Banner Ads Nerdery Webinar from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

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All,

As you may have heard, we have been honored with the #1 ranking in the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal’s Best Places To Work awards project. This ranking is a result of your responses to a web-based survey earlier this year. Your survey responses earned us the #1 ranking in the “Medium Companies” category, which includes companies with 100-1,000 Minnesota employees.

Let me finish by saying, “I told you so!” But let me start by saying a bunch of other stuff that leads up to my dramatic finish (which is when I will say, “I told you so!”).

Over the past few years we have become players on the local and national Business Awards Circuit. It is true that we nominate ourselves for awards all the time. 40% of Mark Malmberg’s job is to keep redialing business magazines to try and win prizes, such as “Be our 25th caller and win # 1.471 in the Inc. 5000 List!” Many years ago, I was recognized in the Business Journal’s prestigious “40 under 40″ award thanks to a much younger Mark Malmberg’s redialing skills. Dialing a 1-800 number over and over using a rotary phone takes dedication and lubrication. That was back when Mark was youthful. Nowadays, the other 60% of his job involves him banging his cane on the ground and complaining about “those darn kids with their WiiTari games!” Please take no offense – that’s just an old man’s cry for help. And by “help,” I mean 16 individually-wrapped Werthers Originals candies in a small dish on his desk where a young person would normally keep an optical mouse.

Enough about Mark; let’s talk about us for a little while. We have grown at a rate that outpaces most business in the country. We have managed this growth organically, meaning we haven’t grown through acquisition or by means of investment capital. In our growth, we have been recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in Minnesota, as well as in the country. We should all feel proud for our growth achievements, but our growth only tells part of our story. Our growth is about dollars, not about people. The Inc. 5000 and Biz Journal’s Fast 50 don’t measure us by how many jobs we have created, or how happy people are with those jobs. But those things are a priority for us over pure revenue growth.

As proud as I am of our revenue growth, and our recognition in both the Inc. 5000 and the Fast 50, our recognition as a “Best Place to Work” is a more significant accomplishment for all of us to be proud of. Though Mike Derheim will take credit for the black “Suggestions Box” in the lunchroom, this working environment has always been a collaborative effort and everyone here is responsible for our culture. You took the survey, and overwhelmingly gave your co-workers, your managers and the leadership high rankings. Furthermore, you took the time to provide positive commentary regarding the company’s strengths, weaknesses and food/beverage selection. As a result of your input, we were awarded first place in the project, and that tells a more complete story.

I don’t have a plan for your workplace enjoyment, and I can’t tell you how we will continue to be an awesome place to work as we grow, but that’s exactly how we got to where we are today. Pentathanerd, Light the Light Walk events, Game Night, Overnight Website Challenge,  user groups meetings, and Bottle Cap Talk (formerly Minh’s Friday Fiesta) don’t make for a fun, respectful and caring community – they are a result of it. This award is all about you and your Interpersonal Awesomeness, and you damn well better keep it that way as we grow or your whole nerdy community will become flooded with a bunch of gossiping, back-stabbing disrespectful Prima Donnas and when it implodes, I will stand upon the heap of social rubble that remains and yell, “I told you so!”

- Luke

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I’m not sure if it’s genetic or if I’ve been socialized to do this, but there’s something about a Steve Jobs’ presentation that turns me into a barely-verbal toddler. With every product he announces I shout “me want that” just like my nephews used to when they were toddlers and watching any commercial that featured brightly-colored plastic junk. So yes, new iPods, new iOS, new iTunes (with a new logo that ditches the CD), Ping a music social network, and a new appleTV. So much stuff. . . here’s what all the pundits are saying already.

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Game dev club: Some stay after work to play with game development, Wednesdays at 5:30 p.m.

Thursday: MN PHP user group meetup, 6-8 p.m., with a tech talk on HMVC (Hierarchical Model View Controller) by Daniel J. Post. RSVP at http://www.mnphp.org/.

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The rankings were determined by employee surveys created by Quantum Workplace, which reported the results to the Business Journal. We topped the list of medium sized companies – those with 101 to 1,000 employees – that do business within the Twin Cities thirteen-county metro area.

The nerds had a lot of nice things to say about working at The Nerdery, including:

“Every day I wake up and actually look forward to going to work. I know that my opinion matters, what I do matters and that I am valuable to the company.”

We take our Nerdery culture seriously, and that makes winning this award a great honor.

Want more? Take a look at what Nerdery leaders had to say and get a few tips on how to create a rocking workplace.

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Some people find banner ads maddening, sometimes with probable cause. Some are conditioned to never ever click a banner ad, but with the right design you can get them to have a look. And we can help. RSVP at http://www.nerdery.com/banners to check out one of our two free webinars on banner ads – Tuesday August 31 at 10:15 a.m. Central and Thursday September 2 at 3:15 p.m. Central.

We’ll address two primary kinds of banner ads: those designed as a call to action (the ones that beg to be clicked, made to drive traffic) and those that just sit pretty for the sake of brand awareness. We’ll cover development best practices favored by media service providers and the standards of rich media service providers regarding tech specs, sizes, bells and whistles.

If you want your banner ad to really make a scene, we can make that happen – but buyer beware that placement costs rise, as do risks of being more distraction than attraction to some online consumers voting with dollars of their own. Maybe a game is the right play for your banner, but maybe not. Nerdery developers are good at weighing in on what will work, and really good at working directly with media and rich media service providers to implement the ideas of our agency partners.

Good seats (of your choosing) are still available, please RSVP.

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Not pictured above: Inc. 5000 commemorative plaque #3 (it’s in the mail)

For the third year in a row we’re on Inc. Magazine’s list of America’s fastest growing, privately owned companies. Inc. saves trees by featuring only the Inc. 500 in its print edition, so here’s us in Inc.’s inkless edition, and here’s how our publicist has marked the occasion.

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