Pemaquid Communications

Last weekend marked a milestone for those of us involved in the online world here in Maine. Joe Michaud, who had led MaineToday.com for the last dozen years, stepped down at the end of April, and many MaineToday “alumni” were on hand at Ri Ra last Friday to wish Joe well (Ellen Kanner, an old co-worker who now is a Web designer at Dartmouth, even came down from Hanover).

Folks who spent time working under Joe’s leadership have gone on to form successful, influential Web businesses in the area: Franklin McMahon (former MaineToday.com Creative Services Manager) now has a well-known photography and podcasting company; Justin Davis now heads Portland Web Works, a Pemaquid competitor whose Clients include the Maine Office of Tourism; and (because I like to enumerate things like this in groups of three) I’ll throw myself in there as well.

Way back in the mid ’90’s, when we barely knew what a “browser” was, Joe and a small team at the Portland Press Herald created a skunkworks to try to figure out this “Internet thing”. What developed was a series of Web sites that coalesced to form MaineToday.com. Under Joe’s leadership, MaineToday won many awards, often against larger competitors, and became known as a standard-setting creative force in the mostly bland world of online newspaper publishing.

We were always testing boundaries. I remember covering the 2000 election from the studios of our television partner, WMTW. My job was to post up-to-the-minute blurbs to the MaineToday site about the local, regional and national returns coming in that night. It was pretty radical for a newspaper to have someone publishing on the spot with very little editorial oversight. We didn’t call it blogging back then, but that’s exactly what we were doing.

Now Joe is hanging out a shingle as a consultant to said newspaper industry - and they really need to hear from someone like him. Newspaper ad revenue continues to erode, and those dollars are not migrating to publishers’ digital facsimiles of the printed word. Newspapers’ core revenue centers have continued to lose out to online competitors like Craig’s List (want ads), Cars.com (automotive ads) and Zillow (real estate ads).

My take is that it won’t be long before the creative destruction precipitated by the Internet drives newspapers to the same fate as encyclopedia salesmen. However, if there’s anyone who can help smart publishers figure out how to best take advantage of their remaining assets - strong brands, relatively large audiences and strong advertiser relationships - it’s Joe Michaud.

I met with a Client today and at various points during the conversation I found myself mentioning “spiders” (the search engine, not eight-legged, variety), “feed readers“, “widgets” and “blogs“.

Finally, the Client looked at me and said, incredulously, “What a interesting world you live in!”.

Indeed.

Well, it’s finally gotten to that point - things are crazy busy again (usually they’re just crazy). For about a day I thought the answer was to bring on more help coding the xHTML and CSS. While I still think that’s important, I realize that’s only going to make me busier in my role as Project Manager for an ever-expanding # of current assignments.

So, what to do?

What I really need is a quarterback - someone to survey the opposition, the field position, make the reads and call the right plays. Someone who’s tough on the competition but who treats Clients and team members like they are worth their weight in gold, because they are (sounds trite, doesn’t it?). Someone who can allow me to elevate to the level of Head Coach.

I say quarterback b/c I’ve always hated the typical role given to the project manager at most hi tech companies. Most places I’m aware of seem to use project managers to ‘count beans’: how many hours have been done on a project, relaying new requirements from the Client to the production team, creating reports for the boss. I’ve also seen situations where the project manager is supposed to ensure that a project stays on budget, yet doesn’t have the decision-making authority over creative direction to make that happen. The PM then gets caught in the crossfire between the creative team, management and the Client. Not a good place to be.

Hence quarterback.

So I’ve started the search for a Client Services Director who will spend time understanding Client needs, and working w/t/Pemaquid team to come up w/creative ways to meet those needs.

Is that you? Or someone you know? I’m all ears…

If you spend enough time reading Web pages recently, you may have come across the term “mashup”. You were probably not even reading your favorite news site’s description of the latest rush hour mishap. Instead, it probably accompanied a description of the newest “Web 2.0″ site.

For the uninitiated, a mashup is when you take an app from one or more Web sites and “mash” it all up w/content on another, usually to create a uniquely interesting - and hopefully, useful - interactive feature. The most famously popular example of a mashup is probably the Google Map API, which all kinds of people have incorporated into all kinds of sites to provide geographic information in creative ways.

We’re excited to say that at Pemaquid we’re working on our own Google Map mashup for a Client in the tourism industry to provide an interactive mapping feature to show Maine points of interest to the folks from away. Can’t tell you too much more right now - it’s Top Secret - but we’ll be launching it soon. Stay tuned….