At first, this seems an absurd question. Of course, the individual owns it. But, is this accurate? And what do we mean by “own”? What what is owned? What if you work at a company? What if that company supports your LinkedIn activity? What if that company pays you to make contacts? To be sure, there are many questions of ownership. In this discussion, I’d like to focus on one, specific question: who owns the expressions about your current employer?

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Website overhauls often cause a rousing and lively discussion leading to long meetings, lists of lists to be collected, strategic decision-maker input, and sometimes even talking to the end users about the site. And it seems inevitable that all of these goals and ideas need to be wrapped in a cleaner and newer interface design with a dash of the latest marketing trends. And it has to be better than your competitors (or other departments). Then the technology questions hit.
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We spend a lot of our time working very hard to get sales and marketing teams to work together. And this involves questions like the following. What is an effective way in which marketing teams can refer leads to sales teams? What do sales teams do with the leads handed to them from marketing? What happens if the leads are not fully qualified, or if, after qualification, it is deemed that the client is not ready for a company’s services but soon will be?
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Strategy and tactics are two of the most common terms in the marketing world. Yet, perhaps because they are so common, it’s hard to know what they really mean. The trouble with this is two major challenges. If we don’t know what these things really are, then how can we evaluate them? That is, without an understanding of these tools, how can we recognize, manage, or buy good strategy and good tactics?

In addition, without a full understanding of these two things, it’s hard to connect them. As we all know, strategies are all too often shelved or ineffective. And tactics are all too often directionless. That is, strategies are often empty and tactics are often blind.

In the end, not fully understanding what these things are and aren’t can easily result in wasted time and money as well as in frustration and indecision.

In this presentation, I will offer definitions of strategy and tactics. Based on this, I will discuss the features of good strategy and good tactics. And I will add to this a crucial missing element, often overlooked: measurement.

At first, it seems that delivery and sales are unrelated and that salespersons have nothing in common with account managers. This is not just a question of personalities. The roles themselves are often seen as completely distinct. Indeed many account managers loath selling, and many salespersons are uninterested in delivery. But is this distinction accurate? And even if it’s accurate about the current state of affairs, should we tolerate this distinction?
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Often those in the industry (graphic designers even!) think a designer’s job is to do that and only that—design. That is, the job is supposed to be to create a design that visually communicates the brand strategy and receive the “thumbs up” from the client. Check. Check out . . . well, not quite.
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OK, it seems that about once a year the ‘next great social media tool’ emerges. This year, it seems to be Twitter. Last year, it was Facebook. A couple of years ago, LinkedIn was all the rage. That leads me to a couple of burning questions:

1. At what point is it acceptable to abandon or ignore a social media tool?
2. When does it make sense to include a new social media tool as part of your social marketing strategy? Read the rest of this entry »

WordPress, especially 2.7, can do a lot for small sites and blogs once you’ve got the basic install up and running.  And let’s face it, with so many hosts providing one-click installs of WP and Plugins available via direct downloadable updates now, administration is much easier.

Further, the revamped user interface is a huge boon to finding what an author needs quickly.  And on the design side, being able to easily select templates to apply to a page now is a wonderful improvement and helps separate the setup and design part of the site from authors’ needs.

However, it’s not a quick solution for any content management system (CMS) problem.  There are many sites which just won’t quite work on WordPress.  For example, recently a client was discussing whether WordPress could handle their many thousands of pages as they migrated from static hand-linked html. (It was good that they wanted to move to some modern CMS.)  However, the site isn’t really designed to center around blog entries, and their static page count is huge. Both of these factors work again WordPress, despite it’s recent advances.

All we had to show them was how long the single page selection menu would be in the administration to give a good example of some of the shortcomings still inherent in WordPress as a full-fledged CMS.  Even with plugins such as Page-mash, there’s only so much effort that’s been put into general site control that you would normally expect in a modern CMS.  So while we’re certainly very happy with the changes that have come out in WordPress, it’s still not everything for everyone.

Typography on the Web has come a long way in the last couple decades. In the past, Web typography was rarely well designed due to technical limitations. Although constraints do still exist, doing a little extra to create clear, readable typography on the Web is both possible and smart.

Quality Web typography improves communication. It also enhances flow and interactivity. Your written content is usually the most valuable element on your Web site. Thus, prioritizing your Web site typography is actually highlighting your most profitable resource. Below are three basic, but important rules to abide by when considering typography on the Web.

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