Tag Archives: Interactive Marketing

In case you missed it, a whole lotta links that I haven’t had time to post on Fridays

The Nerdery has been busy, busy, crazy busy lately. So busy, in fact that we’ve had actual content on Fridays instead of the weekly link dump. Now comes a busy meeting Monday, and a perfect time to get rid of these great stories that have been burning a whole in my virtual pocket.

• MinnPost – Here's a niche business: designing fonts:"There's this greater design community with all the ad agencies and design firms downtown, and the natural byproduct are the specialists," Diesel said. "We do look over each others' shoulders, and that's a very unique thing to do."
• News from the Herd: What's all this "branding" stuff about?: “This presentation by Marty Neumeier of San Francisco brand firm Neutron pretty much says it all in 20 minutes. It gives a definition and then provides a blueprint so that you too, by slide 120 or so (don’t worry, it’s one of these one word per slide numbers), will be the market leader in your category!”


• Man Vs Machine: Robot Programmed to Love Traps Woman in Lab, Hugs Her Repeatedly: “The trouble all started when a young female intern began to spend several hours each day with Kenji, testing his systems and loading new software routines. When it came time to leave one evening, however, Kenji refused to let her out of his lab enclosure and used his bulky mechanical body to block her exit and hug her repeatedly. The intern was only able to escape after she had frantically phoned two senior staff members to come and temporarily de-activate Kenji.”


• Registration Open for MN.swf Camp 2009 | blackcj.com
• Finance and Commerce: Ad Agencies, clients catch stimulus fever: “Or so it would seem, given that two Twin Cities marketing firms are already attempting to win new clients by offering their own “stimulus packages.”
• Scanwiches: Don't look at this if you are even remotely hungry. It will only make things worse.
• 10 Things To Consider When Choosing The Perfect CMS | How-To | Smashing Magazine: “Choosing a content management system can be tricky. Without a clearly defined set of requirements, you will be seduced by fancy functionality that you will never use. What then should you look for in a CMS?”
• What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered? – Stack Overflow:
  
  // Dear maintainer:
  //
  // Once you are done trying to 'optimize' this routine,
  // and have realized what a terrible mistake that was,
  // please increment the following counter as a warning
  // to the next guy:
  //
  // total_hours_wasted_here = 16
• StepUp Communications | Stuff Graphic Designer’s Like: “6. Black clothes (maybe a cool dark grey at most)”
• 8 Tips to Design a Charity Website | Webdesigner Depot
• 50 Things Every Mac Geek Should Know | Mac|Life: “Like a champion cyclist knows bike parts,a car buff knows model years, and a sports fan knows win-loss records, all Mac geeks worth the title must know these things.”


• From Outcast to Awesome: 17 Famous Nerds Who Paved the Way: “>In a different age, the label Nerd induced visions of tapered, high-water jeans, thick-framed glasses, and preppy, ill-patterned shirts. Oh, the horror! Now, check out the East Village on a typical weekend and what are the most stylish gents donning? Why, tapered jeans, thick-framed glasses, and button-down shirts! My, my, my, how things have changed!”


• USATODAY.com – Psychologists now know what makes people happy: The happiest people surround themselves with family and friends, don't care about keeping up with the Joneses next door, lose themselves in daily activities and, most important, forgive easily.
• Robots – The Big Picture – Boston.com: “Robotic systems continue to evolve, slowly penetrating many areas of our lives, from manufacturing, medicine and remote exploration to entertainment, security and personal assistance. Developers in Japan are currently building robots to assist the elderly, while NASA develops the next generation of space explorers, and artists are exploring new avenues of entertainment. Collected here are a handful of images of our recent robotic past, and perhaps a glimpse into the near future. (32 photos total)”
• 10 Geeky Tricks for Getting Out of Bed in the Morning | Geekdad from Wired.com
• The Cult of Done Manifesto: “Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.”
• 10 Must-Have iPhone Apps for the Adman
• Gaywads, Dorkwads Sign Historic Wad Accord | The Onion – America's Finest News Source: "Now is the time for us to set aside our differences and join together in opposition of our common enemy–the mean, popular kids who have mercilessly inflicted locker-room wedgies upon us since time immemorial."
• Roger Ebert's Journal: Hunt not the snark but the snarker: “What concerns me is that snark functions as a device to punish human spontaneity, eccentricity, non-conformity and simple error. Everyone is being snarked into line.”
• Five Myths about Content Strategy: “Yes, page flows and imagery play a huge part in shaping the online user experience. Without clear navigation and a pleasing page layout, a user's experience could hardly be considered positive. But many site owners fail to see that content plays an equally important role to structure and design in this regard. As Julie Hayden tells us in her piece on A List Apart, language is the ultimate user interface. The tone of a site and the consistency of voice can make or break a user's impression. Language is a very flexible and adaptable tool that should be used to your advantage on your website.”
• Featured Workspace: Land of the Colorful Cubes:”The size of their cube farm is modest, but the personality of it is enormous. Employees at The Balcom Agency would appear to have nearly free reign in customizing their work space. In the work spaces below you'll see everything from vivid color selections to personalized bookcases to curtains and couches and everything in between.”
• 7 Fresh and Simple Ways to Test Cross-Browser Compatibility
• 8 Visual Case Studies of Fun Marketing Materials!
• Death Star, Star Wars, Death Star, Storm Trooper: “It sucks to be a storm trooper with a heart. The Dark Side hasn't been the same since that day.”
• If social media experts aren’t experts only the charlatans will be “experts.”This is a great, great discussion about Social Media Experts, the scourge of Twitter, and how actual experts can take back the word from the charlatans.
• Agency vs freelancer

Friday Links: The iPhone High School reunion is a must watch

• When Advertising Fails, Trust In Art – mediabistro.com: AgencySpy: “Trust In Art is a self-described stock market for cultural renewal. Ten artists have introduced their communities based art works to the online community.”
• MediaPost Publications Activating A Brand On Twitter 02/13/2009(via @balcomagency twitter)
• geeksugar: Robots as Home Decor
• Doomed: why Wikipedia will fail – Ars Technica: “A cyberlaw professor argues that Wikipedia is doomed. The online encyclopedia will need to choose between being "high quality" and "open," but both choices are fraught with risk.”
• Marketers: Don't Stop Innovating Because of Budget Cuts – Advertising Age – MediaWorks
• Requested Reading Recommendations — School of Visual Arts — MFA in Interaction Design: “Upon the request of readers, we asked faculty to recommend books for an interaction design reading list. These could be landmark texts, underdogs, or critical reads, or stepping stones to other fields. The following is what resulted from our request, comprising in part: a sneak preview of what will be assigned in courses; what some consider to be cornerstone interaction design texts; and what some consider important connections to other fields.”
• Going rogue inside a big company (a la Best Buy) – (37signals): “Words of wisdom there: “Listen, don’t be stupid and take care of each other.” Man, it’d be great to see more companies encourage employees to think that way.”
• Chip Kidd’s video tour of NYCC » Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog (via @caerickson)
• graphpaper.com – Are We Designing Interactions or Designing Software?: “One of the problems faced by designers trying to integrate their work with most software development processes, even (or possibly especially) with Agile development, is that the literature makes no distinction between software development and software design, or at least no distinction that makes any sense to dedicated user experience designers.”
• Flickr Celebrates Their 5th Anniversary + The Oldest Image On Flickr
• Wooster Collective: Was Shepard Fairey Arrested To Embarrass The Mayor Of Boston? – A First Hand Account
• 10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Websites | How-To | Smashing Magazine
• Clips: The iPhone Is That Guy at Your High School Reunion
• [ws] Color Scheme Designer
• 10 Web Typography Rules Every Designer Should Know | Webdesigner Depot
• Triple-Triple :: A blog for Scrabble nerds and word game geeks, featuring tips, strategies, hacks, links and much more
• adaptive path » blog » Henning Fischer » UX at Zappos: The Right People and the Right Mindset

Friday Links: A free audiobook and how to avoid death by caffeine

• Audiobooks: Download The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Audiobook for Free
• From The Head Of Zeus Jones » Blog Archive » Where is the value in the print media industry?
• AdFreak: Minnesota Lottery ads heavy on melodrama
• Lego Batman finalist for destructive toy award
• CMYK is for Printers | Design Milk
• Ask SM: How Do I Create A Colorful Sitemap With jQuery? | CSS | Smashing Magazine
• Technology: Get Your Tech On in America's Most Wired Cities
  It's cold here, we like to stay inside a lot in the winter. We need to be connected somehow.
• Death by Caffeine
  For a lot of folks at The Nerdery, this might be a good page to keep bookmarked just to be safe
• redblackbrown: Frivolous Friday : Celeste Prevost
  Redblackbrown's Frivolous Friday interviews Zeus Jones designer Celeste Prevost.
• State of Your State: Minnesota's Ad Scene – mediabistro.com: AgencySpy
• Monograph | Teach the Web
  How to approach teaching Web design and development in schools
• The Media is Dying: An Interview With the People Behind the Twitter Account | The Blog Herald

Dramatic shift in marketing reality

I’m posting this video not just because it makes a valid point to anyone who works in (or with) advertising, but because the animation is so well done.

Scholz & Friends: “Dramatic shift in marketing reality from Michael Reissinger on Vimeo.

(found via Web Strategy by Jeremiah)

Friday Links: Some things sure to help you pass the time until the weekend

• redblackbrown: Frivolous Friday : Alison Beattie: A short interview with Colle + McVoy’s Interactive Designer, Alison Beattie
• Letter From The Editor: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish” Gina Trapani's farewell post on Lifehacker made me a little weepy. It’s always amazing to read about people who have such passion for their work.
• - Some more random stuff on the future of internets and things: Mediation is one of my favorite local (that’d be Minneapolis for you unlocals) blog. A lot of times the content Taylor posts isn’t germane to the topic of The Nerdery, but here it is. I like his no-nonsense approach to online trends for 2009.
• Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn’t seen it) on Vimeo: I’ve never seen Star Wars either, and this woman knows a lot more than I do about. Impressive!
• Brain Traffic: Our Blog: Response to 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design
• How to Become a Shortcut – Advertising Age – TalentWorks
• Pepsi: Then and Now
• What Will Save the Suburbs? – Allison Arieff Blog – NYTimes.com
• The new Fog Creek office – Joel on Software: Now this is a pimped out office.
• Don’t forget- a set on Flickr: Street art in Berlin that reminds viewers that all the advertising they see has been Photoshopped
• Micro Persuasion: Why Text Remains King of the Web
• Are You Facing a Lead Generation Dry Spell?

Friday Links: Predictions for 2009

Late December/early January is a magical time for a blogger. It’s the Festival of Lists — best ofs, worst ofs, the year recapped, and of course, my personal favorite, predictions.

Here are a few of the predictions floating out on the Web.

Read Write Web’s 2009 Web Predictions: Apps that do filtering, inferring and recommendation have a great year; several will release plug-ins for Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook and other ‘sipping from the firehose’ apps.

117 Magazine and Media Predictions for 2009: 2009 will feature the greatest redirect in marketing approach that the media industry has seen since the explosive growth of cable television (and its subsequent usage opportunities that caused planning confusion in the 1980s and early 90s) . Looking forward, savvy marketers will broker deals with media companies not for reduced page rates or air time, but for their subscriber list – the more selects available, the better.

42+ Social Media and Content Marketing Predictions for 2009: As mainstream media pares staff and traditional media readership declines, opportunities for brand marketers to get out their message will evolve dramatically. No longer needing to persuade mainstream media gatekeepers, brand marketers will realize the critical need to provide relevant, quality content.

Girls in Tech’s 2009 Tech Predictions: Cloud services and computing is not new, but we will probably see these services and companies really take off this year. A great example of a cloud service is photo-sharing sites. It’s really any service that allows the consumer to store data or information anywhere but their computer or mobile phone. Also, software-as-a-service companies are based on this model as well. It’s about paying-as-you-go instead of financing a big software purchase.

Endgaget Predictions for 2009: Tiny iPhone, giant iPod.

2009 Online Marketing Predictions from TrendSpotting: In the face of overall economic turmoil, online ad spending holding up a little better than in other media

36 Predictions for 2009 in Media/Tech/Pop: Newspapers. At least three major daily newspapers cease to exist. The most likely members of the carnage: the Denver Rocky Mountain News, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Predictions for Google’s 2009: Google’s efforts to promote Chrome will change people’s perception about Google, which will be increasingly associated with Microsoft.

My predictions for 2009:

• We will hear a lot about personal branding, it will take awhile for people to realize it’s really about being yourself
• Gen Xers will reluctantly give their coolest generation title to the Millenials while simultaneously declaring nobody cares about being cool
• Ironically, Grunge will become fashionable again, flannel enthusiasts rejoice
• Bloggers and journalists will realize they are on the same team
• Nike will invent a pair of shoes with a GPS in the tongue that Twitters your location whenever you stop for more than five minutes
• There will not be enough advancement in robot cleaning maids, I will be disappointed
• Something amazing will happen

What do you think 2009 has in store for the world?

Profiles in Nerdery: Adam Gedde, bridging the gap between sales people and nerds

1. Astrological Sign: Scorpio.
2. Time at the Nerdery: Nearly 1 lunar cycle.
3. Area of expertise: Interactive marketing, search engine marketing, and a bit of programming. I’m also vocally endowed.
4. When people ask you what you do, how do you respond: I tell them I’m the bridge between the nerds and the sales people. I need to be able to understand the technology surrounding the solutions we provide for our clients, but I also have the opportunity to keep my digital consultant skills sharp.
5. Favorite kinds of projects to work on: I like mash-ups – taking a bunch of existing, cool things….slapping them together….and building something completely new. That exercise used to be very difficult, but thanks to things like APIs, REST, and the maturation of digital development tools it’s much easier to do.
6. What one thing about The Nerdery surprises people the most when you tell them about it: That we have this many nerds in one spot. I think there’s a law against that somewhere.
7. Seven dream Jeopardy Categories: 1) Search Marketing Jargon; 2) Great Tenor Arias; 3) Beavers and Ducks – Quotable Movies; 4) Save the Cheerleader; 5) Save the World; 6) Farley-isms; and 7) History of Mountain Dew
8. Favorite Fictional Nerd: MacGuyver, followed closely by Chuck Bartowski
9. According to the Wikipedia entry on Nerd, some nerds show a pronounced interest in subjects which others tend to find dull or complex and difficult to comprehend, or overly mature for their age, especially topics related to science, disambiguation, mathematics and technology. Do you know what disambiguation is: That’s a trick question, isn’t it?

A pretty decent proposal*

One of my tasks as The Nerdery’s blogger is to pull back the curtain on the Willy-Wonkaesque machinations that make this the magical place that it is. This is sort of a challenge, what with non-disclosure agreements, busy nerds, and well, frankly, things that are really cool and interesting to us might not be so interesting to you, our readers.

But that’s one of our trademarks, we never back down from a challenge. So today I am going to tell you a story about proposals, the Wonder Twins (who hate being called that which makes calling them that much more fun), and why you should care about this.

The superhero moniker is pretty apt for Ryan and Adam who are Solutions Engineers here at Sierra Bravo. They are often thanked by our sales folks for being faster than speeding bullets and able to meet impossible deadlines in a single bound.

Ryan and Adam are responsible for putting together the proposals we give to prospective clients. When you’re looking for some outside help and look to The Nerdery as a potential partner, they’re the ones who are going to help you get started. They listen to what your looking for, what your risks are, and your deadlines, then they build these proposals that outline the scope of your project and how we’re going to go about getting it done.

And they really are listening, that’s not just marketing spin. I read through one of their recent proposals for a big project on a super-tight deadline that requires a specific application framework, and was surprised to find this:

These pages are a critical step in communicating your value proposition. . . and our development team will ensure that site visitors are able to easily navigate, read, and move within these pages without fear of compatibility issues or disruption of the browsing experience.

Not only do the Wonder Twins understand the technical aspects of their job, they understand what parts are crucial to your business. How awesome is that?

So why does this matter to you? I’m getting to that.

What I learned is that it’s unique for Web firms to have staff solely dedicated to working on proposals. Because this is what the Wonder Twins spend their day doing, they get to truly understand what you’re trying to accomplish and what you need to sell your project to your client.

Once they get that, they spend their time thinking of the best ways to approach your unique project, how to prepare for any foreseeable forks in the road and, basically, help you figure out if we’re the right people to help you with this project.

They’re doing all this before we’ve even won your business. And that’s why you should care, because this is the kind of standard you should hold your partners (and well, everyone you deal with) to, people will to invest time in understanding what you need before you even sign on the dotted line.

*I got to give credit to my cubemate, Trip, for the nice headline — a riff on “Indecent Proposal.”

Friday Links: On simplicity, etiquette, and inspiration

This presentation by Clay Parker Jones was one of the most informative, thought-provoking things I read today (read more about the presentation on Jones’ blog Exit Creative). Sure it covers well-trod ground — social media, web design, content — but what Parker Jones does is present his ideas with stunning simplicity using real language both of which just reinforces his ideas.

While the presentation is aimed at ad-folk, it contains the sorts of lessons that anyone involved in interactive marketing (from design and development to content and community) could benefit from. (found via Paul Isakson)

Now onto the Friday links.

• Forty inspirational speeches in two minutes. This one is great, watch it and it will help you make it through these last few hours on a Friday.
• Now that you’re motivated, go take a look at Ad Age’s tips to cope, even thrive, through the downturn.
• Also found via Lifehacker, The Ultimate Social Media Handbook. Which reminds me of a link one of my fellow nerds tweeted about this week Maggie Mason’s 14 Ways to Twitter Politely.
• The Top 10 Marketing Blunders of 2008
• From the more you know file: Tonight’s full moon will be the biggest it’s been in 15 years. [via]
• Christine over at Brain Traffic’s blog warns about the pitfalls of placeholder copy and talks about how proofreading should be the part of the Web QA process.
• Oh, this just in from Ryan: Take a listen to All My Internet Friends. Make sure to read the lyrics.

That’s all from me this week, I get to go meet with The Nerdery’s Wonder Twins. You’ll get to learn all about it next week. In the meantime, what were you reading on the net this week?