Sometimes, non-tech companies find themselves the source of geek obsession. In San Francisco, one of these companies is Samovar Tea Lounge.

The question is: how to embrace it?

In the case of Samovar, they put a personal appeal to the tech community in their actual menu, called “Tea and Technology.”  It’s a simple gesture but one that communicates Samovar’s technology philosophy and also how fans can extend their Samovar experience outside of the cafe through digital mediums, such as their e-newsletter, Twitter and videos on their site.

It’s amazingly smart and a good example of a company that is really tuning into who its customers are beside the obvious (in this case, tea enthusiasts).

Check out the video, which also includes an ode to summer at the end that I made for all of my wonderful viewers.

Tea and Technology from aziari on Vimeo.

Know any other non-tech companies that are using some innovative methods to connect with their tech-y customer base? Please share!

Yesterday, I attended LaidOffCamp in San Francisco, which if accuracy is the goal, should have been called something closer to WorkCamp.

The point was to bring together both folks who’ve been laid off (God knows there’s a lot of them right now) as well as people who are untraditionally employed (think freelancers) in a loose “unconference” format where topics and presenters are decided on the spot. You’d expect some sort of screaming match to erupt in this intentional disorganization, but amazingly the whole shindig went off without a hitch.

24-year-old San Franciscan Chris Hutchins was inspired to create LaidOffCamp in January after being laid off himself. Since then, many more planned LaidOffCamps have sprung up around the nation and there has even been international interest, which speaks to the fragile state of the global economic system, if anything.

Throughout the day, I sat in on sessions on Startup Basics, Building a Resume 2.0, Def Leppard Networking (yes, you heard that right), and Freelancing Tools to name a few.

Lucky for you I documented the whole experience and also got the opportunity to sit down with Chris in between his New York Times and other media interviews. Here’s what you missed and what Chris had to say:

I was doing some 2009 brainstorming for a freelance client recently. This company is ultimately a service business. It doesn’t sell its own product or have any proprietary technologies. One of my suggestions was to put branding over its process to make what it does more tangible. So prospects can say, “Aha. I get what you do and I understand what we will get from you!”

Agencies face the same exact problem. They’re ultimately service businesses. What’s a given agency’s process, though? What makes it different?

Go to a number of agencies’ Web sites and you often find the same language. The same services. The same promises.

The truth is there are few agencies that are actually alike internally. Also, that few agencies get social media. And they’re are few that are nearly as good at developing messaging around themselves as they are their clients.

I get it. Writing a biography for yourself is hard. But just as we tell our clients: Differentiate or die.

Even though themediaisdying, we must think deeper than integrating social media into our work to keep up with the movement from print to online and the hands of citizen journalists.

For the longevity of our agencies, we must develop novel ideas, systems and technologies that help us do a better job at what we do and communicate how we are different to (potential) clients. Then clients can look at us and say – “Aha. I get what you do and I understand what we will get!” They can preview an agency spearheaded monitoring technology, for instance, and say, “No one else is doing this. We will be five steps ahead of our competition if we choose you as our AOR.”

I truly feel that so much emphasis has been placed on social media the last few years that we have forgotten the basics (not to say social media isn’t important. It’s a huge passion of mine). We must put the air mask on ourselves before we can put it on others.

If we wait too long – helping others and not developing our processes and messaging internally – we are are putting our organizations at huge risk, particularly in a time when the same number of agencies are competing for a fewer number of available accounts.