Just when you think you’ve seen it all…

If the idea of grown adults playing an online virtual farming game (and often shelling out real cash to do so) doesn’t surprise you, then check out FarmVille’s newest neighbor: Lady Gaga. Yup, the Pop Princess of Weird has partnered with online social gaming wizards Zynga to bring you the future of cross marketing. And it hurts so good.

Yesterday marked the inaugural “What’s Next DC – Your Marketing Communications Roadmap” Conference. Marketers, PR Specialists, Web Development Companies, Technology Experts, Associations, Government Organizations, Social Media Addicts, and more converged on George Washington University in Washington, DC to listen, learn, share, and network. Whats Next, the brainchild of Tod Plotkin of Green Buzz Agency in Arlington, VA, was born of Plotkin’s frustration with the fluff and sales pitch-iness of typical events, and so he set out to create something different. His goal was to keep people engaged constantly with good information and make sure they got any questions answered that day. While not quite an “unconference” like Nonprofit 2.0, it was a veritable assault of information lined up with no breaks (except for a quick lunch) in short bursts with scheduled “niche conversations” and “floating experts” on the side. Captico sent 3 emissaries: our Lead Developer, Todd Fisher; a Project Manager, Bob Wolfe; and New Media Coordinator, Corrie Davidson (me).

Rand Fishkin, the CEO & Founder of SEOmoz.org, managed to stuff an inspiring presentation on “Advanced Tactics to Maximize SEO Opportunity” into a too-short 25 minutes presentation at the What’s Next DC 2011 Conference on Monday, January 24th. With organic search results becoming increasingly competitive, Rand’s specific tactics supplemented with examples and case studies had me eager to try some new techniques to pimp out our website. You can view his slidedeck here. (All photos by Nakeva Corothers). Some key takeaways included:

Bryan Eisenberg, Managing Partner at Eisenberg Holding was the second presenter at yesterday’s “What’s Next DC – Your Marketing Communications Roadmap” Conference. He held the one of two 45 minute time slots with “The Future Shopper, How Offline is the New Online”. It was a great presentation on how the convergence of communications, logistics, and financial technology continues to evolve to reduce the friction in the customers’ buying process.

Tomorrow several members of the Captico Team will be joining social media, new media, and technology experts from across the country (and perhaps the world!) for the “What’s Next DC” Conference in Washington, DC. The event promises to be jam-packed full of real data, case studies, real experts (no fluffy “gurus” here), networking opportunities and roving discussions.

The folks over at DCWEEK have announced this year’s event dates! DCWEEK 2011 will take place in Washington DC, November 4-11, 2011.

“DCWEEK is a festival in the US capital focused on bringing together designers, developers, entrepreneurs, and social innovators of all kinds. It’s a series of 100s of distributed events powered by the community and complemented by core conferences, parties, and projects created by the festival organizers iStrategyLabs and Tech Cocktail. DCWEEK 2010 was assembled in 3.5 months and drew 6,000 attendees from around the world.”

A new social marketing tool was launched over the Thanksgiving holiday – just in time for the shopping frenzy that is the Holiday season. And as today is “Cyber Monday”, (or the monday after “Black Friday”) I thought it would be a good time to do a write up to introduce you to the fledgling site and clever tool that is GoPromoIt.com.

Last week, Google launched the Beta version of “In-Page Analytics” – a visual aid that sits on top of your website to give context to the data that regular Google Analytics provides. Google Analytics is a great tool for webmasters to track traffic to their website, what users are doing on the site, and what people are clicking on.

Learn a little more about Captico and meet some of the team in this short video!

Complex animation on the web has been generally limited to Flash.   Flash is great for what it provides, but there are limitations, expensive tools, a browser plugin, etc… It is possible to run animations using images and browser native DOM, but this too is limited to basically static graphics and the DOM box model.
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