I was reading the July edition of the Colorado Carbon Fund‘s newsletter this morning and they highlight an interview with One Tribe Creative‘s founder, Paul Jensen. While One Tribe Creative wasn’t a brand I recognize I was pleased to see a creative agency involved and supporting social ventures or socially conscious organizations. My parents raise me on the phrase “Community Service is the rent you pay for living” and I understand the large impact of a little volunteering.

In the interview, Mr Jensen highlights three “principles and communication strategies” that could benefit all organizations.

1. Do what you know is right.  This strategy provides a roadmap for interacting and navigating corporate business decisions while acknowledging that businesses and consumers are a community working together for the greater good.
2. Be honest and transparent.  No business is environmentally benign, thus communications should be more about being truthful and humble to help mitigate the impacts a customer’s business has upon the environment.
3. Tell stories.  Instead of publishing a list of product benefits, allow customers to tell stories about how your product and company benefited them. Jensen recommends stories about how a product was useful, what features customers felt they couldn’t live without, and what happened as a result of using a product.

What is it about for-profit companies that cause people to loose sight of these goals? Why do inappropriate water-cooler jokes about current affairs make it onto company social media accounts? Why is maintaining integrity even something that needs to be discussed?

A large difference between the socially responsible businesses and the run-of-the-mill businesses are the people. People who are involved in the community are consciously and socially aware of how their communication and actions affect others.

I think my group of friends and colleagues are socially aware. Personally I participate, volunteer and/or mentor in several local organizations that directly benefit the community.  Young Professionals International Network, Social Venture Partners, EarthCorps and Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Many of the new friends I’ve made have actually been through my participation in these organizations. By giving a little bit of our free time, we can contribute to organizations and the community in addressing the needs of the greater good.

In what ways do you reach out to your community? Who does your organization partner with? And if there isn’t a direct connection between your organization, employees and the community, what do you think would be interesting opportunities to give back?

One of my company’s business models includes, or is hinged on, custom work. We do custom websites, custom web applications, custom mobile applications, custom web design, custom hosting solutions, custom etc. Our real competitive advantage is for a price you can get exactly what you want. But therein is the problem: for a price.

The individuals, small and medium sized businesses, or non-nationally-targeted companies can’t afford a $50,000 internet marketing budget. (Even if there was some assurance of making that back within a quarter, money’s tight. As we’ve seen in previous difficult years marketing budgets are among first to be cut to save cash.) So do we need to lower our prices? Become faster? Ignore the aforementioned markets? One way or another, it seems like I’m forced to discount the value of the work we do to accommodate the spending ability of a prospect.

What if we didn’t re-invent the wheel every time we had a new project? As with any company it turns out things we’re best at, we’ve created with multiple clients or future deployments in mind. We’d said a year ago we wanted to start trying to leverage existing code and applications and I’d say, considering we have around a dozen SaaS deployments, estimation/quoting tools, enterprise level custom content management systems, tons of custom WordPress deployments, (you get the idea) – I’d say we’re there.

Wild Apricot is a membership-based software. Piryx is donation and fundraising software. OpenSocial is a networking platform. (More fun can be found at Programmable Web.)

If we’re planning on doing custom work or if a client needs a feature, why not leverage something that exists already that we didn’t author ourselves? Talk to me about advantages, disadvantages and really what your preference would be: all custom work, leveraging existing software and plug-ins or only using plug and play software to power online campaigns.

I understand there’s pride in making our own applications and plug-ins for third party open source software, but other competitors are making bank off of reusing and customizing open source platforms – and even if there are fees associated (which would get passed on to a client or covered in any of estimates anyway) it’s still good to take advantage of tools already in existence. Regardless, taking advantage of customizing standard open-source work (WordPress, RoR packages, etc) should allow anyone to still offer custom solutions at high value for a little-less cost. It’s a win for everyone right?

MySpace Developer’s Challenge Info

So this post is partly to inform you of said contest and that there’s a $10,000/category prize available.

Then I kept reading, forgot I was on MySpace, and was immediately angered by the faux-syntax and layout of the right column of the page.

Click and share in MyFrustration.MySpace.com