Michael Leis

Reflecting on my recent experience talking with a range of senior agency leaders, as well as senior practice leads in traditional shops across PR and Direct marketing, the race for the middle (as Forrester calls it) is not only on, it’s getting kinda heated. Regardless of the background of the agency, leadership understands that clients [...]

One interesting aspect of watching societal computing habits right now is around metrics. We all love them, we like to see who the influencers are, how many unique vistis happen over a period of time, how many times a cartoon got stumbled. Many companies right now, especially those that tout themselves as eminently “open” and [...]

Email has become the elephant in the room. For just about every single business and education institution, the utter dependence on email as a primary communications and knowledge sharing channel is putting a quiet stranglehold on every aspect of operation. Email as a problem space goes so deep and so wide, it’s difficult for most [...]

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.

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]