When it comes to building {successful} websites, appealing to a large and diverse audience requires a mastery of the web and expertise in user experience. You need to thoroughly define a strategy that will engage the majority of that large audience – and keep them coming back.  Now… take all of that complexity, and double it! This is the challenge we faced when tasked with creating a website that appealed to both B2B and B2C market segments.

You might be thinking, “Get my red staples button, that’s easy!”   But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Here are a few fundamentals that need to be balanced when creating a website that accommodates both B2C & B2B customers:

Product VS Relationship Driven

Typically, a website meant for engaging B2C customers works at converting the “shoppers” into buyers as quickly and aggressively as possible. When on the web, end consumers want sales information handy and can easily be enticed with incentives.  In many cases only one or two people are making a purchasing decision and not interested in a long-term relationship – just a quick fix to their need or problem.

When it comes to a B2B experience the focus shifts from being completely product driven to one that is based on developing a relationship. In a business scenario, the first point of contact with a website is to gather research. Content is king, and the information available online is used for comparison and discussion among peers. It is critical that you have the information they are looking for, or you may be crossed off the list. At this phase, companies aren’t ready for a hard sell – just pursuing options. Continue Reading →

My beautiful infographic

From the day I stepped into the marketing world, one of my first lessons was in the great debate of usability versus design. The way of thinking was, and still is for many people, that you simply cannot have 100% of both.  Meaning, you MUST sacrifice one or the other; should your website be visually spectacular and lack common navigation and web standards or should it function well and just be… kinda good looking?

For a while, I had been trying to decide which side of the fence I stood. As a digital marketer and all around #websavvy gal, I started to subconsciously analyze the websites I came across with regards to the design and user friendlessness.  What I found is that many of the websites that balanced usability and design would fall into this cookie cutter mold – logo upper left hand corner, navigation near the top, big rotating banner messages, and if the user experience was really good (these are gems) a few calls to action sprinkled in.

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AIGA Chicago, the professional association for design, chose Manning Productions to give the organization’s first Small Talk of 2011. For those of you who don’t know, AIGA Chicago Small Talks are designed to be intimately scaled events that offer participants the opportunity to learn about the business practices, view work, and experience the environments of local studios and firms.

When AIGA initially approached me to see if Manning would be interested in hosting a Small Talk, I felt very honored, and knew that it aligned with our company’s goal of becoming thought leaders within our respective industries. My only hesitation was creating a lecture format that would accommodate 30 – 40 people in an  office space designed for 10 – 15 employees. As a solution, we opted to divide attendees into 10 groups of 3 or 4. Half of these groups would first attend the lecture, given in the conference room by Doug and Patrick. The other half would rotate through 5 stations, each containing a short presentation on a piece from our portfolio.

I presented tweeSP at one of the stations, a web application that scans a user’s twitter feed and produces a product wish list from Amazon based on what the user has been tweeting about,  and I found that this format of presentation was extremely successful. I was able to engage with the participants on a level that can’t be achieved in a typical lecture format, and I felt like I walked away from the event having been able to truly dialogue about our work.

Recently, AIGA Chicago hosted a roundtable at Studio Blue with area interactive creative directors, and I was lucky enough to be asked to participate.

One of the main issues affecting area interactive creative directors is finding and hiring new talent. Because of the fast-paced, ever-changing nature of our industry, universities have not been able to adapt their programs in order to properly equip students for the real world. Currently AIGA Chicago boasts a mentor program that brings together designers from all levels of experience to share ideas, and offer advice. One suggestion that was thrown out was to expand and focus the mentorship program, as a way to guide young designers who have a passion for interactive design, but who haven’t necessarily been given the proper tools in order to be employable. Another suggestion put on the table was to create an ideal model for an interactive university curriculum, as a way to demonstrate to schools how to structure their programs in order to better prepare their students for the real world. Continue Reading →

Shortly after lunch on Friday, Amy launched her Twitter account, only to discover that @twitter had recently tweeted about tweeSP: “Funny: tweesp.com can channel your friend’s Tweets to tell what they want from @Amazon using Tweet Telepathy.” As Amy scanned the @replies, she realized that the tweet, while doing an excellent job of promoting our site to @twitter’s 4,000,000+ followers, had quickly exhausted tweeSP’s hourly API requests.

Patrick responded to @twitter with the following reply: “We’re glad you like tweeSP, but can we ask a favor and possibly get whitelisted? Your recent Tweet exhausted our API requests.” In addition, we set up a Twitter account, @gifts_by_tweeSP, to explain to users why they are receiving error messages in real time.

In under 20 minutes, Twitter responded to our request: “Thanks for requesting to be on Twitter’s API whitelist. We’ve approved your request!” Since then, we’ve feverishly been monitoring both Twitter and tweeSP to gauge peoples reactions, as well as how our site is handling the high traffic. To our surprise, we realized that a number of staff members from Twitter have been tweeting about tweeSP:

“Besides a ping pong table and beer bong, tweesp.com suggested a compelling book to me: amazon.com/Working-People…”, @ev, Evan Williams, Co-founder of Twitter

“yeah, tweesp.com is super cool,” @wm, Ruby, NLP, Stats and General Engineering at Twitter.

Despite the excitement over the reaction to tweeSP,as well as finally being whitelisted by Twitter, Manning realized we had hit another stumbling block: Amazon limits tweeSP hits to 2000 requests per hour. While this may sound like a lot, tweeSP uses anywhere from 5-10 requests per twitter handle searched. Unfortunately, that is severely limiting our access. We are working as fast as we can to fix this problem, and we appreciate your patience. We hope to have it resolved soon!

Last week AIGA Chicago sponsored a discussion with legendary Designer James Victore on his first book Victore, or Who Died and Made You Boss? Though familiar with Victore’s raw, political, sometimes controversial body of work, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the man as speaker.  But his humorous, somewhat profane, and surprisingly motivational speaking style drew me in from the get-go, as he shared stories that ranged from how and when to fire a client, to convincing the MoMA to write a letter to his mother.

Victore went in depth about both the form and design of his book (created by Paul Sahre), as well as its contents: a retrospective of his work created over the past 25 years. What consistently impressed me throughout was his love for graphic design as a tool for communication, and his steadfast fearlessness to express himself and what he believes in. Below is a taste of works that can be found in his book:

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Twitter has been a topic of conversation lately around the water cooler, for reason soon to be revealed. I think that it is interesting that the “I ate crispix for breakfast” meme is still around. I wanted to counter with just one of the many ways that I employ Twitter—professional development resource.

As someone who works in the web world, Twitter fits nicely in my tool kit. After all, it is folks like us that created the service that is currently winning the Webby People’s Voice battle for the entire internet. Twitter is a representation of what the web has become: real-time, democratic publishing platform and the finger on the pulse for the planet. I use Twitter in many ways, but one of my favorites is as an aggregator for the cutting edge in web design and development. Follow my workflow outline to see how I have put Twitter to work for me. Continue Reading →

I, like a number of my Manning colleagues, come from a film/video background. One thing that you learn early in this medium is that pre-production holds the keys to success for a moving picture. For whatever reason, however, pre-planning for web projects can seem mysterious, pointless or as a means to pad budgets. Just like a film production, pre-production and planning are vitally important for web success. I have a stumbled across a number of succinct and well written articles about planning and preparing for web projects that I would like to share. Continue Reading →

A living (or dynamic) document is a document “which may be continually edited and updated”. Wikipedia is a fantastic example of a living document, especially when contrasted with a physical printed volume of a traditional encyclopedia. In essence, all websites are living documents because they can (should) change overtime, whether it be copy changes or the addition of fresh content. To be honest with you, as a former video producer and academic, the idea of a living document excites me. I challenge you to find a media textbook written in the last 15 years that does not include a clause like “the specifics of this book will be outdated by the time it goes to print” in the introduction. However, as a web project manager, I have come to fear the hidden repercussions of the living document.

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Yesterday I rediscovered this old post about the WAC hiring a PR firm to bolster Boise State’s quest for a BCS birth. Well, I forgot about this post, otherwise I would have made this update 6 weeks ago, but Boise did, in fact, go undefeated and did reach a BCS game. Ironically they beat TCU, who received the non-BCS autobid. I am not sure what the Boise/WAC payout was, or what the PR firms cut was. But in the end, the campaign worked.