Every Big Idea Starts With A Simple Sketch

Twitter first draft by Jack Dorsey.

Smart Clients Become Their Agency’s Best Client – Steve Jobs’ And Phil Knight’s Marketing Secret

Great post by Avi Dan…

To get the most out of their agency, smart clients become their agency’s best client. Steve Jobs understood this. So did Phil Knight from Nike. They understood what matters to agencies and to agency people:

1. Death by nitpicking. Nothing wears out agencies faster than re-do’s, having to rework the same idea over and over again. I had a simple rule with my agency: we allowed ourselves only 3 strikes.  If, by the third revision, the idea was still not approved, we retired it and moved on to the next idea.
2. People who can say, “Yes”. Too often the agency has to present ideas to middle managers who are not decision makers, and whose role is often limited to rejecting ideas. Smart clients involve the person who can say “Yes” from the get-go, be it the CMO or even the CEO.
3. Collaboration. Agencies crave respect – clients that empower them to have a more consultative relationship, rather than a vendor-like arrangement. A key value an agency can bring to the relationship is third-party objectivity, as the client view and the customer view need to be supplemented by an independent agency view in a healthy relationship.
4. Creative hothouse. Creative showcase accounts, and the chance to win creative awards, attract a disproportionate share of the agency’s, and the industry, best talent. A great client has uncompromising standards of creativity and an almost religious belief in a great brief.
5. Evaluations. Great clients are objective and encourage two-way communication. They implement a 360-degrees evaluation process, where client and agency have equal input. For great clients, the evaluation process is a dialogue, not a report card. It is designed to inspire mastery, beyond just capturing functioning capability.
6. Compensation. Smart clients encourage agencies to become their business partners and be measured by business results, aligning compensation with outcomes, and giving them an opportunity for maximizing their upside.

It is up to the CMO and his or her marketing team to create an atmosphere of excellence on their business, and an inspired culture of achievement. An great client, one with the passion to become an agency’s best client, will attracts a disproportionate amount of agency talent that will give it a strategic competitive edge.

Follow Avi on Twitter.

Subjot Is Not Just Another Twitter Clone

Do we really need more social networks? Looking at New York based Chris and Becky Carella’s latest venture, Subjot, the answer could well be ‘yes’. Subjot, on the other hand, makes a decent effort in terms of setting itself apart.

It’s not just another Twitter clone. There’s no denying that there’s a ton of similarities but there is one feature in particular which is pretty interesting – and that is the ability to curate the content you follow from other users. So instead of following all of their status updates, you can view a list of the topics they ‘jot’ about, and select only the ones that are of interest to you.

How does it work?

When sending an update, which is limited to 250 characters, you can accompany that update with a ‘subject’ of your choice. People who follow you can then select from your subjects what exactly they want to hear about. Read full article…

GIF Shop – Brilliant New iPhone App

Love it! The animated .gif maker for your iPhone. Easily create and edit looping animations, upload to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr all on the go! get it at the app store

Big Idea! Event-driven Programming For The Masses – ifttt.com

ifttt – Short for “if this then that”.
New Service with the potential to make a significant impact.

In today’s time-pressured world, people are constantly looking for ways to speed up their daily tasks. Hoping to help towards that end, we recently came across ifttt — an application that allows users to exercise their creativity in automating certain online activities. Ifttt hopes to automate digital tasks so that they can trigger a function for which they were not originally designed. This is made possible through a “trigger” and “action” model. For example, a trigger could be “If I’m tagged in a photo on Facebook”. When this occurs, it will automatically execute an action, such as “create a tweet on twitter”. Tibbets gives another example: “For instance, you can use Google reader starred items to share images on your Tumblr blog, or customize how and which photos from your Flickr stream show up on your Facebook wall.” These tasks can be turned on and off, with a maximum of ten being turned on at once. Ifttt ultimately relies on the creativity of its users to effectively automate their online activities. However, by making this a simple and intuitive process, Ifttt has the potential to make a significant impact.

Related articles

• Use Ifttt to Make the Internet Work for You (appreaders.com)
• ifthisthenthat | Web Task Automation (rubbishcorp.com)

Apple Takes On Instapaper

The news comes only a few days after Arment said that he will retire the free version of Instapaper on the iPhone and iPad, …

Instapaper developer Marco Arment doesn’t seem too worried though, saying on Twitter,

“For many reasons, I believe Instapaper would still have a market even if Apple implemented Reading List synced to iOS devices.” He also said that it appears the feature is more closely imitating ReadItLater at the moment, which isn’t as feature-rich as Instapaper.

Related Blog Post

• Paid Apps vs. Free Apps – Intriguing Insights by Marco Arment (Instapaper)
• Apple takes on Instapaper, ReadItLater with “Reading List” for Safari (venturebeat.com)

A Crowdsourced ‘Timeline for the World’

Thanks Angela Maiers for your comment on my recent post around crowdsourcing tools. You recommended vineme.com as a very useful tool. For almost one year  Josh Fleming, Tony Muse and Chris Taulborg have been hard at work building Des Moines’ newest startup, VineMe. VineMe is billed as a “social platform that allows the world to crowdsource content by time, tags, places and people.” (public launch March 31, 2011). Here is what Josh Fleming says about this new crowdsourcing venture:

“We want to curate life through visual content. I always enjoy discovering content in new ways. It’s why people flocked to the internet. It’s why Google quickly became a verb. It’s why apps are so popular. The combination of discovery and ease of use is what is driving technology today. We think VineMe offers both.”

“Storify” Your Social Media Life – Now In Public Beta

Image via CrunchBase

http://storify.com,  a company building tools to help journalists, bloggers and experts curate the real-time Web.

Storify stories have been viewed more than 13 million times on their site and across the Web since private beta launch in September 2010. They had 4.2 million views just in March.

Private beta users have created more than 21,000 stories. Storify stories have been embedded on more than 5,000 sites — including some of the most-read destinations on the Web like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, BBC, NPR, PBS, CBC and many other blogs and sites.

Related Articles

• Curation Tool Storify Opens To The Public (readwriteweb.com)
• Social Reporting Tool Storify Raises $2 Million (mashable.com)

The Three Muscles of Creativity – Inspiring Short by Intel

In this Intel Visual Life short documentary, Michael Wolff, co-founder of Wolff Olins Agency and considered one of the preeminent visionaries and perhaps the father of 20th century brand expression and identity, talks about his approach to looking at the world, including the muscles of curiosity, appreciation, and imagination. I admire the innovative branding work of Wolff Olins. This short documentary is another reminder of what it’s all about.

“I have three muscles, without which I couldn’t do my work. The first is curiosity. (You can call it inquisitiveness, you can call it questioning.) The second muscle [is] the muscle of appreciation. It’s not questioning so much as it is noticing… how joyful things can be, how colorful things can be, what already exists as an inspiration. The muscle of curiosity and the muscle of appreciation enable the muscle of imagination. Everybody knows that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. What few people realize it is only through the parts that the whole gets delivered. I see seeing as a muscular exercise, like I see curiosity. It’s a kind of being open, really: If you walk around with a head full of preoccupation, you’re not going to notice anything in your visual life.” ~ Michael Wolff”

“State of Cloud Computing” by Jess3

Visit http://www.thestateofcloudcomputing.com/ for up to the minute stats on cloud computing.

“State of Cloud Computing,” is an encompassing look at the history of cloud computing and the growing cloud economy.

The State of Cloud Computing video highlights the multitude of possibilities that cloud computing offers, from sharing videos and photos from anywhere in the world to storing and organizing data for remote access. Skype, Dropbox, YouTube, Wikipedia, Yahoo, MSN, Gmail, Farmville and Twitter are all referenced, and the video provides a snapshot of statistics.

The fact is, unless you have been living under a rock, you are in the cloud. Cloud computing touches us in numerous ways in our daily lives. As cloud computing continues to evolve, so does our ability to express ourselves and accomplish amazing things on the World Wide Web.

The conversation about cloud computing is happening around us. The three-minute video is hosted on a micrositehttp://www.thestateofcloudcomputing.com that aggregates the conversation about cloud computing across the web, including Top Cloud Computing Links, Top Cloud Computing Terms and Cloud Computing Around The Web, which pulls Tweets in real-time that are related to the cloud.

Sponsored by salesforce.com, an enterprise cloud computing company, and produced in collaboration with JESS3, a creative interactive agency, the video is part of a broader family of videos, The “State of” series, which launched earlier in 2010.

Related Articles

• The Impact of Cloud Computing on SEO (bruceclay.com.au)