Last night at a meeting in Lexington, I had a glass of ice water for first time in two weeks.
We don’t have drinking water available in our home or at the office here in Columbia. We still do have a house with all of our belongings and memories, though. We also have bottled water.
I can’t express how much I now prefer a glass of iced water to a bottle of water.
I started using Twitter in mid 2006, so I’m a little biased… but I still have many expectations and hopes for the platform that I don’t for Facebook, Instagram etc.
Twitter stands(or, it could if it were to become developer friendly again) at the fulcrum point between traditional social networks and the future of online social interaction (messaging platforms) with its following, rather than friending, structure and the ability to send direct messages baked into the architecture.
Now it’s Dorsey’s responsibility to perform a Steve Jobs-esque “second act” in which he returns to the company and rights the ship and steer it away from being perceived or imagined as an “enticing takeover target” …
“The microblogging site’s co-founder and chairman, Jack Dorsey, will replace him temporarily. Although the number of monthly active users topped 300m in the first quarter, growth has been slowing; revenue of $436m, though up 74% year-on-year, was less than expected. Twitter, a relative minnow in today’s tech sea, as the above interactive shows, looks an enticing takeover target.”
Source: Leaving the nest | The Economist
I have this conversation with website build or revamp clients almost daily… It might sound odd for someone who runs a web marketing company to say that website design really doesn’t matter as much as you think it does. But it’s true. Focus on the other aspects of your business and stop worrying whether your site has too much white space.
The expectations of people visiting your site and our collective notions of web design have changed to the extent that “pretty” isn’t necessarily “better” due to the speed of your page and the experience (content) your site offers (particularly on mobile).
Sergio Nouvel has a good write up about this with more salient points:
“This switch from web design to experience design is directly caused by the shift from web pages to digital products, tools, and ecosystems. Web pages are just part of something much bigger: mobile apps, API’s, social media presence, search engine optimization, customer service channels, and physical locations all inform the experience a user has with a brand, product, or service. Pretending that you can run a business or deliver value just by taking care of the web channel is naïve at best and harmful at worst.”
Source: Why Web Design is Dead | UX Magazine
The post Thinking Out Loud 85: Alternate Universes vs. Altered Universes appeared first on Thinking.FM.
https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/emilie_wapnick_why_some_of_us_don_t_have_one_true_calling.html
On a personal note, I had my Ordination Council meeting yesterday. It was an intensely personal time, but it was something that I’ve been working towards for a long time.
I can’t go into specifics, but one of the themes I addressed is “why” I’d want to go through this if I weren’t necessarily going to participate in something like parish ministry (or “being a preacher” as we call it here in South Carolina).
That has to do with my long time intention of finally launching Hunger Initiative.
Between the terrible disaster that has affected South Carolina and my hometown of Columbia over the past week, and my ordination process (being formally ordained this Sunday) … it feels like “things have changed” (to channel Bob Dylan).
That doesn’t mean like I’m putting Harrelson Agency aside (certainly not), but it does mean that it’s time to get Hunger Initiative off the ground. I first started talking about this during my days in Connecticut back in December 2001. It’s time and I’ve been putting this off for too long.
You can follow along at Hunger Iniative‘s site or @endhunger on Twitter … snagged that one early 🙂
These are great numbers at the macro level, but this is troubling:
“Corporate profits are at record levels; stock prices have more than doubled.”
vs
“The same Census report showed that the number of people living in poverty went up in 2014 to nearly 46.7 million — which is 6.8 million more than in 2008. The official poverty rate — meaning the percentage of the population living below the official poverty line — was 14.8 percent last year, which is 1.6 percentage points higher than in 2008.”
Source: Obama’s Numbers (October 2015 Update) | FactCheck.org
Elisabeth and Merianna talk about building audience and expanding your market as a solopreneur. They talk about the stresses and joys of owning your business. They also talk about the progress in their own writing projects.
The post Thinking Out Loud 84: Solopreneurs appeared first on Thinking.FM.
“We estimated that on an average American cell data plan, each megabyte downloaded over a cell network costs about a penny. Visiting the home page of Boston.com every day for a month would cost the equivalent of about $9.50 in data usage just for the ads.”
Source: The Cost of Mobile Ads on 50 News Websites – The New York Times
I’d venture to say that local TV and news sites have even more ads than boston.com and “cost” you more in data downloads each month. There’s a reason local news stations are eager to promote their content on Facebook and why most engagement and comments happen there rather than on their own sites.
If your business, group, or church site is loaded with plugins, images, and unnecessary animations (especially Flash), you’re already likely being penalized by Google in organic searches as your site is not as mobile friendly as it should be.
Keep that in mind when you open your own site on your mobile device.
“A bubbly, no-holds-barred “trendy lady” with a marketing degree and two recruiting companies, Cordray sees no reason you wouldn’t want to “showcase your character” online. Co-founder Nicole McCullough comes at the app from a different angle: As a mother of two in an era when people don’t always know their neighbors, she wanted something to help her decide whom to trust with her kids.”
In theory, I love the idea of the “sharing economy.” In practice, it’s turned out to be a blessing and a curse for many reasons.
Peeple was bound to happen, but this is a terrible idea and will result in anxiety, frustration, and bullying (among other things) for many people. Sometimes “it just doesn’t feel right” is a good justification for not walking down a business path.
“Without a solid marketing plan, too much is left to chance. When you rely on “hope based marketing” you’re at very high risk of losing money, time, and traction, because nothing is strategic and everything is reactive.”
Shopify has a blog that’s always worthwhile read for small business owners (Shopify is a content management system that excels at allowing for the easy setup of a site for selling products). This pretty extensive walk through of some basic marketing plan tips is worth your read if you’re a business owner (or want to be one) and need some guidelines for marketing.
As always, get in touch if you need more help with your marketing plan or next steps!
“The U.S. Web Design Standards are the U.S. government’s very own set of common UI components and visual styles for websites. It’s a resource designed to make things easier for government designers and developers, while raising the bar on what the American people can expect from their digital experiences.”
Source: 18F — Introducing the U.S. Web Design Standards
Interesting move by our government, and definitely something that needed to be done. The four goals they worked towards are fairly close to the ones I lay out with clients when we’re working on a new site design or build as well:
- Make the best thing, the easiest thing. We believe that making tools that align with the values and needs of digital workers in the federal government will drive adoption.
- Be accessible out of the box. We created tools that seamlessly meet the standards of 508 accessibility, from colors to code.
- Design for flexibility. We aim to give the American people a sense of familiarity when using government services, while allowing agencies to customize these tools to fit their unique needs.
- Reuse, reuse, reuse. We reviewed, tested, evaluated, and repurposed existing patterns, code, and designs from dozens of government and private sector style guides to make use of tried-and-true best practices.
Add “Your tastes are not everyone’s tastes (i.e. the client is not always right)” and that’s pretty much my approach.
One of the things Thomas and I try to do with Thinking Religion, as well as Elisabeth and Merianna on Thinking Out Loud (and all of our Thinking.FM podcasts) is sound different by sounding like ourselves.
“My Wife Quit Her Job podcaster Steve Chou is, like Nick Loper, another savvy online marketer who realizes the algorithm might be his most important audience member. Subscribers are another key piece of landing in the iTunes New & Noteworthy section, and without it, a podcast might fall off the radar.”
Source: Why podcasts have such terrible ads – Vox
I never want to do a podcast where we have to beg for ratings or use the same 5 generic ads that every other podcast uses.
However, I’ll be the first to tell you that’s not a very lucrative way to do podcasting. It’s definitely a losing proposition when you consider time, hosting costs, bandwidth etc. But, I think we’ll stick to our donation model for now (despite its poor performance in terms of actual revenue). As the hosts of No Agenda frequently remind us, “Value for Value” is a much more authentic and enjoyable stream of revenue for a medium such as podcasting.
“Maddon doesn’t care what you think of his lineup. He doesn’t care what you think of where or when he plays his veterans and rookies. He doesn’t care that your uncle was buried having never witnessed a Cubs World Series championship.
It’s a trait we rarely see in Cubs managers.”
Source: Cure for Cubs? Joe Maddon doesn’t care
Stop caring what you think others will think and take your team to the post-season.
Elisabeth and Merianna talk about developing the place as you write a manuscript and the dilemma of floating characters. They also discuss the stalling or need to take a break that comes after pressing send and how to overcome that and continue to write!
The post Thinking Out Loud 83: Putting Characters In Their Place appeared first on Thinking.FM.
“Conversely some of the earliest adopters of LTE — like the U.S., Japan, Sweden and Germany — are starting to fall behind in terms of data performance. In part, these older networks are suffering from their own success. In the U.S., for instance, LTE’s introduction in 2010 resulted in a huge base of LTE subscribers in the country today. Those subscribers are all competing for the same network resources, slowing down average speeds. In comparison, newer networks in South America and Europe are more lightly loaded. But the U.S. has also failed to keep up with the rest world in both spectrum and technology. All of the four major U.S. operators have been expanding into more frequency bands, but none have been able to match the capacity countries like South Korea and Singapore have plowed into their networks. The U.S. has also been much slower in moving to LTE-Advanced.”
Source: The State of LTE September 2015 – OpenSignal
During my first few weeks at Wofford College in the Fall of 1996, I stumped the campus IT team by asking for the TCP / IP details or a way to get an internet connection in my dorm room. “Why do you want to have the internet in your dorm room?” one of the IT team asked me. Two years later, the whole campus had a high speed fiber connection.
We’re undergoing a transition from laptops to mobile devices as a primary mode of computing for many people, young and old. However, as Thomas Whitley and I talked about on Thinking Religion yesterday, the transition is happening quickly on university campuses.
I’ve talked to young people who said that mobile service was a factor in where they wanted or decided to go to college. It wasn’t a primary factor, but it did make into the equation. I hear the same from businesses and clients I work with today when deciding on where to have meetings (“We can’t meet in that part of town…the Verizon coverage is terrible.”).
I wonder when / if we’ll, as a country, insist on investing in more development of LTE and mobile in both urban and rural parts of our country as the mobile revolution continues? Or has our political mood changed so much in twenty years that the government stepping in and working with an industry to improve what is potentially seen as a necessary service an impossibility?
“We’re here to tell you we believe that in rural North Carolina and in rural America, Internet access ought to be just as likely as telephone access…You ought to be able to use it in the fastest possible way…And if you can, it’ll mean more jobs, more businesses, higher incomes and more opportunity.”
President Bill Clinton
Wednesday, April 26, 2000
“Feedly connects you to the information and knowledge you care about. We help you get more out of you work, education, hobbies and interests. The feedly platform lets you discover sources of quality content, follow and read everything those sources publish with ease and organize everything in one place.”
Source: Sam’s public feedly collections
I use Feedly as my RSS reader and go through a good many blog and website stories everyday on topics ranging from art to religion to marketing to tech to science.
Over the years, I’ve had people ask for a way to see what blogs and sites I’m reading… Feedly has made it possible now to share those (along with the standard but nerdier OPML files that did the trick 10 years ago).
So, here’s my public “collection” or groups of sites that I read throughout the day on the topics of Arts & Science, Marketing, and Religion / History / Archaeology.
We too easily understand the differences between “conservative” and “progressive” but our churches have taught us very little about what being “pastoral” actually means…
“Americans are often tempted to read Francis as a “progressive” pope who has tossed out the conservative playbook of Church leaders past. After all, he’s thrown down scathing critiques of global capitalism, pushed for radical reform on climate change, and shifted the Church’s tone on issues like homosexuality, divorce, and abortion. So as pundits map his views, many conclude that he’s pushing the church into uncharted territory. But as a 15th-century Vatican cartographer might have put it: hic sunt dracones.”
Essential reading as Pope Francis lands in the United States today to begin his tour of the country.
“If you are arguing against climate change, vaccines, evolution, etc. you do not get to invoke Galileo because in any accurate analogy, you are the religious fanatics (or the astronomers who blindly clung to Aristotle).”
If only I had a dime for every time I’ve encountered the “Yeah? Well, everyone thought Columbus was nuts too!” or “Yeah? Well, Galileo was right despite what all the scientists of his day said!” in a conversation.
“Another benefit of the SEP’s not being crowdsourced is that minority views get more exposure. Wikipedia’s overview of feminist philosophy is hopelessly short. The SEP has dozens of meticulously researched entries. A 2012 survey by Wikimedia, Wikipedia’s parent organization, found that about 90% of its volunteers were men. “Its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy,” said the MIT Technology Review in its article The Decline of Wikipedia, which criticizes its byzantine editing hierarchy. The same goes for an important idea in philosophy: feminism.”
Source: This free online encyclopedia has achieved what Wikipedia can only dream of – Quartz
Not just a better Wikipedia, but a better model for the internet? Perhaps in some ways, but decentralized federation has its own beauty as well.
‘”We believe the new bars will inspire people to not only quickly identify their own symptoms and satisfy their hunger, but give them a new, fun way to call-out friends and family on who they become when they’re hungry, too,” says Snickers brand director Allison Miazga-Bedrick.”
Source: Snickers Swaps Out Its Brand Name for Hunger Symptoms on Painfully Honest Packaging | Adweek
“Brand apathy” is a very real and serious issue for both large and small businesses, nonprofits, and churches looking to make a connection with varieties of demographics, community, consumers, and people.
It has been interesting to see Coca-Cola roll out their “Share a Coke with…” campaign and the various amounts of reception it has generated. I’d love to see those internal metrics on which names, which zip codes, and which demographics perform the best.
Motorola, Nutella, M&M’s, and Kleenex are among the larger companies that have jumped on the idea of using personalized packaging to increase brand engagement. Smaller companies, such as those in the wedding and service industry, have long used personalization as a marekting tool.
However, beyond using a first name and last name scheme on an email newsletter or a “personalized” letter in an offline mailing, many small businesses have yet to use the tools available to do more personalization despite the potential benefits.
I’m always surprised by clients or potential clients who are so strongly insistent on their brand identity (whether it be a logo or a particular style of packaging) that they are simply unwilling to even consider a form of personalization despite the metrics and data.
“Consumers” in 2015 and beyond are accustomed to the idea of personalization, partly because of large brands such as Coca-Cola, but mainly because of the web. If you’ve spent any time at all browsing, surfing, or buying online (and who hasn’t), you’ve certainly noticed personalized ads that follow you from Amazon to Facebook to Google to Huffington Post and back again. While we’re currently debating ad blocking and tracking in the nerdy sectors of the internet, there’s no doubt that the web has become full of trackers because they work. Granted, adtech hasn’t been the best steward of these tools, but there’s real benefit to using them ethically.
So why aren’t small businesses, churches, or nonprofits making more use of personalization online and offline?
I’d say it mostly has to do with the psychology of their leaders and an unwillingness to do better marketing through exploration.
“Talk, don’t listen … decide, don’t engage” sums up that mindset. That’s a mindset that will lead to organizational death. The Cluetrain Manifesto is old in web years, but still very applicable.
“Generational study being more art than science, there is considerable dispute about the definition of Generation Z. Demographers place its beginning anywhere from the early ’90s to the mid-2000s. Marketers and trend forecasters, however, who tend to slice generations into bite-size units, often characterize this group as a roughly 15-year bloc starting around 1996, making them 5 to 19 years old now. (By that definition, millennials were born between about 1980 and 1995, and are roughly 20 to 35 now.)”
Source: Move Over, Millennials, Here Comes Generation Z – The New York Times
If you’re wondering why the NFL is signing deals with Snapchat or why messaging apps are the new webs (and why we marketers are still trying to get our head around all of those issues), look no further than the identification of Gen Z.
They will change the web and how we use it (and how we market through it) in ways that make my Gen X / Y / Millennial (1978 here… born on the cusp) head explode.
“There are too many Padawans right now and not enough teachers. The Galaxy is flooded with people who think they can do what founders do in their lives: sacrifice everything.”
Source: You don’t have what it takes | Calacanis.com
Good points from Jason on the startup myth with a nod to the Jedi myth. I know I’ve been there and felt the sting before succeeding.
“There’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all.“
I don’t even know what to say… just saw this on Twitter:
Does this advertisement from the May 10, 1764 issue of Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette make you want to pick up some Benjamin Jackson Mustard and Chocolate?
Source: 18th Century Advertising, When Brevity Wasn’t Key | Rag Linen | Online Museum of Historic Newspapers
We complain about ads on the web (or Facebook) today, but the convention is nothing new. Our ability to contextualize ads, and ignore them, are interesting developments in our own own structural literacies.
What is new is the ability of advertisers to “track” our digital selves on and off the web and our ability to actually block ads on the web with ad blockers.
How will the web “disrupt” humanity’s second oldest profession?
BTW, this ad totally makes me want to go to Philadelphia and buy some of this mustard.
Though our digital technologies have made life super-convenient for us – just tap and it’s yours, whatever it is – maybe it’s time for us to recapture some of the territory we’ve ceded. Time to pull the blinds, exclude the snoops, recapture the notion of privacy. Go offline.
Any volunteers? Right. I thought not. It won’t be easy.
Source: Margaret Atwood: we are double-plus unfree | Books | The Guardian
Part of my daily tension as someone who loves my whirring gadgets and gizmos and on demand lifestyle-thru-technology.
