Tuesday
May012012

Adaptive Web Strategy: Moving from "How" to "What" and "Why"

Dave Peterson, ND&P Interactive Marketing Manager, discusses the Internet, its evolution and related website strategy.

The Game
Many years ago when we started building this concoction of servers, code and digital media we were pioneers and inventors of what would become the Internet. Websites took shape, best and worst practices were cycled through, and today we have an infrastructure of business and personal sites that have become societies unto themselves.*

Evolution
We’ve had to solve many problems over these years. What browsers should we use - what should they do? What code to write, what format to put media into, should we use extensions? For the most part we’ve solved most of this. For good or bad, the browser wars have settled down - sure we have fan favorites but the huge chasms that were once there have closed. Code methodologies have settled into a few camps and we’re seeing fewer massive shifts in how websites are built.

Media formatting and video codec problems are mostly in the past (i.e. YouTube and Vimeo have essentially solved online video for most). And while it was a painful and humbling process we may have seen the death blow to browser extensions (looking at you Flash/Silverlight).

The Rules
So have we solved the web? No, we've just figured out the rules of the game. The solutions that have come are huge, but I’d consider most of these akin to the getting the rules of baseball down on paper - who will play well from here on out and how they will do so is still left to be figured out. We used to have a saying plastered around our office in the 90s [yes, I was doing this in the 90s... but I was so very young then ;) ]

- “E-Business is still business” I don’t think we borrowed that from anyone but I’m also not vain enough to think it’s original. What we were going for then was a reminder that no matter how cool and wonderful being on the bleeding edge of technology was we still had to solve business problems or our work was irrelevant. So while we’ve solved many technical and procedural problems of how to get things done, I believe we are still young as an industry on what to get done.

Too often we see project teams place the emphasis of their concerns on those how’s while forgetting what and why. When I’m called into a project creation or review meeting one of my main concerns is to determine “do we know why this project is happening?” followed quickly by “what problem does this project solve?” If we cannot quickly come to an answer my warning sirens go off because I know that these questions will be asked six months/a year later when there seems to be no measurable fruit for all of the effort.

The Perfect Team
What we've come to understand, is that in addition to our work as advertisers/marketers we've had to blend in skill sets that typically have been isolated in other industries. We did this with technology several years ago but new/refined disciplines like Information Architecture and Experience Design have moved past being catch phrases in meetings to expected capabilities. Add to this the evolution beyond traditional SEO to Search Marketing and Content Strategy, as well as a radical shift in traffic analytics, and we’re reminded daily that we’ve far from figured out this game.

Play Ball
So what’s next? Take an adaptive posture to web solutions; don't be afraid to ask questions about your project. Ask more of us; ask more of your team. I cringe as I type this but, like baseball, don’t get comfortable with easy answers; the stats and tactics you used last year might be weaker or meaningless now. This isn't to propagate a negative or cynical disposition but to acknowledge that, like in baseball, what worked before may not give you the results you expect now.

Like there will never be another 1927 New York Yankees, there will never be a perfect website. Key variables like budgets, time constraints, availability of project leads, and what your competitors are doing will consistently force you to prioritize your efforts. ND&P has an audit sheet of what makes a great website and while that criterion changes every year, what doesn't change is that we have to choose what a particular site will be good at. Taking assessment of your goals and those key variables will help you determine how to structure or restructure your efforts - giving you a better shot at a competitive "season."

*Google reaches over 50% of the global Internet population, and Facebook 45% with an average time on site of 23 minutes a day. Twitter is consistently in the top ten of visited sites in the world - 8th in the U.S. Pinterest, essentially non-existent six months ago, has rocketed into the top 20 and is trending to capture 3% of the global audience with an average time on site of 9 minutes.  (Note: All data pulled from Alexa.com)

(Dave Peterson)

Thursday
Apr262012

Instagram costs $1 billion dollars?!, A new look for Google+ and other news you may have missed this month.

Will Filters and Facebook Make a Great Team?
Within a matter of days Instagram, the uber popular iOS photo app, announced its availability to Android AND its sale to Facebook for a whopping 1 billion dollars.

Lookin’ Good, Google+
Google+ has a new look! Along with the new facelift, some new features include revamped navigation, new profile pages, and a dedicated page for Google+ Hangouts (Google+’s multi-person video chat offering).  Go on over and take a gander.

Music Soothes the Savage Brand?
Ever wondered what your favorite brand sounds like? Music streaming platform Spotify will now allow brands to create their own playlists and soundtracks for you to enjoy.  Now you can boogie and buy at the same time!

Pique your Pinterest
Are you in it to pin it? Say hello to Pinterest, the latest and greatest social network. Your favorite brands are flocking to this picture-based site thanks to its sharing abilities. Also, it’s very popular with the ladies, who undoubtedly control the majority of household purchases.

Friends Help Friends Find Jobs
Two years and 25 million members later, BranchOut, a Facebook network, allows its members to use their Facebook friends as potential job connections.

(Janae Johnson)

Thursday
Apr262012

How Smart is Your Phone?

I do so much on my phone these days that I often forget not everyone has a smartphone. But then I’m already well into my second one, and planning for the next. So I’ve had a few years for this type of phone to really become an intrinsic part of my everyday life.

I started digging a little on the difference between phones, only to quickly discover there is no industry standard definition of what a smartphone is. We used to simply say someone had a “dumb” phone or a smartphone. But rapid technological evolution has led to rather muddy categories, and there’s overlap between them. But here are what I consider the basic categories:

DUMBPHONE
AKA "basic" cell phone - you can make calls on it: pizza, police. The usual stuff. That’s pretty much all early cell phones could do. But most have cameras now. And basic text/mms capability. (MMS, or multimedia messaging service, lets you also send graphics, video or sound files over your network – have to be able to share those photos somehow!).

FEATURE PHONE
We’re already into gray area here. Feature phones are more advanced than your basic dumb phone. You could argue that even having a camera makes a basic phone a feature phone, but “features” have quickly evolved to also include things like touchscreens, GPS navigation, media player capabilities and calendars/scheduling/reminders. Today’s feature phones would have been considered smartphones not too long ago.

SMARTPHONE
Take all your regular goodies and add direct internet access and the integration of application programming interfaces (APIs) – translation: app’s! You’re walking around with nothing short of a mini-computer. Access your email, video chat (for phones with two cameras), and create and send documents and files. Shoot, edit and post video to YouTube. Do your holiday shopping or some online banking. Watch a movie. And with some phones, you can even share your internet access with others – my own HTC phone gives me a private mobile hotspot for up to five other devices.

SOME STATS
Check out the links included below for even more interesting info:

 - Nielsen reports that as of February 2012, almost half of U.S. mobile subscribers now own smartphones.

 - PewInternet estimates a similar figure (46%), and further shares “smartphone owners are now more prevalent within the overall population than owners of more basic mobile phones.”

 - From a handy blog I ran across (Communities Dominate Brands – blog of the book), here’s a tidbit to make you think: “we have now celebrated the first full year when smartphones have sold more than all types of personal computers (including tablet PCs like the iPad) combined.”

 - From Marketing Land: More than 27% of emails are opened on mobile devices (phones accounting for 20.6% of that number).

MY PHONE
My phone has slowly edged out some of my other devices and resources over time. I made a list of things I use my phone for – a few include:

  • An alarm clock
  • A calendar and birthday-reminder
  • Internet access (on my phone and for my laptop)
  • Digital Camera and Hi Def Video capture
  • Email for multiple accounts
  • Twitter and Facebook for multiple accounts
  • Games (and I’ve made online friends - there’s seasoned fireman in Texas who regularly beats me with words like “za” in a Scrabble™-like game)
  • Endless shopping lists and memos (movies to see, bands to explore)
  • Weather forecast (no more “local on the 8’s” for me!)
  • Music player
  • GPS Navigation (and a compass, too!)
  • Calculator
  • Stock Ticker

And I can’t forget another one – I baked my first turkey this past Thanksgiving. Thought I had everything covered until I read I was supposed to “brine” the turkey. What the heck?!?! A quick search and I had a YouTube video up and playing that walked me through what to do. (and the turkey turned out GREAT, btw). Crisis averted.

I hope relying so much on smartphones doesn’t result in making US dumber over time.

 (Shaun Amanda Herrmann)

Wednesday
Apr112012

What's News Pussycat? (Here, kitty, kitty . . . )

I haven’t seen it all—but then again, who has?

What I have seen is “The Most Incredible Instagram (IG) Photos We’ve Ever Seen” so deemed by none other than the “Tiffany Network” (see: 1953, CBS). And on this day when all the news (I jest—a tee-tiny portion of “the news,” whatever that is) happens to be: Facebook forks over a cool billion for Instagram.

And, Mike Wallace (see: CBS, 1953) is dead at 93.

Just so happens, the year Mr. Wallace was born, Woodrow Wilson sat in the White House, and the U.S. Congress established time zones—Mike Wallace saw some things.

It all drips with irony and uber-mar-com zeitgeist-iness.

Oh yeah, #15 on CBS News’ big list of IG hot shots is, well, an XCU (extreme close-up) of a rather uncomfortable looking gray-striped cat with what appears to be an antique watch strapped to its head.  

(Cue David Byrne: This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no fooin’ around . . .)

Don’t get me wrong—there are some really cool shots bouncing around IG’s slab of the net-o-sphere—more than we could ever hope to count or fully contemplate— and I’m sure if anyone can leverage wrist watch-strapped cats into “big biddness,” it’s Facebook. But, but— 

Now, where’s my cat, anyway?

(Doug Cook)

Friday
Mar302012

HAM-FISTED COPYWRITER HAULED INTO TASTE COURT

To paraphrase the closing line of the Jack Nicholson classic, Chinatown, “It’s Chicago, the red meat capital of the world. What’er you gonna do?” 

I’m supposing that line of reasoning would constitute at least some of the case for the defense of this mildly ribald, “gotcha” of an outdoor board from the friendly by-ways of the City of Broad Shoulders and 72-oz. bone-in sirloins, accompanied by loaded potatoes.

HOT DOGS CAUSE BUTT CANCER

Copywriter: ”Your honor, it’s a desperate situation. Meat-eaters among us, otherwise good and honorable men, are dropping like flies from the dread disease of prostate cancer, one of our most easily treatable forms, if detected early. It’s—“

Judge (AKA, arbiter of good taste and decorum): “Butt? . . . Butt? Is that really necessary? What about the eight-year-olds in the back of mom’s soccer wagon?”

Copywriter:  “Your honor, people don’t respond to tasteful messaging anymore . . . we’ve got people on TV say things now that you didn’t hear in the back alleys of Rush Street a generation ago. 

JUDGE: That board isn’t on a Rush Street back alley. I happen to know, as you do, that the traffic count for that board is in the hundreds of thousands every day.

Copywriter: Yes, your honor. That’s correct. But butt, no word-play intended, is just one syllable—a very quick read! And you’d be surprised how many people think prostate’s just a fancy word for lying down.

Judge: Excuse me?

Ad guy: Prostrate—it means lying down. A little tricky . . .

Judge: Yes, I see.

Federal Trade Commission Mock Court of Decorum aside, the truth is that, by today’s standards, “butt” is quite tame. And if the mild shock value of the form—and, setting aside such healthful things as turkey-dogs and veggie-dogs—the wanton lambasting of the meat food-chain’s bottom dweller—can startle a few thousand broad-shouldered (and wide-bodied) Chicagoans into reducing meat consumption, and a quite a few more to get a check-up . . .

Judge: You are hereby dismissed with a warning citation. Now, haul your back-end outta my courtroom and go have a salad and (doting mom accent) a nice piece of fish!”

(Doug Cook)