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It’s rare that I cross-post to my personal blog, but some occasions call for extreme measures. Please check out the following: In Memoriam — Alan Nathan Yost (1972 – 2010).Read More →

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The big day has finally come: the pitch.

You and your team have been working feverishly for a week pulling together your response to the RFP. Digital strategy, audience research, creative execution, and a business case for significant future growth. You did your competitive research, understood the landscape, and developed a strong story about a 3-to-5-year arc of business growth. You hone your story, removing extraneous detail, crafting a presentation that will fit in your slim one-hour slot. And then you’re ready, finally.Read More →

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Amber Naslund wrote a piece today about why she believes the social media “industry” has a credibility problem. In it, she decries four basic failures of people who claim to be experts in social media (direct quotes):

  • We talk too much about the value of our time rather than putting it to good use
  • We cannibalize our own
  • We’re intolerant of missteps
  • We talk about conversation, but we focus a great deal on the tools. And, on ourselves

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In a bygone era, courageous men moved logs by the thousands with rivers, crossing vast distances and enduring enormous risks. One of the perils of the trade was the log jam, when topography and conditions conspired to bring the flow of logs to a halt. In these situations, the solution was to find the key log, the one log that, when released, would break up the entire jam.Read More →

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Wordpress (WP) has enjoyed a great deal of success over the last several years. It’s a wildly popular publishing platform that’s gone from being just a tool for bloggers to a publishing system used by more traditional publishing sites (e.g., the Wall Street Journal magazine). In its most recent upgrade (version 3.0), a number of significant feature enhancements have pushed it further down the road towards become a more full-featured web content management system (CMS), garnering acclaim from many looking for Wordpress to evolve. Read More →

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So you finally decided to get your blog up and running on a self-hosted version of Wordpress, the amazingly popular blogging platform. You’ve seen plenty of sites using Wordpress, and maybe even heard about themes, the powerful system that lets you customize how your site looks and behaves. You can choose from a wide variety of free themes, many of which have different content, layouts, and appearances. The problem is that straight out of the box, these themes look like, well, themes. They’ve got a personality, but it’s not yours.Read More →

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The world of social media is awash in a sea of data: followers, friends, likes, links, purchases, engagement. Anyone trying to make sense of (and justify) their social media efforts has to dive into this sea. Fortunately, there are a plethora of tools tools available (free and otherwise) that slice and dice this data in different ways. But how much do they actually help? In the case of many of the free tools out there, the basic principles of information design are taking a backseat, with incomprehensible charts, mysterious metrics and marginal usability ruling the day and obscuring the valuable information present.Read More →