Catching a new wave.
Welcome to what we expect will be an exciting new year, filled with opportunity and prosperity. Everyone at One On One is up for new challenges and eager to forge ahead. And we’re already kicking into high gear with this year’s Canadian International AutoShow. The AutoShow is a client that has given us much flexibilty and many opportunities to try out different techniques and technologies.
In point of fact, while we were off, a group of us were busy maintaining the website (autoshow.ca) plus two daily contests. The first is a Daily Ticket Giveaway whereby entrants visit a link (here) and provide some personal details which enters them into a daily draw to win a pair of tickets to this year’s AutoShow. Upon completing the entry, they are presented with a thank-you page which encourages them to tweet the hashtag #autoshowtees on Twitter, thereby entering them in a daily draw to win an AutoShow t-shirt.
As each one of us was in charge of a different aspect of the contests, we turned to Google Wave to help make the process simpler. If you’re unfamiliar with Google Wave, it’s an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. You create a “wave” which can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. It was perfectly suited for this project and was much more efficient than simply using e-mail.
And so, I would receive word of the day’s Ticket Giveaway winner in Google Wave, then create a PDF claim form from existing files in my DropBox. If you’re not using DropBox and find yourself ferrying files on a USB stick, you might want to check it out. DropBox is a cross-platform, cloud-based storage application and service which lets you store and sync files between different computers and various users. I find it indispensable.
Once the winners were picked and the forms sent out, we would turn to the AutoShow’s Twitter account (@autoshowcanada) to let everyone know who had won the day’s tickets and to pick a t-shirt winner. While this may all sound long and complicated, it would only take up 15 to 20 minutes a day. In the end, it enabled us the opportunity to enjoy our holidays from home—or wherever we were—without having to come in to the office every day. We experienced no glitches and all technologies–Google Wave, DropBox and Twitter–worked flawlessly.
