A marketer without Facebook? It’s like Bert without Ernie–peanut butter without jelly. Aren’t they just better together?

Call it something of a test, but this marketer is doing a bit of back pedaling.

For years I have taunted my family, friends and peers for not jumping on the social media bandwagon. After all, it’s free marketing at your fingertips, and a fantastic means to reconnect and network. As the iFactory Marketing Manager, I created and maintain all of the iFactory social media accounts; as a freelance marketing consultant I guide clients on managing their own accounts; and as a teacher I encourage my students to enforce their personal brands via social media—you could call me a pretty big social media ambassador.

So why, then, did I deactivate my Facebook account over a month ago?
Continue reading…

Just a quick post, today, to pass along an incredibly interesting interview that focuses on search optimization.

In this interview (we recommend checking out the actual recording versus the transcript), Walter Underwood, Search Software Engineer of Netflix, talks about “how Netflix optimizes their search, using Solr, to improve the customer experience using autocomplete, improved findability and other techniques for over two million searches per day.”

This fairly technical interview covers a lot of relevant ground about scaling, caching and measuring how well search is performing from the user’s point of view.

> check out the interview

Text is everywhere. Our eyes have become so accustomed to reading in our environments that we’ve become unconscious to what an important role it plays in our lives. The invention of reading and writing may be the human beings’ most profound contribution to evolution of our world. Imagine communication without text? Remembering something without being able to write it down? Learning without reading?

I recently found myself during a site map presentation constantly reassuring clients, “Yes, we will test that nomenclature during usability testing.” Of course, at the same time I kept thinking to myself “Why wait?” This is exactly what card sorting exercises are designed for – to ensure your proposed structure, labels, and organization meet the users’ needs before wireframes and usability testing. However, when sitting down with Pete, iFactory’s lead strategist, we couldn’t decide which card sorting methodology – open vs. closed – was right for us. Could we fit the exercise into 30-minute sessions? Would we overwhelm the users? Would we get the right data? With those questions, and more, left unanswered we decided to do some research, which led us to an article by Danna Spencer in which she talks about this third method she created called a card-based classification evaluation. It was our “Ah ha!” moment. She claimed her methodology was as effective as a traditional card sort, but it was guaranteed to work in time blocks of 10-20 minutes. What did we have to loose?
Continue reading…