When I was younger, I worried about the implications of having a Bachelors of Fine Arts degree opposed to a Bachelor of Science might have on my career. Would I be pigeoned-holed into being a designer all my life? Were countless beatings at the hands of mindless AE’s to become par for the course? As strange as those worries seem now they were grounded in the reality of my situation. Partly a combination of time and location, my vision was impeded by colleagues, friends and bosses.
I have been in New York for nearly four years now and have grown beyond even my own ideas. Mostly thanks to my BFA because without it I would have not been able to continuously assess, adapt and adopt to every situation thrown at me.
Assess - In art school, we learned to begin all our projects by using your artistic sensibility to assess the overall picture and begin to visualize different solutions. By taking a creative top-level strategic look at our problems we began to form a different type of thought. In sharp contrast to regular schools where you learn to only focus on one solution to most problems we learned solutions are not limited only by the mind’s capacity to develop them.
Assessing current events and thinking outside the box to offer up an easy solution.(circa 2000)
Adapt - Being made to constantly switch applications and learn to adapt to changing technologies at a sometimes dizzying pace readied me for this new changing economy. HTML to drawing and reading we constantly were honing skills that would help later on in adapting to different situations
This started as a sketch of the Lighthouse and evolved into a full scale rebranding.(circa 1998)
Adopt - Sometimes in the name of good design and others not so good design, we were always experimenting with new technologies and adopting it as part of our visual solutions. Being early adopters way back then made it all the easier to learn about influence and changing models of influence on the internet.
Some of my first email blast using HTML emails. (circa 2000)
Almost six years out of school and working now, I can finally say that I made the right choice pursuing my degree in Visual Communications. In the current economy, value is placed on creativity, problem-solving and being able to set oneself apart from a crowded field of normal thinkers.
A quick Blogpulse chart showing buzz on my hometown sports teams yields some interesting results. The Miami Dolphins seems to be the talk of the town even as we see the NFL season coming to a close. It reminds me of my Dad who always laments that “baseball will never get a decent base following because all Miami can talk about is the Dolphins.”
The two spikes you see for the Dolphins are of course in correlation to the New England Patriots quest for a perfect season. (Note: 1972 Dolphins are the only perfect season in the NFL) The Miami Heat spike comes from the trade of Shaquille O’Neal to the Phoenix Suns for Shawn Marion.
Woefully, the Marlins hardly register in buzz talk. With the stadium deal close to being signed and all the offseason trades there is hardly a peep from the blogosphere. I guess it goes to show “father knows best.”
Interesting data from an Emarketer email on Friday, states that 9 out of 10 online buyers read reviews before making an online purchase decision. The data was compiled by Power Reviews and the e-tailing group who surveyed over one thousand buyers. The survey members also said that they read between 4-7 reviews while deciding what to purchase.
What does this mean to web managers, marketers and businesses alike?
That consumer are becoming more powerful every year. They are increasingly looking to the internet for answers and other digital citizens reviews are the currency they value. Opinions are everywhere on the internet; blogs, boards and search results are being seen by average consumers who trust this content. And as this content level rises, reputation will become the driving differentiator to whether consumers buy product a or product b.
By starting a dialogue between you and your customers the lines of transparency are opened up. You will reap the benefits of an empowered consumer. That value is two-sided and you will learn as much from the comments as the people making a purchase decision who stumble upon them. Additionally, the CRM benefits are tremendous as you continuously refine your service or product these comments.
If you are building, redesigning or planning a new e-commerce site user reviews and community will become important aspects to any plan and these numbers only reinforce the growing importance.
Everyone has a different tipping point, when they reach critical mass over information. Old ideas have to make room for new thoughts. Neural passages are running at full capacity. Yes, life in 2008 is a virtual playground for information. If you want to find something it is usually only a few clicks of the mouse away.
With all this information exchange happening in the mind, it is essential to keep your brain at peak performance. It is for this reason, I am proposing a CMS (content management system) that seamlessly blends the old-world Stephen with new-world.
I am thinking a vertically-integrated enterprise solution that is a bio-engineered framework that resides within my core. With this in mind, I thought of 5 great reasons I need a Personal CMS for a more productive life.
Here they are.
1- Intake Quantity - Amount of information is becoming exponential getting it to my neural passages which are overworked like the a Tokyo highway in rush hour is becoming increasingly difficult.
2- Versatile Cataloging - Adding new thoughts and removing old ones has become a game of chance in adulthood. Who knows what is left in there clogging up good nodes. A CMS would allow me to catalog these and remove unnecessary files before they collect dust and go rogue.
3- Image Recalculation – Fashion is fickle. If I can quickly evaluate and recalculate my image then I can continuiously be in style. On a semantic level, perhaps my CMS will suggest stuff for me.
4- Accountability- Tracking what I said and when could help in a million ways. Adding some accountability to my brain for what it decides, says and becomes could really change the outcome of my life.
5- Standardization – Easy-to-thought process. No more lost keys, enough said.
Anyone else have any ideas about how a personal CMS might help them?
I have for awhile now been hearing various comments about the Twitter craze. Friends say its great and others say “pointless.” Love it or hate it, Twitter is here to stay. I have been using it for about 8 months now to varying degrees of success. Recently it has become much more than a microblog informing me of news and events in real-time.
A colleague unfamiliar with Twitter asked me what I thought about the platform as a vehicle for brand insight. The question was mind-blowing. The amount of valuable content available for spidering is beyond explanation. I directed him to run a search for any brand’s name and discover himself.
Distribution of content and reputation are important factors of Web 2.0 communities. Twitter incorporates both of these factors brilliantly. It can deliver you information to multiple touchpoints including mobile phones. Furthermore you can choose to follow people or have their information delivered to your stream.
The picture above shows Jeremiah Owyang’s highly creative and innovative way use of Twitter to rate Super Bowl ads. The ability to rate these ads in real-time with a mobile phone (RE: versatility) leaving short blurbs (RE: qualitative) is fascinating. If Twitter were to set this up so they could quickly compile data like this and make it available to brands the opportunities are endless.
One thing is for sure Twitter is definitely helping to redefine marketing tools.
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