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Our friend and former colleague Gillian Floren has landed in a new position as vice president of marketing and business retention at Greenlight Greater Portland, a primarily private-sector group devoted to promoting the economic vitality of the greater Portland-Vancouver metropolitan region. She will join CEO Tim Priest and Steven Pedigo, vice president of research and business attraction, as a member of the leadership team. Until recently, Gillian served as publisher (and before that, editor) of Oregon Business Magazine. Her strong relationships with regional business leaders and policy makers, developed during ten years with the magazine, should serve her well in the new role. [Great timing department: Oregon Business is running an interview with Priest in the November issue.]

Here’s a new addition to the almost emerging South Waterfront neighborhood:

The Innovation Lab is designed to serve the community as a hub of activity, information and resources, including available meeting space. At opening, it will feature:

• Product Wall: A 25-foot, interactive, seamless dynamic plasma wall that features touch screen technology, pod casts and community search functionality.

• Community Wall: This interactive display wall serves as the (lab’s) official community center. It provides information on volunteer opportunities and community events, supports fundraising for community organizations and includes a survey option for users to tell (the lab) which topics they would like to learn more about.

• LocalSpace: (the lab’s) own social networking site. Designed to connect and assist local businesses in a virtual setting, LocalSpace offers opportunities for mentoring, expert advice, public community calendars and 3-D mapping from Microsoft’s Virtual Earth.

• Computer Cafe: Features tables embedded with state-of-the-art Lenovo laptops inviting visitors to try out easy-access online… solutions or simply surf the Web.

• Ask an Expert: Uses the Cisco Unified Meeting Place solution to connect customers face-to-face with experts on a wide range of … topics at any time.

• Interactive and In-store Shopping: Browse merchandise from local merchants as well as … Local Music CDs, books and other finds.

And…

The Innovation Lab will serve (it’s own) signature blend of coffee as well as customers’ choice of a latte, americano or cappuccino at the press of a button.

What is this place? Of course: It’s an Umpqua Bank branch.

[Via a news brief on the Business Journal site that was based on this press release.]

This job was listed today on Craig’s List in the Marketing section. If you don’t go for it, I might. Let me know.

Sources familiar with our old stomping ground say…

• Oregon Business publisher Gillian Floren will be departing next month for new opportunities, on the heels of her successful (well-sponsored) Business is Good bus tour. No word yet on where she’s headed.
• Oregon Business managing editor Christina Williams recently moved on to pursue a job in marketing communications.
• Oregon Home sales manager Karen Olson recently left for Portland Monthly’s new Spaces Northwest.
• Oregon Home sales pro Tera Surratt departed to the O.
• Production director Tyler Ashcraft left over the summer to join high-end printer DynaGraphics as a sales exec.

Nicole Vogel of PORTLAND MONTHLY won the OEN’s 2007 Award for Entrepreneurship for Individual Achievement at the Oregon Entrepreneur Network’s dinner on Thursday night.

Nicole is the first media person in (my) memory to win, or even be nominated for, this annual award. Which is exactly why you probably won’t see much serious coverage in certain other local media. That’s not a complaint, but it is kind of funny for someone seeing all this from the outside. But you may remember this story, an exception to the provincial rule, in the PORTLAND BUSINESS JOURNAL almost three years ago. In the piece, Richard Meeker of WILLAMETTE WEEK graciously tipped his hat to PM’s successful launch and then added,

“the real test will come in the next two years. The questions are: Will they be able to sustain circulation on a monthly schedule? And will advertisers get results? I hope the answer to both questions is yes.”

At the time I thought Richard had indeed hit on two key questions, with the implicit assumption that the content had to be good enough for readers. Looking back, I don’t think it was that simple. We can talk about that over coffee some other time.

In the end, the real test for an entrepreneur is building a profitable and growing business. The business is clearly growing, with acquisitions, launches, fat issues, tons of ads and continued wide newsstand distribution. The magazine has won “national” awards for content. According to Nicole, as quoted in the Salute to Winners section included in in last week’s BUSINESS JOURNAL, profits are around 18%. Sure, I know. But come on, even if you move a few points either way…

Congratulations, Nicole.

As a consumer of Portland career listings and of local blogs, I sometimes see interesting juxtapositions. Today I read this post on Jack Bog’s Blog:

We’ve had a lot of fun calling Portland’s South Waterfront district “SoWhat.” But today a reader suggested that maybe we should give that joke a rest. After all, “SoWhat” is based on people’s reactions to the latest condo jungle, and by now everyone’s had ample chance to see it for what it really is and react accordingly.

Now we’re moving into a new phase, where condos can’t be sold and the city’s already tapped itself out on infrastructure. We haven’t even started to deal with the sewer issues or the greenway, and there’s no money, we’re told, for a lot of the goodies that were originally promised.

Why not, the reader suggested, rename the whole district “Bankruptcy Village”?

The full post is here.

A little later, I stumbled upon this listing on Craigslist:

Community Relations and Marketing Coordinator

South Waterfront is Portland’s newest urban neighborhood and the largest sustainable/green redevelopment project in the nation. This is a unique opportunity to use your marketing, communications and event coordination skills to support and promote community and green living at SWF. Overview of Community Relations at South Waterfront: To actively engage the residential, retail and other business neighbors in the development and promotion of community building efforts through cooperative events and opportunities. To help develop a sense of shared neighborhood which benefits the community of SWF and beyond.

This job will be a cakewalk!

I mentioned in an earlier post that an Ignite Portland event was in the planning stages. Some of the details were just announced: The event is scheduled for Thursday, October 25, 2007, at Wieden & Kennedy (224 NW 13th Ave, Portland, OR) evening start time to come. For more details tune into the Ignite Portland site .

Looks like some sharp Portlanders are bringing an Ignite event to Portland. Ignite events are a kind of geeky idea smack-down in which interesting or cool concepts are presented to the audience in short, timed, bursts of Power Point and performance. Sure sounds like fun. Folks at O’Reilly Media were behind earlier Ignites. It’s not clear from the Portland blog what role they’ll play in Portland. Here is the Ignite Seattle! site. And check out a video or two here. Here is how they do it in Boston.

Oregon Business magazine publisher Gillian Floren has been planning and dreaming about this trip for more than a year (since before I left that company last Fall to chase other dreams.) It’s great to see the Business is Good! Tour underway. A rotating crew of editors, business leaders and policy makers is touring the state in a Monaco Coach, with stops and events in 18 communities all over the state. With all the talk in new media about the importance of communities and conversations, it’s great to see something like this pulled off in real-life 4 dimensions. Looks like GF recruited a bunch of A-list sponsors for the tour. The daily blog of the tour is here, complete with a video of state Senator Betsy Johnson hitchhiking. (Wait, is that legal?) By the way, the magazine was recently redesigned and it looks really good, based on a flip-through at the magazine stand (I guess my subscription has run out.)

Sitting in a lecture hall is not usually my idea of fun. But inVerge 2007, held in Portland last week, kept me glued to my seat in the Gerding Theatre for two full days of presentations by innovators in cross-platform media and marketing. Invergence is a word coined by conference developer Steve Gehlen to describe the dynamics of convergence in today’s increasingly interactive, multi-platform media/marketing landscape. I assisted Steve a bit here and there during conference development, and was seriously impressed by the quality of the program he pulled together in just a few months. All of the presenters are internationally known for their work; less than half came from Portland. They came from companies such as Weiden + Kennedy, MTV, Ensequence, Rentrak, Edleman, Nau and Interpublic Group, and media studies centers such as those at MIT and Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Here are a few soundbites from my notes (not necessarily verbatim speaker quotes):

The consumers are the channel

– Ken Papagan, CEO Rentrak

The product is the system

– Adam Richardson, CEO Frog Design

Media companies never were in control in the mass media era; it was just an illusion. Now it’s clear there is no control.

- Mark Deuze, author of the book Media Work, professor at Leiden University, The Netherlands

OK, slogans are cheap. In fact, these are pretty meaningless without context. But the underlying thinking of these pronouncements and their strategic implications for media and marketing are serious. The world is changing too fast for folks in those fields not to know this stuff. Check in here or at inVergence.com for detailed postings, presentation notes and links to videos on what went down at the conference. A few presenters, and the conference organizer, cite Convergence Culture by MIT professor Henry Jenkins III as a mind-changing book.

Let’s hope the stage is set for an ongoing annual conference that will draw thought leaders from all over the world to Portland each September. Nice job, Steve.