Michael Leis

As this latest front has only passed a few flakes by my window, it looks as though my children will go to school tomorrow for the first time in about a week. Throughout the past two weeks, we have shoveled, played, watched movies, and looked repeatedly for things to do. All the while, my usual [...]

This past week I had the pleasure of being invited by Dennis Schleicher to visit Sears and host a discussion on visual and narrative techniques found in dramatic storytelling, and how they apply to system organization, social media and user experience.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]