iOS AND ANDROID
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James Chudley of Smashing Magazine posted a great article on How to Use Photos to Sell More Online. Its a lengthy article with great photo examples. The article was written for products, but I believe these can be put to use no matter what you are doing online. Most importantly, we don’t want to put up a photo just to put up a photo… make it do something for you like:
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We curate quite a few websites where we manage the use of photography. We work hard not to “slap on a photo”, but make it have some meaning and usefulness in the grand scheme of the website. Read the full article.
I’ve been looking for something like this for a while.
What the hashtag?!?! is a social encyclopedia for hashtags found on Twitter.
At the time of this post the site is tracking 14,329 hashtags for 5,099 users.
Although #LW is not listed and I’d really like to know what it means. Someone please tell me.
Happy hashtagging!
Clark Kokich, CEO of Razorfish, one of the largest digital marketing and technology firms in the world just put up a blog post entitled Simple Math.
He talks about how digital agency fees are growing higher than the digital media spend. As some customers see this trend as “wrong”. Kokich goes on to say that it’s perfectly fine and going back would be bad.
The world of digital marketing is changing. Its moving away from buying media on the traditional outlets and moving into owning media on your own outlet or earning media on online social outlets.
If a $500k social influence marketing program (all agency fees) performs as well as a $10-million paid media program (10% agency fees), who really is being penalized? Answer: the media, not the client. Instead of being challenged, agencies should be applauded for building and managing owned media that delivers results at a fraction of the cost of paid media. – Clark Kokich
Marketing your company is just as important as the quality of work you do. In fact, for companies like ours the quality of our work is a major component of marketing.
For a fast growing business where founders and owners are a part of the production process, it becomes difficult to continuously reach out to new potential customers.
I just asked Joe Zeff, owner of Joe Zeff Design, a 3D graphic design company located in new jersey, how he markets his company. He gave me 3 ideas:
1. Exposure through work – the magazine industry has really embraced 3D design as an alternative to photography and illustrated information design. Although there isn’t a big return from these projects, but they build credibility and relavence.
2. Email blast – Joe’s target customers are art directors, he has a list of thousands of them, each month he sends them a blast email showcasing his latest work.
3. Blogging/ social networking – this was surprising to Joe, but blogging has put him on the forefront of conversations and he’s able to contact many a bigwig through Twitter.
Thanks Joe!
:P
This article is 3 years old, but I think it really nails the reason Apple has the following it does. The lack of choice theory makes sense once you think about it. Why do you think Apple customers are so loyal?
“Pundits often refer to them as “zealots” or “fanboys.” The more polite references include “Mac loyalists.” I am, of course, talking about Apple’s (AAPL) more vocal customers, those who will defend the company and its products in any debate going on around them. What is it that drives their passion for most things Apple? Is it a deluded mind, warped by the Reality Distortion Field that Steve Jobs so successfully wraps every new product in? In short, the answer is no.
The truth behind the scenes is not that Apple has a large group of customers that are too dedicated and passionate about their products, or the company as a whole. The reality is far more simple and obvious: Apple simply has a large group of very satisfied customers — and that’s the secret ingredient left out of nearly every analysis or op-ed piece that mentions these “zealots.” ”
Read the original article here
There is a thin line we must walk between form and function. We’ll always have a bit of both.
If we had a scale from bare-bones utility versus over-the-top flashterbation, we’d be somewhere in the middle everytime. Sometimes we’ll lean towards the utility side and other times we’ll lean towards the experiential side. Usually this is a page-level decision depending on the page’s purpose.
Some examples of when we lean to the experiential side include: when we need to evoke emotion, display complex information, facilitate decisions, or guide through a flow.
We’ll lean to the utility side when we need to people to do something repeatedly, when delivering serious or sensitive information, or when we want to focus attention.
UX Magazine wrote a great article on comparing Eye Candy vs. Bare-Bones in UI Design.
BTW – We agree
Peter Shankman, the founder of Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and The Geek Factory, gave the people at the NJ Business Marketing Association a great talk on how he thinks about and uses social media to make his businesses successful. Thank you Peter, thank you BMA and thank you fellow Lwer Derrick, Christine, and David for attending with me.
Here’s what I took away from the talk
Grow your personal brand
Peter was big on the individual. Businesses don’t do business with people. People do business with people. Your business is a reflection of the people that run it. He wants everyone to develop their personal brand through social concepts like texting (twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc.), phone calling, and (yes) snail mailing notes. A quick side note on snail mailing notes. Last month we were hiring for project managers the people who are standing out in my head are the ones to followed up with a personal hand written note. Its all about doing something different to capture the minds of people. So go forth and start building your personal brand, its going to define you in the future.
Plan for backup??!!?
Peter made a great point stating that he was always told to “have a backup plan”. Why? Why not concentrate on a the plan for success? It’s better than concentrating on the plan for failure. My take is that when you have to plan for failure, what you are planning is costly thus increasing its risk. In Peter’s world (and ours) big things evolve from small things. Start small, start fast, and start now.
Information is free
The world as we knew it was broadcasted to us from only a few sources. Print, radio, and television were all broadcasted from a few to many. The internet is making information free and creating a many to many relationship. Breaking news doesn’t come from CNN anymore, it comes from twitter. In this world we are creating views of the world at the exact moment it happens and sharing that view with people all over the world.
Ask your customers, how they want to get information
There is so much information out there and so many ways to take it in. We listen to podcasts on the commute into work, we read blogs with the morning coffee, we check facebook status when we come home and sit down. We have developed routines of digesting information. So how do you get your information to your customers? Ask them. Talk to your customers often and ask them how they would like to get your information.
Peter says the Social Media is having other people do public relations for you. Here are is 4 fours of social media:
Again thank you Peter for the great talk.
Lifehacker has a great post up about the facts and many myths about browser cookies.
Here are the facts, and myths they cover:
The bottom line is that cookies aren’t really a problem, and blocking them will generally make your life more difficult.
I strongly recommend you give it a look – Fact and Fiction: The Truth About Browser Cookies
Syndicated by The Geek Whisperer
Yesterday, I attended an event by the New Jersey Communications Advertising and Marketing Association (NJCAMA). Met some good people and heard some great things. The guest speaker for the evening was Geno Church from Brains on Fire. Geno gave a great presentation on word of mouth marketing (WOMM) and movement building where he took us through a few case studies with Best Buy and Fiskar (yes, the orange handle scissor people).
Here are a few notable quotables that stuck with me and my notes.
Everything is crap… Unless you have a strategy behind it
Social media is not WOMM
People trust people
Tactics bog us down
“No! If you build it we won’t come”
90% of WOMM occurs offline
Why should people be motivated to participate and share? Why people tell stories
Geno captured everything quite eloquently when he says that we should create movements not campaigns. Then he went on to explain lessons learned about movements
The first real challenger to the iPhone looks like it will be Droid. I haven’t read anything but great stuff coming from the people who have seen the über smart.
It has an iPhone look complete with touch screen, but it also has a slide out QWERTY keyboard (WIN)
The device is made by Motorola; powered by Google’s mobile operating system, Android; and it will be sold through Verizon, thus it will be on Verizon’s awesome network.
Droid will run the latest version of Android, which looks incredible (see The Boy Genius’s write-up).
If the hardware reports are true, then Droid will have the same processor core as the iPhone, making it far more powerful than previous Android phones (Engadget).
Google CEO Eric Schmidt is decrying Android’s imminent explosion in the marketplace, while analysts’ are talking about Android’s potential for market domination by 2012.
Verizon is also going all out with their marketing. In the lead up to the announcement of Droid, they have been bashing AT&T’s flimsy network with their cleaver, “There’s a map for that” ads.
Then their Droid announcement ad launched a flurry of attacks on the iPhone’s limitations.
“The Droid poses a different and more significant challenge to the iPhone than any other phone to date. The Palm Pre could have been that challenger, but it lacked the Verizon network, and users were unimpressed with the hardware. According to people who’ve handled the device, the Droid is the most sophisticated mobile device to hit the market to date from a hardware standpoint. When you combine that with the Verizon network, you’ve got something that is most definitely a challenger to the Jesus phone” (TechCrunch).
If Droid is everything that Motorola, Google, Verizon, and the tech writers are claiming it should be incredibly exciting (The claims are pretty much confirmed). Better still, Droid should be available within a few weeks.
Pay close attention to the oddly placed umlaut under the "r"
It’s clear to me that Droid means business because it has an unnecessary umlaut in its name.
~ syndicated by TheGeekWhisperer.com
