We all know that companies are collecting massive amounts of data about us (or we should), but somehow we are surprised that companies actually crunch the data and act up on it.  Sunday’s New York Times magazine addressed this issue looking at how Target has targeted pregnant women “As Pole’s [...]

A few months ago I talked about how users hate change, but let’s not forget that a lot of communicators hate change, too. I’ve been in several situations where I had to train reporters, editors and writers in the newsroom or writers in a PR and marketing group how to [...]

I’ve had two people ask me in the past week if social media was just a fad and really worth putting any resources into. There’s been a lot written on this in the past two years and quite a few clichés, but I thought I would finally weigh in since [...]

If you a manage a web site and it crashes you think about all the users hitting your site at that time and getting the same error message that you just saw when you discovered it had crashed. If you look at it from the user perspective, you immediately go [...]

Moneyball is a great movie. Finally watched it last night. It reminds of some very simple logic. Find the number that best dictates your success. Measure everything about that number. Determine which factors move that number in a positive direction. Measure everything about those factors. Use the most efficient way [...]

Last night I discovered this blog hiccuped. All the wonderful posts I published since October didn’t show. They are up now. I hope you enjoy it.

I bought my wife a Kindle Fire for Christmas. I’m impressed and she loves it (and the price isn’t bad either). I’ve read a lot of hype that says that Amazon is pushing the device to make more sales, but I really believe that is a pure content device. It’s [...]

Most web sites today are ran by a content management system (CMS). A CMS separates content from design and makes it easy to post content to the site without the knowledge of HTML. A CMS can be cheap (open source – free) or expensive ($100,000) plus a year, but what feature of [...]

If I have a product that doesn’t depend on Christmas business, then I wouldn’t advertise over Christmas. All the retail hype and advertising just drowns everyone else out unless you have the money to shout as loud as anyone else or find the right advertising channel that doesn’t have the [...]

Where do you get the most out of a conference? Keynotes from the big names? Practical break out sessions with best practices? The showroom floor with vendors? Hallways receive my vote for the best part of a conference (especially those with big leather couches). I’ve been to large conferences with [...]