More details over at Co. Design

Frederiksen’s big idea is to change the way you think about what counts as marketing for professional service firms. Traditionally, this has included trade shows and cheap give aways such as coffee mugs, t-shirts, etc.

Instead, think about creating content that is valuable to your potential customers and then give them that content for free as a means of establishing your expertise in the field.

While potential clients may indeed take your free coffee mug and keep it in the company break room, wouldn’t you rather they be reading your white paper on important trends in their industry and thinking about how they could partner with you to improve their business?

Not all of Frederiksen’s 10 tips will feel right for your particular business or industry. But I recommend reading the article and thinking about how you might be able to adapt one to improve your business.

Ship mobile apps if you can afford it.

I had not expected this recommendation but I after reading his analysis I get where he is coming from. Today, we can often deliver a user experience via mobile applications that is superior to that which can be delivered via a mobile website.

However, the nuance of his discussion comes as he looks forward. Insight number 2:

Be aware that the cost of mobile apps will increase as platforms proliferate.

Not only the cost of developing for an increasing number of platforms but the ongoing maintenance of applications and the data. This should be a serious concern for many organizations and underscores the second half of his original statement: Ship mobile apps if you can afford it.

Insight 3:

In the long-term, mobile sites are the way to go.

While there are some user experience trade-offs today, developing mobile sites rather than investing in mobile apps will help you avoid excessive development and maintenance costs associated with mobile apps, will allow you to avoid paying money to various app store owners, and — perhaps most importantly — will allow better integration with the larger world of the web.

In the end, Nielsen reiterates what he said back in 1999, the internet will defeat smaller, closed environments.

And in the end, that is good for us and for our clients. I recommend reading Nielsen’s full analysis

“Time to pop open the champagne because based on the latest data from Net Applications, IE6 usages in the US has now officially dropped below 1%,” blogged Roger Capriotti, Microsoft’s director of Internet Explorer marketing.

“We hope this means more developers and IT pros can consider IE6 a ‘low priority’ at this point and stop spending their time having to support such an outdated browser,” he added.

We couldn’t agree more.

I refuse to intellectualize, or try to understand how it happens. It happens, and I just try to ride with it. And the frightening thing is when it doesn’t happen, it’s actually terrifying because you realize, “I’ve dried up. It’s finally happened: the well is empty.” But, then if you get through those periods, then something starts happening again. A lot of what happens, it’s like doing a painting without actually doing a sketch in advance. You just start and you got this, you add another thing, boom, boom, boom.

Terry Gilliam: On Ideas, Unlearning & Avoiding Debt

Be sure to check out both videos. One shows the final product but the other gives a bit of the background — at least as well as a bunch of surfers can explain it — of how they did it. Great intersection of technology, creativity, and waves.

ideal for museums and far superior to resolving to an entry in the same language for every user.

2d Code has a great example posted so you can see this in action . I believe there are interesting possibilities for this technology in retail settings — especially in a place like New Orleans (or other tourist destinations) — to provide shoppers with relevant information when people may not be shopping in their native language.

Rather than thinking about mobile devices first and foremost as ‘mobile’, Chris asks us to think about them as  personal devices . This has profound implications for how these devices might interact with the web to deliver a customized user experience. Beyond that, however, it begs us as designers to think about how we might reframe our content to deliver meaningful information to users we now know just a bit more about — such as where they are.

Chris created a demo showing how content of a news story — in this case a map of the recent riots in London — might be improved by incorporating location information from a mobile device. Be sure to visit his demo at  “ http://aqworks.com/articles/responsive/  from your mobile phone and see how this new content approach increases understanding of an event that for many of us was distant and abstract.

If you are interested in responsive web design, responsive web publishing deserves some consideration. And Chris’s article is a great place to start.

Look up! Be present. Talk to the stranger next to you. Don’t travel hundreds of miles only to remain in the same place.

Even better is that I used it to finally settle a long-term score: most popular recurring monster/menace in literature history.

http://img808.imageshack.us/img808/1770/ngrammonstersmenacesv2.png

If I were a betting man, the smart money was probably on Vampires, but who knew Pirates were that popular for that long?

And what on earth happened in the 1980s? Did Isaac Asimov just go bananas at his typewriter? I mean, don’t get wrong, I  love  robots and all, but this is taking it a bit far, no?

Why would we do this when the market of new customers is vastly larger than the much smaller pool of people who already love our product or service?

Perhaps because research indicates that brand evangelists tend to spend 13% more with your company and they tend to refer business equal to 45% of what they spend.

As Mack so nicely sums up:

So let’s compare and contrast the two approaches:

Company – Targets New Customers. Loses them just as quickly as it gains them, so constantly having to reinvest in getting more New Customers to replace the ones it lost yesterday.

Rockstar – Targets Brand Advocates (Fans). Brand Advocates have a strong sense of loyalty for the Rockstar, so they not only stay as customers, they go out and actively recruit New Customers, Existing Customers, and customers with Some Brand Affinity to buy from the Rockstar.

Mack’s article is worth a read.

Hint: Type “0” for a free download.

Over the past few months, we have completely reinvented our studio’s approach to web development. We have adopted a mobile first, responsive design strategy that is informed by strong content strategy . While there are many reasons for our adoption of this new web design and development workflow, a driving factor is the market penetration of the iPhone and now the iPad.

While much has been made of the consumer rush to adoption of the iPad, it is now clear that corporate America has also taken note. The iPad is beginning to penetrate the Enterprise zone :

…many corporations are actively engaging in large-scale implementation, with management backing and IT support. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that 65% of the Fortune 500 has already deployed iPads or has pilot programs in the works, while trade magazine Network World now puts the figure at 80%. Of course, we don’t know just how many people within these corporations actually have company-purchased iPads, and how many of those are running company-sanctioned applications. But with names like Dupont and JP Morgan Chase in the mix, this is by any definition a big deal.

Speaking of bucking a trend (or just outright over-doing it), don’t miss the last logo in the slideshow, as it features a previous Louisiana governor’s attempt to wrangle unfortunate type gradients under what looks like a smoky, half-sun/moon. Man, oh man.

In South Korea, a grocery store set up a virtual store in a the subway station . Commuters on their way home from work can scan the QR Codes on the products, add the products to their shopping carts, and place an order online. The real groceries arrive at the commuter’s home shortly after they do. 

That is smart.

Why do some companies survive changes in the market and evolve their offerings while others are unable to make the transition?

Part of the answer may be that companies organized around a core idea — rather than a core product or technology — are in a better position to adapt to change.

This article from The Economist explores some of today’s tech companies through this lens:

An elegant organising idea is no use if a company cannot come up with good products or services, or if it has clueless bosses. But on the basis of this simple formula—that a company should focus on an idea, rather than a technology—which of today’s young tech giants look best placed to live to 100?

While this renewed emphasis on content is a appropriate and necessary, that doesn’t mean that everyone dealing with content understands what everyone else — people who are also dealing with content — does with that content or what the other team members might need in order to do their job well.

Dan Brown, an Information Architect, articulates 10 things he needs from a Content Strategist for their collaboration to be fruitful . A great read for anyone interested in designing great user experiences.

More than ever before our clients are thinking about investments in marketing and in the development of their brand rather than ‘marketing expenses.’ Our more forward looking clients are even reflecting this on their financial reports. This helps align company expectations and keep managers from looking at Marking as an expense that can be trimmed to temporarily make the bottom line look better.

Starting with the notion of taste, Paul Graham examines good design and reminds us where it comes from.

I was talking recently to a friend who teaches at MIT. His field is hot now and every year he is inundated by applications from would-be graduate students. “A lot of them seem smart,” he said. “What I can’t tell is whether they have any kind of taste.”

Taste. You don’t hear that word much now. And yet we still need the underlying concept, whatever we call it. What my friend meant was that he wanted students who were not just good technicians, but who could use their technical knowledge to design beautiful things.

In customer service, you plan schedules, determine tone and put people in charge. You answer questions like: when will someone be on call? How will they speak to the customer? What authority do they have to make promises or fix problems? And all of those things work together to ensure that your customers walk away feeling cared for.

If you didn’t do these things… If your customer service reps didn’t have clear understanding of their tone, authority and schedule, it could get pretty frustrating for your customers.

In the same way, if you don’t think through the elements of content strategy, your website can be very frustrating for your customers.

Austin Kleon discusses 10 things he wishes someone had told him while he was in college.For me, the key here is his emphasis on action and creating things as a means to discovery. We learn what we are doing via the process of doing.

If I waited to know “who I was” or “what I was about” before I started “being creative”, well, I’d still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things. In my experience, it’s in the act of making things that we figure out who we are.

We need to protect our brand. We prefer to work on the brand values that are not reproducible by others including the content we create for the public. No other brand can offer this.

Increasingly, companies are discovering that the content they create to surround their ‘product’ or ‘offering’ or ‘service’ is an essential component of the brand value.

A Compelling discussion of why designers need to be able to discuss their process and their decisions.

Share the details that go beyond the obvious. Break down the visual characteristics to their origin in your process. Provide insight into the history and purpose of the design elements being employed. And don’t forget the most important part; how do these collective decisions come together and solve a problem?

(From the Freakonomics blog: Visualizing Mortality History)