If You Watch It, You'll Probably Buy It

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YouTube opened a new conduit through which marketers could reach consumers but what they created wasn't just a new video distribution channel like some alternate form of television. They've gone beyond simply offering a different technology for message transmission. YouTube allows marketers to harness the consumer base itself as part of a modern strategy. The once passive receivers of television and radio advertisements have, through YouTube, become part of the salesforce.

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Say No to Placeholder Text

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We spend a good part of our days filling out screen-based forms. Some forms are easy to fill out because a thoughtful designer has taken best practices into account. Some forms are painful because they create confusion over what's expected. They're ambiguous or they require too much typing. Here's a snippet of wisdom that I wanted to save for later use: ditch the placeholder text.

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Social Media in Space

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Government agencies need to explain and promote the value of their efforts to taxpayers. They’re in a constant fight for government tax dollars as surely as corporations are in competition for consumer dollars. An all-star social media user within the U.S. government is NASA. Let’s take a look at how they use social to their best advantage and contrast their efforts with two of their closest counterparts: the European Space Agency (ESA) and Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as SpaceX.

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The Ethnography of Online Communities

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In his book The Social Code, author Patrick Hanlon argues that social media communities can be characterized by seven distinct elements: a creation story, a creed, icons, rituals, sacred words or lexicons, non-believers, and a leader. In this post, I'm going to test his thesis by comparing his criteria to a Facebook interest group called “Space Hipsters.” 

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You say you want feedback…but do you really?

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In the age of the corporate intranet, one of the most obvious methods for taking the temperature of the staff is the online comment forum or discussion board. It is precisely because the solution seems so obvious that the decision to adopt it is usually made without a thoughtful consideration of the consequences. The manager who asks for employee feedback may get more than she bargained for. Save yourself some aggravation (and unpleasant surprises) by being honest about how much feedback you're really willing to accept.

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