Oct172011
I know I only revamped this blog a year ago, but in that time my priorities and interests in how I want to blog have changed. So, hold tight while I don’t update this blog and instead prepare for my new one. I have a lot to say, and the new blog, while preserving the [...]
Sep232011
A post on Facebook by a friend made me want to post about this. He woke this morning to find that a missed call was labeled from his brother. But his brother passed away a year ago. In that time, he hasn’t been able to bring himself to remove the entry from his contacts. I [...]
Sep22011
I had my first parent-teacher conference ever. My 4 year old is in Pre-K, and his teachers wanted to discuss my expectations, though I suspected they had a few of their own. One comment they made was that my son was sometimes reluctant to try to do things himself. Yes, I had noticed that he [...]
Jul252011
A friend of mine lamented this morning that she may need to find a new job. I chirped back, “Oh, how fortunate that you’ve decided that on the same day LinkedIn has added new job application features.” She shrunk a bit before admitting that she didn’t really even have a completed profile on LinkedIn. And probably [...]
Apr272011
I love getting the little notice in my inbox that someone new is following me. It’s not because I like the numbers but because I assume that someone has looked at my profile and thought to themselves that they’ll get some interesting or fun updates from me that they’ll ultimately find worth their time. In [...]
Apr52011
Sure, Google is so big it’s a verb. Sure, it dominates search. Sure, it’s made people very rich. But it’s also a company that is doing a lot of things poorly. There, I said it. Before you cry out, “Blasphemy!” hear me out. The reason Google got so big is because it has done search [...]
Feb12011
There are times when guesswork is good, I suppose. As a general rule, I tend to favor the facts. I like data. Hunger for it. I like to observe shoppers in a store and see how they interact with the product. I like to listen in as people respond to a brand online. It’s normally much more insightful than my imagination. There are things that we think we know that are pretty spot on, but you’d be surprised what you can learn if you open up the lines of communications to your customers and potential customers.
To get started, here are some ideas about how to get more customer feedback. In exchange, you’ll gain more insights, get more ideas, and help your business (or your client’s business) thrive.
Comment cards. This may seem old school, but people do fill these out. If you have a physical location, you can set these out where someone can find them easily. Make them easy to fill out and easy to drop off.
Enhance comment cards with QR codes. If someone can scan your QR code, fill out the information from a smart phone and have a fun interaction while helping you out, all the better. This format isn’t great for lengthy responses, so let them check boxes and offer up some short comment if they choose.
Jan252011
There has been a lot of discussion about the future of the social media strategist – especially on social media, on Mashable (The Future of the Social Media Strategist), and others. Well, I can’t exactly be quiet about this as it is something that impacts what I do for a living. I am not a social media strategist, though the core of that job is something that I do. I am a digital marketer. I take the goals of the company, break it down to strategies, and then tactics, and engage in those marketing tactics to get the results defined in the earlier steps. Marketing is about creating results by communicating. It’s content, whether words, pictures, video or something else. Social media is often a big part of it, and I’m glad because it’s work I enjoy.
Social media is fun for me because it’s so ubiquitous, instantaneous, and personal. It’s a 1-to-1 relationship with the world. It’s full of surprises, and it’s full potential is far from being realized. Evolving, exciting, engaging. Some pretty great E words.
Jan192011
Chris Brogan suggested in an article on Open Forum that among the improvements you can make in your email marketing this year, you can move that silly link that’s always at the top to view the email in a browser to the bottom of your email and spare that space from doing your email housekeeping. Instead, you can use that to communicate something of actual value to your recipient. I like this idea, but recently, I noticed another reason to like it: my gmail email list.
Gmail gives me the sender, the subject line, and then the first few words of the email in the email list view. When you see what the first few words are when you put “Click here to view in your browser” at the top, you really begin to understand how much this sucks. And some intros are worse than others.
Maria Lorena Lehman is an architectural designer and author who writes on a blog called Sensing Architecture. I do enjoy her articles, and I am always taken (but not surprised) by the parallels between great architecture and great web design. In a recent post, Lehman outlined the Top 10 Tips to Great Museum Exhibit Design. Each of her points, it seemed, were talking about web design with little need to change nary a word. Here is the list verbatim.
