Planning Automated Marketing Programs
With a growing number of companies signing up for marketing automation software, it is important to consider how to go about planning your automated email marketing programs. From initial idea to implementation, it is important to have clear goals and visualize all of the various paths of the program.
Planning for a Rebuild
Two years ago, we listed all the things that should be on your mind before planning a rebuild — and there are many, from browser compatibility to budgeting. Even after all this time, much of that list remains the same today. But what has changed are the ways in which these individual factors are understood and handled. Since planning is naturally on our minds in January, we thought that this would be a good time to check in on this topic and bring it up to date...
Content Creation and the Problem of Burnout
I want to take a step back from the series of posts I’ve been writing about content marketing and address something that’s only tangentially related--but that anyone involved in the production of content must eventually contend with: burnout. Behind all this talk about content lies a pretty daunting assumption having to do with creation, and any honest discussion of high-volume content strategies must recognize and contend with the problem of creative burnout.
Google Zeitgeist 2012 – Takeaways
Google just released the trending search terms for 2012 as the Google Zeitgeist. Apart from a fun peek under the covers, what can this possibly mean for you? Well, more than you might guess...
An Introduction to Marketing Automation
How to Avoid Scope Creep
Scope is a powerful word. Mention it to any designer, developer, project manager or client, and you’re likely to provoke a mixture of emotional responses. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. OK, maybe it won’t be that dramatic. But you probably won’t get a smile...
Don’t Be So Linear
In Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling's manifesto for design in a post-gizmo society, the author points out that technologies "do not abolish one another in clean or comprehensive ways." If they did, the designer's job would be far easier. Instead, we must design for the spaces between the old and the new—a challenge that Sterling calls wrangling...
Making Sense of the Data
We designers need to be proactively involved in measurement. Knowing how to gather and interpret interactive data will better position us strategically, not to mention prevent inheriting unhelpfully data-glutted reports and being held accountable to someone else's vague interpretation of them. But, it's more important that the data ground our vision in reality than be used to build credibility with clients. We want our clients to trust our judgement, but our measurement process should lead them to the same conclusions we've made if they were to do it themselves...
Stuck in Idle
One of my greatest fears is that my last living thoughts might be of Friends. Not my friends; that would be lovely. I mean the television show, Friends. Of all the things I could remember in my final moments—loved ones, nature, great art or music—I instead recall fake people I never really knew...
Playing with Data
Most professional information designers I know see themselves as stewards of tradition. Traced from early practitioners like Snow and Minard and on through contemporaries like Pentagram and Tufte, it is one purely focused upon the effective display of information and resistance to the allure of aesthetics. But in design culture, aesthetics play an important role, one that is particularly relevant today as new tools enable millions of amateurs to visualize just about anything. Rather than seeing this as a good thing — a potential innovation explosion of Cambrian proportions — many professionals instead perceive their tradition as under attack...