The St. John Group » New

Meetings with Meaning

george — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 17:33:11 +0000

Meetings – everyone has them, everyone hates them, and they tend to take up more time than the allotted 30 minutes or one hour we have scheduled in our calendars. Internal meetings are the worst; you start to talk about everything on your plate, giving the purpose for the meeting less priority. Not only does this cause you to lose your focus, it also renders the meeting “a waste of time”. Losing focus in a meeting can be detrimental to the purpose of the meeting.

SJG is no exception; we have in the past fallen into this trap of internal meeting hell. Our meetings would spiral down into production details of our clients work. We would lose sight of the big picture. We would forget what the meetings purpose was. We needed a framework for our internal meetings in order to regain focus on our what was important to our company. In short we needed to think of our team as a client.

Here is a set of tools and techniques that we came up with to apply to all of our internal meetings:

Have a published agenda: Publishing the agenda to the team shares accountability for the meeting. An hour is not a long time, and an agenda will ensure each topic is addressed.
Set the timer: Deadlines are your friend and meeting them provides a great sense of accomplishment once completed.
Action items: What needs to be accomplished for the next meeting?
Ownership: Who is responsible for each action item?
Commit to next meeting! Another deadline that will ensure your team meetings are successful.

One of the outcomes was our bi-weekly blogs. We now apply the knowledge we have with our clients to the SJG team. What can you do to make your meetings more profitable and enjoyable?

Winner of Marketing Effectiveness Award

Elliot Ng — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:56:39 +0000

We are honoured to announce that we are the winner of the 2009 Summit Marketing Effectiveness Awards! This is the culmination of working with our great creative team and great clients, who all focused on creating a memorable marketing experience.

The award was in the business-to-business product category and was selected from over 504 international entries. Our RFID bookmarking experience, which was created for Research In Motion (RIM), the makers of the popular BlackBerry® smartphone, was chosen.

Partnered with The Taylor Group, the RFID bookmarking experience was developed for the BlackBerry events marketing team. It provided visitors at the BlackBerry tradeshow booths a way of tagging the products and services in which they were interested. At the end of each day, the visitor received a customized email with targeted information and offers that were tailored specifically to their tradeshow visit. RIM was able to accurately track leads and determine the effectiveness of each area of the tradeshow booth. In addition, the powerful analytics allowed RIM to compare the performance of different tradeshows from year to year and across various industry segments.

For more information, please visit:
• A video demo of the RFID bookmarking experience in action
• Customer video testimonials
• Our case study

To find out more about this award or other services The St. John Group can offer, please contact Thom Rockliff at 416.504.4884.

Welcome to the New SJG Website!

thom — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:24:09 +0000

After much pondering, designing and coding we are ready to launch the new website. We have added additional projects and case studies on our site. Take a look around. Make yourself at home.

Over the next few months we will unveil some exciting new additions to our digital home. So don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed so we can keep you up to date on the latest adventures of SJG. We’re excited to hear what you think of our new site. Send us an email or comment on our blog. We would love to start a conversation with you.