We humans are social creatures that thrive on face to face interaction and communication.   Tom Erickson, interaction designer and researcher in the Social Computing Group at IBM’s Watson Labs defines social computing as providing an online place, application or service that have some of that “life” to them. 
His new report provides a though-provoking analysis of what is “social computing,” how does it differ from “social media,” and what is its impact on the way we work, live and play.

Erickson’s report and interview discussions provide insight for digital designers and developers like Manning, but also important ideas for those in online marketing and communications.  He likens digital designers to architects and urban planners who are creating public spaces to encourage people to interact, communicate, and live together.  He suggests that we look at online spaces in terms of the interaction they support and promote.

It’s a compelling analysis well worth the investment of time.

Back in the days of our CEES iPrep app, Apple made it kind of a pain to distribute works outside of the App Store. Businesses that wanted to create internal tools had use ad-hoc builds — a process that’s pretty difficult for even tech-savvy clients.

Someone at Apple woke up and realized that internal business apps needed their own tools. Enter the Apple Developer Enterprise Program.
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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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Periodically, we like to challenge ourselves and test out an idea we’ve been kicking around. In this case, we asked ourselves, “What if we create a web app that uses the content of people’s tweets to determine what gifts they might like?” That’s the basic premise behind our Twitter gift idea generator: tweeSP.

We’ve just launched the site and so far we’ve been very pleased with the results of our little social media experiment. We’ve used tweeSP to find gifts ideas for friends and family, or just had fun seeing what presents are recommended for celebrity tweeters.

Many people question the value of Twitter, but here’s one example of how tweets can be used in an incredibly interesting and useful way. So take tweeSP for a spin and see if you get some interesting gift ideas for the last few people on your holiday shopping list.

PS – for those of you scratching your head over our name for this cool new toy, it’s a play on Twitter and ESP. Now aren’t we punny!

I’m not a big Dallas Cowboys fan.  But having shot a video with Hall-of-Famer Terry Bradshaw on the old Texas Stadium field, I agree the Cowboys needed a home.  With it’s 100,000 person capacity, its a  monument to how important football is in Texas.

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ABANow.org

Recently, our friends at the American Bar Association asked us to redesign their Media Relations and Communication Services website. There were many practical reasons for this: adding features, improving site navigation and usability, and making content easier to add and update.

But the primary reason for the redesign was in the social media realm. The Media Relations Division was evolving from communicating with the news media, to take on added responsibilities for communicating with members, the legal community and the public. In addition to timely web content, these readers like to get a well-rounded perspective on the news. They still look for traditional fact-based information, but also enjoy the perspectives offered by blogs and seek the reaction of others within their social networks. Continue Reading →

The explosion of video on the web is taking a more central role in web development than simply added an embedded video player with a YouTube Clip. It’s hard to imagine creating a new, dynamic consumer-oriented site that doesn’t involve streaming video content in some way. Video is gaining prominence and importance over text content in many ways.

One of the best examples is the new Montreal tourism site. Montreal is going 100% online with its marketing this year. The tourism agency reports that 87-92% of all visitors are planning and booking their travel online – so it isn’t that hard to let go of traditional marketing.

The success of the Montreal campaign may raise questions for other marketers – to help them develop an e-marketing strategy. The answer may be to make 2009 a learning year for digital and online marketing because this technology is not going to go away.

CBS Sports has enhanced their NCAA March Madness on Demand site by offering third party sites access to free applications that feed live scores and other information from games.

Additionally, the NCAA March Madness Developer site offers a selection of widgets that are more sophisticated than ever including applications dedicated to brackets, live scoring, and news on each of the Division I Men’s Basketball Programs. So, for example, we can feature this widget on our blog (just don’t tell our boss Doug, the die-hard hockey fan).

You can also provide a link to see games like Michigan vs. Clemson (Thursday at 6:10 p.m. CT) for free online in HD using Microsoft’s Silverlight player.  However, you’ll want to have Silverlight pre-installed, de-activate any pop-up blockers and in this case be a Wolverine fan.

CBS has said that they anticipate a 30% increase in ad revenue from their March Madness site this year reaching nearly $30 million.  Last year was the first that all games were available via the on demand site and revenue jumped 130%.