Monthly Archives: June 2011

Site-Member Profile: Treacy Information Services!

Year Established: 2002

Business/Organization Name: Treacy Information Services

Owner/Executive Director Name: Ann Treacy

Product/Service: Web site development, search engine optimization and social media strategy

Unique Features/Competitive Advantage:

We work primarily with small businesses on realistic online market plans that fit your budget and busy calendar

Contact Information:

Ann Treacy Treacy Information Services 1841 Fairmount Ave St Paul MN 55105 651-212-9107

http://www.treacyinfo.com/

atreacy@treacyinfo.com

Notes/Misc other:

Treacy Info has worked with a wide range of businesses including resorts, manufacturers, business service providers and nonprofits.

We provide training and mentoring to businesses that are interested in managing their online marketing.

We also provide full service online marketing services to businesses that prefer to outsource all aspects.

Treacy Info strives to bring balance to online marketing taking into consideration a business’s budget and goals as well as opportunities in new media.

Please sign up for our weekly email newsletter, which offers tips on free and low cost ways to make the most of the Internet.

{Subsequent note: This was a feature back in that period, my effort at that time to support small businesses around me and the community in general! Happy to see Ann is still active in multiple instances still today!}

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Fun Friday: Gay Pride!

Clarity Solutions celebrates Gay Pride for the wellbeing of our entire community.

We urge all citizens of Minnesota to vote NO on the marriage amendment in 2012, and to help organize the defeat of that amendment until then. The constitution is not about discriminating against groups of people. Our community is most well when all members of our community are well.

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Filed under Business, buy local, Community, Fun, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Uncategorized

Site-Member Profile: TigerOx Painting, LLC

Date Established: 2001.

Business/Organization Name: TigerOx Painting, LLC

Owner/Executive Director Name:

TigerOx is a partnership between four equal partners, Anders Christensen, Ceridwen Christensen, Rachel Taylor and Jeremy Wikre.

When we first formed our company, we were very much four individual contractors. Each one of us was involved in every area of the business, because that is how we were used to doing business for ourselves. It took us a long while to differentiate our responsibilities.

Anders, with his much broader experience in the industry, naturally is much more involved in the public interactions: meeting clients, doing estimates, etc. Jeremy does production management. Ceridwen moved away from production when she was having her children, and took over the marketing and estimating aspects at that point. Rachel is currently on maternity leave.

Product/Service:

TigerOx Painting, LLC, is a residential painting contractor, but saying we are painters doesn’t capture the full scope of our work. We do both interior and exterior painting. The function of exterior paint is not purely aesthetic. Paint also should behave as an unbroken skin protecting your house from the elements, especially from the intrusion of water. We never paint damaged or unprepared surfaces, and a large portion of any project we undertake is spent in preparation for painting, not in painting itself. For our interior projects, the same standards apply. We paint only after the plaster has been patched, the stains sealed, the peeling paint scraped away.

The members of TigerOx have long histories with historic Minneapolis houses, especially Anders. Anders has been interested in historic restoration and the history of building styles in Minneapolis since he bought a Victorian house in the 70s. Because of that long association, TigerOx can rehab old fashioned double-hung windows, refinish old woodwork, hang wallpaper, remove wallpaper. Not only can we do this, this is the work we enjoy.

Unique Features/Competitive Advantage:

Our unique features are part of our skills. We have broad skills and long experience with older homes. We are happy to take on odd, small or complex projects, projects that might otherwise require several different people. We have a number of regular customers who have us come in every couple of years and perform a punch list: repair a doorknob, repaint a closet, refinish three window sills. We are not just tinkerers though, and have successfully completed large painting projects, from painting the entire interior for a couple in St Paul, room by room, or painting an exterior in Minneapolis which included more than sixty traditional storm and sash windows.

TigerOx Painting is very aware that when we work on your house, it may be our work place, but it continues to be your private space. We earnestly endeavor to minimize the disruption of the painting process, from putting away tools nightly, to cleaning up paint chips and debris as we work. With the passage of new EPA standards for dealing with the preparation of areas with lead paint in them, this isn’t just good sense, this is now the law. Lead paint is present in any home built before 1978, and that means that almost all of the houses we work on have lead paint in them. We are are a lead-safe certified firm.

Contact Information:

Web site: www.tigeroxpainting.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/TigerOx-Painting/107581559263214?ref=ts

Phone: (612) 827-2361

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Filed under buy local, Community, Local, Minneapolis, Site-Members

Reddit Hits 1.2B Monthly Pageviews, More Than Doubles Its Engineering Staff (via TechCrunch)

Exciting!

Reddit Hits 1.2B Monthly Pageviews, More Than Doubles Its Engineering Staff Community news site Reddit, which at some point was running on one engineer, has almost tripled  its engineering staff today, with the addition of three new hires, Google's Logan Hanks, Oracle's Keith Mitchell and recent engineering graduate Brian Simpson. This brings the total number of developers on the team up to five. Reddit can use all the developer help that it can get, seeing as though unique monthly visits are up 37% since January, going … Read More

via TechCrunch

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Filed under Books & Publishing, Social Media, Technology

Hootsuite: New Features! Exciting!

I love Hootsuite.

It took me (seriously) a while to get comfortable with it. But now I just adore it.

I mean, all the volume of content still is a bit much at times.

But overall it works well for me and I haven’t even considered using any other similar program.

I schedule messages quite a bit, since I’m working under the belief that having tweets spaced at least 45 – 60 minutes apart is optimal. My actual work life doesn’t allow for being with Twitter all day long every day. So the time I do have, I use to gather content and send it out again – in the future.

Now, that is one area that I’ve been less than enthusiastic about – the scheduling. I mean, it’s worked fine as far as doing what it’s supposed to do. But when I’m scheduling 8 messages for a work day ahead, first thing in the morning, it’s not easy to keep all those times in mind to fit new things in to the stream optimally.

I didn’t really fret about it though, I figured with all they have going on, they would probably be addressing that.

And now Hootsuite has made all my dreams come true. There is a ‘Publisher’ window, 2nd-from-the-top over on the left side, which shows you all your scheduled tweets! And, more than that, you are able to revise your scheduled times for any of the scheduled tweets! And you can edit the tweets themselves!

I am extremely happy. Now the process of tweeting is much closer to the process of good writing – you can brainstorm basically, set up various tweets. Leave it for a bit. Then come back to it, go in to ‘Publisher,’ and edit what you’ve written as you look at the full set of items all together.

Maybe you were going to re-tweet one particular item about a new development, that had a link to a good source of information about that development. A little bit later, you come across a better reporting of that new development. Before, it didn’t matter. That tweet you had scheduled was gone, you had no way to revise it, you just had to live with it.

Now that artificial ceiling on the quality of your tweets has been removed! You find better content, you can replace that in!

Each tweet you send can now be its actual best self!

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Filed under Books & Publishing, Business, Infrastructure, Marketing, Resources, Social Media, Technology

Brand Love (via @karenbaglin)

So important!

Brands and branding have taken over my brain recently like an addiction.  Began with @berniebay emphasizing the need for personal branding in the ever-expanding social media environment and still uncertain economy. His message struck a chord:  moved to a sunny clime almost 18 months ago; bought a place and worked from home on a ‘Big Brand’ project until they didn’t renew.  Six months later was laid off in an area with 12% unemployment, where no o … Read More

via @karenbaglin

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Site-Member Profile: Promoting Brilliance, Inc!

Organizational Name Promoting Brilliance, Inc. Lighting up your career and workplace.

Established: 1995

Organizational Owner & Leaders

Beth Wellesley Founder | Leadership, Career & Collaboration Consultant. As a career and communication consultant, Beth Wellesley has spent over 20 years in the role of career coach and cultural change agent.
Contact Info: beth@promotingbrilliance.com (612) 824-0454

Michael Peterson Board Member | Partner | SVP Client Services
Contact Info: michael@promotingbrilliance.com (612) 824-0098

Websites
Biz Site: www.promotingbrilliance.com
Blog: http://news.promotingbrilliance.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/BethWellesley
Facebook: http://bit.ly/4hdwV6
Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/bethwellesley

Programs & Services Promoting Brilliance, Inc. is a consulting firm that provides services fundamental to change and innovation. Our mission is to support people in taking responsibility for their career and organizational brilliance. We work with organizations and individuals to create effective communication and collaboration as well as career development success. Our services and tools address the necessary connections that lead to sustainability and fulfillment at work.

Our service offerings include:

– Leadership consulting and training – Manager and performance coaching – Collaboration learning and off-sites – Communication development and training – Career transition consulting – Career development planning – Learning assessments – New work/life balance consulting programs – On-boarding strategic consulting – Business partnership consulting – Succession planning – Offsite design and facilitation – Customized workshops and seminars – Guest speaking

Unique Features We design our own programs, learning and development tools to address communication, collaboration, and career development. These include: Drama Busting™ Tools, Keyssential™ Communication Insights, Career & Life Blending™ programs, Team Brilliance™, Collaboration Pilots™, and Leadership Brilliance to increase your competency currency.

We support the vital connection between values-based decision making and leadership for your business and career growth.

Promoting Brilliance provides workshops, seminars and other Brilliant Connections events.

Upcoming events include:

June 28 | Aligning Your Professional Identity | Authenticity In The Real & Virtual Worlds

July 21 | Hit The Refresh Button For Your Career | Sustainable Progress & Continuous Innovation

August 18 | Sincere Connections | Utilizing Your Authentic Assets for Career Fulfillment

Check back soon for more events!

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Site-Member Profile: E & L Bindery!

Business Name: E & L Bindery

Year Established: 1960

Business Owner: Jeff Dahlin

Product/Service: Custom Hardcover Bookbinding services Unique Features/Competitive Advantage: Serving the niche market of binding and book restoration for individuals, schools, companies & organizations. Print runs for 1 copy to 200 copies.

Examples: Limited Editions binding: Family histories, poetry collections… Professional Journals and Thesis binding: Also includes dissertations, honors projects… Periodicals binding (Newspaper, Bulletin, Newsletter file volumes): Bind those stacks of back issues into protective hardcover volumes for easy storage and reference. Book restorations and repairs,Custom binders, portfolios, and boxes.

Contact Information:
Phone: 651/251-2255
Email: jeff@elbindery.com
Website: http://www.elbindery.com/

Other Community Activities: Jeff Dahlin, owner of E & L Bindery, also participates in the Minnesota Renaissance Festival. At Windrose Mil as “Master LooseLeaf,” Jeff demonstrates the art of bookbinding alongside other specialized artisans who demonstrated paper making, printing and calligraphy. Jeff/Master LooseLeaf has been honored by the King as a Master Artisan over the years.

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Filed under Books & Publishing, Business, Local, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Site-Members, St. Paul