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How to avoid “No Strings Attached Budgets”

Have no money to invest in what your business or organization needs the most? This post is part of a productivity series aimed at helping you optimize your budget management.

If you want to save on a budget, you should have a very detailed budget first.

This may seem obvious, but surprisingly many companies don’t have a complete budget written down. Oftentimes, they just have certain budgets, but many of their expenses are typically left floating free without being thoughtfully tied to an actual plan. These sums of money are what I define as “No Strings Attached Budgets”. Continue reading “How to avoid “No Strings Attached Budgets””

QR Digital Assistant – Case Study

Logistia Technology Center

Logistia Technology Center (Finland)

Marketing Over Coffee Award Winner

Description

The Logistia Technology Center is the #1 Science Park in Finland.

Companies based at the Logistia Technology Center don’t always have personel 24/7 at their offices. Some of them have headquarters outside the Technology Center and use the office at Logistia only to receive prospects, leads and customers during certain hours or days per week. Generally, the large majority of the offices are unattended during lunch breaks, holidays or closing days. Continue reading “QR Digital Assistant – Case Study”

If Social Media were a drug…

This infographic was designed by Patrick Moberg. I had a look at his work over at patrickmoberg.com and liked it very much. I actually found out about his work last year and decided to save the infographic in my online life set on flickr together with other interesting images I’ve collected around the web. Continue reading “If Social Media were a drug…”

Strategic Online Marketing & Advertising

UPDATE:

Strategic Online Marketing

The Advertising Club of Toledo recently invited me as the guest speaker for their monthly luncheon program held at the Toledo Club in – you guessed it – Toledo, Ohio.

My presentation focused on strategic online advertising and marketing, but in order to make sure I addressed the interests and questions of people who would be attending the luncheon, I created a survey that people could fill out and submit beforehand so I could tailor a few points to their input. Continue reading “Strategic Online Marketing & Advertising”

Advertising Club of Toledo – Luncheon Program

On November 16th, I’ll be speaking at the Advertising Club of Toledo‘s monthly luncheon program in Toledo, Ohio (U.S.A.). The general theme of my talk will be about strategic online advertising and marketing.

As I finish to prepare my presentation, I would like to know what AdClub members are most interested in learning about, their professional background, and their level of experience in the “digital space”, so that I can tailor a few points of my presentation to their interests and experiences.

For example, would AdClub members like to know more about how to use social media within their advertising/marketing strategies? About the importance of creating relevant content as part of a digital strategy? Or perhaps about any campaigns with a positive ROI where new tactics made the difference?

Those are just a couple of examples to get the juices flowing, but please go ahead and fill out the following form and I will incorporate your interests into my final presentation.

You can also feel free to email me at andrea@itive.net or @/DM me on Twitter – @vascellari

And just a friendly remember that registration for the luncheon must be made by Monday, November 14th.

Thanks for your input and I look forward to meeting and speaking with you on November 16th!
I’d like to thank Joe & Nick from UlrichPinciotti Design Group for sponsoring my presentation.

Andrea

The Final Stretch

Almost there! My team and I have been busy putting our blood, sweat and tears into the restructuring and upcoming launch of our new “digital brain” at itive.net. We’re almost ready to go, but have a few more details to wrap up. In the meantime, I encourage you to head over to the site and take a sneak peek at our new look. While you’re there:

  • you can check out our latest video
  • and sign up for our newsletter

so you’ll be in the loop when the site is back up and running 100% :). Of course, I always appreciate your feedback so if you’d like, go ahead and let me know what you think of the new style!

Andrea

itive.net - Digital Creative Agency

It’s About Us and Balance.

Wedding (Italy)

Our economic system is collapsing. This “recession” is just a joke. A recession? A recession from what? From this purposeless system we created?

This is just the tip of the iceberg and things are about to get worse.

Admit it, ignore it. We are all well aware of how much we pushed the boundaries and how much this going to cost us.
You can argue about a whole lot of things, but there’s just one and only truth. Balance.

You can try to change, move and push every single law that governs the natural world we are living in as much as you want, but guess what…it will all go back to a perfect point of balance.

We pushed. We pushed too much and even worse we “created” on top of these absurd and unsustainable abstract systems that we think “can” live in fictional bubbles. One of the many examples? This senseless monetary system.

Where are we going people? This, all this, is just ri-di-cu-lous.
Am I against money? Well… a currency system can be a good thing if it’s managed the right way, if you know what I mean.

You might think that I’m crazy, but actually I believe that I’ve never been more concrete in my entire life and the more time goes by the more I feel like we all just missed the damn point.

It’s not about the money, it’s about us. Us.

Anyway, if this rings any bells or moves something inside of you, drop a comment and I’ll be happy to talk more about this in future posts…this indeed if you are not trapped in a pointless “social-freaking-media” bubble that stops you or makes you lazy enough to not comment on this. Nothing against social media…I like it, but way too many people are missing the point on that, too.

I will just reply to comments here on my blog.

Andrea

Top 20 Social Media Influencers and Beyond…

Kristi Hines (@kikolani) published a nice list of “The 20 most influential people in social media” and Simon Kemp (@eskimon) did a good job in this thread reminding us all that since more than 80% of the world’s social media users live outside of the US it would be a good idea to add some other influential names beyond America’s shores to the list.

Brava Kristi and bravo Simon. So far so good.

Krishna De is an outstanding communicator and a long time digital-friend. She suggested that I could be considered as an influencer in Finland. First of all, I’d like to thank Krishna for mentioning me as an influencer. I tend to work with my “head down”, putting all the passion and commitment I have into everything I do in this industry. Ultimately, my greatest reward is to see a satisfied smile on the face of whoever I’m working with because what we did together meant something to them and made a difference. So, when someone points me out for any reason related to what I do, I feel honored.

Secondly, though, after reading the following comment I felt that I should probably clarify my position a bit and give out a little bit more information about what I do since I have been – and still am – very involved in the Finnish social media and technology space…

Jaana Nyström - Not wanting to promote myself but I'm the "Google+ envoy in Finland", according to the local Google Industry Manager... At least I'm diligent! :D

If you can’t see/load the picture above:

Jaana Nyström – +Krishna De New York in Finland now? 🙂 +Andrea Vascellari has nothing to do with Finland, I think? Must be an error this…

Not wanting to promote myself but I’m the “Google+ envoy in Finland”, according to the local Google Industry Manager… At least I’m diligent! 😀

For those of you who have been connected with me for a while now, you are probably aware that my company and I work on international projects, but for the sake of this thread on G+, here’s my reply which just focuses on some of the ways I’ve been “influential” in Finland.

Hi Everyone,

Hi Jaana,

Jaana I’ve been living and working in Finland since 2005 and I’ve been researching and studying the Finnish information society cluster since 2002.

In Finland, I’m currently running several projects for national and local governments, regional development, B2B, B2C, pharma and education. If you have a look at the people/connections we commonly share here on Google+ you’ll notice that I’m well-networked with the Finnish social media sphere 😉

I’m often a contributor to various international podcasts sharing my point of view from the Finnish perspective (but not only, since I have Italian-Canadian roots) specifically in the fields of PR, marketing and communications. In addition to that, since public speaking is part of what I do, I’ve been invited to speak at some of the largest conferences in Finland i.e. Mindtrek, ITK, etc. If you quickly browse through my Linkedin profile you’ll notice that I’ve been invited as an official blogger to many industry conferences, such as the LeWeb, Web 2.0 Expo, etc. and I’ve also represented Finland at two editions of the Bloggers World Forum respectively in Bucharest and Vienna. So these are most likely some of the reasons why you’ll find a fairly large group of people worldwide referring to me when they think of Finland – it’s the same for me when I think of Ireland and 2 names immediately come to mind Krishna De (@krishnade) and Bernie Goldbach (@topgold).

On the other hand, leading an international digital strategy agency requires me to travel quite often, but my home is currently in Finland. My team and I work across 4 continents and we recently opened a new office in New York (NYC) so the information you see on my Twitter profile refers to that. I hope this explains and clarifies everything.

Andrea @vascellari

– Good to meet you, Jaana. Andrea

Just a Few Care

Project after project, I realize that it is a small (too small) number of people who actually put their heart & soul into what they do.
The large majority doesn’t care. They do something because they have to or because they kind of like it enough to keep doing it until they get bored and drop it.

The only truth is that many people are not 100% in love with what they do.

So my suggestion is: Quit right now and do something you love more than anything else, otherwise your lack of commitment will just keep causing never ending problems for the people who work with you. Period.

Do you have any thoughts to share? As usual, you are more than welcome.

Andrea