January 28th 2016
In this video from the Delight Conference, I pull out some stops to tell the story of Market Basket which has become one of New England’s most storied brands and a frequently cited case study in public relations, negotiation and designing for delight.
January 25th 2014
A growing number of high-profile organizations – from DARPA to Adidas to the University of Michigan to Netflix and NASA – have run competitions which offer cash prizes to the best solution to a particular problem. Though these efforts may seem like sideshows, they can produce incredible, breakthrough ideas, often at a fraction of the cost of owned efforts.
December 19th 2010
Solitude – something freely available to everyone – seems rarer than all our hand-held technical marvels made of the most exotic materials on earth. A look at our digital lives, the night, and why we’re better for occasionally departing from the social stream.
November 29th 2010
Has Google made a privacy slip-up? Imagine finding your real gmail use portrayed on CNN. No matter what terms of use say, isn’t privacy inherent to providing a suitable email service?
April 27th 2010
Imagine you’re at a digital marketing conference today; there are four sessions about to start. Come on in. Are Online Marketers Over-Spending On Acquisition? Yep! Is Simplicity the Good Manners of Our Age? Laws of Simplicity and Simplicity in Laws Website Competitive Intelligence: Don’t Manage to Bogus Data Add Video to Your Marketing Mix Now: […]
April 2nd 2010
This Tuesday I had the challenge and opportunity to talk with a team of 20 legal marketers about how online experiences build and validate brands. It was a smart room; I’m glad to have been invited. How Do You Make a Great Page? Since my presentations are illustrations, you may get only the flavor of […]
January 20th 2010
A few years ago I showed my wife a t-shirt from Marketo, the San Mateo-based lead generation company. They were revolutionary, and to underscore that they had a manifesto, and their shirt featured an image of Che Guevara. My wife is a marketer who has lived in Central America; she immediately noted the use of […]
December 1st 2009
Back in the day when I was studying Lay Epistemology, a theory in social psych, Margaret Hagen held a lot of the cool in Boston University’s psychology department. She is the type of researcher who is rigorous, sarcastic, and unafraid to bite the hand that feeds her. Which means she’s fun and a smart read. […]
November 9th 2009
In Monrovia, Liberia, there’s a guy taking the matter of a lopsided, state-run media and reshaping it into a free-of-charge, independent news-aggregator—all accomplished with a whiteboard and couple of markers. (No Internet required!) Each morning, at 10:45 a.m., Alfred Sirleaf heads to his bulletin board to post the day’s news, culling together a slate of […]
April 7th 2009
Occasionally, one finds a website that does something a little different or a little better than everybody else. Recently, a friend pointed me towards a website whose Terms of Service (ToS ) makes a good-faith effort to explain in layman’s terms what the heck they are talking about. At Aviary.com, an online image editing service, […]
The future of digital experiences will be built by strategists who grasp the full array of emerging business, social, and technical models. Specialties in user experience, branding, application design, and data science are laying the foundation for richer user experiences and business models breakthrough products and revenue based marketing.
UsefulArts is a soapbox to discuss the front line of digital experience, and the agencies and platforms that enable it. Digital business needs a cadre of leaders who can connect c-level enterprise thinking with the ways these new interaction models can help organizations to matter more to their most important stakeholders.