On most corporate email systems, not to mention social networks, there's usually the opportunity to upload a photo of yourself. The photos that people put into these things tend to fall into one of four categories: nothing; a face shot; a picture other than just a portrait; and a photo of something else - varying … Continue reading Why you should always upload your photo…
Category: Marketing
LinkedIn, or Facebook for boring people, is celebrating it's 200 millionth subscriber by informing people who sit in the top 1% of viewed profiles and top 5% of viewed profiles of that exciting news. I fall in the 1%. Which tells me a few things... Firstly, that "top 1%" sounds an awful lot better than … Continue reading One in 2 million: my part in the LinkedIn story
There is a good article that I picked up on over the weekend from November on Forbes looking at the intersection of responsive web design and mobile device apps. The responsive design movement is one which is founded on, in my view, a quite technical foundation: websites should be built in such a way that … Continue reading Contextual design
After a software update this morning, I was presented with the "browser choice" window after I logged into my PC. It struck me that there was very little variation in the way in which the words to describe the options available were chosen by the marketing folk responsible for these tiny adverts. Put simply, there … Continue reading Browser adjectives
One of my best friends had declared a state of UDI: unilateral digital independence. I'm not sure how I feel about it. She had ditched her smartphone and so now only accesses social services sporadically and through a PC. She lives in the countryside so mobile signals don't permeate the walks of her house so … Continue reading Declaring UDI
Just read an interesting article from Digital Strategist Tom Liacas describing some of the pitfalls that brands find themselves in when they try to use social media as a marketing channel. He describes three de-humanized examples: the psychopath (using times of mass suffering and hardship as a sales opportunity); the robot (endlessly spouting one liners … Continue reading Brands using humans (not humanizing brands)
An interesting observation from one of my colleagues this morning - when people interact with a brand on Twitter, it's usually to complain. If I think about my own interactions with brands through social media, then it's probably as follows: - I have conversations with individuals who happen to work at brands - I shout … Continue reading I don’t want a conversation – I just want to vent
2012 was a year topped and tailed by analyst statements that point for me to some interesting changes in the way in which technology is consumed, managed and commissioned by big organisations: in January, Gartner reported that "by 2017 the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO" (something that has been often repeated, yet … Continue reading Digital Agencies: the new Systems Integrators?
The chances that I'm going to read all of these over the next 11 days are slim to zero, but here's what's on my Kindle bookshelf for the holiday period: Switch: Chip & Dan Heath; some thinking about how to engage people to get them to change The Self Illusion: Bruce Hood; or why there … Continue reading Christmas reading
So as to redress the balance, alongside the stats and facts approach, I thought it worth a little time for some slightly more subjective opinions to tell my story of 2012. It's undoubtedly been a year of change. On January 1st I had a team of over a dozen people, a focus on marketing to … Continue reading 2012 – the subjective view
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