This is my favorite infographic from the last storm in December
On the eve of yet another paralyzing snowstorm, I think back a few weeks ago to the last time we were snowed in for a day. We shoveled, hung around, and, like any good suburban family, spent a ton of time on the Internet.
With this weekend promising the same, I wonder why I’ve not seen one discount code on social networks or my email inbox. Seems like a no-brainer. It’s the perfect time to send me to a site where I can find out more information and buy something I’ve been considering.
The added layer is making a game of it. read more…
oooh... pretty colors
With so many people coming up with fancy acronyms for social media methodologies, I figured it was time to write about where I see social’s major areas of focus in a few circles and call it a day.
From my side of the table, I’m seeing clients needing to understand these three areas to effectively map a social strategy that works for their brand: social, distributed, and integrated. read more…
Yesterday, I helped get Will Evans ready for IXD10 by making a video for his Right Way To Wireframe panel with Russ Unger, Fred Beecher, and Todd Zakiwarfel (the panel will also be appearing at SXSW). I’m sharing the video here because I think it ended up being a good way to see the methods and tools involved in the interaction design deliverable process from persona through sketching, wireframing and visual design. In about 90 seconds.
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I do know this is the cheesyest image to describe the article, which is why I chose it
Today, the radio industry publication Music Week published Dan Thornton’s thoughts on the iPad’s impact on commercial radio. As Absolute Radio Digital Marketing Manager, he brought up a lot of good thought-starters on the potential. What I found most interesting was him setting the interaction environment of use. read more…
Let me start by saying that I really don’t plan on getting an iPad for home. We own every other class of Apple product and it doesn’t do enough anything to justify the cost.
Having said that, as a digital agency and brand strategist, I believe that anyone who wants to keep a client forever should take a big page from Apple and leverage this incredible delivery network to revolutionize B2B communications. read more…
What a lot of brands are missing in their digital marketing strategy is common-engine thinking. As brands chase social media and leave a trail of long-forgotten campaigns in their wake, what’s needed is a solid, enterprise foundation that allows for any new computing trend to be added or subtracted while always making a tangible deposit in the brand.
Working in the infancy of ecommerce slightly more than a decade ago, the only survivors of the first bust were the companies who had developed their own common engine: effectively allowing for attrition among storefront brands while maintaining a behind-the-scenes hub that could add new sites faster and easier with every installation. If one site needs customization, now that improvement is available to every other site being driven by the engine.
What results from common-engine thinking is a distinct advantage for every team that touches it: read more…
People in marketing constantly chatter about “getting a share of wallet,” or “midshare,” or any other myriad metaphors for being so ingrained in a potential customer’s habits and awareness that when it comes time to pull the trigger, that particular brand has become an automatic purchase.
Forget the metaphors. What is your brand actually doing to literally get on that list? How are you helping people and being a utility in a way where you’ve made the brand easily convenient at the place structured in time to make trial and habits easy to build? read more…
Lately I’ve seen a big push for brands to use their main site and social presences as an aggregator of content. In a way, it’s still a holdover from the corporate era of computing that we as a society are now leaving. An executive will see the way federated media aggregates Tweets on behalf of Microsoft, or some other example, and decide that it’s time to automate content from across the Web to make that brand site an automated destination for users. While this tactic may have its merits on paper, it will ultimately fail because no one wants aggregation. What they want is curation. read more…
Having identified the problem space of pushing all your brand budget chips on Facebook, it’s time to explore the solutions to bridge brand sites and Facebook to deliver the best of both worlds.
Application Programming Interfaces are what drives much of the integration and mobility in data that people call Web 2.0. For about the last year, I’ve been writing about using the API push model, and especially for industries like newspapers, APIs are today’s honor boxes: putting information in the places your audience is most likely to be.
The real beauty of APIs though is when you can use them to make your site a social object in social networks. In the simplest sense, what if someone is visiting your microsite, and when they get to the third click, you give them a virtual gift to post on their Facebook page? It’s a quick operation, which leads directly to: read more…
Moving into its third or fourth year as a Web design / marketing mantra, it seems the people marching to the drumbeat of “Death to Microsites,” has had a confluence with Facebook surpassing 300 milion registered users.
To a chorus of rousing applause, more and more large brands are discontinuing the practice of creating microsites and instead create campaigns that exist solely on Facebook.
This is a hideous, awful idea spawned from the same lazy thinking that made microsites so bad in the first place. So let me play the role of the Lorax here and take a minute to speak for the Microsites, for the Microsites have no voice: read more…
