back with some suggestions and feedback based on things we discovered when working on campaigns focused on real world issues in the past as part of CD.org.
Check out the site and we wish the team the best in taking a different approach toward bringing attention to a noble cause.
Blindness
We also received a package at the Collective Detective Compound containing promotional materials for a viral marketing campaign around the movie Blindness. The package contained a card embossed with “i am blind” in text and also in braille, two pairs of wrap around shades (like you’d get after having your eyes dilated) with “iamblind.org” printed on them, and a self-addressed stamped envelope for a PO Box in Toluca Lake, CA.
It was very awesome of the campaign organizers to track us down (we’ve moved recently) and send this to us. We started CD.org in ‘02, so it’s nice that six years later, colleagues and friends still send us stuff as part of their campaigns.
Archives
The last notable piece out of the mailbag is from a member of the original CD.org:
It’s great to see CD back online and to read about your plans. It sounds very exciting.
I was wondering if the old forums are archived somewhere. So much wonderful brain power and hard work was reflected on it, and it serves as a history of that genre’s gaming community. It would be a shame if it was lost. If you have a chance, could you please drop me a link to it, that is if it still exists.
We archived that version of the site in ‘05 and it was available until late ‘06 I believe. We recently changed servers and did some massive updates and the site is archived, but no longer publicly available.
It’s amazing the longevity and interest in the community and what we all participated in, accomplished, and the experiences we took away. It’s a great feeling to have been a part of something like that. We appreciate it and thank everyone who ever stopped by.
At least once a year we get an email asking about buying the archives or an inquiry into putting it back online. Due to the privacy of the detectives, selling the archives is highly unlikely to happen. Putting up the old site up for even nostalgic reasons would involve massive upgrades to the application to get current with dependent software packages and to secure it against security vulnerabilities. Besides, the Internet is full of tools that are generations ahead of the 2002 custom-built ones on CD.org:
- Our Trail system, could now be set-up with free wiki software like pbwiki
- Our IRC network could be done over Twitter or any IM chat software
- There are plenty of feature-rich forums and comment systems out there — you can even set-up a WordPress meta-blog and use distributed comment systems like Disqus
Of course, having a web application which unified all of these tools was a great reason for the success of CD, but in today’s internet, distributed tools, information, and multiple communities are a better way to go. Get the info “up in the cloud” as it were.
What These Things Have in Common
The thing that loops all of the above together is that we wanted to thank everyone in Collective Detective’s past, from our most awesome supporters, to our critics, friends, lurkers, and customers. However, our future is in a much different direction than our past; we’re a different organization on a new mission. We’ll occasionally have something to say about past projects and we’re happy to dispense advice to anyone who wants to learn or hear about the things we’ve learned and experiences but we’re not focusing on the types of viral marketing promotions we’ve promoted, created, or consulted on in the past.
For the nostalgic, if you look closely you will be able find a lot of CD influences in Collectivus, our next project. We’ve also taken and applied a lot of the lessons learned from CD.org and beyond. We look forward to writing more chapters about our the projects ahead, now that we’ve closed the chapter on what came before.
- byline:
- Josh Babetski
- October 25th, 2008
- categories:
- Collective Detective
CollectiveDetective.org
Not everyone consumes information the same way. Some people like to surf web pages, some people still read these foldable devices made from trees called “newspapers,” some people have a chatty Aunt that seems to be in on everyone’s business, etc. For those on the more online side of information, we’ve got a few new ways to keep up with CD updates and news.
There’s always this site, which if you’re reading this, you’ve managed to find it at least once.
The Need for Feeds
We also have the Collective Detective RSS feed. Feel free to plug this link into your favorite feed reader (like Google Reader); you’ll know every time we make an update.
Follow Us on Twitter
Gearing up to share more news about Collectivus, we recently added Collectivus on Twitter. Twitter is a highly-addictive site for telling everyone what nonsensical thing you’re currently doing. It’ll be more interactive in the future; right now it too will let everyone know when there’s an update to this blog.
FriendFeed
We’ve also added both Collectivus and Collective Detective to FriendFeed, a great new social aggregation site. These too will alert you to updates on this blog and share information in other ways in the future.
Portable Comments
Lastly, we use a commenting system from a great start-up called Disqus. Disqus allows you to use a single login to comment across blog and track discussion updates across the ‘Net.
Information Sharing Made-to-Order
We’ll continue to add additional resources to keep tabs on all CD activity, even though things are pretty quiet now. We want you to be able to find, friend and follow us your way. In the future, when someone asks about “Collective Detective,” you’ll be able to say: “I’ve been following them for years!”
- byline:
- Josh Babetski
- August 14th, 2008
- categories:
- Collective Detective
Collectivus
