MySpace, Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and the list goes on; trying to keep up and maintain all my junk accounts friends status got to be a little overwhelming. At any given time I’d have tabs to an array of communication tools and personal blogs just to stay in touch with friends and family, so I decided it was time to consolidate.

What really drove me to make the move was the daily use of IM in the work environment combined with Twitter for the social environment, lets just say lots of open windows. I took a look at Digsby, just as a trial, and it’s one of the best virtual workspace decisions I’ve made because I no longer have to login to each individual account to get messages and alerts. Once you’ve download the application simply input your username and passwords to the various communication tools you’d like to use and bam…one app to rule them all. Plus with some easy Twitter Apps, I can now send all my updates right to my Facebook profile, no need to continually post to several systems (not a big MySpace user). Do what I did, get rid of all those needless windows and consolidate to one clean system, your computers performance will thank you.

To Ning or Not to Ning - that’s the question around here. Who has the time to join (or start, for that matter) another social network? I have enough trouble finding time to twitter.

The subject did come up in a marketing meeting the other day and while some of us thought Ning was dead there were others who thought it just might be gearing up to take over as one of the best advertising opportunities out there.

I may just be one of them.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not a good morning when I walk into Starbucks and the line is out the door. The other day this happened and the lady behind me inches towards me and says “You gotta really want it today, huh?”. Pfft, lady, I want it everyday. But, let me be honest with myself though, and tell you what I really want. I want to walk into a coffee shop— a local coffee shop—like the first coffee shop I ever frequented in Pacific Beach, California. No corporate mugs or teddy bears. No ham sandwiches, glazed donuts, or skinny-2
pump-vanilla-1 pump-caramel-no whip-lattes. It’s such a vague memory now, but I remember coffee, and banana nut bread which came in fresh from a local vendor. It was simple.

“Err on the side of simple.”

This was possibly the downfall of Starbucks: the opening of too many stores, selling too many products, and not concentrating enough on the coffee consumer. But has that changed? With declining sales, and changing CEO hands from Jim Donald to Howard Schultz earlier this year, Starbucks closed its doors for 3 hours on February 25th for a barista training session among 7,1000 stores. What was the purpose? According to The Seattle Times, “The retraining is part of Starbucks’ plan to revive its brand and sales growth, which by one measure sank to an all-time low last quarter.”

Last month Schultz introduced its five-point plan to boost sales and bring back the customer experience. The press release used terms like “revolutionary” and “reinvention”, but what received my attention was the term “online community”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone here at LevelTen is VERY excited that NationalBreastCancer.org is one of five nominees for Best Charitable/Non-profit sites that “empower and educate people, facilitate civic participation and enable learned pursuits.” Working on a project that educates and gives hope to those affected by breast cancer was incredibly rewarding…and quite challenging at times. Here are a few of the lessons we learned while working on this project: Read the rest of this entry »

I love it!

An introspective article over at A List Apart by Luke Wroblewski delves into the reasons why…

we can do better. In fact, I believe we can get people engaged with digital services in a way that tells them how such services work and why they should care enough to use them. I also believe we can do this without explicitly making them fill out a sign-up form as a first step.

The blog is an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks (Rosenfeld Media, 2008), and you can read it here!

The article is super informative, and expounds upon the practice of gradual engagement, whereby a user is drawn into the website due to useful or practical information that pertains to their specific needs. Avoid gradual engagement solutions that simply distribute the various input fields in a sign-up form across multiple pages. It’s a good possibility that this will reduce efficiency and not delight anyone.

At SXSW last week, I was surprised to learn just how many people spend time out of their day Twittering. Yes, I had heard of Twitter, but I never understood the appeal of writing about every little thing I do during the day. And honestly, I don’t think people would want to know every detail of my life. In a sense, I agree with Eric Webber from AdAge, that Twitter is an “exercise in vanity and a reminder that our lives are filled with a lot of mundane activity.”

If you are unfamiliar with Twitter, it’s basically a personal page to write mini-blog posts, 140 characters or less, to keep your friends updated on your life. It’s your response to the question, “What are you doing?” Like other social networks, you can friend people and follow their updates. Common Craft explains the whole Twitter process very well in this YouTube video.

It seems that this way of communication has become extremely popular with professionals because everyone can update their Twitter page from their Blackberry, iPhone or other PDA device. In a way, it gives people something to do while they are waiting in line, sitting in a meeting or listening to a SXSW Interactive panel.

On a side note, Twitter played a large role in the Mark Zuckerberg Keynote interview, when the audience turned on interviewer Sara Lacey. It provided a way for the audience to band together and share similar thoughts about the interview as it was happening.

Without being a member of the site myself, the main appeal I see is getting snippets of information quickly. This is really part of a larger trend in communication. We all have shorter attention spans these days and this trend is beggining to be reflected in the ways we communicate. We prefer to send text messages to tell a friend that we are “running late to lunch,” instead of wasting a minute on a phone call. We want to get straight to the point when we get our news, so instead of taking the time to visit the websites for Fox News, CNN, etc, we use RSS feeds. People do not want to waste their time reading a lengthy news article, they want the facts quickly. This is especially evident in the fact that we have much more information thrown at us on a daily basis. More information than a person can absorb. So in order to grab as much information as possible, we want quick snippets of the headlines and that is exactly what Twitter offers, quick snippets.

While Twitter is mostly used for updates about individuals’ lives, I would not be surprised if news outlets start using a similar format to broadcast the daily headlines. The Twitter format has the potential to become the new way of communicating as people continue to demand a larger volume of information more quickly than before.

So instead of blogging about your day or writing an email to a friend, you will just have to answer the Twitter question, “What are you doing?”

When I found out Facebook.com Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg would be giving the first keynote talk at SXSW I was beyond excited. In a sense, it was like seeing a celebrity for me because I have been a fan of the site even before I was able to join at my university. I was looking forward to what I expected to be an interesting talk by a very intelligent entraprenuer, but what I experienced was something very unexpected.

About 20 minutes into the interview, the crowd turned on the interviewing journalist, Business Week columnist Sarah Lacy. Even the people sitting around me seemed to be instantly annoyed and fed-up with Lacy’s questions and most importantly her interviewing style. I was not previously familiar with Lacy and while I am sure she has the skills to moderate a high-profile interview like this, she certainly didn’t choose the appropriate style and did not take into consideration the type of audience at SXSW. Several times she cut Zuckerberg off while he was trying to make a point, but the part that shocked me was when Lacy explained how Zuckerberg can look like a bird when he answers questions. Unprofessional but mostly irrelevant. Read the rest of this entry »

When it was discovered that the Virginia Tech shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, got one of his weapons from online dealer TheGunStore.com, you’d think some sort of restrictions would be enacted to keep people with a mental illness from purchasing guns over the internet, or just in general.

You’d be wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

While I work in an interactive development agency, I still find my self a little lost sometimes with all of the new technology and online developments. Recently Chris Brogan wrote a great blog on how to help others understand social media, and I found that this was probably one of the most helpful blogs I’ve read in a long time.

Instead of using the most technical terms for everything, Brogan uses Common Craft videos to go over the three main aspects of social media in the simplest terms. The first of the three is Understanding Blogs, the second is Understanding RSS, and the last of these is Understanding Social Networking. If you click on those links, it will take you directly to the video page from Common Craft - which, by the way, has such a plethora of videos that help you understand a wide range of topics in terms you’re sure to understand. Even if you read blogs or have your MySpace or Facebook page, these videos are sure to shed some additional light on these subjects for you.

Another great outlet Brogan covers is literature. He goes over a list of books that might be helpful for you, your friends, coworkers and even your boss. The most important in his list is The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger. You can also go to their website (www.cluetrain.com) and download/read the entire text for free.

The last call to action in this blog is for others to share additional resources, books and sites that are helpful in understanding these subjects. What are some of the resources that you find helpful? Please feel free to share them with us!

Every morning when you wake up there is a routine that you have become accustomed too. Alarm goes off, you hit the snooze, alarm goes off again, you hit the snooze a little harder this time, then again and harder the alarm clock gets hit till finally you grunt, groan and finally get out of bed and in to the shower..off to work, stop for coffee, wake up some more and then maybe muster up enough energy to start working on your emails or phone calls. ugggggghhhh…. well this may not be your personal routine but its what a lot of people do in one way or another to get their day started. The problem with this is, they don’t really want to get up, and when you arent really happy about doing something, often times it reflects on the rest of our day. So what are some ways that we can change this?

I’s easy to recognize when you’re physically tired. You haven’t slept normally in days or even weeks. You can’t remember the last time you saw the inside of a gym. And enough caffeine is racing through your bloodstream to keep a small elephant alert. Read the rest of this entry »