If markets are conversations, as the Cluetrain Manifesto said many years ago, it makes sense for businesses to think seriously about talking with and listening to consumers.
In a book published last year in Dutch and now available in English, Steven Van Belleghem (managing partner of marketing research agency InSites Consulting, a client of Typeclear) makes the case for a new kind of marketer. Continue reading »
Traditional advertising may be dying, but telling people about your stuff isn’t going anywhere.
Soluto gave me a good reminder of this on Monday. It’s a little application that makes your computer boot up more quickly, while building a base of user knowledge about what’s slowing it down. Oh alright… while using the wisdom of the crowd and the power of networks, if you like that sort of jargon.
It’s simple, it works, and they’ve been winning awards and a good deal of chatter on social media.
In fact, it was their copywriter who pushed me into trying it. Continue reading »
Wild-eyed readers
Eye-tracking research shows we’re amazingly undisciplined when we read. Even when presented with a well formatted text and a logical chain of ideas, our eyes disobediently skip ahead, pause, scuttle back to check meaning, and rush forward again whole lines and paragraphs.
The web offers additional temptation for wandering eyes. Buttons, links, images and attractive fonts are everywhere. On the web, eye discipline breaks down altogether. Continue reading »
The public are funny
A recent vox pop in Times Square asked the public to explain what they thought a browser was.
The results caused a few chuckles among more technologically-savvy people – coders, developers, and anyone at home on the internet.
What is a browser? Google! Which browser do you use? Yahoo!
But they pay our rent
But we should remember that the public are the people we make code for, design and produce content for. Having other things to do, they don’t spend eight hours a day in front of a monitor and don’t know all the tricks. To paraphrase David Ogilvy, “the typical internet user isn’t a moron, she is your wife”. Continue reading »