Stemato.com - Stephen Tompkins’ Blog

Ok….I admit the title is a little misleading. Maybe it should have read “almost everything I learned in design school was wrong” but it does not have nearly the staying power. Anyway, I went on a Bruce Nussbaum reading frenzy yesterday and found out that design education in America really could improve.

First the good stuff about my design education. As I have stated before here, I am so proud to have received a BFA and how it helped me to be innovative to adjust my career path. I do not think a typical business education would have done the same for me but that is just me. I needed a different type of education to learn to adapt and to process different orientations.  Plus it was really cool to make pretty pictures and exercise my right brain muscle to the fullest.

Now the bad stuff that I believe needs improvement. As Nussbaum correctly points out, design is everywhere not just the touch points they teach you in school. Contrary to what I was taught, design is a journey not an finishline. We spent an entire semester learning how to make Rubylths, amberliths and ink drawings. A complete waste of time! Think about how much more effective it would have been for us to learn design as an experience instead of a process to an end.

All the blame cannot be thrown on SCAD as they did the best they could in the time alloted. I do think that they could have made the education a little more adaptable to current trends though. For example, I graduated in 2001 and attended most of my classes during the middle of the web boom and they still emphasized print design as a primary focus.

What if we did not spend time on a specific aspect of design and learned about how people experience design around them before stepping into techniques. Then gradually built up those techniques based on design as a journey from which people experience their lives. Almost a reverse concept of what was taught to us in school but definitely something that would have shaped a new type of designer.

A couple weeks ago, I read Bruce Nussbaum’s blog on the growing gap in China between Chinese designers and Western designers. I found it to be a really fascinating look into China’s economy for a number of reasons. For years, they have primarly relied on cutting cost and driving efficiencies to become the Global Supply Headquarters. Now that many other countries have begun to catch up to the Chinese, they are transforming themselves to meet the future needs of the world.

This transformation according to Nussbaum’s article is in the form of becoming more innovative and creative.  Apparently the Chinese government is throwing millions of Yuan into the design education departments at many of the universities in China. This is a great first step but I think to truly begin to transform the mindset of the people is to foster creativity from the start. You cannot just start in college.

Innovation and creativity is something that is nurtured over a lifetime and can take years to fully blossom. You cannot simply think that pouring money into design schools will solve a cultural problem. Chairman Mao squashed many of the innovative thoughts of his people during the Cultural Revolution.

I visited China last year and was instantly in love with the place. It’s a vast and amazing culture that spans thousands of years and has morphed from innovators to efficiency experts and more. But in order to meet the new innovation needs in this complex global economy, it’s going to take a major shift from the current thought process. Design education is a great step but its going to take a massive cultural transfomation in everything from education to social systems to clothing design to meet this challenge head-on.

One thing is sure to me though. If anyone can meet this challenge because of their diverse history and succeed, it’s the Chinese!

Today I ran across the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan from my apartment and along the way I had some time to reflect on a few things. First off, it was five years ago today that I moved to New York from Florida. I remember being so full of anxiety and anticipation. What would happen? Would I find a job? Would I like it? (Considering I had only visited here once before moving here)

Well, I can say with some confidence that I have made the most of my time here and still seem to be in love with New York. Its funny all the change I have seen in my short time I have lived here. I worked my way to Microsoft (my current work), visited quite a few countries (China is still the best), attended a few weddings (Congrats to you all) and watched my Little Brother graduate from College and move onto Medical School (Congrats Dom). All these things were truly great but not all things have been this good. Here are a few of the bad. My grandma got sick (the worst thing ever - I hate seeing people get old), I still feel homesick every so often, I gained some weight (not much but jeez its hard to get back to high school weight when you are 34) and I am still single.

Anyway,  I am digressing from my thought. I wanted to take this time to say thanks to everyone I have met in the five years since I moved to New York. Its been truly great learning from everyone and I look forward to five more years of learning. I read a Dale Carnegie tip a few months ago and I have tried to eternalize it. It says “Perhaps you will forget tomorrow the kind words you say today, but the recipient may cherish them over a lifetime.” So in the spirit of that quote I am going to leave this post open. I will from time to time post personal thank you messages to people I meet and have met as kind of a memorial to my thankfulness.

Check back often and if you want to say thanks to someone please feel free to leave it as a comment.

Stephen

My list of thanks.

#1 - Mom and Dominic - thanks for all the support since I was a kid. Its truly the cornerstone of all that I am and will be.

Dynamic logic recently released a study that says graphic ads integrated into the content of a campaign drive better brand awareness than so-called framing ads that are on the edge of pages. Interestingly, these ads to seem to stick in my mind more but not because they are driving brand awareness but because they are interrupting my experience. An interruption that ultimately undermine’s my confidence in the brand.

It sometimes feels as if we just took everything that did not work in television advertising and applied it to the web. Saying that it was ultimately better because we could slap fancy analytics on the backend and show ROI. The web is not TV. It has infinitely more opportunities for engaging users and requires a different mindset.  One recent advertisement that I particularly like is the one my company Microsoft did with Federated media called Exec Tweets. Basically,  they aggregated biz exec tweets into a Microsoft branded background. Useful, not interrupting and excellently done upholding the brand’s integrity.

I wonder why more companies are not exploring these type of branded experiences with their media. Perhaps its fear of challenging the status quo or maybe its just ignorance to these models. When will we learn by raising your hand the highest you are not always getting the teacher’s attention in a good way?

A few years ago, I started working at Nielsen Buzzmetrics which eventually became Nielsen Online. I remember the first days there being so full of enthusiasm and pride in working for such a cool innovative company. One of the coolest things, I remember about Buzz back then was BlogPulse the free blog indexing tool that was built a few years prior.

It has so many cool innovative tools to help in trending everything from popular blogs to topics of conversation amongst those blogs. I would look at BlogPulse and immediately know the days news and how folks felt about that news. In a sense, it was and still is a quick glance at the collective ideas of the online world. Its really quite fascinating and I was proud to be a part of the team.

As things go, I moved on from Nielsen to Microsoft and BlogPulse faded into the back of my mind only to be visited rarely. So you can imagine my excitement when I read via Twitter that BlogPulse had relaunched. My mind immediately wondered what cool new tools would be in store for BlogPulse in this incarnation. Would it remain the innovative tool that it was? Would I start visiting more frequently to use these tools in new and wonderful ways?

More than 3 years in the making BlogPulse has a new skin and its much cleaner design than the old one. I appreciate the efforts that were put into making it much easier to find and sort through the mountains of information that are digested daily through BlogPulse. The design is really nice. One thing about the design that I found peculiar was the lack of obvious linking back to Nielsen the parent company of the tool other than a small link in the footer of the page. I see the big logo in the upper right but its not clickable as a link. If this was to avoid obvious marketing by Nielsen than I definitely applaud it.

The other area that I found particularly strange was that other than calling out a few trends in  a new upper left hand box the site offers no particular innovations. Essentially its a new skin on an old site that took a number of years to complete. I would have really enjoyed seeing Nielsen bring some new tools to the site or a blog that explained the changes and brought a personal spin to it. In a world, of AJAX and Javascript that would have enhanced trending tools Nielsen really could have pushed this to the next level. Instead its really the same BlogPulse with new clothes.

In any event, cheers to Nielsen for modernizing the design and helping me to remember BlogPulse and its cool tools. Hopefully in the next incarnation we will see some more innovations but for now it looks like we will have to be satisfied with a new look.

If you are a regular reader to this blog (thanks Mom) you may have noticed the new tab in the menu bar. Its titled “Portfolio”  and contains  a selected assortment of some of my design work. Most of it was completed over 5 years ago when I worked in advertising as an art director.

It probably should have been put up quite a long time ago but as the title to this entry says “better late than never.” In any event, I will be working on the tab from time to time adding stuff and changing the format a  bit so check it out when you are here and get your dose of Stemato’s creativity!

Raise your hand if you have been hugged or kissed on Facebook against your will by some intruding application that seeks to mine and destroy all your personal information. Ok, you can all put your hands down or if you did not put it up then you should pay very close attention to what I am about to write. Those virtual hugs, kisses and fairy dust that are hurled around Facebook are not as innocent and cute as they seem. That is right. They are pirates looking to steal you and your friends’ information for free. So stop buying into it!

First, I should admit that I have fallen prey to a few of these dumb applications over the years. But as of Monday, I will not ever fall for them again. In fact, if I see you doing one in my newsfeed I will block it and you from being in my feed. I know it sounds like harsh treatment but it’s time to use Social Media sites for what they were intended to be used for. Not throwing fairy dust or finding out that because I answered 5 questions I exhibit traits of Chester Arthur. I mean seriously, the insanity has to stop!

Why am I taking such drastic methods?

Because what most people don’t realize is when you load those quizzes and such you are giving the creator of these applications the ability to access your personal data to use for their own purposes. This is sometimes done legally (to post in your newsfeed) and other times illegally (to steal the password for your AIM account). And, the simple fact is that Facebook does not have enough of security monitoring to know what these applications are doing with your info. Nor do they probably care because you authorized it (Read the fine print next time you decide to see what 80’s movie character you are.).

So, the next time you decide to kiss or hug me via Facebook give me a call and we can set it up in person because I am sick of the illegal notifications, and I am sure you do not want your data stolen!

Marketers are always talking about listening to the consumer because its the best source of information. I could not agree more and over the last year and change I have done just that. I left my job at Nielsen in marketing to get closer to the client and to learn as much as I could about them from daily interactions.

First, I want to say its been very humbling to sit on this side of the fence and to absorb all the positive and negatives of client service.

After just over a year, I think I am ready to impart some of my findings on you. My number one learning this year is:

Clients want information.

Good Information and Bad information it does not matter. They just want whatever you have and they want it as concise and detailed as you can give it to them. They do not have time to fumble through lots of rhetoric and information to find the solution. That is what we are there for.

Patience is a virtue

It is an old lesson but definitely one that is important when dealing with clients. Be patient - they don’t have as many insights as you. That is why they called/emailed you. You are the expert and being patient benefits both of you.

Listen, listen and listen more…

This is perhaps the most important. Listen to what clients say and then listen to what they don’t say. Because they don’t always use the same terms that we do. So its important that you listen carefully and address each concern they have separately. This way you are giving information and also showing that you are truly concerned with getting them a satisfactory outcome.

All in all, its been a huge learning curve this year and a great experience that I look forward to another year of learning! What client service lessons have you learned?

A colleague of mine shared this link with me and I thought I would share it with you guys. I know I have not posted on Bing yet but I promise to soon.

http://www.google-vs-bing.com/

Measuring ROI for online campaigns is time consuming work full of numbers and spreadsheets that seemingly go on forever. The media planners days are filled with data crunching and searching for the metrics they need from various sources. Everything from time spent to search queries crowd the typical day and marrying this data together has become a great challenge. It seems everyone has a custom solution.

And as online marketing tools progress, products that deliver excellent data visualization tools will hold a significant competitive advantage moving forward. Why? Well, the ability for a planner to quickly gather the data they need to make decisions is crucial to success and a great dashboard is the lynch pin of this process.

With this in mind I started thinking about Search Marketing interfaces. The differences between many of them are minor but the experience differences are major. The ability to consume keyword group data and which keywords are performing is integral an integral function for search marketers.  But many interfaces create a complicated gossamer of reports and internet pages to give you the information you need. It can feel like Indiana Jones searching for the Ark of the Covenant to find what you need.

Many of these interfaces gives you great amounts of aggregate data but fall short in providing a great quick glance at the keyword and keyword group level. I am aware of all the dashboards that these programs have but I still need more. Its this keyword data that have been thinking about lately. What if you could quickly see in graphical terms what is performing vs. underperformers?

In the following weeks, I am going to build out a sample of this data visualization that I am talking about.