Connecting the Dots / An Agency Blog

“Engage young people where they are hanging out – and that’s online.” That was the mandate from Vancouver’s Wasserman + Partners when they engaged Engine Digital for this year’s WorkSafe BC’s Raise Your Hand campaign. For the three years that we have worked with this brand, the strategy has been to educate young people about the importance of work place safety and the rights that safeguard them. In order to get people excited and involved with the Raise Your Hand message, we had to swap the negative undertones of a safety campaign into a movement backboned on positivity.
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Social Network sites have long been the domain of a youthful digital culture, looking to connect and build friend circles away from the structure and convention of the real world. While this may still be the impression the general populace has on sites such as MySpace, many would be surprised to find out what makes Facebook truly stand out from the pack. Facebook comes of age and sets a pace to bring relevance to a more sophisticated user-base. More after the jump.

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As Apple’s much hyped App platform and iTunes Store have taken off with momentum unseen in any other proprietary commercial marketplace, an incredible number of varied approaches to feature integration have been approved and released for sale to iPhone users. And while the conceptual variation of Apps is as broad as the iPhone market itself, appealing to every possible need an iPhone user may have, I wonder, is there a place for novelty amongst the countless utilities that exist?

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For the past few years, Engine Digital has worked in collaboration with our client-side counterparts on the continued evolution of the TELUS Online Annual Report. And while this behemoth of a project has never failed to result in late nights of production and coding and a general ‘all hands on deck’ approach to team management, we need to hand it to our team for always delivering a solid final product.

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This is it. This is the Engine Digital Blog. Ahem, the long awaited Engine Digital Blog.

To those that are unfamiliar, Engine Digital is a Vancouver-based digital marketing agency. We build stuff, just like this… blogs, microsites, display ad campaigns, and what not, for other folks. The troubling thing is; we’ve only now gotten around to launching one for ourselves, to publish the goodness that is Engine Digital, the good stuff that we create, and the thoughts and ideas from the good people that make up our small agency. It’s sad, I know, that after seven years of turning out creative and innovative client work, we’re just now – seven years in – launching our own blog.

It’s 2009, blogging has become a mainstay, and we’re introduced to new technologies contending for the same space in the technosphere on a weekly basis; technologies like micro-blogging (Twitter and Tumblr), niche approaches to the social network concept (Facebook, LinkedIn, Behance, and Virb), and application platforms (iPhone and Facebook Connect). The value of these tools, used properly, is clearly a smart strategy, and one we’ve provided to many clients with great success. It’s exciting to finally focus on our own efforts; exciting to practice what we preach so to speak.

The title Connecting The Dots stems from the idea that much of what we create – the experiences that live in the digital space – are all smaller pieces of a bigger brand story, one which consumers interact with from their first interaction with a brand, to when they become brand evangelists.

And so this is it – the Engine Digital Blog. While I’d like to end this introductory post with a mandate or mission statement of sorts, in the spirit of social media, we’ll keep things open, organic, and see where the medium takes us. If nothing else, we hope to provide our own unique viewpoint on a broad range of topics, which apply to our industry, our services, our clients, and our people.

Enjoy.