This entry was posted October 20th, 2010 and has no nomments.
In our modern era, it is not only possible, but actually quite simple to be constantly aware of everything that is being said about our companies, our products or services, and our brands. We can listen to, analyze, and dissect every blog post, tweet, or comment coming from every corner of the world. As professionals involved in marketing, we have access to more of this information than ever before.
And this is a great thing. If someone has an issue or is unsatisfied, we have the chance to rectify that and show that we care about and appreciate them as a customer.
The problem, though, comes about when trying to determine which people talking about your brand are customers with an actual gripe and which are just outsiders indulging their inner critic. The most obvious recent example of this was the new not-long-for-this-world Gap logo. As soon as the internet found this gem, every designer, marketer, and Twitterer who hasn’t stepped into a Gap since college jumped on the bandwagon of critiquing it to death. All of this was with good reason. The logo was bad and Gap needed to hear that from this specific community.
But is this the audience they should have looked to for approval to keep the logo?
This entry was posted April 22nd, 2010 and has 5 comments.
There is no doubt that the changes announced yesterday at Facebook’s F8 conference will have a major impact on the web, how it looks, and how we use it in the coming months and years. The prospect of an open graph with the ability to transport your personal interests and preferences around the web with you is quite intriguing. This could also end up being the tool marketers have been clamoring for for years. They may now finally have the ability to hyper-target potential customers online at a scale large enough to demand huge advertising budgets.
But you can never gain one thing without losing something else. The web experience at large may benefit significantly from this, but it will be at the peril of the actual Facebook experience.
First, let’s look at who comprises the majority of a typical person’s Facebook friends. Most of our friends lists include not just family and good friends, but also former and current coworkers, some people we went to high school with, and a few random people who snuck through our approved friend requests. Whatever the reason, we are connected to these people because we, at least on some level, know them.
The point here is this - Most people care about the things shared on Facebook not because of the content itself as much as because of who is sharing that content. For example, I don’t necessarily love looking at pictures of babies, but will gladly spend time looking at pictures of my cousins baby because I love her. What I am not interested in, however, is seeing every site my cousin ‘likes’ across the web that features pictures of cute babies.
This entry was posted January 21st, 2010 and has no nomments.
Today I placed my second order with Dogfunk.com. I had already received free 7-14 day shipping , but when I received the confirmation email I noticed the line,
“We know this isn’t your first time. By now you’re practically family, so we bumped your order to the front of the line. Your order will ship free UPS Ground. Most items ship within 24 hours.”
Wow. Talk about an amazing way to engender customer loyalty and surprise your frequent customers with great service.
This entry was posted December 8th, 2009 and has 1 comment.
Yesterday, Google announced that they were introducing real-time search. Essentially this means that Google results pages will now include information from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. as these updates are being posted. While Bing has already been including real-time information in their search results, it’s always big news when the market leader introduces a feature.
Perhaps the most important thing to note is that Google real-time search will differ from Twitter’s own search in that it will apply Google’s technology to deliver relevant results. This is key. It’s not just about delivering the latest updates, but about delivering the most relevant results to users. Google’s success has always and will always hinge on delivering the most relevant information possible.
I want to spend some time using real-time search before offering my full thoughts on it. In the meantime, Wired gives more details and insights on real-time search as well as some of the other products Google has announced recently. You can also read Google’s official statements about the need for real-time search coupled with Google technology.
Google’s example of how Real-Time Search functions:
This entry was posted March 11th, 2009 and has 4 comments.
I love March Madness. The NCAA tournament is the most competitive and fun to watch event in sports. Also, spring training is now in full force, which means opening day is just around the corner. This really is the best time of year for sports.
It’s no surprise then that big name companies want to be involved with the NCAA Tournament. CBS Sports really impressed me last year with their March Madness coverage. You could stream every game online and the online commercial breaks were well done with video ads corresponding to the player’s skin and companion banners. While I’m sure CBS will have coverage again this year, the first marketing message I received about the tournament was not from CBS Sports, but from Miller Lite and Facebook.
Miller Lite emailed me on Monday to announce their new March Madness Bracket Challenge. Selection Sunday isn’t until this upcoming Sunday, but I guess they wanted to get a jump on all those other requests you’ll get to fill out brackets. Here’s how the ML/FB Bracket Challenge looks and works:
This entry was posted March 11th, 2009 and has no nomments.
I’ve been having a tough time writing this week and just have not been feeling extraordinarily creative. Sometimes, all you need is a beer and some conversation with a good friend to pull you out of that rut.
I just got back from a happy hour with Mike where we spent a lot of time discussing ideas for a proposal we’re working on together. The ideas were flowing and I’m really excited about what we came up with.
Tonight just reminded me how important it is to surround yourself with motivated, creative and fun people. So, to my question. Who makes you more creative? Who challenges you to come up with better ideas? Surround yourself with more people like that. Or instead, spend more time with the creative people you already know.
This entry was posted June 2nd, 2008 and has 1 comment.
Last Wednesday, I travelled to NYC for the 2008 AAAA Digital Conference. I planned to live blog the event, but this didn’t quite work out. First, my train arrived a bit late, so I missed the first 30 minutes or so. I’m assuming that it was during the introduction that they doled out a username and password for their wi-fi. Needless to say, without the luxury of having this information, I had no internet connection.
While I was initially disappointed, I think it was actually a good thing. With so many conversations happening and information flying around, I definitely would have missed some key items if I had been also trying to craft coherent sentences. Instead of going through the conference session by session, I’m going to focus on the ones that most interested me and were, in my opinion, the most successful.
As I mentioned, due to a late train arrival, I missed almost half of Venture Capitalist Mark Kvamme’s talk. I did manage to catch his introduction of SearchMe.com. SearchMe looks pretty cool, but you have to wonder if it stands a chance in gaining enough users to make it viable. With its visual display, there is the opportunity for advertisers to incorporate much more engaging advertising than the standard 95 characters of text. It also takes a much different approach in displaying the search results, which makes it very interesting.
This entry was posted May 5th, 2008 and has no nomments.
This weekend, Microsoft withdrew their offer to buy Yahoo for $33 a share. This MicroHoo merger has been talked about in many different forums by many different people for quite a few months. In the past few weeks, talks have heated up and culminated in Microsoft basically issuing an ultimatum to Yahoo.
Though Yahoo’s stock price dropped about 20% this morning, word is that Yahoo’s executive team celebrated the withdrawal of Microsoft’s offer. How others at Yahoo reacted to the news hasn’t surfaced yet, but reactions from shareholders have been mixed at best.
Now, the real question is, Where does Yahoo go from here? In what I think is a somewhat questionable move, Yahoo just concluded a two-week test with Google delivering ads on a small portion of Yahoo searches. The test was intended to show that Yahoo can earn more money by allowing Google to serve search ads for them. Both companies described the test as successful.
This entry was posted February 25th, 2008 and has no nomments.
Not only is Dustin Pfeifer a good friend of mine and a champion BSSC quarterback, but he is also an excellent web designer and developer. Dustin and I went to school together and also worked in the marketing department at our last company for about four years. During that time we worked on a lot of projects together, many of which I am still really proud of.
I left that company last April and in October, Dustin decided to work for himself full-time and focus on his company, Dustin Pfeifer Creative. He’s already done some great work that you can see on his brand new site, DustinPfeifer.com.
This entry was posted November 7th, 2007 and has no nomments.
If you haven’t seen 365 Shirts yet, well then where have you been for the past 141 days?
My good friend and roommate Mike had the brilliant idea to wear a different shirt every day for one full year. Each day he blogs about the shirt and whatever is going on that day. The goal of the blog is not only to be fun and entertaining, but also to raise money through donations, and awareness for Alzheimer’s research.
So, like I said, if you haven’t been to 365 Shirts yet, get over there and check it out. Then, bookmark it and visit daily.
Also, 365 Shirts is involved in a blog contest hosted by Behance. Behance is a very cool site that showcases great creative work and encourages collaboration and idea sharing among creative professionals. Their tagline is, “Make Ideas Happen.”
