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!

The Hawks are a business school’s dream case study of transforming a team that played before a measly crowd of 5,000 into a sell-out sensation. Now other NHL teams are trying to take hockey marketing to the next level. To compete with the big three (pro baseball, football and basketball), they’re looking for even more innovative ways to connect with a loyal fan base through social media. Continue Reading →

Last week we had a conference call with a client, one of the largest professional associations in the world. Twitter came up a few times and I couldn’t help be think of one of my favorite Twitter publishers, NASA. This led me to do some late night research on NASA’s Twitter strategy. What I found was interesting and thought others might find value in what I discovered. 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.

People are constantly finding new ways to tune out the barrage of advertising thrown at them every day.  First there was the mute button, then came the Do Not Call list, the pop-up blocker, and Tivo among a number of other ways to bypass sales pitch.  As  audiences become desensitized to old forms of advertising, advertisers are being pushed to find new ways to reach their target market.

KFC takes this to a new level with their “Re-freshed by KFC” campaign.  The fast food restaurant is offering to patch potholes in five Major US cities, all they ask in return is to stamp their logo on each repair.  Avoiding potholes now takes on a new meaning.