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From Wall Street Journal: Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over. In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.
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From A List Apart: The value in usability testing comes from the magic of observing and listening as people use a design. The things you see and the things you hear are often surprising, illuminating, and unpredictable. This unpredictability is tough to capture in any other way. Dana Chisnell shows you how.
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From Mark Hurst at Good Experience: Whenever I give a talk on solving email overload, someone inevitable raises their hand and says, "How can I get my coworkers to stop sending me so many emails?" It's a legitimate question, as lots of people suffer from needless emails in the workplace.
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Leading After Layoffs: Best Practices for Re-Energizing Your Workforce is a fine and accessible short book. Did you know that a 1 percent reduction in force can have a huge negative ripple effect throughout the organization?
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From Church of the Customer: Facebook fan pages are the future for three reasons: They're free, easy to create and build a nearly instantaneous pathway to evangelists, prospects or the curious.
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the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released new guidelines (.pdf document) for how businesses can use endorsements and testimonials in marketing. It’s a complicated and nuanced matter. Hopefully the presentations below will help you better understand what has happened and what marketers must be doing now.
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So you want to look like a genius? Most often, we stumble our way into the greatest of breakthroughs.
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Some research suggests that people will forgive a leader who is wrong some of the time if only that leader is really confident. Apparently people prefer confidence to competence.
It turns out that groups with confident leaders do better than groups whose leaders are not as confident. So even with incompetence in leadership, those groups prosper.
Learn How Using Social Networking and Social Media Can Help Improve Your Nonprofit Organization
From Electronic Frontier Foundation: 3rd party advertising and tracking firms are ubiquitous on the modern web. When you visit a webpage, there's a good chance that it contains tiny images or invisible JavaScript that exists for the sole purpose of tracking and recording your browsing habits. This sort of tracking is performed by many dozens of different firms. In this post, we're going to look at how this tracking occurs, and how it is being combined with data from accounts on social networking sites to build extensive, identified profiles of your online activity.
This article is about a method drawn from storytelling that can help us build a better story about our product, unify teams, inspire design concepts and get us closer to evoking the pleasure, emotion and meaning of the experience we intend to deliver to users through the products and services we design.
From Henry Fogel. appear to have caused some confusion in the past with my comments about orchestra board members who try to wield too much authority in programming decisions, and conversely about conductors who adopt an autocratic, almost dictatorial stance, saying, "I am in charge of all artistic matters--just leave me alone." In a private email I was recently asked, "Which is it, Mr. Fogel? Is the music director in charge? Or the board? Or, for that matter, the management?"
Fill-in-the-blank correspondence
By Peter Merholz at Harvard Business Blog. Design thinking is trotted out as a salve for businesses who need help with innovation. The idea is that the left-brained, MBA-trained, spreadsheet-driven crowd has squeezed all the value they can out of their methods. To fix things, all you need to do is apply some right-brained turtleneck-wearing "creatives," "ideating" tons of concepts and creating new opportunities for value out of whole cloth.
In his extensive experience with communities of practice building software together, Chris Mackey says that muscle takes time to build bulk and dexterity. Early efforts are invariably designed to solve immediate problems, often narrowly defined. But the process of resolving those problems together made the group smarter, more sophisticated, and more prepared to grow into the challenge of a larger frame.
