A conversation with Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus
Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus are the authors of Web Design for ROI, and will be featured in a webcast hosted by Aquent on May 22. Their approach to web design, while theoretically informed, is relentlessly pragmatic. As they put it, "Our work is about more than just getting people to think about web design. We want them to act."
If you want to improve the performance of your site, read their book. If you want a glimpse into their approach, read the rest of this post!
1. Web Design Isn't What You Think It Is
"Everyone thinks of design in terms of 'graphic design' - colors, fonts, logos, etc.," says Sandra. "We're working with a more strategic and multi-disciplinary concept of design, one that takes business goals as its starting point. Designing from this perspective allows you to determine whether or not all the elements truly support those goals."
"Our notion of design is really about problem-solving," adds Lance, "and goes beyond interface design or even experience design, because it doesn't just involve the creative folks. It involves all the different people on the team, from the business owner on down, and making sure everyone rallies around the objectives of the site."
"We decided to write this book," he continues, "because we were frustrated at the money being left on the table by under-utilized sites with a lot of potential. Design needs to be about helping a company succeed as a business, and that means thinking about costs, customers, and results. Ultimately, we want to take the discipline up a notch."
2. Small Changes Can Bring Big Results
"People are always surprised when we tell them they can improve site performance with relatively small, inexpensive changes. Well, it's true," Sandra explains. "Consider buttons. We've seen people increase check-out throughput by 40 percent just by increasing the size of the check-out button.
"Now, stop reading this and look at your buttons. Are they large enough? Are they legible? Are they placed appropriately? Do the most important buttons stand out? Adjusting these elements can cost next to nothing and can have a major impact."
"Another quick fix we recommend," Lance says, "is adding a functional tag line to your home page. That can solve one of the web's most common problems: 60 percent home page bounce rates.
"Web users have two questions when they arrive at your site: 'Is this what I expected to find?' and 'Does this site have what I'm looking for?' Your tagline should answer those questions instantly. I'm talking simple text, less than 10 words, that is descriptive, explanatory, and intuitive."
I saw this video on DeanHunt.com. Well, actually, Dean posted a slightly earlier version of it. The one below dates from June 2007:
The main point seems to be that the world is bigger, more connected, and changing faster than we realize. It's interesting in part because it illustrates at least one of the points it is trying to make: originally created for a presentation to 150 people, the various versions have collectively been viewed over 5 million times on YouTube.
There are a lot of thought-provoking tidbits in here and I encourage you to find them for yourself. To save you a fraction of time, I'll share these two with you:
- By 2013, supercomputers will exceed the computational capacity of the human brain;
- By 2049, a $1000 computer's capacity will exceed that of the human race.
As the authors point out, it is very difficult to predict what will happen between the first date and the second. One reason for this unpredictability is something Vernor Vinge dubbed, "The Singularity," way back in 1993. As he wrote then, "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."
In other words, once an intelligence greater than our own appears on Earth, the possible futures ensuing become as unknowable as the events occurring beyond the event horizon of a black hole.
Action Item: During your next job interview, ask the interviewer what plans the company has for The Singularity and the need to serve super-intelligent customers.
I had a little problem with my iTunes account so I sent a message to their support center. The first response I got concluded with:
"Good luck on downloading the song Matthew! Again, please let me know if I can do anything else for you in the near future. I am so happy I was able to help you today with your item. Have a fantastic day and take care! Cheers! Brittany"
I replied: "Thanks! Much appreciated. Now having a fantastic day, Matt"
To which she (Brittany) responded: "Thank you for your kind words and you are so welcome! Nothing makes me happier than to hear that I have pleased our iTunes family members."
I practically blushed when I read that.
Blowing the Job Search
Having some PR responsibilities here, I often respond to ProfNet queries, particularly when they apply to careers and job hunting. Because my responses are thoughtful, but do not always see the light of day on the other side of the querying reporter's in-box, I thought I would quickly share the helpful hints I provided a writer putting together a piece on how people damage their job search:
1) Not doing enough or any research on the target company or the hiring manager. What do they do? What are their goals? Who are their competitors? etc. You better know!
2) Not leveraging your network to get an introduction, a recommendation, or anything else to differentiate you from the pool of applicants. Related problem: Not having or cultivating a network in the first place.
3) Swearing or almost swearing (ex. "friggin'") in the interview.
4) Forgetting you are being interviewed. In other words, acting more casually if the interviewer takes you to lunch, etc. Remember: Until you get that offer letter, you are being watched!
Maybe I was just desperate, but, in order to come up with a blog post today, I went to Google and searched for the coolest thing ever. That search led me to this site, Webware, which features, "Cool Web 2.0 Apps for Everyone."
The coolest thing ever? Even though I did use it to make the adjoining hideous graphic in about 10 seconds, I'm not so sure. I'm kind of leaning towards MindHabits, a game that apparently makes you happier and more self-confident. It even boosted the self-esteem of telemarketers and made them more successful.
This is a snapshot of Modernista!'s new website. Yes, they are using their Wikipedia page as their homepage (though apparently Wikipedia took it down for a while due to this unconventional usage). They also use Google News for their "news" section and Flickr for their portfolio.
I'm not the first to write about this. PSFK wrote about it last week, as did MarketingVOX and others. Before that, a number of bloggers - Gareth Kay, Paul Isakson, and Tom O'Keefe, among them - weighed in both for and against this novel approach.
Some (like Mitch Caplan) found it "Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant." Others, like Mr. O'Keefe, were less impressed. The pro-camp sees it as the ultimate acceptance of Web 2.0 reality, in which your online reputation defines who you are. The cons see it as lazy, ugly, or just one step beyond what Zeus Jones had already done.
I think the difference between the Modernista! site and the Zeus Jones site is significant insofar as the latter is an actual site with links to Zeus Jones-flavored content, whereas the M! site is really just a widget leading you to M! content across the web.
At the same time, Modernista!'s move reminds us that, in spite of the spatial metaphor inscribed in the term, a website is not a place or a location. It is a set of relations between disparate elements. In fact, the elements related are often sets of relations themselves, such as Google search results.
This may be the reason that information architecture seems more cutting edge than graphic design on the web. When "sites" are reduced to their content, or even more radically, consist primarily of continually changing content from other sites, who cares about white space, color palettes, and buttons?
Seth Godin doesn't need my link love, but, just in case you don't follow the daily musings of The Godin One, I thought I would share. Key quotable quote: "Great jobs, world class jobs, jobs people kill for... those jobs don't get filled by people emailing in resumes. Ever." [Tip of the hat to my esteemed colleague, Erin, for this one.]
The other day I pointed out that brand loyalty mimics brain damage. Well, turns out that exposure, even subliminal exposure, to well-known brands can cause you to exhibit behavior associated with them. For example, this study demonstrated that seeing (or, strictly speaking, "not seeing") the Apple "apple" can make you more creative.
Gee, what does exposure to the Microsoft logo make you do?
Todd's knowledge of the digital media realm runs deep and, having worked with clients ranging from Microsoft and 3M to Starbucks and the Whole Earth Catalog, his experience is broad.
As far as content development and asset management is concerned, his message is this: "For many individuals and companies, their content (pictures, text, video, etc) is a mess, a liability, and a cost center. It takes focus and effort to turn the content from a liability into an economic asset, but the path is straight-forward and very achievable."
To find out just how straight-forward and achievable, tune in on the 27th. To register, just go here.
She said it, at least in part, ironically. "Marketing? A science? Come on! What's next? Fishing?"
Marketing may not yet be a hard, or even soft, science. Nevertheless, scientists are indeed taking a hard look at marketing and beginning to paint a very interesting picture of how and why marketing actually works IN THE BRAIN.
James Intriligator is one such scientist. Having received his doctorate in psychology from Harvard for work on "attention," James did a stint as a consultant to the automotive industry, among others, before assuming a post in the Center for Neuroscience and Consumer Psychology at the University of Wales, Bangor.
I've known James for many years and decided to call him up when I wanted to get a handle this "neuromarketing" thing. He was kind enough to walk me through this emerging field as well as his own findings regarding brand loyalty (Hint: It kind of makes you act like a crazy person!), segmentation, and literally getting inside the customer's brain.
I invite you to listen in on our conversation. I think you'll find the discussion illuminating and, at times, even entertaining. (Where else will you hear people talk about "brand build-up," "brand flossing," and "brandectomies"?) I had a lot of questions for James and he had a lot of answers. For this reason, I've split the interview into two parts.
You can check out Part 1 right here by clicking 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, or check out this and all other Talent Blog Podcasts on iTunes.
A few highlights of the interview can be found at the following time coordinates:
02:35 - How Brands Build Up in Brains
04:06 - Ways to Quantify Brand Loyalty
05:06 - Brand Loyalty, Brand Familiarity, and the Attentional Blink
06:45 - Dealing with Excess Brand Build-Up
08:13 - How to Forge a Robust Representation of the Brand (in the Brain)
10:27 - What Counts as an "Experience" in "Experiential Marketing"?
11:40 - Problems with Product Placement
13:23 - Brand Loyalty and Brain Damage
17:43 - A Brand Is the Net Sum of All Experiences You've Had with a Product/Company
19:22 - The Web as a Branding Medium
23:09 - Segmenting the Brand
26:09 - The One Rule that Fits All Branding and Marketing Activity
In the blurb I wrote about my podcast with Debbie Weil, I gave as one of the "don'ts" of corporate, "Don't overestimate the amount of work it will require." A colleague saw the post and wrote, "This doesn't make any sense. You mean 'don't underestimate the amount of work,' right?"
Wrong.
Yes, conceiving and launching a blog takes work. Yes, once you've launched it, you've got to maintain it indefinitely. Yes, you will have to devote time and resources to this project. Nevertheless, and this was Debbie's point, while it does require work and commitment, it doesn't require so much that you shouldn't do it. Putting it another way, I could have said, "Don't let your overestimation of the work required stop you from trying."
When I explained this to my colleague, he responded, "Too clever by a half." To that, I could only say, "Guilty as charged!"
I interviewed Debbie Weil yesterday for a podcast on corporate blogging (which I'll be posting tomorrow morning - watch this space!). While doing a bit of research on Debbie, I came across her compilation of the "Best Top Ten Lists" for 2007. What threw me for a time-loop was this list of "Top 10 Tips for New Bloggers" assembled by the fellow who coined the term "blog," Jorn Barger.
Actually, it wasn't the list that threw me so much as seeing Jorn's robot wisdom weblog, which was the first blog I ever read (while sitting in the Aquent office in Osaka, Japan back in 2000). It reminded me once again that a weblog, now commonly called "blog," was originally defined by Mr. Barger as a collection of links documenting someone's travels around the web. The journal-esque form of today's blogs suggests that the genre has drifted somewhat from his original concept, according to which, as he puts it, "...del.icio.us is actually better for blogging than blogger.com."
In other words, blogging is about the links, not about self-important pontification, snide carping, or insipid personal reflection. (Thank the Heavens that I never indulge in such frivolities on this august and painfully earnest corporate blog!)
So, in the original spirit of bloggery, I present the following links upon which I have recently pointed and/or clicked:
The webcast will provide those who are new to the reputation management game with a comprehensive overview of it. For those already involved in search engine optimization and marketing, social media marketing, or the management of an organization's complex and constantly evolving web presence, Andy has a lot of practical, tactical, and technical advice that will help you make sure you're covering all the angles.
Finally, although the emphasis will fall on things that companies can do, should do, or are doing to manage and influence their online reputation, many of the insights Andy will share can be applied by individuals concerned with building and shaping their own online reputations.
In other words, there's something for everybody here so you owe to yourself to check it out. I mean, your reputation is on the line! Doesn't that matter to you? Don't you want to know that you're doing everything in your power to maintain it in the best and strongest light? Wouldn't you feel bad if your reputation was dealt a horrible blow and you could have prevented or avoided it if you had just attended this webcast?
Don't find out the hard way just how important your online reputation can be; find out the easy way how to protect and nurture it: Listen to the darn webcast.
I'm going to set aside my "career advice" hat for a second and put on my "marketing thought leader" hat so that I can briefly discuss some interesting things I noticed about the Super Bowl ads.
First, GoDaddy. For a few years now, they've been posting the "hot" versions of their notorious ads on their website. While last year the message was "marketing has all the fun," this year, the message seemed to be, "the hot ads are on the web." In fact, the commercial explicitly mocked people for watching the ads on television.
So, Interesting Integration Strategy #1: Create a television ad that is basically an advertisement for the on-line ad (which happens to be on your website).
Second, Under Armour. Apparently, as their Apple-esque ad ended, if you were on their mailing list, you received an HTML email allowing you to pre-order the future of the athletic shoe. The obvious assumption is that even when watching television, people are on-line, either via their cellphone, their Blackberry, or their household PC.
Interesting Integration Strategy #2: Supplement broadcast advertisement with immediate on-line call to action.
The writing is on the FunWall: Marketing is undergoing an unprecedented and overwhelming proliferation of channels. This isn't new news, naturally. It's been going on for a while, what with computers in taxicabs and digital bulletin in elevators and all. But it does seem like every day the web is adding another site, another portal, or another technology that will allow people to connect with each other and, by extension, allow marketers to connect with consumers.
So, in addition to your direct mail campaigns, your advertising (on and off-line), and your promotions, you, Mr and/or Ms. Marketer, need to figure out whether or not you should be blogging, vlogging, Twittering, or podcasting. How can you use Facebook and MySpace? How can you leverage LinkedIn and Plaxo? Where is your sim in Second Life? Your Halo tie-in? Your product placement in Grand Theft Auto? An what about that other cool thing you read or heard about but aren't even sure what it's for?
Everyone feels like they should be doing all or some of the above, but there are so many possibilities, and so much on your plate already, that it's hard to know where to start. To help clear the air and provide some sort of guide to the perplexed, I hunted down a couple of new media-savvy marketers and asked them quite simply: How can marketers best figure out what they should get into and what they can profitably avoid?
So here's how things work sometimes. While doing research in preparation for my conversation with William Lunderman, I discovered this interview with him conducted by Debbie Millman. Since her conversation with William tended towards the philosophical, as well as the physiognomic - they spent some time discussing whether or not brands should target the reptilian or the mammalian brain - I thought she might appreciate my conversation with him. Well, I scoured her blog looking for contact information but could not find any. [Insert "sad face" emoticon here.]
However, I did find her BuzzFeed feed, and after reading about the wayward Ms. Sophie Anderton, I came across this feed devoted to Tilt-Shift Photography, something that I had never heard of before but is really cool.
Essentially, tilt-shift photography relies on a special lens to allow you to take photographs of cities or mountains, for example, and make them look like miniatures. If you want to see what I'm talking about, check out the work of Olivo Barbieri or Vincent Laforet.
Being unusually tall, little things usually freak me out, but not pictures of little building I could squash like Godzilla!
PS. Debbie Millman, if you are reading this, I like your paintings and would love to interview you.
David has literally written the book on the "new rules of marketing and PR." I spoke with him about thought leadership strategies, building user personas, and using press releases as a marketing tool. If you have the time, please check out our conversation and let me know what you think.
You can hear the interview by clicking on the device below:
You can download the mp3 by "right-clicking" ("control-clicking," Mac-wise) this link here, or check out this and other Talent Blog podcasts on iTunes.
Highlights of the podcast can be found at the following time coordinates:
2:14 - Defining "thought leadership"
5:40 - Main challenges to crafting a thought leadership strategy
9:00 - Methods for creating "user personas"
10:53 - The Engineer and the "100 Mothers"
11:30 - "Why don't people do things the right way?"
16:19 - Reading blogs written by your buyer personas
18:00 - The "News Release Strategy"
25:30 - "The media will notice"
Over the weekend I attended the second annual PodCamp un-conference here in Boston. It was great for a lot of reasons, chief among them being the chance to meet people I've corresponded with or spoken to, but had until then never seen in the flesh, as well as the opportunity to meet folks I didn't know before but am glad I do now.
On the "glad I know them now"-front, there were, among others, the "Hollywood Podcaster," Tim Coyne, Doug Haslam and Sandy Kalik of Topaz Partners, the "golden" Jay Berkowitz, and the "twisted" Mitch Joel.
While many folks at PodCamp made an impression on me, I would say the impression I've been wrestling with most vigorously was that made by Mr. Joel. Mitch's presentation was entitled, "Building Your Personal Brand," and, frankly, I wasn't planning on attending it until C.C. told me that Mitch was a great speaker.
If you are interested in other resources that help designers design more greenishly, aside from the links you'll find on the "101 Things" site, you should also explore re-nourish.com, which has an illuminating "Sustainability Toolkit" section.
The other day I had the good fortune of speaking with Paige and Gretchen of MommyCast, a popular podcast devoted to moms the world over and one that has been featured everywhere from Variety and USA Today to the BBC and the Wall Street Journal. I asked them about their editorial perspective, what works and what doesn't when companies approach them with sponsorship offers, and why their podcast has been so wildly successful.
If you haven't listened to their podcast, you should. If you'd like to listen in on our conversation you can use this device:
You can also download this interview by right-clicking (or "control-clicking," Mac-wise) on this link, or access it (along with other Talent Blog Podcast episodes) via iTunes or at Switchpod.
Some points of interest:
2:55 - How moms share information
4:20 - Successful pitch approaches
10:05 - People who don't get podcasting
13:33 - Measuring the impact of a podcast
21:00 - Media kits matter!
The other day I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with Peter Rojas, co-founder of Engadget and Joystiq, and formerly editorial director at Gizmodo.
Although our conversation initially focused on the most, and least, successful ways for marketers and PR folk to work with bloggers, we ended up covering a lot of ground including the new Radiohead release, the blurry line between producers and consumers in an era of unlimited digital manipulation, the evolving concept of "nature," and the mass media's "sovereignty over consciousness."
To listen to our conversation, you can use the device pictured here:
There are some hidden gems in this podcast. Once it's loaded, feel free to fast-forward to the following treasures:
18:42 - On Radiohead's "brilliant, smart, well-played gimmick"
27:09 - Young people and the infinitely manipulable digital world
29:49 - The changing idea of the "natural"
32:38 - On starting the next "YouTube-Facebook-Microsoft-Google"
You can download this episode along with other Talent Blog podcasts from Switchpod
or iTunes.
The Webcast will be conducted by the president of Aquent Consulting, Nina Eigerman. NIna will use examples taken from the work of companies such as Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, L.L.Bean, and Staples to show how careful planning can help your organization integrate print and Web efforts while simultaneously increasing consistency, reducing duplication, and eliminating design-team frustration.
I've had a chance to speak with representatives for these organizations myself and will be posting podcast interviews with some of them at the end of this week. Stay tuned!
It shows how out of the mainstream I am that I stumbled upon the Live Earth global concert extravaganza pretty much by accident Saturday night. I tuned in to the live concert stream via the Live Earth MSN site, and though I was viewing the feed in lowly Safari (yes, some people still use it!), I was able to catch some (to may tastes "underwhelming") performances. I'm an old fuddy-duddy, music-wise.
Live Earth, "The Concerts for a Climate in Crisis," were far more interesting to me in concept then in reality. Billed by its promoters as an event that "that will bring together more than 100 music artists and 2 billion people to trigger a global movement to solve the climate crisis," it apparently set a new record "by generating more than 9 million Internet streams." Even if that number fell short of the billions promised, it is still impressive and highlights the "world-wide-ness" of the web. Before the web, ubiquitous broadband, etc., the idea of a global concert actively viewed by millions would have been impossible. Now it's yesterday's news.
Even more fascinating than the global reach of the web, however, is its long temporal arm (or tail, as some would have it). The record broken by Live Earth had been set by Live8, which found that the majority of its streaming traffic, to the tune of 100 million streams, came during the six weeks after the event. Accordingly, the Live Earth folk expect 80% of their traffic to be post-hoc.
The fact that this live event will enjoy an extended lifespan thanks to the web, and that in fact 80% of its life will take place there, illustrates one way that web-based projects never-end. This point was made quite articulately by Gerry McGovern the other day in an essay he posted with the catchy title, "The Web is messy." It is the temporal open-endedness of the web that makes it messy. It goes on forever! A website is not like a commercial or a brochure that is completed and sent to make its merry way in the world. It is more literally like a living place that is changed by its visitors and occupants and must evolve to meet their needs and expectations.
As any parent can tell you - living things are pretty messy. Live events are as well - just ask the folks who had to clean up after the concert-goers on Saturday. Indeed, Live Earth was criticized for the energy required to put on the actual concerts, especially given the fact that some performers (referred to as, " The artists formerly known as huge carbon footprints," by Marina Hyde in The Guardian) flew private jets "halfway across the world to play," as the New York Times reported.
Is the next step for "green" activism a totally web-based, non-stop musical experience? Why not create a virtual, streaming concert made up of great live footage from bands of yesteryear? Wait, wait, I got it. How about "Second Live Earth"?
A friend of mine passed this link along to me. It is a video of a software demo at the TED Conference back in March. The speaker is Blaise Aguera y Arcas who was demoing two software packages - Seadragon, which is used to browse large amounts of visual data, and Photosynth, which organizes pictures into navigable, 3-D spaces.
This stuff really has to be seen to be believed. It represents the future of how we will interact with visual data and also highlights that we are already creating virtual models of the world we live in by uploading content to websites like Flickr. There is also a cool example of an explorable, high resolution advertisement for Honda. Imagine if a picture in a magazine contained the richness of data you could find on an entire website. Mind-boggling.
Microsoft acquired Seadragon back in February. Aguera y Arcas makes a funny comment about that when people start clapping at the amazing things he's showing them. Have you ever attended a software demo where people burst into spontaneous applause?
Brought to you by our Guest Blogger, Nomi. Image courtesy of fo.ol.
In the nineties, one of the loudest voices to proclaim that people don't and won't read online was Jakob Nielsen, never one to shy away from sweeping declarations. Nielsen asserted that rather than read, people scan the page. Readers on the web, he posited, took an active rather than passive approach to reading. With so many pages competing to offer the same or similar information, people don't read just a single page, but tend to move between several pages and create a mental collage of the chunks that most interest them from each. People also take an active role in digesting what is written on the page. They were inclined to click on things that interested them rather than allow the layout of a page to dictate the order in which they were given information, or the relevance of different bits of information to that specific user. Additionally, he stated that readers would not scroll, so stories had to be kept short or risk going unread.
This was in 1997. A decade later, a lot has changed on the web, including Nielsen's position on scrolling. Improved screen readability, improved control over the design of text on the web, and mass-acclimation to a new medium by both publishers and readers are some of the factors responsible. The Poynter Institute recently published a new Eye Track study showing that people do read on the web, even more than they read in print.
Al Gore did not invent the PDF (nor, as I've pointed out before, did he ever claim to invent the Internet). But last week he did serve as keynote speaker at the CRE8 Conference, which used to be called the "Adobe Acrobat & PDF Conference," hosted by Aquent Graphics Institute, Aquent's official training arm.
As severalcommentators have pointed out, although former-almost-president Gore did speak engagingly about global warming and what we all could do to combat it, he did not talk about the role of the PDF in that battle. Nevertheless, he was, quite against character, apparently very funny (seen here yucking it up with the president of Aquent Consulting, Nina Eigerman who asked him to sign her Mac):
I haven't written about Second Life in a while and, truth be told, I haven't been "in-world" in a while either, but, thanks to the eclectic, ubiquitous, and industrious link-gathering of Joseph Jaffe, my interest in Second Life goings-on was recently rekindled.
First of all, Jaffe leads us to this post on Greg Verdino's blog about a social media marketing campaign being run by Coke. Read through the comments if you want a good overview of the kinds of debates raging around "new marketing," Consumer Generated Content, and corporate behemoths.
Jaffe also highlights a very comprehensive post on "alternatives to Second Life." If you are curious about the possibilities of the metaverse, what's out there, what could be out there, pro's and con's of this or that virtual world, AND you don't have time to actually visit them all, this is a very thoughtful, informative, and measured overview.
C.C. Chapman is a blogger, a podcaster on music and new media, and VP of New Marketing for crayon, that "new marketing" company presided over by Joseph Jaffe with offices in Second Life.
Given the increased demand for interactive marketing expertise and the accompanying talent shortage, I called C.C. to find out how he had carved out a niche for himself as a new media "go-to-guy."
Turns out he's got a killer combination of technical know-how - he started his career as an information systems consultant before teaching himself HTML, landing a job as a web-master, and eventually morphing into a digital marketing manager - and a palpable passion for new media.
"Passion" is frequently heralded as the key ingredient to professional and personal success, but if we are to learn from C.C.'s example, we will quickly learn that "passion" is not enough. C.C. distinguishes himself by being a rather hyperactive doer. He doesn't just enthuse about blogging - he's been blogging for 6 years. He doesn't just marvel at the potential of podcasting - he created a successful, syndicated podcast. He doesn't just think that Second Life is "neat" and "promising" - he actually meets clients there.
Long story short, if you want to create campaigns that integrate and rely on new media, you need to familiarize yourself with it in a hands-on fashion. You've got to get into the sandbox and play. Start a blog; produce a podcast; try out Twitter. As "new media" or interactive marketers, says C.C., "We've got to do what we're talking about; that's part of the fun."
OMG! We can have fun doing this? Yes, we can, as long as we take a page from the C.C. Chapman playbook and remember that the fun is IN the DOING.
If you are currently pursuing a career in design, then you might want to read a recent post by Bruce Nussbaum over at Business Week Online entitled, "Are Designers The Enemy Of Design?" Aside from the provocative question of the title, Mr. Nussbuam poses another that is at the core of his argument: How do you switch gears from designing for to designing with? [Emphasis mine.]
As "design thinking" and "innovation" have risen to the top of corporate strategic priorities, the design profession has seen its own star(s) rise. Now, the elitism inherent to such star-worship is running smack up against the democratizing forces of "user generated content." Who will win?
I believe that the ultimate winners will be those "designers" and "innovators" who create tools and platforms that allow people to create and share their own work or that allow people to collect and celebrate the cool work of others. Of course, this means moving away from designing things and artifacts, to designing situations, experiences, and possibilities.
The "design" challenge is: How do I do that?
The "design management challenge" is: How do I design jobs and work environments that encourage designers to do that?
It's easy to forget that there was a time when no one did the things that we do now.
Take blogging, for instance. 55 million people do it, it's a major focus of mine, and it's even part of my job, but there was a time when, believe it or not, no one blogged because it was not yet possible.
Now run the clock back 157 years to this date in 1850 when Nathaniel Hawthorne published his classic novel, The Scarlet Letter. According to the The Writer's Almanac, The Scarlet Letter stands as the "the first great American novel in part because it was the first great American novel that could reach a large audience."
Hawthorne's novel enjoyed a relatively broad audience and long-lasting popularity because it was among the first to be mass-produced (2,500 copies initially) by factory workers on steam-powered printing presses. Industrial, large-scale publishing, which I can hardly imagine not existing as I look at the many books, magazines, and newspapers littering my workspace, had finally become a reality.
Consider now that, when I "publish" this blog post, it will be available almost instantaneously to anyone on Earth with access to the Internet. Likewise, if you follow this link you will be able to read The Scarlet Letter in its entirety online. The publishing industry that catapulted Hawthorne to fame, while not yet dead, has evolved into something that would have been inconceivable to him.
The technologies we rely on as marketers become second nature. Then, before we know it, they're history.
Mike Wagner recently posted to his blog a piece on raw marketing. "Raw marketing" involves "a raw, direct, and honest invitation to become someone's customer," while the "cooked" variety makes him feel like "some marketer is trying to yank me around."
I think a lot of job seekers could find a lesson here. When composing a cover letter, assembling a resume, or constructing a portfolio, where are you "cooking" your brand? When you find yourself doing that, pause for a moment and ask yourself, "If I were going to approach this prospective client or employer directly and honestly, what would that sound like?" Then try it.
Of course, you'll have to overcome the idea that honesty and directness are out of place in a job search....
Sad to say, even though I have PhD from an Ivy League university, I never learned Latin. So, when looking at some layouts for a newsletter the other day, I was trying to decipher the greeking, and failed. The words of the great Roman author, Cicero, from whose "The Extremes of Good and Evil" the Latin text often referred to as "lorem ipsum" is taken, remained, well, Greek to me.
Thankfully, I need mourn my utter lack of a proper, classical education no longer. The friendly folks at the MIT Advertising Lab, with this post, pointed me to a lorem ipsum generator that is completely devoid of meaning, made as it is entirely of names for Web 2.0 companies.
Hey, Cicero! How do you like these apples? - Eskobo goowy manjam. Guba simpy bebo, zecco plazes moola gpokr. Idio moola umundo zingee jaxtr mikons foldera doostang!
It's late in the week. I've got a lot of thoughts to share about the value of working for demanding bosses, sarcasm as a pedagogical tool, and the art of making oneself invaluable, but that's going to have to wait until next week.
Instead, I'm going to draw your attention to a blog written by the editor of The New Oxford American Dictionary, Erin McKean (if you'd like, you can hear her talk about the use of Google by contemporary lexicographers in this interview with NPR). Her blog is called A Dress A Day. It is well written, imaginative, and, well, all about dresses, dress patterns, dress shops, and everything else "dress-ilicious."
Humans are capable of endless fascination and can frequently, as in this case, fashion something quite fascinating from it. Thanks, Erin McKean, wherever you are.
In my last post of 2006, I called for a reality check vis-a-vis the interactive talent shortage. Sure there's a shortage, but, I asked, how significant is the shortage given the actually work being done by marketing departments and ad agencies?
Gathered from a number of different sources, these charts make it clear that there is still a ton of money, upwards of $50 BILLION, spent on direct mail and the total amount spent on promotional items, $18 billion, roughly equals the amount spent on ALL on-line marketing put together.
Which is another way of saying that, while the demand for marketing and creative professionals with on-line experience will continue to grow (and, I'll admit, $18 billion isn't nothing), businesses still rely heavily on folks with strong print design abilities. And lets face it, many interactive designers are still called on to do print work. As one Flash developer put it to me, "People may or may not go to your website, but everyone has to get their mail."
For what's shaping up to be my last post of the year I'm going to return to a topic I've addressed before: the talent shortage in the interactive world. Just this morning, for example, in a WSJ article [registration required] about Digitas being acquired by Publicis, I read, "Among the challenges for the coming year: hiring. The industry is still strapped for talent on both the creative and technology sides..." As ad agencies and their interactive arms try to shepherd their clients into the digital age, their biggest hurdle is finding the people who can actually do the work they're selling. Or so the story goes.
I'll ask you to pardon my skepticism with regards to the digital talent shortage. I realize that it is difficult to find experienced Flash developers and Java programmers, but why aren't more traditional web and graphic designers cross-training themselves and moving into this high-demand area? It's probably because there is still a lot of traditional creative work out there. Even a quick glance at the 99 open positions currently listed on Digitas' website reveals that only about a third are properly "interactive" and many of those are not "technical" so much as project management roles.
From a "reality check" standpoint, according to this article online marketing still only accounts for 10% of advertising spend. And while that spending may increase by 28% in the coming year, it has a ways to go before it displaces items like direct mail and promotions. In other words, it makes sense for marketers and creative types to stick to their knitting for the present since there are still a lot of, for lack of a better term, "non-interactive" opportunities out there.
At the same time, it would be prudent to begin augmenting one's portfolio with on-line or other interactive experience sooner rather than later. After all, the demand for this type of experience isn't going to decrease (unless someone dis-invents the Internet). Think about it: If that 28% rate of increase stays steady, on-line ad spending will have doubled by 2009. The question becomes, "What can I do now in order to move into an interactive advertising or marketing role three years from now?"
"As a result of the growing popularity of consumer-generated pictures, videos and e-mail messages on Internet sites like YouTube and Myspace, advertisers are getting consumers to essentially do their jobs for them."
The above quote may be found in this article [registration required] from the New York Times. It focuses on the emergence of Times Square as "a publishing platform," as Peter Stabler, director of communication strategy for Goodby, Silverstein and Partners puts it. In brief, thanks to the ubiquity of digital cameras and the rise of user-generated and social networking sites, marketers are finding that "experiential marketing" (or what used to be called "publicity stunts"), such as Charmin's fancy public restrooms, are growing long legs on the Web. These restrooms alone, "[u]sed by thousands in Times Square [were] viewed by 7,400 Web users on one site alone."
While this raises a lot of interesting questions about the meaning of "product placement" and whether or not advertisers should start courting, and compensating, particularly popular or prolific private citizens for featuring their products on Flickr and YouTube, I was particularly struck by the formulation "getting consumers to essentially do their jobs for them." Now it is certainly the case that YouTubers and Flickr-ers are, wittingly or un, doing things that benefit advertisers and the brands they promote. But so is anyone wearing a t-shirt with a visible logo.
It is not the job of advertisers to wander around the city in sandwich boards; it is their job, however, to come up with novel ways of getting brand-specific messages out to the world. If they create a spectacle noteworthy enough to generate spontaneous buzz promoted by random individuals, then they have done exactly what they are supposed to do. In fact, by now, I'd be astonished if the folks who conceived of and executed these events weren't planning on a significant "web" effect. In a sense, if no one had posted this stuff to the Web, then you could rightly accuse advertisers of shirking.
Or do I, and not the paper of record, not understand what advertisers are supposed to do?
Buying keywords so that advertisements will run alongside relevant content, be it search engine results, articles, or blog posts, is the meat-and-potatoes of on-line marketing. Paying for advertisements to be associated directly with words appearing in these articles or posts, on the other hand, is a logical, though controversial, next step.
And some marketers are already taking this step, according to a November 27th article from the Wall Street Journal entitled, "Is It News...or Is It and Ad?." Here's how it works: Purchased words appear in the article with a double underline (as opposed to the single underline of a normal hyperlink). If the cursor moves over the word, a pop-up advertisement appears. Simple, and, in its way, fiendishly ingenious.
The controversy surrounds the intermingling of advertisement and editorial content. Although some publishers who are currently allowing this type of advertising, like FOXnews.com, claim that there is a "firewall" between editorial and advertising, it certainly wouldn't take long for their writers to figure out which words will get tagged and, consciously or unconsciously alter their content accordingly.
Whether or not the line between editorial and advertising is crossed on a daily basis in myriad ways, the mere fact that many odd, and even disturbing, juxtapositions have cropped up between the intent of the advertisers and the context of the keywords they've purchased indicates that this "firewall" may indeed exist.
As an illustration of what can go wrong, the article contains this example:
[A] recent Popular Mechanics story titled "Worst Case Scenarios: How to Survive a Riot" advised readers to "stay away from the windows" ... the story contained an ad for Microsoft Windows linked to the word "windows."
And this one:
In September, on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's site, an ad brokered by Vibrant Media for Target.com ran next to the words "Anna Nicole Smith" in an Associated Press article about the death of the reality-television star's 20-year-old son. The ad said "Shop for Smiths. Save 10% to 20% online at Target.com."
Jeff Lanctot of Avenue A/Razorfish expresses skepticism about the long-term viability of in-text advertising. He finds the comparison with traditional paid-search advertising flawed because, in the latter case, the ads appear in the context of a specific search conducted by the viewer. With in-text advertising, he says, " the user has nothing to do with which words are linked."
I think that Mr. Lanctot would have to agree, however, that were the user reading an article about videogames and all the ads were about gaming, then this approach would be perfectly legit. It might even be more powerful than paid-search. Unfortunately, since the currently available technology links ads to words regardless of context, there is a high probability of irrelevance (or worse, as in the examples cited).
Andrew Dimock, of The Bivings Report is more sanguine. He believes that this sort of problem will be solved eventually as natural language processing -- the ability for computers to "understand" the written word and make reasonable decisions about context -- evolves.
That evolution might not be far off. Consider Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which is essentially a computer that asks humans to do things it can't do itself. Why couldn't humans be employed to read for context and approve the final placement of in-text advertisement? Aside from creating a new role of "Artificial Intelligence Assistant" (coming soon to a resume near you), this would overcome the major obstacle standing in the way of this technology's widespread adoption.
"The fox is in the henhouse and it's going to gobble a good part of this business up before anybody realizes they're history," said Gene DeWitt, president of DeWitt Media Solutions.
A story in today's New York Times [registration required] catalogs moves by Google, Yahoo, and eBay to increase their print and TV ad-selling businesses. Although the rise of these new-media giants sounded the death-knell of the old media titans, they aren't dead yet and, as it turns out, have found a home for the time-being in the growth strategies of their conquerors.
This news mirrors the marketing career trends I addressed in my last post. Just as marketers must be able to plan, manage, and integrate programs across old and new media, albeit with their feet firmly planted in the latter, the companies that they are working with and for are striving to do exactly the same thing.
There is another career-related moral in this story and it involves "disintermediation." From the outset, it was recognized that the web (or, in the broadest sense, the networked world) eliminates the middleman: Why go to the retail outlet when you can buy directly from the manufacturer? Google is changing the landscape of media buying along the same lines. They are on their way to becoming the one-stop-shop for buying space across the media spectrum. To that extent, they make the job of media buyer easier. But the next logical step will be to introduce more tools and automation that could make the role of media buyer (or even the ad agency itself) obsolete.
Of course, this challenge could itself present a new opportunity. Tim Armstrong, Google's vice president for ad sales, points out that the ability to target advertising to smaller and smaller audiences across a wide range of media actually increases the complexity of media buying. As the actual purchasing of media becomes exceedingly simple, the critical players will be media planners and strategists helping their clients understand and navigate their numerous options so as to optimize spend. At the same time, automation often brings with it the need for customization, which in turn calls for people able to manipulate and maximize the efficiency of technical systems.
Google's '05 annual report acknowledged that "large advertisers would most likely continue to focus most of their ad budgets on traditional media," which means that traditional media buying isn't going away immediately. Still, if we can reasonably conceive of the end, can it really be far off? Paul Lavoie of Taxi, an ad and design agency, suggests that Google could become the largest ad agency in the foreseeable future. That possibility should remind us that, as powerful as the "traditional media" may be for now, the term "traditional" always refers to the past.
Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus are the authors of Web Design for ROI, and will be featured in a webcast hosted by Aquent on May 22. Their approach to web design, while theoretically informed, is relentlessly pragmatic. As they put it, "Our work is about more than just getting people to think about web design. We want them to act."
Maybe I was just desperate, but, in order to come up with a blog post today, I went to Google and searched for 
I'm going to set aside my "career advice" hat for a second and put on my "marketing thought leader" hat so that I can briefly discuss some interesting things I noticed about the Super Bowl ads.
In the nineties, one of the loudest voices to proclaim that people don't and won't read online was 
