We’re digging this Autumn in Portland. The rain, the colors, the pumpkin patch. And we’re especially into all the Halloween excitement here with MileGhost5! Along with bunch of creative folks here, we’ll be handing out candy here on Halloween (we’ll be in our studio from 5 pm until 8 – or until our pumpkin fairy princess plain pumpkins). The event is free, all are welcome, and there will be free hot cider and cookies provided by EAT.
Hope to see you here.
A Google TV remote by Sony:
An AppleTV remote by Apple:
As designers, we strive for the latter.
These men and women are probably in creative fields in some way, whether that is directly them or what their business involves. (They have a respect for the arts and creativity.) These men and women probably shop at places like New Seasons, Whole Foods, Zupanʼs or other similar specialty, high-end markets. They may frequent places such as IKEA, Design within Reach, Antique Shops, Boutiques, or specialty stores…not big corporate box stores (ie. Best Buy) though Target is probably an exception.
- Part of a larger description of our audience (created by a lovely designer assisting us with evaluating our identity). Quite apropos.
We at Needmore have become very interested in social media, and when you talk about social media, you are probably talking about either Facebook or Twitter. These are the two kings, and it can be hard for folks to figure out what the difference really is, and what that means to their business online.
There are a lot of obvious difference between them, but in order to get to the heart of the matter, you have to look at the underlying way people connect to each other. From these differences, you can extrapolate a whole lot about them both.
On Facebook, you connect directly to another person, and it is a two-way relationship. This relationship is a lot of work, and it is intended mainly for connecting to friends, to people you already know. No one on Facebook can ever have more than five thousand friends, no matter how big of a celebrity or business they might be, so friendships on Facebook just don’t work. What does work, for many people, are the “pages” feature, designed to let you put a business page on Facebook, which can have as many friends as you want. But this doesn’t change the underlying architecture of Facebook, and it doesn’t change the nature of, and reason for, visiting the site.
On Twitter, however, the relationship is asymmetric. Which is to say, it works just fine one-way, that’s how it’s built. Someone like Ashton Kucher can have a billion followers, and you can have just a few, and it makes no difference. Celebrities obviously aren’t going to follow a billion people back and, on Twitter, it’s never an issue. As a consequence, the way people “follow” others on Twitter has a very different pattern. Whereas on Facebook, you are likely to follow people you already know, on Twitter you are likely to follow people you are just interested in, or want to learn more about, or think you might be friends with in the future. It’s more “aspirational” in nature, and that’s a very important difference.
Because of these differences, it’s easier for people to “follow” your business on Twitter than on Facebook. When people follow a Facebook page, they tend to think of it as a one-time activity, as if they were “voting” for that page. They are much less likely to want constant interruptions from businesses on Facebook, alongside updates about their friends. But on Twitter, users are very comfortable browsing through a long timeline of tweets. They use this timeline to keep up not just on other people, but also on news sources and media. Because Twitter is so simple and one-directional by design, it tends to have as many characteristics of news media as it does characteristics of social networks.
This is just one reason why we tend to advise you to focus your business’ online networking on Twitter first, and then Facebook. We feel that it’s better suited to the kinds of things our clients do, it is easier to get started, and more likely to bring value in the short term.
With the deluge of ways to market to potential customers online, you likely wonder why on earth you would want to send out newsletters to a mailing list. I mean, that costs money, right? One of my favorite design blogs, Design*Sponge, has an insightful article up today Jordan Moore about email marketing. She advises gathering emails right away, possibly even before you know exactly what you’ll send out to your list.
The reality is that all small businesses should gather contact information from their interested audience over time. Even if you don’t think you have a need for this information right now, you may in the future and will be glad you took the time to collect this data.
Jordan has a point. There is absolutely nothing stronger than permission to market to an individual; permission marketing means that someone has gone out of their way to ask you let them know what you are up to. And, signing up for your newsletter is one of the easiest ways for them to do so.
Sure, there are a myriad of ways to get your message out (blog, Facebook, and Twitter, to name a few). And, all of these are important venues for your message and should certainly be part of your larger social media plan. Interestingly, though, Jordan notes that newsletters are far more personal than blog posts or RSS feeds. She suggest, perhaps rightly so, that getting an email directly from you is a more intimate experience than happening upon your blog’s RSS feed.
The takeaway is that these addresses, given freely to you by your customers and fans, should be treated like gold. They are, after all, a gathering of individuals interested in hearing about what you and your business have bee up to. What can be more valuable than that?
We were lucky enough to catch a documentary on Klaus Voorman that the Smithsonian Channel has been running, the other night.
What a career this man has had! And yet it’s rare to run across someone who has heard of him.
In a nutshell, he met the Beatles in Hamburg, and moved to London soon after, to kick start his graphic design career. He played bass with Manfred Mann and created the unforgettable cover for Revolver.
He continued to play bass throughout the Seventies, including such tracks as Imagine and You’re So Vain. Indeed, Carly Simon said that his bizarre noodling on the bass inspired her to reply “son of a gun,” which in turn inspired the track.
If that’s not enough, he moved back to Germany for a while in the Eighties and produced the hit Da Da Da, among others. So you can blame him for that, too.
A pretty crazy career, and a nice time to reflect back, as he has just turned 70. It’s clearly more than just being in the right place at the right time. The man has crazy talent, and he’s so easy-going everyone liked being around him.
It’s amazing how much the new Apple displays resemble the iPad. It’s uncanny. Clever, actually. Because when Apple wants to show the iPad in use, running demonstration videos that everyone can see from the store windows, they just use the new display. You could be forgiven for thinking there was a new, giant 27-inch iPad out.
Which is kind of funny, because people made so much fun out of how the iPad was just a “big iPhone.”
Apple tends to use the same materials – aluminum/steel and glass – so effectively that it’s hard to compete in terms of build quality. Other manufacturers have standardized on plastic bodies for their consumer products, so it becomes hard for them to distinguish themselves in a cost-effective way. They would have to start from scratch building products with those materials. But since Apple’s designs all use those materials, rather than simple plastic shells, they can.
The designers at Apple are always thinking about the manufacturing process.
So it’s almost as if I have myself a brand-new 27-inch iPad. It’s heavy.
