Month: March 2007

March 30, 2007

March 29, 2007

March 28, 2007

March 27, 2007

March 26, 2007

March 23, 2007

March 22, 2007

March 21, 2007

  • Thought

    Debating how much Twitter should be about me vs. my “followers” – reconsidering the whole “I’m having a good latte” kind of tweets.

    View on Twitter

March 20, 2007

  • Thought

    American Idol – anyway to see how many twitters are doing the same thing right now? 🙂

    View on Twitter

  • Has Web Dev Changed In 10 Years?

    Alex Pejcic is President & Co-Founder of “Sonic Boom”, an interactive agency in Toronto, Canada. We’ll be following up this question with five more for Alex later this week.

    One Degree: Has the business changed since you started “Sonic Boom”10 years ago and if so, how?

    Alex Pejcic: Yes it has changed! Here are 10 profound changes that I have experienced over the last decade:

    1. Clients are much wiser and therefore better understand the value of interactive media in their marketing or IT mix.
    2. The increasing importance of brand, user experience and psychographics in the strategic makeup of interactive campaigns.
    3. The unquestionable need to qualify and quantify the success of interactive campaigns to prove ROI on client spends.
    4. With respect to Sonic Boom, large-build projects are less in demand, and smaller (but very significant) “campaign-focused” assignments are more requested.
    5. The paramount role of customer service in retaining clients. Since interactive media is a living, breathing organism, our company required being modular and responsive in order to manage such business. This was the formula Sonic Boom used to secure the agency’s survival and ironically stimulate growth.
    6. Online audiences are becoming much more demanding and therefore the “big idea” is king. Creativity in content and technology is a must in order to demonstrate prominence over our clients’ competitors.
    7. The emergence of online guerilla marketing tactics such as viral messaging, blogging and opinion polling. Who would have thought that clients would be comfortable in allowing consumers to provide insight to other consumers on their behalf in such a transparent manner?
    8. Broadband connectivity, digital display mechanisms, and mobile communication are becoming the norm in Canada and likewise gaining wide acceptance across the world. This will continue to open many doors for our industry.
    9. When we started Sonic Boom in 1996 we were all part of a pending gold rush, then the bubble burst around 2001. Now here we are in a professed “renaissance” all in the period of 10 years. Are we on the verge of another revolution?
    10. Words that had never existed before like searchability, usability, blogging, podcasting, texting, spamming and actionability have become an everyday part of my life.

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on March 20, 2006.

March 18, 2007

March 17, 2007

March 16, 2007

March 15, 2007

  • Google Plusbox Makes Life Harder For Marketers

    Google loves to experiment with features and UI (User Interface) by providing different features to a limited sub-sets of users. Recently you may have heard that Google is starting to integrate alternate content into search results using something called a plusbox. For example, they’re testing adding Google Finance information inline with some results.

    I happened to find one of these in action (for my employer Tucows no less) when searching for software on Google. Here’s what a Plusbox looks like closed:

    And here’s what it looks like open (i.e. after clicking on the ”+”):

    This raises an interesting challenge for marketers in publicly traded companies like Tucows. Now you have to worry about the impact of your stock performance on the perception of searchers. You also have to pay extra attention to those normally bland and generic descriptions of our company because it may just end up (like ours did) representing your company in Google!

    I’d be interested in feedback from others who might be starting to think about this kind of stuff. And may I also say publicly — Damn you Wikipedia! Tucows has been the number one result for “software” longer than Google has existed. Now we’ve been bumped by the collective hive intelligence! 🙂

    Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on March 15, 2007.

March 14, 2007