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(From guest poster, Greg Carter)

The night, I purchased tickets online for a theatrical event. Yeah, I know, very exciting, but why I'm bringing this up is because of the checkout process.

Thanks to the email from the theater troupe, I found the show listing with relative ease. But after selecting two tickets and clicking checkout, I was asked to create an account (or login if I already had one, which I didn't), click the link to create an account, and an exasperating five separate pages later, I was finally able to order the tickets.

Lucky for the troupe, I really wanted to see this particular show, or else I would have given up the process long ago.

It's a glaring design flaw such as this that authors Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus hope to combat with their book Web Design for ROI. (ROI stands for "return on investment", or this according to Investopedia.)

True, the theater probably does need all that information to process the ticket order, but a simpler process, something that takes into account the user and his/her reactions, would probably decrease frustration and increase online ticket sales.

Your company may have hundreds of fantastic products for which the public is hungering, but if the home page is too cluttered with information and images, or searching for a specific item turns into a hunt for Dr. Livingstone, or the potential buyer can't tell the "Add to Cart" button from the "Exit" button, then your site may not be doing its job. However, instead of spending thousands of dollars to re-design your entire site, Loveday and Niehaus suggest perhaps a little tweaking to the design, how pages are laid out, will show a quicker and better response.

Take into account your users. Most people quickly skim a homepage, looking for information important to them. Long paragraphs probably won't hold their interest, so why not try headlines in a bolder type, stronger color and have the headline link to another page with that information or story. People also tend to read from left to right, top to bottom, so creating your pages with that flow in mind will make the experience a more pleasant one. Or, as a rebuttal to my ticket purchase example, give the user the option of creating an account or not.

REI's checkout process does exactly that, and I can say from my own experience, I liked not having to create a password and enter account information just to by a one-time gift (for my brother since I'm the farthest thing from outdoorsy you could imagine). Design a good user experience, and the user is likely to return or to even recommend your site to their friends.

Web Design for ROI offers other simple, common sense techniques to re-work the design of a site to make it more productive and effective. For anyone who designs sites or has a say in their creation, this book would be an incredibly useful tool.

(Photo by haydnseek)

Great digital marketing managers have several things in common: they are passionate users of technology; they exhibit a fanatical attention to detail; they know how to connect the dots in very complex, dynamic systems; and they are skilled at translating business needs into technological reality.

At least that's what I gleaned from conversations with two Aquent talent: Terry Kong, a digital marketing manager represented by Aquent's New York office; and Becky Huber, a marketing manager with strong online experience represented by our Richmond office.

Terry currently oversees direct digital marketing (email campaigns, newsletters, etc.) and intranet management for a major financial company's corporate and institutional business. Becky has worked through Aquent at a well-known credit card company where, among other things, she was involved in their first online marketing campaign. Here's some of what they told me when I asked, "What separates the great from the good, digital marketing-wise?"

1. Passion for Technology

"Subject matter expertise is good," Terry told me, "but you really need to know the technology. Actually, it goes beyond knowledge and understanding. You have to be into technology."

"I'm looking for internet junkies and email junkies," adds Becky. "People who are not just interested in or familiar with technology, but actively engaged with it." Terry, who builds websites and explores the world of gadgets in his spare time, explains it this way, "I want the folks on my team to understand the limitations and the power of technology because they've actually used it." On that score Becky points out, "There is a lot you can learn and pick up in the execution space, but you have to start with genuine enthusiasm for the tools."

2. Attention to Detail

"Effective online marketing, whether we're talking about banner ads or SEM, requires that you compress everything you want to say into 6 to 10 words. You have to drill down to the core, the heart of what you do," says Becky, "then you have to get your hands on all the research you can and find out what it is about what you do that really engages the audience. And THEN, you have to test continually."

The ability to test continually was something that Terry really liked about e-retailing specifically. "In contrast to B-2-B online marketing," Terry points out, "with retail stuff you can see results day to day and you can tweak on the fly to get closer and closer to the pot of gold."

Cory Doctorow recently published an essay, "Why I Copyfight." His basic point is that sharing knowledge, stories, music, etc. is an essential part of human culture (in this, his arguments echo those of Jonathan Lethem), but that internet technology has made such sharing and copying virtually indistinguishable, and therewith criminalized an ubiquitous and, to a certain degree, essential human behavior. The danger now is, if you enforce the laws, and eliminate copying, then you effectively abolish human culture. (I may be exaggerating the point a little here.)

Reasonable copyright law, he goes on to say, must make a distinction between "good" copying, which is just human, and "bad" copying, which is stealing. Doctorow demonstrates that the former is actually penalized more harshly than the latter by pointing out that the penalties for bootlegging DVDs and hawking them on the street are actually lower than the penalties for making a movie viewable for free on the web.That just doesn't seem right, right?

As writers and designers and otherwise creators of content, do you make this same distinction between copying as just a part of healthy, human cultural exchange and copying as unmitigated rip-off? What about that old truism: Poor artists borrow, great artists steal?

I got a PhD in German Studies which means, among other things, that I had to make a living as a corporate trainer, writer, and more recently, marketer. It also means that I spent a lot of time studying fascism, communism, and the dynamics of power.

In the course of my studies I came to view both individualism and collectivism with ambivalence and skepticism for much the same reasons: Individualism tends to deny the collective backdrop from which it provisionally emerges and upon which it depends for meaning and survival; collectivism tends to overwhelm and erase the individuals it is supposedly there to nurture and protect and from whom it draws its sustenance.

In the new world of total social mediation, as Theodor Adorno might say, this dynamic plays itself out in a novel way: Online, while a username gives the appearance of individuality, the "user" speaking may actually be a collective, and vice versa.

In this way, the power imbalances that reign in society at large, are simultaneously recreated and obscured. When you confront someone, you don't know if you are confronting a person, an institution, or an entire complex of social relations. At the same time, when an individual responds to this confrontation, he may forget that he is not necessarily speaking as himself, but, instead, as an extension of a larger corporate entity or a particular group of people united by a common interest.

When evaluating online conversations, or participating in them, we err when we reduce them to their literal content. We have to continually weigh and reweigh this content in terms of real, off-line power differentials. For example, based on this differential, a participant may be right in a logical or rational sense, but wrong in a political, social or ethical sense.

Ya get me?

Looks like we're in a recession, my fellow Americans (if you happen to live somewhere else, more power to ya!). Home prices are dropping and foreclosures are up. Over 500,000 private sector jobs have evaporated since November 2007. We're even seeing runs on banks. If you want to know how bad it could get, but also get some reassurance that things aren't as bad as they could be, check out these graphs provided by the New York Times.

Then yesterday, Google shares lost nearly 10% of their value after reporting earnings that disappointed investors. When the public radio show Marketplace reported on this, they made two interesting points:

On the one hand, they emphasized that Google is not a tech company, with Martin Pyykkonen explaining,"At the end of the day, in terms of running the business and how they get paid, it is through advertising." That statement was followed by this comment, "And we all know what happens to ad budgets in a weak economy -- they get cut."

In other words, things could continue to get tight for people who have jobs related to advertising. Not to put too fine a point on it, this means many of the folks - graphic designers, copywriters, etc. - that we work with and, frankly, us!

On the other hand, things are going OK for companies in the hardware business, like IBM, primarily because they have a lot of long-term service contracts in place that act as a recession buffer.

Bringing it all back home, I think the trick will be for folks who write and design to position themselves and their skills as a necessary, even critical, kind of ongoing service to their clients.

Is this realistic? Can it be done? Are you doing it? Are we?

Image Courtesy of Brent and MariLynn.

The ranks of Aquent bloggers are set to expand. In addition to this blog and that of Aquent's LA office, our international arm is going to be launching a blog, if I'm not mistaken, and I've been working semi-feverishly on providing our local offices with some plug-and-play tools that should greatly facilitate blogging efforts at street-level. Aquent is going to be "joining the conversation" on a planetary scale, world, so step back!

To top it off, it appears now (finally?) that a right honorable member of Aquent's management team is standing on the verge of getting his blog on. I don't want to say too much about it just yet -- the proof of the blog is in the pudding, as we all know -- but I did want to use him as inspiration for today's post.

This presumptive blogger was working up some pre-launch content and he was looking at my blog for something to take issue with. He said, in effect, that he couldn't find anything he didn't agree with on this blog. I was crest-fallen.

I shouldn't have been surprised, I suppose. After all, blogging is a personal idiom, and this is a corporate blog. Persons become individuals by differentiating themselves from others; corporations become persons by subsuming the individuals they "incorporate."

Unless you disagree with something or someone, you can't separate yourself from the brute uniformity of Being. You become background noise and eventually fade into oblivion. On the other hand, if you differentiate yourself too much within the corporate context, you enter the brute uniformity of Unemployment.

DARN IT! I DON'T CARE!

I want this blog to be somebody. I want this blog to express itself. I want people, even those super-ordinated to me in Aquent's complex and Byzantine hierarchy, to hear me and disagree with me!

So, here goes: I think that everyone who works for us, including all internal staff and talent, as well as any consultants, contractors, or temps we engage, should have to legally change their last name to "Aquent," as a non-negotiable condition of employment.

Let's see you agree with that!

Image Courtesy of MShades.

Back in the days when Second Life was being hyped as the future of the web, Clay Shirky quipped that "3D is a crappy way to search." I totally agree, in part because I've often had the experience of looking for something in my house, which came with the three standard spatial dimensions, and wishing I could search these dimensions the same way I search the web: textually.

The shortcomings of 3D search were brought home to me when I stumbled across the Seed Gives Life site. The site itself consists of a semi-explorable faux 3D Flash landscape which looks cool, but is kind of frustrating because, although you can poke around a bit in their pretty pastel forest, there isn't much to actually find there.

Then I found their blog and came across this post, msnbc's Ess feed viewer is pretty awesome." Turns out that msnbc is using an interesting technology, Spectra. which allows you to create a 3D newsfeed. Interestingly enough, since the feed can get kind of crowded, making in difficult to pick out the individual items of interest, they provide you with a tool that allows you to filter the feed view using, tah dah, text-based search.

Promise: 3D can provide a rich and imaginative interface.

Peril: It can be just as cluttered, obscure, and user-unfriendly as reality's own 3D interface.

Solution: Infuse the wonderfully awkward and beautifully frustrating tri-dimensional world (or its digital surrogate) with the awesome power of the hyper-dimensional world (sometimes called "the web").

Image Courtesy of advencap.

A week ago I posted that I would be attending the MarketingProfs' B2B Forum here in Boston and, long story short, I did.

My überboss asked if I would put together some slides on what I learned there, but I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone by writing about it here. After all, isn't Web 2.0 about sharing knowledge, insight, information, and, well, love?

So, in no particular order, "My Learnings."

1. Aquent Finds Marketers Job

Here's an anecdote: I was late to lunch on Tuesday and had to find an available seat for David Meerman Scott's presentation. Introducing myself to one of my tablemates, she said, "I know Aquent. I got my first job through you and a good friend and mentor of mine used to work for you guys." This was actually the second meal in which I heard words to that effect.

2. Aquent Finds Marketers Marketers

The other type of conversation I had, again fairly randomly, involved people who identified themselves as clients of Aquent. These were smart people doing innovative things at big companies.

3. Marketers Turn to Aquent as a Resource

I met people who said, "Oh, I was on your site looking for a new gig." I met others who said, "Oh, maybe you guys can help me find a new job." Another person wanted to know if job titles were a good vector of segmentation (if that makes sense).

As a follow-up to our webcast with Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus, I thought I would proffer my two cents on ways that the evolution of the web is and will affect careers in web design. It's the first time that I have recorded a podcast fueled solely by my own fevered thoughts and distorted personal reflections. I hope you find it edifying, or at least enjoyable.

If you don't have twenty-five minutes to absorb this podcast, my main thesis is fairly simple: As people and organizations expand and diffuse their web presence, and websites get boiled down to a convenient collection of links to points within this decentralized presence, site design as we know it will become less and less important.

I could be totally wrong, or, more likely, partially wrong, but I think I'm at least partially right. What do you think?

To hear the podcast, please click on the Flash device below. You are also welcome to download an mp3 of this interview by "right-clicking" ("control-clicking," Mac-wise) on this link. Finally, this and other Talent Blog Podcasts are always available on iTunes. (Note: At the time of posting, I was having a hard time pinging iTunes. If you can't find the podcast there now, it should appear within the next 24 hours.)

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My own favorite quotation from the aforementioned podcast: "The Web is THE site."

At the end of last year I wrote a post proclaiming that I was going to make this blog more about Aquent. As part of that effort, I've wanted to introduce more and more voices from around the company into this channel. Of course, I've continued to highlight Aquent talent, their insights, abilities, and achievements, and I've also given periodic shout-outs to my environmentally conscious and often funny comrade-in-blogs, Tim Donnelly. But I know I could do so much more.

For starters, check out our Tampa office. The folks down there were talking to me about starting a local blog and so I asked them to say a little bit about the market for this one. I ended up speaking with Tampa's Isela Santisteban, and this is what she told me:

"I've been working with Aquent for the last 9 years, first in Miami, then Fort Lauderdale, and now here in Tampa.

"Tampa is like the mid-West of Florida. It's a great place to raise a family, have fun, and go to the beach! A lot of businesses are located or headquartered down here - Home Shopping Network, OSI Restaurant Partners (that owns and operates Outback Steakhouse, among other properties), and Publix Super Markets, for example - and there are plenty of opportunities for people looking to work in healthcare, finance, hospitality, technology, consumer packaged goods and related fields.

"About half the work Aquent talent do in Tampa is interactive. The rest consists of marketing, graphic design, and print production. Our clients include a number of high profile companies as well as agencies with major accounts. The way the market is right now, I can find a job for anyone with interactive experience at any level.

"What I love about my job is that today's talent becomes tomorrow's client. I'm still talking to people I placed 9 years ago and I'm sure there are people I've just begun to work with that I'll still know 9 years from now."

It's not unusual for Aquent staff like Isela to be with us for a long time. This sort of longevity gives our clients and our talent a lot of continuity. It also means, as you can imagine, that the Isela's of the Aquent-world are centers for ever growing networks of talented, creative professionals. To get in touch with Isela or any of her equally enthusiastic and connected colleagues, call them at (813) 287-9119.

On another note, and speaking of Florida, right now Aquent's training arm, AGI is busy putting on the CRE8 Conference in Orlando. One of the presenters there is none other than Todd Tibbetts, a consultant with Aquent Studios in Seattle, whom I've mentioned here before. He's blogging about his adventures at CRE8 and, more than anything else, making me feel like I'm missing out on something magical. We'll be hearing more from Todd in the days to come, so stay tuned!

Image Courtesy of soupboy.