Perry
Hewitt
Web thought leaders and authors Karen McGrane and Ethan Marcotte now publish a popular responsive web design podcast. Each episode features an interview with the people who make responsive redesigns happen, and covers the various complexities from change management and organizational readiness to design optimization and monetizing mobile.
You can see my interview here, which talks about the current content strategy shift toward mobile, and a recent responsive redesign at Harvard.
Weekend fun: Jimmy Fallon runs down the pros and cons of Ello, the new ad-free social network.
Weekend fun: Anyone else remember using an SE/30 for wordprocessing or playing Dark Castle? A team working at the Harvard Innovation Lab has visualized the evolution of the desk (see the original video created by bestreviews.com) from an old-school Mac with accessories to your laptop today. Spoiler alert: there’s an app for that.
Last week, well over 10,000 digital marketers and technologists arrived in Boston for MITX’s Future M, and Hubspot’s Inbound.
For Future M, I was fortunate to participate in a fireside chat led by industry pro Sarah Fay on how to cultivate a digital team. Smart question from the audience: who are the three members I would bring to a desert island digital team? My answer: developer (always be building), storyteller (it’s vital to have a narrative, be it words and pictures), and strategist (define why are we doing what we’re doing — and what we’re NOT doing).
At Inbound, I presented the deck below on the Rise of the Chief Digital Officer. Not clear what the future is for that curious title, but the need for a digital competency that favors integration over education will certainly endure.
Thanks to all who attended and followed up later with great ideas and insights.
What do L’Oreal, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and McDonalds have in common? Like Harvard University, they all have CDOs. But what on earth does a CDO do in a world where almost everything is digital? A CDO is a means to catalyze change and to empower one person to accelerate digital capabilities across the enterprise. This session will focus on practical ways that CDOs, CMOs, and other enterprise leaders can create and innovate through digital strategy.
Weekend fun: The time-honored geek ritual of unboxing a new tech product is re-imagined in Blue Man Group’s video of the iPhone 6. But once unboxed, will it bend? Here’s a roundup of internet reactions to #bendgate.
Facebook is updating its News Feed, again. This set of changes focuses on putting more weight on trending topics, so your feed reflects more discussion of what’s going on right now. Now the recency of the likes and comments on posts will matter more, perhaps reducing the frequency of those odd moments when a friend’s heavily-liked wedding post resurfaces in your feed as they’re celebrating their third anniversary.Weekend fun: Tough week? Nervous about going long on today’s Alibaba IPO? Go ahead: watch some puppies playing with a GoPro.
Today, people don’t simply replicate offline activities online; rather, they create and engage in new mobile and social behaviors.
To get a sense of what’s new in digital, blink twice: helpful, innovative products are cropping up everywhere. But to build an institutional structure for digital engagement that will stand the test of time, organize once—smartly and creatively.
Change is now our norm. The last decade has produced a rapid and stunning transformation in digital behavior. Students arriving on college and university campuses in the fall of 2014 were born in 1996; back then, college students visited a physical location—a computer with a modem on a desk—to connect to the Internet and their new electronic-mail accounts. By the time today’s freshmen were in kindergarten, 62 percent of U.S. adults had mobile phones. Once the students reached middle school, iPhones were everywhere. This generation has grown up during the seismic shift from computing as a discrete activity to living with a ubiquitous Internet.
Today, people don’t simply replicate offline activities online; rather, they create and engage in new mobile and social behaviors. Our very language has changed. The graduating class of 2014 Instagrammed their selfies and Snapchatted their campus farewells before Ubering to the airport. Today, more than 90 percent of U.S. adults own mobile phones, 65 percent have smartphones, and 74 percent participate in social networks. The explosion of the mobile and social Internet thus extends far beyond the student body to the rest of the campus environment. Because of these deep-seated and rapid-fire changes, current digital engagement and expectations require fresh approaches to forging and maintaining connections with students, alumni, faculty, and staff.
Over the past five years, Harvard University has developed a strategy to advance digital communications and engagement. One key takeaway for us was simply this: why, how, and where an institution builds a state-of-the-art digital system is as important as, if not more important than, the technologies an institution ultimately chooses for building the system. That’s because if the first part is done right, the system will work far better, with both internal and external audiences vested in its success. In this process, strategic and audience-driven thinking trumps 3.0 tech.
Strong partnerships spanning campus communications and IT organizations, various schools, and the university’s central administration—as well as the core belief that we are co-developing these solutions with, and not simply for, our audiences—have buttressed our approach. Although there is no one simple roadmap for all higher education institutions, we laid out five steps that can ensure a solid foundation on which to build:
Weekend fun: Ever wonder what your favorite characters in videogames do when you wander away from the controller? Find out here — GIFS included.
Weekend fun: As I type this, some 80 million of my fellow Americans are sleeping. This clever visualization based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides an interactive and sortable view of what other Americans are doing.
It didn’t take long for Hyperlapse, a new, stand-alone app for time lapse videos, to reach the #3 spot in the app store. Created by the team at Instagram, the app has a sleek, simple user experience that belies the sophisticated capabilities under the hood. At right, my first attempt to magically speed up traffic in Harvard Square. Click to view on Instagram.Weekend fun: How can you make Game of Thrones even geekier? Add in some old school video game sound effects. You’ve been warned: serious nostalgia trigger for gamers over 30. Fun fact: there are now more adult women gamers than teenage boys.