Archive: September 2008

The digital revolution has made its way to the U.S. Postal Service. Starting in May 2009, USPS will put scannable bar codes on business- and first- class mail. Dubbed “Intelligent Mail”, this technology makes it possible to track the movement and delivery of all of your bulk mailings—truly invaluable information. From Kilplinger.com:

“Businesses can expect the bar codes to bring the same kinds of efficiencies in data mining and management found online to snail-mail billing and direct marketing. The digital mail revolution, named “Intelligent Mail” by the USPS, will help companies zero in on their best sales prospects by much more quickly gauging response rates to mail offers and tweaking pitches if they flub. It’ll be a huge improvement over today’s system of not knowing for weeks whether an ad or promotion was a hit or a dud.”

Online marketing is a quick-or-dead business, which is probably why people try to shave microseconds by turning everything into an acronym. Alexandra Wharton pulled together this nice little glossary of online marketing terms, so you can know what the heck to say when you asked:

“Do you want to learn from link bait with PPC, or test a blanket effect with PPI?

You won’t find it at your local U-Haul store. Or in a geometry textbook. And it’s not a style of old-school punching techniques created by the famed boxer Jack Johnson.

A Johnson Box is found at the top of a direct mail letter to summarize the key offer and entice the reader to read on. Often, it’s framed and features a larger font size. Legendary direct mail copywriter Frank Johnson is credited with the invention of the Johnson Box.

Since most people would rather watch paint dry than read a four-page letter, the Johnson Box gives readers a condensed version of the offer. Johnson Boxes have also been adapted for use in e-mails, so expect this relic to survive the 21st century.

Bottom line: If you don’t feel like reading, check out the Johnson Box and the P.S. line—you’ll get the point fast.

In our relentless pursuit of analytic perfection, we present to you a pie chart of things Rick Astley would never do.

Find more examples of people analyzing pop culture in their free time at GraphJam.

A friend and mentor, Mike Yapp, often spoke to clients about his 3 questions (Yapp’s 3 rules) that any home page must answer. They were:

• Who are you?
• What do you do?
• Who do you do it for?

These questions are the most important goal to accomplish with any home page as you need to quickly communicate to users about your brand and why should it be relevant to them.

Why the urgency? Well, for any new or uninformed user, they will spend perhaps a total of < 5 seconds reviewing the site depending on where they came from and why they are there. It is important that they understand your brand and what it means to them.

This is part of the Brand and Communications problem that most websites face. They fail to really understand who they are and what they want to communicate to their customers.

The second common challenge on many websites is part of the inherent value of the web and leads us to our next set of rules: Focus, focus, focus!

Most company websites try to tell all their audience everything that the company wants them to hear. The two challenges inherent here, are a lack of priority and not focusing on what the user’s needs are.

For any site, ecommerce, company main site, etc. there are multiple audiences who come to the site. A company needs to prioritize its audiences into a hierarchy and prioritize its messaging and home page real-estate to communicating to them. This has as much to do with messaging as design as user-experience, but the lesson is the same: Focus on the most important users and tell what they need to hear to act on what you want them to act on.

The second challenge here stems from the very nature of the web. A website is available to everyone. But it doesn’t need to speak to everyone who could possibly come to your site. Common secondary audiences for most company sites are press & analysts as well as job seekers. Both of these types of users are motivated to interact with your site and don’t need precious home-page real estate dedicated to them. They know where to find the news and careers sections (in the About US) of your site with little effort as long as your navigation is clear and you have a site map.

So I would expand these rules to the following:

1. Clearly explain your Brand and Value proposition through addressing these 3 questions:
   1. Who are you?
   2. What do you do?
   3. Who do you do it for?
2. Focus your efforts on your home page on convincing the primary users of your website on what you want them to do
3. Prioritize your messaging through clear design and user-experience on clearly communicating to your users what they need to know and how you want them to act

Not long ago, new stories broke with the morning headlines. Each story from the major media outlets had a big impact and carried the conversation for the day. Then, people would wait for the next update from the evening news or through the follow on stories from the next day.

Today’s stories are broken in real time. Updates and opinions pile in from the thousands of alternative new sources online every minute. I’d argue that each new story carries less weight. This new media landscape balances major news outlets with bloggers and other media outlets that were created with the new digital world.

There are positives and negatives to all of this, however:

1. Everyone Steals the Thunder - In the past, if there was a leak, it would be hard for the leak to spread to quickly. Nowadays, it’s just a quick post and away we goooo….

2. Information Viability - With more and more incidents of bad information being spread…it’s hard to tell if a news story is real or made up. Who and what do you trust…. (see United Airlines old news story posted resulting in a 75% sell of the stock).

3. Polarizing of News - In the past, you saw fewer informational outlets who were all more or less unbiased. Now, I find there are significantly more news sources but they are more polarized and biased. I find myself attracted to those I personally find digestable.

4. False Facts Have Greater Impact - With so much information online and no methodical way to fact-check everything put online, false stories carry farther especially when it is something people “want to believe.” This causes untrue facts to spread long before it is debunked.

I am of course a true believer of the benefits that the digital web has brought to bear when it concerns information. We hear more and learn more quicker and faster. Common everyday people can now command an audience without having to go to a media giant. It’s makes the world smaller. We can learn about any story around the world anytime at the touch of our fingertips.

However, it is just as frustrating with some of the unsettling ways media is growing online. It will be interesting to see how this matures over the next few years.

Unless you’ve been operating your business out of a cave for the past decade, you’ve probably heard the call to “go green” with your marketing. [Note: caves are very eco-friendly]

Here are six ways to minimize the environmental impact of your mailpiece.

1. Design ecologically. Combine bind-ins and ride-alongs with your mailpiece in a poly or polywrap to reduce the number of separate mailings and the paper needed for those mailings.

2. Choose certified paper. Third-party certifications such as the Forest Stewardship Council, Sustainable Forestry Initiative and the Pan European Forest Council let recipients know that the paper was made with wood pulp from healthy, well-managed forests.

3. Use “green” ink. Ask your printer if it uses renewable resource-based inks such as those made from a blend of various vegetable oils. There is even a printer who will plant a tree on your behalf for every job printed bearing the Green ink® logo. Published on Digital Output, this article by Melissa Tetreault addresses the present state and future direction of green ink.

4. Update your mailing lists often. About 41 million people changed addresses last year, yet 33 percent of those people never reported their new address to the U.S. Postal Service. Engage a mailing list service that can eliminate wasted mailings and the associated energy, paper, ink and fuel costs. If you are a member of the Direct Mail Association, there are several good white papers available on this subject including: “Where Did My Customer Go? the Problem of Undeliverable-As-Addressed Mail”.

5. Co-mail. Reduce fuel consumption and emissions—and your postage bill—by co-mailing. The process combines two or more magazine or catalog titles into a single mailstream. Quad Graphics, one of the largest privately held printers in the world, has a lot of good information on co-mailing.

6. Promote recycling. The beauty of print is it’s 100 percent recyclable. Take part in promotional campaigns to help increase recovery rates and use the “Recycle Please” logo on your mailpiece. The DMA has an industry wide public education campaign that encourages the recycling of catalogs, magazines, DM and packing.

I have found the best definition of graphic design is, a visual communication that combines images, words, and ideas to convey information to an audience. So in a nutshell, my job as a graphic designer is to basically organize someone else’s information and make it attractive and enticing. At SolutionSet I mostly design for the world-wide-web, or as it is sometimes called, “the information superhighway.” The Internet allows us to stack layers upon layers of information and access this information anywhere and anytime; the list of things we can do with information on the web is endless.

Recently I read the book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell. This book takes a deeper look at how we use the information that we pull in from all around us to make decisions. The author is particularly interested in an idea he calls “thin-slicing.” Thin-slicing is the ability of our unconscious to make rapid decisions in a situation solely based on a very narrow ’slice’ of that given situation. Gladwell states that in certain situations the judgments we make in a couple of seconds can be as good as or as reliable as those we reach after careful deliberation. He gives numerous examples through experiments and life stories where people made a decision based on tons of information or very minimal information. The results were very counterintuitive in a lot of these situations. He is not saying in all cases, but in certain instances thin-slicing was more accurate because too much information can actually get in the way of making a decision.

It started me thinking how this applies to the communication of information through design, especially when trying to introduce a brand on the web. The web gives us the ability to offer up buckets and buckets of information and in most cases the more information we have the better decision we can make. Is this correct in all situations? I’d have to say no. A brand is strongest when it can cause an emotional reaction as well as appeal to us analytically, especially if you are trying to start a relationship between a brand and a user. But, since the viewer may have only a few seconds before they click onto the next website, you must grab the viewer quickly on a gut level and entice him/her further into your brand. Then you can appeal to them on a more analytical level and offer more information about your brand. In order to grab the viewer at that emotional gut level, the designer must use the most simplified - yet specific communication that is based off their core understanding of the brand.

A brand is a balance of information and emotional understanding, and this is where I have found SolutionSet’s strength. We are a group of dreamers and a group of realists. A group of people who think in code and a group of people who think colors and typography can change mood. This dynamic of opposites allows for a balanced solution to a given design problem. We know when to trim the fat and when to fatten it up, and it shows in our designs.

His name? Claude Hopkins. His deal? Believed that advertising existed only to sell something. Hopkins wrote a book called “Scientific Advertising” (available here in it’s entirety) about which David Ogilvy said “Nobody should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times. It changed the course of my life.” We tend to agree.

If you feel like you’ve been in too many conversations about brand currency and the appropriate use of logos, color palette, and the like, then this book will remind you that all marketing issues come back to this: “Will it help sell more widgets?”.

If you’re not sure a book about marketing written over 80 years ago is relevant today, just read Chapter 2. Good, good stuff.

One of the things I like doing when I have just 15mins of free time on weekends - you know, not long enough to actually get out of the house or read a book or get into a TV show or nap, but too long to do nothing – is surf around delicious. It never gets old because there is just an amazing amount of cool stuff on the internet that I would never find on my own because I don’t really read a lot of blogs and I don’t have enough time during the week to keep up with all the latest web2.0socialmediacloudblogwidgetmashup news out there. And of course, every time I go there I discover new diversions.

So I thought I’d share a random assortment of neat things I found there this weekend.

First, I found this interesting article on 8 everyday words with X-rated origins. You need to read it. Suffice to say, I will be using the word “hysterical” more often now.

Then, I decided I need to grow up a bit and started to see if there was actually anything useful that could improve my life. I found this very cool online calculator. Actually, the calculator itself was no big thang since I don’t really need to know the cosine of an angle or multiply anything by pi, but I really liked the unit conversion deely on the right side. See, I grew up outside of the US and so I have never figured out how many ounces in a cup and I am berated all the time by my wife because my cooking is good but always just a little off. Too much chicken broth, for instance. I’m convinced its because I am measuring-unit challenged. I see glory days of following recipes to perfection in my future.

Now, this one people probably know about, but it was news to me. Wordle lets you create word clouds from text. I have no idea why you would want to do that but I thought since I had come this far, it would be fun to put in something kinda boring. Like the investment strategy of Fog City Capital, the private equity firm where I work (and one of SolutionSet’s investors). Here’s what came out.

Finally, I found a site that, Kent Bancroft, who works in SolutionSet’s accounting department could have used this week. Let me explain. Kent lost the key to his car, but it was a key with an electronic thingie in it which needs to talk to the car wirelessly for the car to start. Of course the spare key does not have the electronic thingie, so it did not work (and hence, is not really a spare – but that’s a different topic). So he had to get his car towed to the dealer whose electronic thingie maker was broken. Long story short (and $300 short), Kent could have used this site.

I was on a roll; I could keep going. Except that I was woken up from my websurfing by my 6-month old who had just woken up.