For those of us in Adland, Mad Men is a persistent reminder that not much has changed in our business over the past sixty years (with the exception of all the illegal and non-PC stuff, of course). Believe it or not, agencies are still run pretty much the way they are depicted on TV. Evidently, the great management and technology revolutions sidestepped Madison Avenue. Read More →
Time is ticking away, friends. There’s just one day left to snag a front row seat to the future of digital media. paidContent Live features influential leaders from publishing, advertising, media, finance, and entertainment, all coming together for a timely discussion about the business of content. There’s no better way to get the skinny about what’s new and what’s next than listening to this very impressive list of speakers.
Get your ticket before they’re all gone. Did we mention that there are only 36 of them left?
Today’s question comes from an anonymous but thoroughly frustrated digital innovator:
Companies often advertise for “thought leaders” and “game changers,” but during the interview process, they usually reveal that they really just want to build incrementally on what they’ve already got. In a second interview with a major company, I realized that although they want to be recognized as an innovator in their industry, their major focus is on building the adoption for their current technologies across the company. I can do this, but I have the skills, insight, and passion to build the next generation. Is it worth continuing the conversation with them? Do I stand a chance of convincing them to innovate?
That’s a great question. It’s actually pretty rare for prospective employers to be guilty of outright false advertising. It’s way more likely that they’re “aspirational innovators,” meaning that they want to innovate. Someday. When the stars align and everything is perfect, they’ll take that leap. Unfortunately, that’s not quite your timeline, is it? Read More →
As product people who subscribe to a lean and agile methodology, we have a tendency to think in short bursts and only focus on the near term, because after all, things change. 
Our typical strategizing looks like this:
However, the downside of this type of thinking is that you can lose sight of the bigger vision and of the long-term business goals.
In order make sure that we don’t lose track of the bigger vision and make sure that our quarter-to-quarter priorities help move the business forward in the right, I am proposing that we instate a “Look Back” at the start of every year, and check in with it in June to see how we are doing. Read More →
Every year it’s the same thing. We start out the New Year filled with good intentions, high hopes, and a formidable list of life-changing resolutions. And for an indomitable few, those resolutions result in positive changes and personal growth. But for the rest of us, life tends to get in the way.
Before we know it, January is over and February flies by (it’s such a short month!). Then the spring holidays come along. Then it’s summer, and… well, you know the rest. That pledge to “start tomorrow” just leads to the eventual realization that today is yesterday’s tomorrow. So, what can we do about it?
We can start today. For real. Right now.
What we need to do is go from “resolutions” to “real solutions.” And one real-life solution that really works, is easy to do, and can kick-start us into action, is to start reading. And my recommendation is to start your New Year’s reading with any one of the 13 inspirational and motivational books on this list. Read More →
This article originally appeared on Wyatt Jenkins Product Jazz.
Mobile is reinventing how people work by moving previously complex tasks to smaller portable devices. This work process reinvention is one of my bets on where to place your development resources in the next few years. Lets review the facts illustrating the changes we’ve seen recently. Read More →
“We should give the user more of what they obviously want.”
It seemed like such a good idea at the time, didn’t it? Reading about holiday entertaining? Then you must want to see more recipes and decorating ideas. Checking out career success tips? We’ll give you a ton of career success tips.
Here at Budget Travel, I have yet to talk to a single partner or advertiser who doesn’t want to target users based on what they’re already looking at. Selling deals? Put a deal to Paris on a page about — wait for it — Paris! All of this makes sense…up to a point.
Pivot 2012 is fast approaching. So fast, in fact, that there’s less than a week left to register for the premier conference for those working at the intersection of Social and commerce. It’s going to be a hotbed of innovative ideas and prescient glimpses of the future. It’s also a great opportunity to rub elbows with all those decision makers and visionaries that you read about in Fast Company. That’s why we jumped at the chance to sit down with Pivot President Mike Edelhart to talk about the conference, the future of Social, and the changing face of business. Read More →
Back in the day (I’m talking 2002-ish), our sales team was keen on promoting a “home page takeover” or other home-page-based advertising executions to really give clients that WOW factor. After all, everyone comes to the home page!
Today (10 years later, if you can believe it), I still hear salespeople get all worked up about pitching a home page takeover. But no one goes there any more. Read More →
Last Saturday the New York Times’ business section ran an article (“Nurturing a Baby and a Start-Up Business“) about women with small children who launch high-growth tech companies. It profiled several women launching and running highly successful start-ups while they are pregnant or have very young kids and how their success is “dispelling the image of the tech entrepreneur as a single, usually male, wunderkind.”
The article goes on to say that the investing world remains skeptical about a woman’s ability to launch a tech startup and make it work while also raising young kids. Apparently some — but not all — venture capital firms are concerned that women with small children won’t put in the long hours and give the 150% required to make a fast-growth tech company work in the first few crazy years. Read More →
We’re pleased to welcome Sheryl Victor Levy to the blog. As a coach for businesspeople who don’t want to be left behind by technology, and as a digital strategist in her own right, she always aims to be a little bit ahead of the curve. She’ll be blogging for us about the ways that digital marketing, advertising, and media are changing just about every other aspect of business — and what you need to know to use this knowledge to your advantage.
Last week I attended the June New York Tech Meetup, along with nearly 800 other guests. Given that the group as a whole has some 24,000 members, these Meetups are always in demand. I had an extra ticket, and I received more than 25 emails in less than 24 hours asking about it.
The event consists of two hours of presentations by local startups, and then an after-party (which yours truly was way too tired to attend). I have to say, the evening was pretty cool. Read More →
You’ve heard of HiPPOs, right? They’re the Highest Paid Person’s Opinions, and there’s someone with them in every group.
Whether they come straight from the actual Highest Paid Person’s mouth, or just someone who sucks up to her, or the guy who’s super-charismatic and persuasive, there’s always someone who has the last word. “I think it should be like this,” they intone. And so it shall be done. Read More →
Jacqueline Dooley has been working in the fields of online marketing and search marketing for over a decade — we’re so happy to welcome her to the blog. In her posts, she’ll be laying out for us the basics of paid search, and the ways to make sure you get the most out of it. The post below appeared first on her own blog, Search. Click. Find.
Paid search is a do-it-yourself medium. It takes literally five minutes to set up an AdWords account, fund it, create your first campaign, and launch. And Google has been aggressively targeting small businesses by providing $100 coupons and vouchers through hosting companies and ISPs, as well as reaching out directly to small businesses.
For all of the above reasons, as well as the continued pressure to find new leads and generate new business, many of my small business clients are confused about how to move forward. They feel a sense of urgency to launch an AdWords campaign (everybody’s doing it!) but they aren’t sure how to approach it. Add to this that it’s so easy to get started with AdWords -– just register, plug in your credit card, and GO! — that the temptation to launch before you develop a thoughtful strategy can be overwhelming. Read More →
I was at a product manager’s gathering a while ago, and the topic of video came up. Someone threw out the idea of taking short-form video — say, 90-second clips, the kinds of video you watch on mobile phones and laptops — and having it available on internet TV, which one would navigate using a standard remote control. “There’s nothing wrong with that,” the manager said. Well, yeah, there’s actually a lot wrong with that. Read More →
User experience design (UXD), the science of structuring information and developing user flows, is breaking out of its native-digital niche, where it originated as a planning and architectural tool for developing website and apps. Now it’s a critical element in many different kinds of marketing strategies.
Understanding the full range of consumer experiences with a brand is a critical factor in building awareness, engagement, and advocacy — and in framing or evolving a value proposition that integrates and emphasizes features and benefits in believable and sustaining ways. Read More →
Jonathan Hills is a product developer and strategist who blogs for us about how traditional companies, particularly media brands, can reinvent themselves in the digital age.
When I began my career in digital back in the dark ages of the late 1990s, online video was something you rarely ran into. And if you did, it consisted of a postage-stamp-sized clip of blurry pixels that took about 10 minutes to stream via RealPlayer. Now, video’s everywhere. According to Comscore, over 180 million people in the U.S. watch online video every month.
With an audience that big, it’s not surprising that more and more brands are trying to grab a piece of the pie -– especially since online video advertising continues to grow at a rapid clip. So what’s the best way to build a viable online video product? Here’s a hint –- it doesn’t involve talking heads.
There are three things the Web really doesn’t need any more of. The first is group-buying sites/emails/apps. The second is photo-sharing apps. And the third is talking-head videos. Especially talking-head videos of website editors talking about something they’ve just written about 15 minutes ago. Read More →
This June brings the second annual User Experience Awards, which honors and celebrates outstanding UX projects and practitioners. To find out about the awards and the submission process, we checked in with the founder and president of Oxford Technology Ventures, Beverly May, who will be moderating the awards. If you have a project, idea, app, site, or software that you’d like to have considered, you still have a little time to get your ducks in a row — the deadline for submissions is May 1.
Why now? What changed about UX and design to make last year a good time to launch the awards?
UX has become more widely understood and recognized as a key differentiating factor in an ever-more-crowded digital marketplace. When there’s hundreds of thousands of apps, or dozens or even hundreds of competitors in your space, suddenly the product experience becomes very important for user adoption and retention. UX was always important, but it wasn’t as well understood as a separate discipline and approach, and its importance wasn’t as widely recognized and valued in terms of strategic differentiation. There’s been increasing recognition that a customer-centric design and product approach is really the only way to build high-impact, effective, useful, and engaging products and services. Companies who launch or, more likely, maintain legacy products with bad UX are increasingly putting themselves in a strategically weak position and are opening up the opportunity for a competitor with superior UX to gain considerable buzz and market share. Read More →
Conferences are a tricky thing. There are so many of them, especially in the fields of digital media, marketing, and advertising, that it’s hard to know which ones are worth it. But what about SXSW Interactive, which earlier this month unleashed a vast stream of tweets, articles, posts, press releases, and controversy, including the question of whether or not it even still matters and an example of a social good gone bad? If you’ve sat out SXSWi so far, you might be wondering if all the chatter means that it finally jumped the shark. Read More →
You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud or an evolutionary biologist to figure out that there is something about Facebook that resonates deeply in our psyches and in our lizard brains. New research is attempting to identify and document how this works — and what it means for the rest of us trying to connect with the public.
The fact that people accumulate friends and family members and then post and watch countless photos and videos feels very primal and tribal. As we build our social networks, we exercise the passive aspect of our flight-or-fight instincts, meaning that as we add “friends,” we’re constantly monitoring them for signs of friendship or aggression — and unfriending those who fail the test.
Read More →
Today we’d like to welcome to the blog Jonathan Hills, a product developer and strategist who will be blogging about ways that traditional companies, particularly media brands, can reinvent themselves in the digital age.
For army rangers, casual campers, and budding serial killers, the Swiss Army knife is an attractive tool. Knowing that you have a single product at your disposal that can do a variety of tasks averagely well is quite comforting. It represents a highly portable way to get by in an emergency — which clearly has value. But given the option, it’s unlikely that a three-inch nail file would be your number-one tool of choice if you needed to skin an otter — or whatever people do when they’re surviving in the wild.
One of the biggest mistakes traditional media companies make when working on their digital product strategy is to fall into a Swiss Army knife mindset. It usually goes something like this: Read More →
An analyst at Altimeter Group, Rebecca Lieb covers digital advertising and media. For a list of all the Hired Guns presenting this year, check out our SXSW-prep post.
Book Signing for Content Marketing
Saturday, March 10, 1:30
Author: Rebecca Lieb
Why did you want to speak at SXSW?
Content marketing is a concept as old as the hills, but it’s just beginning to appear on digital-marketing radar screens (thanks, social media!). It’s also my passion: I not only wrote a book on it, but also just published a research report about how enterprises are adapting to its challenges. Contrary to popular believe, it’s NOT free! Read More →
A work-in-progress list of links and other info to get the most out of Austin…
All The Hired Guns participating this year, with links to the Q+A’s we’ve done with them:
Noah Scalin
Unstuck: Get (and Keep) Your Creativity Flowing
Friday, March 9, 3:30
Book signing: 4:05
Todd Henry
Book Reading and Discussion
Friday, March 9, 4:00 Read More →
In the days leading up to SXSW Interactive, we’ve been looking at the Hired Guns and Hired Guns pals who will be there. Up today: social-media innovator and “wannabe entrepreneur” Brandon Lee:
Social Networking: Giving Cancer Patients a Voice
Monday, March 12, 3:30
Presenter: Brandon Lee
Your Twesume
(your resume in 140 characters or less):
I’m a wannabe entrepreneur and I like to get my hands into everything. I studied journalism and web and graphic design at TCNJ. I am a black belt in tae kwon do and a drummer.
Why did you want to speak at SXSW?
I wanted to speak at SXSW to see how the bright and creative minds reacted to my nonprofit. I also know that SXSW is a very popular venue so I wanted to speak about social networking for cancer patients to as many people as possible. Cancer in general is a topic which is extremely important to me and has changed my life. Read More →
Great product people understand their users in a qualitative way — what their motivations are, what they use your product for, and what issues they have with your product. It’s a core part of being a product owner, particularly when you are looking to build something new. But when you are looking to optimize your site experience, you also need product metrics.
Qualitative research tells you “why,” but product metrics tell you “what.” It’s metrics that help product owners make decisions and, even more important, understand if those decisions were ultimately right or wrong. Read More →
In the days leading up to SXSW Interactive, we’ve been looking at the Hired Guns and Hired Guns pals who will be there. Up today: author and consultant Todd Henry:
Book Reading and Discussion
Friday, March 9, 4:00
Presenter: Todd Henry
Your Twesume
(your resume in 140 characters or less):
Founder of The Accidental Creative, author of The Accidental Creative, arms dealer for the creative revolution.
Why did you want to speak at SXSW?
I’m as or more excited about meeting tons of sharp, visionary people at SXSW than I am about speaking! But anytime I get the chance to share how creatives can unleash that final 20% of their creative potential, I’m there. I’m excited to share the insights from my research and book. Read More →
Tomorrow, Wed., February 29, the presentation expert Joel Schwartzberg will teach his Hired Guns Academy class on how to Nail That Keynote: Adding Strength to Your Professional Talks, Appearances, and Job Interviews.
As a frequent coach for competitive public-speaking teams as well as individuals and groups of all sorts, Joel knows what it takes to get a message heard — loud and clear. In this three-hour class, he’ll give you what you need to know to craft presentations that stick, including the best way to use visual aids, some easy tricks to get rid of the jitters, and a clear explanation of why the words on the page are only one part of what makes speeches memorable.
To find our more about Joel and his approach, check out a few of his recent posts:
There are still a few spaces left for his class this Wednesday, but don’t wait too long — space is limited. Looking forward to seeing you there!
As I wrote in a a post last year, we’ve entered the era of using data to tell stories. Natalie Zmuda’s article in last week’s Ad Age, “When CMOs Learn to Love Data, They’ll Be VIPs in the C-Suite,” did a good job of explaining the other side of the data coin –- using data to inform and power marketing programs. Marketers haven’t been lacking for data; instead, the issue has been about how to contextualize the information and how to separate the truly important from the irrelevant. Read More →
We have a bumper crop of Hired Guns presenting their ideas at next month’s SXSW Interactive. Over the next few weeks we’ll be profiling them, so that you can get a taste of their ideas — whether or not you’ll be making it to Austin yourself. Today’s selection, Jeff Gothelf, will also be cochairing next week’s AgileUX New York City conference.
Demystifying Design:
Fewer Secrets, Greater Impact
Sunday, March 11, 5:00
Presenter: Jeff Gothelf
Your Twesume
(your resume in 140 characters or less):
Interaction designer, author of upcoming book on Lean UX (O’Reilly, June 2012), founding partner at Proof.
Why did you want to speak at SXSW?
SXSW offers an international audience of creatives and technologists with whom conversations about the web, design and technology are always interesting and diverse — plus it’s one hell of a party. Read More →
[from the Next Web. See also: The Top 15 Brands on Twitter]
Hired Guns blogger Todd Cherches was quoted in yesterday’s Crain’s NY Business, in an article (“Fountain of inspiration”) about possible reasons that the best ideas often seem to come in the shower:
Mr. Cherches’ activity of choice involves heading for the bath—–a direction made considerably easier by the fact that he runs his business from his Manhattan apartment and has no employees. “Showering blocks out everything and everyone, so you’re away from it all,” said Mr. Cherches…. “You’re creating a cocoon of solitude.”
For Mr. Cherches, it’s all about the “creative pause,” a term probably coined in the 1960s by Edward de Bono, a famed scholar of creative thinking. The concept refers to a time when someone stops thinking about a problem on purpose, engages in another activity, and often unexpectedly comes up with a solution without even trying.
And from The Hired Guns blog:
Janice Croze and Susan Carraretto, identical twins, launched 5 Minutes for Mom in early 2006 as a site to help promote small businesses (“mom and pop shops”) and the online parent community in general. Back then, web directories and blogrolls were the main method for growing traffic and creating community; social media hadn’t yet managed to make much of a splash. Pageviews came quickly, but not without a lot of hard work. Read More →
Lisa Schneider writes for The Hired Guns blog about the technological changes that everyone in digital organizations needs to know about, whether it affects their own job directly or not. Questions about technology or making the transition to a primarily digital career? You can either put them in the comments or ask them via Twitter.
Recently, a colleague left a dinner where there was lots of talk about HTML5. “What does this mean for our website?!” was the fairly panicked email I received.
Gone are the days (if they ever existed) when people outside the digital or IT teams could ignore the technology behind websites and applications. And while not everyone needs to know how to code, workers in management, editorial, marketing, and other areas all definitely need to know enough about the technology to understand its implications.
HTML5 is simply the next iteration of HTML. But what’s different, and why are people excited? Read More →
Here’s an obvious statement: the web (internet, computers, mobile, all of it) is changing. Here’s maybe a less obvious statement, but still nothing groundbreaking: the rules for how you build, maintain, and grow business on the web are also changing. This means that you need to adapt, to be prepared to change how you operate, and to be different from what you are today. What works today is almost certainly not going to work tomorrow. Read More →
Of all the different management, leadership, communication, innovation, and thinking tools, tips and techniques that I’ve learned over the years, nothing has affected me more, or has had more practical applications, than Edward de Bono’s “Six Thinking Hats” model.
De Bono, the guru of “thinking about thinking,” originated this framework that I now use, either consciously or unconsciously, literally every single day. It’s one of the best examples of how we can use visual and metaphorical thinking and communicating to solve real-world challenges. Read More →
Online display ads are most likely here to stay, but that doesn’t mean they are the only way to get the word out. In a recent talk at the Appnexus Summit, Reuters reporter Felix Salmon floated one idea for a different kind of ad — basically it would be an aggregated set of links to targeted content from all over. The selection would provide what’s often missing in current advertising: “a reason to want to look at your ad.” It may not end up being the future of online advertising, as Salmon claims, but it’s intriguing idea, given the many sites that have succeeded through various kinds of aggregation. Readers continue to want and need help finding the good stuff.
It’s no coincidence that the Counterparties blog, which Salmon runs, is modeled along the same link-heavy lines. Reuters’s home page runs a distinct Counterparties box at the bottom of its home page, and it’s easy to imagine this becoming its own sponsored ad unit in the future.
If you’ve got a head for marketing and your skills extend beyond pretty words and images to include being savvy with numbers, stats, and analyzing data of all sorts, then your career prospects ought to be very bright right now.
Ad and marketing agencies want people like you, and there just aren’t enough of you. As John Ebbert, the managing editor for a Web site devoted to ad technology, told the New York Times, “There is pain for hiring in digital at all levels.” Read More →
The least creative place you can be is most likely where you’re sitting right now.
Like many people, I spend the majority of my workday in one room, sitting in front of a computer. And while my office may be on the more creative end of the spectrum — filled with all manner of interesting objects — it’s still the least inspiring place I find myself on a regular basis.
Workspaces are places of familiarity, but if you’re looking for inspiration, you actually need the exact opposite: an influx of the unknown and a sprinkling of the completely random. And there’s no better way to finding these experiences than just simply getting out of your environment.
For a year, Skull-A-Day, my daily art project, was my excuse to spend part of every day away from my desk. Sometimes it was just going to another part of my office to make something by hand, but very often it required me to get out of the building entirely and spend a some time really paying attention to the world around me. Read More →
Sitting in a San Antonio bar with a business partner in 1967, the entrepreneur Herb Kelleher grabbed a (now-legendary) cocktail napkin and sketched out a simple triangle while posing this question: What if we were to create a small, local airline that connected these three cities? With that sketch, the idea for Southwest Airlines was born.
The next time you are trying to generate ideas, brainstorm a solution, or explain a complex idea to someone, why not use a cocktail napkin — or a scrap of paper, or a flipchart or whiteboard — and sketch it out!
Even if you don’t think you can draw, it’s not about artistic ability . . . it’s about getting ideas out of your head and down on paper so they can be shared succinctly with someone else.
Once, a new coaching client of mine, a regional vice president at an international pharmaceuticals company, was wrestling with a costly, complex, and incredibly challenging business dilemma that had been distracting him and keeping him up at night for months.
On my first meeting with him, I solved his problem in less than five minutes –- simply by means of a napkin sketch.
It’s not that I’m so brilliant — in fact, I really didn’t fully understand all the complexities of his situation (that actually might have worked to my advantage) — and I can barely draw. But my napkin sketching ability saved the day. Read More →
Kidneys and Eyes, the moving blog run by a mom and marketing executive who happens to be named Julia Roberts, was started to help keep friends and family up to date on her two kids, who were three and five years old at the time. This wasn’t just a place to post the occasional snapshot: both her children had been diagnosed with a rare form of polycystic kidney disease, a genetic condition for which there is currently no cure or treatment. Read More →
I was at the Business Insider Silicon Alley 100 event last night when news of Steve Jobs’s death hushed the room. People began to whip out their Macs and iPhones and stared at the news in disbelief while the glow of the very devices that Steve Jobs created washed over them. After the initial shock, the conversation quickly turned to the impact he made on the world and on individual lives.
Right now, with all the economic despair in the air, the European debt crisis gyrating daily, and Wall Street being occupied by the unemployed, it’s natural to feel paralyzed and out of control. And it’s easy to look at the loss of a leader like Steve Jobs and think that this really is the end of days for innovation in America. What’s next? Read More →
Next Monday, October 3, Noah Scalin will teach a Hired Guns Academy class on ways to stay creatively productive.
Are you a perfectionist like me? If you aren’t, I can almost guarantee your company or boss would like you to be one. This is a shame, because perfectionism is probably the biggest roadblock to innovation that you will ever encounter. In fact, letting go of perfectionism, or as I like to call it, preciousness, is the key to unlocking your creative potential.
Over the years we’ve been taught that it’s unacceptable to try out new things that could potentially fail because they will:
A. Waste Time
B. Waste Money
C. Get You Fired
D. All of The Above
So we’ve gotten into the habit of working safely within our comfort zones in order to avoid creating anything that’s less than perfect. This is fine for just getting by, but terrible for moving forward. Read More →
Product Management, User Experience, Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Usability Testing
Project Management, Program Management, Production, Content Production
Animation, Art Direction, Creative Direction, Corporate Identity, Flash Design/Dev, Graphic Design, Web Design
Content Strategy, Editorial, Copywriting, Copy Editing, Research, Blog Outreach
Brand Management, Business Development, Sales, Product Marketing, Event/Conference Planning, Promotions, Marcomms, Corporate Comms, Direct Marketing, E-Marketing, Public Relations, Market Research
Account Management, Account/Brand Planning, Media Strategy, Communications Planning, Media Planning/Buying, Social Media, Search (SEM, SEO), Web Metrics & Analytics
Web Development, Front End Development
[no subcategories]
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