Stage Two's blog

Today, the entire team from Stage Two spent the entire morning helping the community. For the second time this year, we were honored to participate in some community service at the San Francisco Food Bank to do some social good – a perfect tie in to Social Media Week in the city. Joining us this time were Alyce Lindquist, the president of the San Francisco/Silicon Valley chapter of the Social Media Club and Dana Oshiro, writer for tech blog ReadWriteWeb.

While last time we had a good time packaging orzo pasta, this time we were needed to package cabbage and oranges that would be sent to schools and other non-profit agencies who would distribute the goods to those who needed it. You might think it was tedious work for the three hours, but it was really fun to talk with other volunteers and the employees there about the Food Bank’s mission.

To help highlight our efforts to bring social good to Social Media Week, both Jeremy and Dana Oshiro were guests on the Social Media Hour – a weekly podcast that highlights different trends in the industry and is hosted by storyteller and thought-leader Cathy Brooks. You can listen to the entire podcast by clicking here.

At the end of the day, our reward was hearing how much we have helped the community. For just three hours, we packaged around 12,000 pounds of food! If you consider the fact that 150,000 people in the city alone go hungry every day, the amount that was done in such a short time just by volunteering speaks volumes and can greatly help the people that truly need it.

To help out at the San Francisco Food Bank or to learn more about what you can do, please click here.

Here are some photos from our time at the SF Food Bank (and even a short video!)

Most of the entire gang that helped out today at the San Francisco Food Bank

Team Stage Two and volunteers packaging cabbage

Jeremy Toeman doing some social good

Even the oranges were happy for the help!

David Speiser helping to package some oranges

Mielle Sullivan with her specially formed orange

Jeremy Toeman just can’t stop himself from packaging oranges!

Today marks the beginning of Social Media Week around the world. Social media enthusiasts gather in Berlin, London, New York, Sao Paulo, Toronto and here in San Francisco. To kick off the week, Chris Heuer & Kristie Wells of Social Media Club organized the Social Media Camp in the Presidio. Designed to be both a conference and an unconference, today’s event centered around helping people understand social media. Presenters offered much more than a “101″ view on social media and gave lively and informative discussions on things like how you can measure your return on investment, creating a social media business, understanding the synaptic web, professional storytelling and a panel that addresses the reality of the real-time web.

If you’ve never been to an unconference before, the standard model is that at the beginning, the attendees submit panels that they are interested in participating in, typically as a speaker/panelist. Once voted on, the ones the majority find interesting are placed into different times. Essentially the agenda isn’t set until that actual day so participants will be able to have a thorough and customized plan for the day.

The Social Media Camp opened with three great keynotes. The first one was by Echo founder Khris Loux who talked about the synaptic web and how the depth of connections was a powerful mechanism designed to continuously bring important information to our attention. After that, Ribbits/BT’s Vice President of Web Services, Kevin Marks, took the stage to promote the chief communication officer before Cathy Brook’s thought-provoking keynote on personal storytelling and why the hell we are really matters.

Afterwards, the agenda went into full swing with breakout “camp” sessions and more panels that helped educate and influence the way people used social media. According to the organizers, the hope was that the attendees would enjoy hearing from leading voices in social media and make some connections with people of different backgrounds.

Even our very own Jeremy Toeman took part in helping to educate folks at Social Media Camp. During the last panel, he teamed up with Collecta co-founder Brian Zisk and ReadWriteWeb’s community manager & blogger/reporter Jolie O’Dell to wage battle on the reality of the real-time web. It was a lively debate on how people how people have & are responding to customers almost immediately and even presented some great takeaways.

When all was said and done, the attendees left hearing from these “thought leaders” on a wide arrange of topics. It wasn’t about how to use Twitter or what benefit you could get from Facebook fan pages or anything elementary. The Social Media Camp helped teach people how to communicate using social media with an emphasis on listening and customer service. It was all about understanding the fundamentals of social media and not about transparency, authenticity, credibility or any other buzz word imagined.

So for the opening day of Social Media Week, I’d say it was a good one. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing more in the next few days.

I wanted to call this a tweetup, but if I’m blogging it I think that breaks the rules? Just kidding. Anyhow, a bunch of us mobile/gadget/convergence folks wanted to get together, chat about how the world just changed (or didn’t), and also talk in advance of Mobile World Congress (aka 3GSM).  We’ve teamed up with Lisa Whelan, from SocializeMobilize, to gather fun people and the great people at Jillian’s (at the Metreon, spitting distance from the event. literally) put aside a little space for us.

No RSVP needed, but all the details are available here.  Looking forward to seeing you there.

I’ll buy a drink for the first person to show up WITH whatever new thing got announced at the event. :)  Yes, multiple winners if there are multiple things.

BTW – you can visit my personal blog to see recent thoughts I’ve shared on the supposed tablet.

It’s been a while since we’ve moved into the new office and we definitely wanted to celebrate the holidays, so we figured that this year, we’d knock off some long-delayed things to celebrate, including having a nice office “housewarming” party and  to celebrate our third-year anniversary.

To help spruce up our place, we turned to our friends at 1:AM gallery and Quinn Wharton who generously provided art and photography work that is currently hanging on our walls. And not one to leave our friends famished and parched at a party, the fine folks at Work of Art event planning & catering made some delicious hors d’oeuvres and set them up on our very own meat tree – yes, you heard that right…we had an artificial tree that was filled with meat on a stick on the tree. It was absolutely delicious!

Stage Two also made a couple of cool announcements as well, including a new “soon-to-be” website for the company and our next new product called Gunman – the first iPhone First Person Shooter using augmented reality. We encourage you to give it a shot and to let us know what you think.

We thank you for stopping by our office for our Holi-Warming-Versary party and regardless of whether you were there or not, here’s a recap of photos:

Some of the artwork provided by 1:AM Gallery

Photography art provided by Quinn Wharton

Legacy Locker’s Gregg Delman

Stage Two’s Adam Burg & Jeremy Toeman

It’s our very own meat tree!

Decorating the meat tree.

Transforming the Stage Two office.

Ron Hirson of BOKU and Sol Lipman of 12seconds.tv

David Cohn of Spot.us and Stage Two’s Jim Schaff

David Cohn, Dave Mathews, Jim Schaff & Kevin Brown checking out Gunman

Jeremy Toeman with CNET’s Rafe Needleman

And what holiday party wouldn’t be complete without some Foosball? It’s David Speiser, Gregg Delman, Andrew Kippen & Jim Schaff.

To view more photos from our holiday party, please click here.

Last Friday, Stage Two helped our client, BOKU reach out to its fellow industry professionals through some creative guerrilla marketing during the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco at the Westin Hotel. The conference was quite fitting for BOKU since it is focused on being a mobile online payment system designed to make it easy for people to “pay for digital goods and social experiences” across the Internet.

The issue that BOKU had was that it needed to draw some attention to its product even though it was a sponsor but didn’t have a booth on site. Stage Two was tasked with coming up with a quick solution that was easy to implement and could generate some positive publicity. After mulling through several options internally, including the possibility of holding a contest, conducting live interviews or utilizing Twitter, our team decided that the best way was to keep it a little simpler.

At the Virtual Goods Summit, each attendee was given a pin to wear and the ones that wore them the most creatively & were spotted by the BOKU team were awarded one of two prizes. Some received a working remote-controlled helicopter with the BOKU logo while others were given embroidered BOKU track jackets. The Stage Two team rolled into action by photographing and video recording the recipients playing with the “BOKU-copter” – which was also posted on the BOKU blog for additional promotion.

You can view some of the photos taken from the Virtual Goods Summit on the BOKU blog or their Flickr page. Additionally, videos are also on their official YouTube channel as well.