Milwaukee BizTimes (Formerly the Small Business Times) is Southeastern Wisconsin’s source for news and information for the business community. So Trivera was honored when they chose to profile founder, president and CEO Tom Snyder as the featured local executive in their Coffee Break column.

You can view the entire article here

In addition to lots of great insight into what makes Trivera tick, there’s also an unanswered question: What’s the funniest thing that ever happened in your career?

A lot of people tweeted me to ask about my answer. I tried really hard to put this 140 characters… no luck.

Yes. I was fired over a Barry Manilow song.

I was actually a very successful DJ (used the name Tom McCarthy on the air) and music director at WLTQ and Star 95 back in the late 80’s.  As Program director at EZ-Listening WEZW, we had a General Manager that just didn’t get a “love-songs” format. Despite huge ratings, he was constantly questioning what we were playing. He would even call the request line from his car with “traffic reports” when I was on the air, but then would also ask me why we were playing the song that was on that moment.

One day he came into my office and demanded that I justify the fact that we were playing a particular Barry Manilow song.

I must have been having bad day, because I brought up the song on our music scheduling system, and gave him a single keystroke that would eliminate that song on his station forever.  It probably wasn’t so much a Barry Manilow song that cost me my job, as much as it was telling my boss to “just come over here, delete the  %#$*& Barry Manilow song, and get out of my office.”  He hit the delete button, then went straight to his office and called corporate to give him permission to delete me too.

The episode got me out of radio, into the broadcast software business, and eventually, into Web. While I loved that business, in retrospect it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’m much happier doing what I’m doing now, and just listening to the radio while I work.

Back in 1996 (and ever since), Trivera was on the cutting edge of brand re-enforcing Web technologies.  As one of Milwaukee’s first Web development firms, we helped businesses take advantage of a new medium that, at the time, many were saying was just a fad, and would never be commercially viable.

So it’s no surprise that we’re feeling a case of Deja Vu. More than a decade later, Social Media is taking over the Web and marketing landscapes. Everyone is blogging. Facebook is evolving from a hangout for school kids to a Baby Boomer magnet with huge brand benefits. Twitter is a powerful new vehicle for businesses, and Trivera is right there in the thick of it, helping them capitalize on it.

At a recent Social Networking event, or “Tweet Up,” TMJ4 cameras caught Trivera’s Tom Snyder who was tapped to train business owners how to use Twitter as a business information, reputation management and marketing tool.

At that same event Fox6’s Ted Perry caught up with Trivera’s Marjie Snyder to find out what the buzz was all about. She’s included in this May ratings sweep feature from their 9 O’Clock news.

It’s no exaggeration to say that everyone is asking what it’s all about. Most businesses are asking how they can use it to make money. You’re fortunate. You have someone you can ask. Someone who has done it before. And most importantly someone you can trust.

Trivera is including Social Media strategic and tactical consulting, staff training and standards development, campaign guidance and execution and application creation in our proposals for all clients. We’d be happy to help you determine which of these powerful tools are right for you…and how to use them to fuel success for your business.

Don’t let this wave pass you by. Call, email or Twitter us today! We’re here to help…again!

An amazing concept: an economically viable mainstream home that produces more energy than it consumes. It took a visionary company like the Neumann Companies to conceive and build it, and it took  a visionary company like Trivera to create the Web site for the project.

Through the combination of several readily available technologies, which include a solar photovoltaic system (PV), geothermal heating and cooling system and solar domestic hot water, the EP Home has the ability to produce 100 percent of the energy needed to heat and cool the home, run all the appliances and power the occupant’s electric vehicle to and from work. The home promotes an energy independent lifestyle by consuming no fossil fuels, which allows for a dramatic reduction in greenhouse emissions and dependency on foreign oil.

The home is located in the Autumn Ridge Development three miles west of Oconomowoc. Building began in early February of 2009 and will be completed by August, in time to be showcased in the Milwaukee Area Metropolitan Builders Association’s 2009 Affordably Green Built Parade of Homes.

All the info about the home can be found at http://www.energyproducinghome.com, a site built, hosted and maintained by Trivera Interactive.

Milwaukee’s General Mitchell International Airport Web site has re-launched with a new graphic design. Taking creative direction from the internal team at Mitchell, the new look was crafted by Trivera to take better advantage of today’s larger desktop resolutions.  A larger menu, more impactful graphics, a realtime graphic weather display and a “Lowest Airfare” widget are just some of the additions to the site. The larger format also incorporates larger graphic callouts to the most popular internal pages.  The re-launch follows the recent debut of the mobile version of the Mitchell site, and includes the automatic mechanism that detects whether the visitor is coming to the site on a traditional computer or a wireless device and serves up the appropopriate version for that visitor.

The new site is just the latest project in a realtionship between Mitchell Airport and Trivera that began in 1995.