tdog.blog

Designers….learn it, use it, love it.

Grid systems bring visual structure and balance to site design. As a tool grids are useful for organizing and presenting information. Used properly, they can enhance the user experience by creating predictable patterns for users to follow. From designer’s point of view they allow for an organized methodology for planning systematic layouts.

After creating a well-structured and usable grid, consider allowing it to breath. A page without a grid is a usability nightmare. On the other hand, a grid that has creatively overlapping, escaping, or energizing columns leads to a more enjoyable user experience. Discovering or planning areas of the design that will have some freedom will lead to more interesting and appealing design solutions.

Article includes case studies and examples. I’ll certainly be using this idea more as it brings some sense of stability into front-end design considerations.

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The good folks at paidContent.org are reporting alternative media spending will grow in 2008 by 20% or more–to 88 billion US dollars. For those of you who are not clear on what “alternative media spending” encompasses online advertising, mobile advertising, digital-at-home (ie, interactive TV, DVR ads, video games, etc), and other ad buys.

– Taking a closer look at online and mobile advertising - which includes search and lead generation, online classifieds and displays, e-media, online video and rich media, internet yellow pages and consumer-generated ads - spending jumped 29.1 percent to $29.94 billion in 2007. That collective category also experienced CAGR of 31.4 percent from 2002 to 2007. And while PQ’s forecast serves as a balm for alternative media, its research provides more angst for traditional media, as the former’s growth was driven was driven by a direct shift away from the latter.

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In the last seven years, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting with, talking to, and working alongside some really terrific people across a variety of companies. I’ve worked with solo entrepreneurs, startup companies, Fortune 500 giants with titanic budgets, and SMBs with tight pursestrings and big dreams.

Across all of these situations and environments, there’s one thing in common: about 9 times out of 10, when I ask about marketing, I usually end up having a conversation about “brochures” and “swag and tchotkes.” In other, guarded moments with people outside of marketing (say, in Sales, or IT), conversations about the marketers usually devolve into three things:

• They’re helpless when it comes to technology.
• They couldn’t identify a lead if one showed up with a wheelbarrow full of money.
• They’re only good at printing up brochures and hiring booth babes for the convention.

All of these statements (and many more like them) are patently unfair, of course–but let’s face it guys, marketing practitioners have always had a bit of a self-esteem problem. We know we’re among the first to get the axe once bad times roll around–but we’re not willing to do the hard work of establishing ourselves as grownups at the revenue table. We accept the fact that our activities cost money–but we don’t take credit when all of our communication efforts and follow-ups turn into a plausible lead in the pipeline (and later, a sale). We know that we’re not experts in all the technical things required to feed a Web 2.0 effort, but then again we don’t fight like crazy for the kind of headcount we need to stay competitive.

Why is that? I don’t know. But it’s got to end. Marketing is really the only way that companies stay alive. Yes, sales brings in the money, but if sales had to draw their attention away from selling to communicating (yeah, that really long tail of informing, educating, empowering and talking to the customer [in print, online, at events, via webinars, white papers, case studies, conference calls.....etc etc etc] way before and during and after the sale is made) then you would see sales plummet….and in fact, there would be other second-order effects because really, you hire a salesperson to sell, not to figure out messaging strategy or build web sites or write white papers. They would do these things so badly that they would not only be selling less, but screwing up the fewer sales they would get.

With that in mind, read a few blog posts below and assert yourself.

• Earn a seat at the Revenue Table, Part 1
• Earn a seat at the Revenue Table, part 2

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If you’re anything like me, you manage team members (employees, contractors, freelancers) and customers. Given enough people you interact with, you start having to process a lot of voice and email communication–and a lot of that stuff contains either status updates or action items. Unfortunately, a vast amount of that stuff is long and convoluted, each beginning with an explanation about what happened and finally meandering to a closing that summarizes the problem and maybe offering some kind of solution or way out of the problem.

Often times, you have to read the whole message in order to figure out if there’s a problem or an action item in there somewhere. It can get pretty frustrating, particularly if you’re in the heat of the moment and receiving 20-30 such emails every few hours. Such is life in the fast lane, right?

Not necessarily!

As my good friend Ian Stahl once said to me in the middle of the DotCom madness, “Stop coming to me with problems….bring me a problem and a solution.”

Here’s a nice little template for making status communications run smoother:

1. Punch line: The facts; no adjectives, adverbs or modifiers. “Milestone 4 wasn’t hit on time, and we didn’t start Task 8 as planned.” Or, “Received charter approval as planned.”
2. Current status: How the punch-line statement affects the project. “Because of the missed milestone, the critical path has been delayed five days.”
3. Next steps: The solution, if any. “I will be able to make up three days during the next two weeks but will still be behind by two days.”
4. Explanation: The reason behind the punch line. “Two of the five days’ delay is due to late discovery of a hardware interface problem, and the remaining three days’ delay is due to being called to help the customer support staff for a production problem.”

Notice that this template is in reverse order of how we normally get status information, but it is a heck of a lot more efficient for everyone involved because of the reversal.

You can read the whole story (and the story behind this blog post’s headline) at computerworld.com.

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I gave a talk at TechBA (a program that’s part of the University of Texas–basically they nurture and grow tech companies from Mexico) a few weeks ago. Each slide in my Keynote presentation consisted of 1-2 words. I had two slides in there that featured diagrams that I built up with transitional effects, but that was it for complexity.

Each word was in like 96 point font on a plain black background. The topic of the talk was “Marketing 2.0″ and the focus was on the fact that Marketing 2.0 is really about getting back to the basics of Marketing, where marketing was before Advertising (and Advertising Agencies) turned marketing into an exercise in shouting at the top of your lungs over and over and over again until somebody purchased your stuff.

In any case, after reading Presentation Zen and Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 Powerpoint rule I’m happy to say that I’m finally on the cutting edge of something or other.

Listen, all of you who think that each slide should contain 6-7 bullet points (and each bullet point should feature 6-7 words)…there’s this thing called “cognitive overload.” If you present us with a ton of words on the screen and start talking about those words, we will only be able to focus on one or the other. When we figure out that you are simply reading from the slides, then we’ll just read the slides.

Guess what? We can read faster than you can talk. So there’s no point in your being up there, right? Just email us your word-packed presentation (or what some call “slide-umentation”) and be off with you.

My personal goal? That you can’t understand my slide presentation without my presence (or at least, my voice). I use 1-2 words per slide, or an arresting image, and use those words and images to bolster what it is I’m talking about. And I get a lot more engagement out of the audience. I used the word WTF on a slide behind me as I talk about “what your target market shouldn’t be thinking when they encounter your marketing.” Even a bunch of software guys from another culture got what I was saying–the titters and laughter said it all.

Am I saying that I’m the next Tony Robbins. Hell no. But at the very least I can make a presentation enjoyable and dynamic and try to erase some of the collective pain being inflicted on business audiences every day.

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