Archives for observations
A Few Lessons Learned from Food Bloggers – Part 1
If you know a thing or two about me, you probably know that I am a culinary junkie. I spend a huge amount of my time reading about food, watching food-related videos and shows, walking around kitchen stores, and as you probably guessed, I do my share of cooking and eating as well. So when clients [...]
Websites with Linger
Two years ago, my wife and I took an amazing trip to Northeast France and Belgium. We spent four days in Bruges, which is maybe Europe’s most picturesque town. Bruges is home to some of Belgium’s best beer destinations, including several amazing beer bars, beer-themed restaurants and a brewery museum that showcases Belgian brewing circa [...]
I say potato, you think Vichyssoise. Let’s talk.
In my 10+ years of managing projects, teams and client expectations, I’ve come to the conclusion that the most common threat to the success of relationships and projects is simple lack of communication. Why simple? Because usually the simplest misunderstanding at the outset of an engagement is where it all starts to skid downhill. For example, [...]
Making Amazon More Actionable
I’m an Amazon junkie. I’ve bought everything from books to power tools on Amazon. I’m a prime member, meaning I pay $70/year for the ability to get items shipped to me in 2 days or less, every time, rather than paying for express shipping every purchase. Suffice to say, I use the site a lot. [...]
The Passive-Aggressive Brand
A couple of days ago, my sister sent me a link to PassiveAggressiveNotes.com, a site I’d seen before, but one that still elicits a chuckle every time I check it out. There’s just no replacement for the snide little notes co-workers and roomates leave one another. My favorites are variations on a simple theme: “Your [...]
Free Advice for Adobe Acrobat Programmers
I often find myself making PDFs to send our design work over to clients. Acrobat is a great little program that nearly everyone has, and is rarely blocked by corporate firewalls. It’s generally very easy to use, too. Here’s how I make most PDFs for client presentations. Make comps. This takes some time. Drag files onto Acrobat icon [...]
On Method Design and Efficiency
In acting, there is a school of training known as “Method Acting,” whose proponents begin preparing for a role by immersing themselves in the culture they are trying to portray. Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro are three well-known practitioners, often going to great lengths to remain in character, even after the [...]
Use Social Media for Customer Service
We’ve all seen stories about rogue customer service teams using social media to help customers, but here’s a great way to institutionalize it. At the end of the article, you’ll find a reminder and links about why great customer service improves both sales and profits. Using Social Media Opt-Ins for Customer Service Imagine if at the end of [...]
iPhone 3.0 and Amazon Kindle: How Much Will They Pay?
When Amazon rolled out the Kindle iPhone App (iTunes link), it lacked one key feature: the ability to purchase new books or subscriptions through the iPhone. You still have to go to Amazon.com to get your content, then sync your account via iPhone. (And yes, I’m totally spoiled for whining about a simple extra step [...]
Managing During Hard Times: A First-Timer’s Perspective
What’s a new manager to do during their first real big downturn? There’s a lot of conflicting feelings, obligations and advice about how to manage during a recession. I’ve been sorting through it in my own mind, and have developed my own mental checklist. Know Yourself I went through the “dot-bomb” back in 2001, but I was [...]
Oh, Baby (Einstein)
As a new mom, my internet habits have changed a bit. I am part of a whole new world now, full of mommy blogs, parenting communities and endless companies pushing products you just MUST buy for your baby. (Bumbos, Boppies and Bjorns! Oh my!) One company that has impressed me from the very beginning is [...]
Lingo Bingo
So there I was sipping my coffee this morning, checking my RSS feeds and WHAM! Inspiration! I should say for the record that I love our project managers, and I love our account managers, and that they have been nothing but good to me and the rest of the creative team, cleaning up the digital messes [...]
How to Time Your Holiday Email Marketing
A friend of mine writes and manages the online marketing for a local online retailer, and asked via Facebook about how to time her holiday email marketing to her customers. I’d been tweeting (thomschoenborn on Twitter) about a webinar from Nielsen Online about online holiday shopping, and she shot me a message asking about Black [...]
Being a Little Bit Transparent is Like Being a Little Bit Pregnant
It seems that I can’t have a conversation about blogging without also talking about fear, legal liability, and transparency. Which I find somewhat ironic: as a business, most of our clients have tens, if not hundreds, of employees who are trained to talk to clients. Customer service reps. Sales people. Technical support. They’re trained in [...]
Who is Pop Art?
In the course of re-launching the website for our interactive agency, we wanted to bring the Pop Art people forward. After all, Pop Art is in the business of interactive advertising and marketing services. Services that are provided by people who like to laugh, explore geeky things, and do great work. The question became, “What [...]
America’s First Brand Touchpoint
A couple weekends ago, my wife and I took a trip northward to Canada (aka “America’s Hat”), specifically Vancouver, B.C. The trip was great – what an amazing, global-feeling city. I heard more languages spoken on the street in 10 minutes there than I have in the past 10 days in Portland. We had some [...]
Food and Advertising: How to Cure the Culture of Obesity
I am the world’s worst eater. Bar none. Put a burger in front of me, and I’ll ask for bleu cheese and bacon, too. Which is why I was dumbfounded when I started seeing this McDonald’s commercial a while back: I wanted an apple. The commercial illustrates a conundrum faced by the U.K. government anti-obesity [...]
The Truly Friendly Skies: Southwest Airlines
I love Southwest Airlines. In a time when nearly every other airline is bankrupting themselves, exacerbating their problems with underhanded pricing, starving their customers, and providing Soviet-era customer service, Southwest is expanding their offerings in their typical friendly, easygoing way. If you’ve never flown Southwest, try it sometime. It takes a bit of getting used to, [...]
Copywriters and SEO
It’s time for copywriters to evolve and embrace search engine optimization. And not just re-writing headlines, but owning the search-optimized content creation process from start to finish. The only reason writers and editors haven’t been responsible for SEO in the past for interactive agencies is because SEO firms (and interactive firms) position it as some [...]
Welcome to the Future
When the first iPhone was announced, I publicly stated that I would wait for version 2 before purchasing. It took about 30 seconds of playing with version 1 before changing my mind. Holding the slim, elegant device in my hands, I felt like I was experiencing radio for the first time. I didn’t want to [...]
Are You Saying Too Much?
Guy Kawasaki had a great post the other day on his blog. If you want customers to be happy, give them less product Information. Here’s a counter-intuitive thought: Shoppers with less information about a product are happier than those with more information.” He cites a study conducted by the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business. The [...]
What Was I Thinking?
Great book(s) review from the New Yorker about why consumers make stupid decisions. There’s a lot of “duh” statements in here — Consumers are effort-averse? Really? — but stated in a researched, academic way. A few Halloweens ago, Ariely laid in a supply of Hershey’s Kisses and two kinds of Snickers—regular two-ounce bars and one-ounce [...]
Interactive Marketing: A Dark Tale
On May 12, 2007, Warner Brothers released the first web teaser for the upcoming Batman Begins movie sequel, The Dark Knight. The teaser was an image of the Batman bat symbol exploding into many pieces. It was mysterious but it was only the first clue into an almost year long interactive marketing campaign [...]
Forget Viral: Start a Wildfire.
We’re all big fans of Malcolm Gladwell over here. And so when I saw this article in Fast Company titled “Is the Tipping Point Toast?” I dug right in. If nothing else, I love a good academic smackdown. The article interviews a former prof who now works for Yahoo, and who refutes the “viral” theory [...]
*cluck*cluck*cluck* Who Are You Afraid Of, Ya Big Chicken?
I bet you’re not trying to be No.1. I bet you’re making excuses. I bet there’s someone in your company, or in your industry, who OWNS you. They’ve got the Midas Touch, and you’re niggling about process documents and sweating out a 15 percent improvement. No? A new study on professional golfers suggests otherwise. Call [...]
