Posts by David Poteet

[ March 9, 2009 ]

Why your website is not an ad

Let's get one thing straight. Your website is NOT an ad. It's your front door. With an ad, you start the conversation. The customer is listening. You hope they'll respond.

With your website, a person chooses to walk in the door for a reason. Every link they click is a chance for them to tell you that reason. Your site has to anticipate their questions and lead them quickly to success. Along the way you'll have opportunities to tell your story.

How you approach this question of "Who starts the…

[ March 5, 2009 ]

There’s nothing like a good fight between creatives and techies

John Williams and I had lunch recently and talked about a funny question. How come "creative" and "technical" people get along at NewCity – unlike every other place he's worked in his previous 10 years? (Nevermind the fact that some of the most creative people I know are IT people). John wrote about it in a recent blog post too, but I wanted to share my perspective.

One of the things we identified is how we handle a conflict. Here's the perfect setup:

Timeline is set at start of project.
A…

[ February 9, 2009 ]

Carewords results from Imperial College

I wrote in January about the work we're doing for Imperial College Research Support. Research Support serves academics and administrative staff as they pursue research funding and manage ongoing research projects. They came to us because people found their site difficult to navigate, and they wanted to streamline the user experience. As part of that effort we conducted a Carewords survey to get a better idea of what people are looking for when they come to the site. Read on for the results of the survey.

[ December 30, 2008 ]

Doing a Carewords Survey for Imperial College London

We're working on a user experience project right now for Imperial College London's Research Support group. This group serves the needs of academics and administrative staff on the Imperial College campus as they pursue funding for research and manage ongoing research contracts. As part of the project we are conducting a Carewords Survey, which is an approach developed by Gerry McGovern for identifying the top tasks of your site visitors. You can see the actual survey we set up for Imperial College London below.

Gerry wrote recently about how top task performance heavily influences branding:

The essence of the brand is the experience customers have with a product or service. There is of course a visual component in branding but it has been vastly overemphasized. When we think of Google do we think of a colorful logo or a fast way to find stuff? Web brands, in particular, are functional. The successful ones help us do useful things.

[ December 19, 2008 ]

College Facebook groups getting hijacked

Brad Ward reported yesterday on his Squaredpeg blog that he's uncovered what looks like rings of people who are creating groups for incoming freshmen classes on Facebook (or getting admin privileges on these groups) for questionable purposes. These people are not actually applying to or planning to attend these schools. They may be developing networks that will allow them to easily target students with marketing campaigns.

Schools need to be aware that their Facebook communities may be hijacked…

[ September 26, 2008 ]

Changing Behavior through Experience

Advertising Age reported on Advertising Age's CNBC CEO Summit earlier this week. In their article they quoted BBDO CEO Andrew Robertson, who said:

"We used to think about messages that created a case for a particular behavior. It's not about that now. It's about creating experiences that, by participating in them, change consumer behavior. I'm only interested in behavior. Everything else is just a proxy for it. Unless behavior changes, it's all been a waste of time and money. That's an…

Prev // Next

Search the blog.

Results that speak.

"With our work over several marketing projects, New City has helped NSTA grow the usage of the NSTA Learning Center and engage strategic partners who have invested in the Learning Center."

- Al Byers, The National Science Teachers Association