Cask & Drum includes 11 great acts on 2 stages, plus a two-and-a-half-hour tasting of craft beers and fine wines.

Headliner Dwight Yoakam will wrap up a day of great music and fun that also features Shovels & Rope, Railroad Earth, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Lord Huron, Kopecky Family Band, Courtney Jaye, John & Jacob, The Lonely Wild, Shelly Colvin, and Kate Tucker and the Sons of Sweden.

To learn more about this exciting new event, read Mary Colurso’s story in The Birmingham News.

FOR TICKETS and more information, visit the Cask & Drum website.

How long would it take before it is back up and running again?

When your web site is down, you lose credibility, goodwill, customers, or donors.

If you are running an advertising campaign that directs people to your site, and your site is down, you are actually paying to make a bad impression on visitors. Once the moment is gone, they are not likely to ever come back.

The finest Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is worthless if your site is down when the search bots (or people searching for your site) come to visit.

You can host your site for next-to-nothing, but when it inevitably goes down, you can count on next-to-nothing service from a call center on the other side of the world.

You can host your site on a server that is shared with hundreds of sites, and wonder why your site grinds to a halt because some other site that you don’t even know about (perhaps of questionable content) suddenly becomes popular.

You can host your site at your own office, leaving you vulnerable to power outages, or an accidental line cut from a utility worker.

At Agile Brands, we believe that the precious message that your web site presents is too valuable to leave to chance.

So we host your site using industry best practices.

Our data center features five diverse backbone networks, redundant climate control, redundant uninterruptible power supplies, redundant 1.5 megawatt Detroit Diesel generators for longer term outages and 24/7/365 staffing and security.

Our servers host only Agile Brands clients — all of them reputable businesses. They feature redundant systems with internal monitoring for uptime and service quality.

When we call our data center on the phone, at any time, we can talk to someone who is standing right there in front of our server and can do whatever is necessary to keep the sites that we manage running smoothly.

Our servers and software are kept up-to-date with security and feature updates for the operating system and required software.

We have redundant disk drives on each server for fast replacement in case of hardware failure, and we make offsite backups to recover quickly from natural disasters or other catastrophes.

And our data center is environmentally-focused and Carbon Neutral.

As of this writing, our uptime (including scheduled maintenance) for the last year is 99.995%

But even that isn’t enough for us. Because if you don’t know there is a problem, you can’t fix it.

So, we monitor your site automatically for outages and performance issues from dozens of locations worldwide, so that we will be the first to know if there is a problem and can address it in a timely manner.

In short, we host your web site as if the survival of your business or organization depends on it.

Because it does.

In the mid-fifteenth century, a German goldsmith became the first European to make practical use of movable type.*

The implications of Johannes Gutenberg’s technological advance were world-changing. For the first time a Bible could be produced that cost just 30 florins.

Printing presses soon spread across the continent, often run by Gutenberg’s countrymen. Scholars say a staggering 30,000 or more titles were published in the fifty years that followed.

To say merely that printing became accessible to a larger group and was a factor in the continued emergence of a viable middle class is to understate the magnitude of the knowledge revolution that ensued. Even though 30 florins was real money–three year’s salary for the information worker of the day, a clerk–Gutenberg’s press suddenly allowed for an exchange of information on a vastly greater scale. The results, including things as disparate as the novel and the modern nation-state, were unforeseeable before the singular moment that marked the invention of movable type.

What, you may ask, does all of this have to do with my company?

Only this: if you are running a widget company or a services company or a widget services company, you are now also running (compliments of the networking revolution) a media company. You now have both the means to inexpensively reach a global audience and the burden of doing so creditably if you are to survive, let alone thrive.

Because if you take all of the superlatives one might reasonably apply to Gutenberg’s revolution and multiply them by the population of the Internet squared, you arrive at something approximating today’s media explosion along with its implications, from the flat earth and the long tail, to the Facebook Friend and the Tweetup.

All of which means that if you want to avoid being a media company, you’ll have to quit being a company altogether.

The good news is the range of media options available to you has never been broader.

So, if you can manage (or find someone to help you manage) this mix of Balkanized, fragmented, ever-evolving media, you can do great and amazing things for your company.

And also for that company you didn’t know you had until now–your media company.

* the Chinese beat Gutenberg to the punch by several hundred years, but abandoned the idea as impractical for a language with thousands of ideograms.

To make the challenge even more interesting, Internet marketing is changing at an ever-faster pace. It’s no longer possible for you to keep up and still have time to run your business.

That’s where we come in.

The principals in Agile Brands have been residents of the Internet and its precursors from the very beginning. They were the first to take brands like Coca-Cola® into Second Life® (and to realize SL’s inherent limitations).

Agile Brands can help your brand be agile — an absolute necessity in a world where marketing travels at the speed of light. And, because we also have have decades of experience in advertising, public relations and public affairs, we can marry the powerful new tools of online marketing to traditional media, strategic messaging–even crisis management.

So, if you need help making sure your brand is relevant online, or just need additional expertise on search engine marketing or social media, call on us.

It’s easy to get started. The first step in creating an online brand management plan that can make a difference in your bottom line is simply to E-mail us.

At the very core of our approach at Agile Brands is the notion that everything must be carefully and continually measured against clearly defined goals and objectives. Only such diligent measurement makes it possible to optimize your site and maximize your Return On Investment.

From the beginning, we remain focused on specific, measurable business goals. We then follow endless iterations of a three-step process: 1) carefully MEASURE site traffic and stats against goals, 2) TWEAK content, recognizing that small changes can lead to big results, and 3) REPEAT the process.

With each iteration, you try  something new. And, each time through, you learn something new.

The end result: steady improvement over time.

And, just as this philosophy applies to the Web, it also provides value with regard to E-newsletters, social media and even traditional media channels.

Let us tell you more about the kind of approach to online brand management that is based on facts and results–not mere hope and guesswork.

Measure. Tweak. Repeat. Just contact us to get started.