Tag Archives: branding

Friday Links: Would you ever let your widows and orphans hang?

• Your must read, if you haven’t gotten to it yet this week: Interview with anonymous Facebook employee.
• If you can stomach one more decade retrospective, take a look at The Most Relevant Identity Work of the Decade from Brand New. It’s a quick, interesting read.
• Let ‘em hang: Orphans and widows, widows and orphans.
• Have you taken Pentagram’s What Type Are You test yet? The password is: character. I’m Cooper Black Italic. What are you?
• Guerrilla Marketing’s Newest Revolution: The traditional street-level ‘gotcha’ has been reinterpreted — and made more effective — through a digital lens
• Toy Lamp: 48% awesomer than you’d think.
• Why marketers must go mobile.

Great Scott! Things sure look different around here

Welcome to Nerdery Interactive Labs. Super sweet, isn’t it?

If you’re one of those who is afraid of change, don’t worry. Same great nerds, new great look. It’s still us, just with a shiny new name and brand.

Nerdery Interactive Labs, or still The Nerdery, is the name we’ve given to the division of Sierra Bravo that partners with ad, design, and marketing agencies to build amazing things for the web.

You might not know this but we started from humble beginnings. Just three programmers who integrated legacy systems with the web, as our company grew so did our capabilities. We found that more and more we were uniquely suited to partner with agencies to bring their ideas to life on the web.

As you probably know, if you’ve been reading some of our media coverage, we’ve grown like crazy this last year. Since our partner program has become such a large part of our business we decided to give it its own name and identity. And you’re looking at it, kid.

The Nerdery doesn’t change who we are or what we do. It just gives us a name, look, and feel that’s more fitting of a web development company working with creative agencies.

Go take a look around. I highly recommend checking out our work and then when you’re done with that, the Periodic Table of Nerdery (which is my favorite part of the new site).

So what do you think. Pretty cool?

Friday Links: Three stories you should be paying attention to

We’ve had so much going at The Nerdery we haven’t posted any Friday Links. We’re still pretty busy, but there have been a few stories popping up that really deserve your attention:

• If you have not been following the fall-out from Tropicana’s new packaging, you’re missing out. The new packaging is being blamed for 20% drop in Tropicana sales. It’s a study in consumer behavior and brand loyalty.
• Today’s Future Tense, talks about how the Internet has “shattered” advertising, by giving consumers a new way to gather information on goods and services. It’s a thought-provoking listen and well worth a couple of your minutes.
• And finally, it appears as though Google is in talks to buy Twitter. Wowee! There’s never a dull moment, is there?

Delivering Happiness, Zappos keynote at SXSW

Yesterday, Tom O’Neill sent out a tweet encouraging all the the nerds to take a gander at Tony Hsieh’s slides from his SXSW keynote. There’s also a very cute graphical representation of his speech you can look at.

I thought I’d post it here for all our readers. It’s probably one of those things we can all learn from. It’s about more than Zappo’s magical customer service (and it is magical, I know this from experience), it’s about branding, corporate culture, and vision. Take a look, I guarantee you’ll learn something.

Friday Links: On the color of 2009, ballancing billable hours & creativity, and my cruel cubemate

Before we get to the this week’s link roundup. I thought I’d post this bit that I saw on a few blogs of Louis CK on Conan O’Brien about how everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy.

• 30 most inspirational business Web sites [via].
• Ad Age has an interesting column this week on Marketing to Women during Economic Upheaval. The most interesting advice Marti Barletta offers up is how sustainable products will now trump disposable products and that makers of “green” products should start adding a thrift message to their marketing.
• The Big Picture put together a stunning gallery of pictures of Venice Under Water. I love how nonchalant and unconcerned most of the people in the pictures are.
• Inc.com has a great round-up on the different ways a company can monitor its brand and gather customer feedback online.
• As someone who is still a little shaky from trying The Nerdery’s coffee labeled High Octane, I found Christoph Niemann’s piece on his love of coffee extra charming. Take a look, it even features drawings on napkins that look they were done with coffee. [via]
• Pantone’s trying to get us to look on the bright side of things by naming Mimosa as the color for 2009. Yum.
• Last week I mentioned how Life Hacker was soliciting its readers to name the free software they were most thankful for. Now, they’ve kindly rounded up the top vote-getters. Sweet!
• 5 breakthrough social network conversations
• I really loved Phil Johnston’s post Balancing the Billable Day vs. the Creative Way about how you need to have both the time-sheet tyrants and the daydreamy creative-types to run a successful agency (which I think you can extend to most any kind of business where things are created).
• Here’s one from the lucky I am still speaking to him file. My cubemate (who I call Trip Shakespeare) sent me this: 40 Ways to Deliver Killer Blog Content (hrmph!).

So what were you reading this week?