Working with our friends at Boston magazine, we developed an iPhone application that allows consumers to search and access content from the magazine’s highly regarded annual Best of Boston® issues. Best of Boston® is the go-to resource for the expert-selected winners in over 70 categories, from suits to sushi.

Through the app, you can access Best of Boston® winners from the last five years, searching by location, keyword, and category. You can even share what you find and save your favorites.

It simply and effectively gets you what you want: the best from the people that know what’s best. Whether you’re a tourist or a local, it’s ideal for navigating Boston.

We developed the app as part of our newly formed Venture Branding practice, spearheaded by partner Mike Troiano. The Venture Branding model has two facets: we have great ideas and take them to market or others have great ideas and we help take them to market.

Our work with Boston magazine on the Best of Boston® iPhone app is an example of the former; our work with Chris Lohring on the creation of Notch Session Ales, an example of the latter. Whichever way it works, we get to play with smart people and create viable brands and businesses. What could be better?

If you want to check out the Best of Boston® iPhone app (just in time for the weekend), click here. And let us know what you think.

It got us thinking — along with our friends and colleagues at MITX — that there had to be a way to stage a meeting of the marketing minds that would go beyond talk.  And so, between cocktails and panels and whiteboards, FutureM was born.  Slated for October 4-8th, FutureM is a week-long collaborative conference on the vision for marketing in Massachusetts through an intersection of people and ideas and inspiration.  It’s a chance to hear about the latest in marketing, technology, and design– together.  And if the thought of nonstop keynotes scares you as much as it scares us, fear not: FutureM includes panels, roundtables, summits, parties, meet-ups, and more, because the best ideas rarely get created around a podium.  We can’t wait.  Check out the rumblings of the future here.

In the meantime, we wanted to share the opportunity to be a part of FutureM.  If you have a topic, technology, team, or even a question that can help define what’s next for marketing, submit an event idea.  So get creative and join us at the future here.

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Sudbury has the highest concentration of households with school-aged children of any town in Massachusetts, which makes for a very family-oriented town, and also puts a lot of focus on the quality of our schools. Each year the town sets a budget and struggles to live within it – like most towns, families, and people I know. When it can’t, the Town Fathers propose an “override,” meaning a right to raise taxes to cover expenses of the town over and above those that were budgeted.

Each year the proponents of this tax use the same slogan for this override: “Support Sudbury!” Each year they say that to maintain our first-class schools, fire, and police, we need to reach into our pockets and give a little more for the team.

Since 1999 the good people of Sudbury have “Supported Sudbury,” and this well-intended philanthropy has led to a series of challenges for the town well documented in this video highlighting some rather daunting facts and figures.

Anyhoo… I’ve had just about enough of this. And I met a like-minded denizen of the town, Bob Haarde, who’d decided to run for Selectman, and do something about it.

I met Bob for dinner at the local hangout, and we talked about how I might be able to help his campaign through the addition of a social marketing program. I offered to help, but told Bob that in the end, the program would succeed or fail not based on my talents, but based on his willingness to contribute substantive content to the channel, and to engage with the people drawn to that content. I agreed to get him started, and he agreed to create and post three pieces of original content to the system in the next 72 hours. This was important since time was short… the election was a week and a half away.

That night at my kitchen table I created and customized accounts for him on Posterous and Twitter, connecting them to each other and to a Facebook Fan Page I created from within Bob’s own Facebook account.  I took the Posterous e-mail and sent it to him, with instructions to publish whatever he wanted to share with voters, described in a casual and personal way, along with whatever anecdotes he cared to share about the journey of a regular guy into his first elective office.

He began to do so, and after he’d added three or four posts I began following our fellow Sudbury-ites on Twitter, and sharing the page with my own local friends on Facebook. By the election this week – 10 days after they launched – we’d amassed 25 Twitter followers and 60 Facebook fans, collectively connected to hundreds more. The Posterous entries were being published to both channels, and being viewed natively between 50 and 100 times.

Bob Haarde is now Sudbury’s newest Selectman. He has the seeds of a coalition to deliver on his campaign promise (“Cut waste, not teachers.”), and a direct and ready channel to the network of local voters that got him elected.

And he won by 36 votes.

We do this for brands (Coke = Real, BMW = Performance, Zappos = Service) and for just about everything else. We saw a potent example of One Simple Thing™ – or OST™ – thinking writ large last night in Massachusetts politics.

The truth is that comparatively few people met Scott Brown and Martha Coakley before yesterday’s election. Few closely followed press coverage of the two in the weeks leading up to the vote, and even fewer read their various position papers on the Web.

The vast majority of the 2.2 million votes cast yesterday were cast based on a single, simple distillation of what each candidate represented.

Martha chose her OST™ first, focusing on “Democrat,” which seemed like a sure bet for the seat vacated by Ted Kennedy, our beloved Lion of the Senate.

Scott Brown, though, chose a different OST™: “Truck.” Seriously. For those of you who don’t live here, Mr. Brown and his pickup truck were everywhere on Massachusetts media over the last few weeks, which for a long while made the Coakley team feel like this was going to be a cakewalk.

Well… it turns out that in an environment where voters feel Washington isn’t listening to them, “Truck” trumps “Democrat.” People like “Truck.” It’s solid. Populist. Dependable. When this began to become evident in the polls, the Coakley campaign tried to give Mr. Brown a new OST™: “Republican.” The Brown campaign countered by giving Ms. Coakley a new one as well: “Political Machine.” There was a shouting match for a while, in which Mr. Brown appears to have been more focused and effective, after which voters went to the polls ready to cast on the side of “Truck,” or “Machine.”

“Truck” won. By a lot. At least that’s how we see it.

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A mixed but on balance positive review of our wonderful Post 390 client in The Boston Globe. Bottom line: The restaurant is a runaway hit, even as it works out the inevitable kinks.

From the piece:

“To its credit, the team behind Post 390 knows the food is not yet up to par. Several days before this review was scheduled to run, the restaurant’s publicist called to say as much. The crowds have been greater than they anticipated, she said. It’s hard to refine things when the kitchen is struggling to keep up.

Still, crowds were the goal. A month before the restaurant opened, I spoke with Kenneth Himmel, founder of the restaurant group. “It will be very high energy, very high volume,’’ he said. By that measure, Post 390 succeeded as soon as it opened. Now the restaurant needs to work on tasting as good as it looks.”

What do you think? Have you had a positive or negative experience at the restaurant? Anything we should make sure they know??

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