Last week I participated in a data and gov tech roundtable hosted by Nick Sinai at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard Kennedy School. Nick brought together an all-star panel with Lynn Overmann, Todd Park, Aneesh Chopra, and newly-named U.S. Chief Data Scientist D.J. Patil. Entrepreneurs, academics, and officials exchanged ideas on the challenges of collecting, structuring, and …
Friday 5 — 2.20.2015
Consumer feedback is crucial in building a successful product. Understanding how and when to solicit it can make all the difference. Read and learn from these 5 mistakes we all make with product feedback. Marketing is now in the experience business. In a digital era, marketers need to invest in user experience as a critical competency, and embrace …
What Google knows to show you
Google has come a long way from the user experience of “ten blue links.” Today, Google pulls in a vast amount of the information it searches, has a keener understanding of what you are looking for — and serves it up to you directly. Google’s organization of the world’s data, called ‘The Knowledge Graph,’ affects about 25% of …
Check your normative defaults
Your software has opinions — here’s how to spot them In July of this year, Facebook made a small design change that reflected a large shift in perspective. On both the desktop and the mobile app the globe icon in the blue bar became dynamic rather than static, reflecting your position on the planet. If you were …
Friday 5 — 12.5.2014
We’re all producing more video, but who’s watching? Unlike written content, where a strong open may draw a reader in, there is a divide between those who press play on a video, and those who don’t. This post suggests that video consumption may not be evenly distributed across your audience — and you may have a very specific segment that forms …
Friday 5 — 11.28.2014
Technology surrounds us, but what do most internet users understand about it? A Pew survey on web and digital technology found that only 23% of adult users are aware that “the Internet” and “the World Wide Web” are not the same thing. And while 83% of those surveyed could correctly identify Bill Gates, fewer than half knew that Facebook started at …
Friday 5 — 11.14.2014
Beyond audience analytics and editorial review, what are some other ways to suss out how well your website content is performing? Here are seven website graders you can try today. We’re all hoping for a silver bullet for email management, but Google Inbox isn’t it. While the Material Design approach makes the app look slick, the default bundling of conversations and …
Friday 5 — 10.17.2014
Twitter has enabled streaming audio to a limited number of partners via Audio Cards using Soundcloud. Now users can listen, like and share audio content on SoundCloud without leaving Twitter. This feature will be big for music, and useful for finding new audiences for public radio programming. Audio excerpts might also serve up interesting teasers for online learning content. With …
How to lead a responsive web design
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 …
Future M and Inbound
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 …