I have been very vocal about my disdain for the MBTA, particularly over the past winter when they were significantly late nearly every day. When asked about why, they flat out lied to us about why they were late and we later found out that the conductors themselves were on a soft strike. To top it off, instead of trying to fix their problems with timeliness, they changed the schedule, basing it on the times that they could actually arrive. They did all of this without ever consulting or communicating with their loyal customers. They eventually resolved their labor issue and I (sort of) got over the fact that they wimped out and made changes to the new schedule that still, in my mind, works against people who need to get their kids to day care and then to the train.

Things have been going well until recently. You see, it has been hot outside. Our line, the Worcester line, uses CSX tracks. When it gets hot enough to bend iron outside, CSX puts speed restrictions on the tracks. This causes issues. MBTA’s normal strategy is to make an annoucement in the station that says that trains are delayed. There is usually no further communication until recently. The conductor on the 6:30 Framingham train has taken it upon himself to be more… social. Instead of just saying “The train is late. It’s CSX’s fault.” He uses a very warm and apologetic (for a dude with a wicked awesome Boston accent) tone.
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Seeking Developers

For as long as you can remember you have been into computers and programming. You spend most of your day connected via your desktop, laptop or device. You sometimes solve coding problems in your sleep and then implement your solutions when you wake up. Even though you are passionate for a particular development platform, you see the need for others.

Every third book on your bookshelf is an O’Reilly and you know who Dr. Dobbs is. You often code for fun. Your RSS reader is full of sites like Slashdot, Tech Crunch and Gizmodo and your offline reading staple is Wired. When you see two cool technologies, you try to figure out how to make them work together. Your ideas of fun are gaming, jail breaking your iPhone or hacking together a Google maps mashup. You’ve probably had more than your fair share of Mountain Dew, Red Bull or Monster Energy. Your de.licio.us bookmarks are mostly coding how-tos. Bonus if you like to blog, use Twitter, Plurk or Froggums (I made that last one up). If your apartment or house has a mat that says “Welcome” in binary, that may be taking things too far. I am only kidding. You are our guy/gal. Seriously though, that Bluetooth earpiece is not meant to be worn all the time.

Apply for Developer positions here.

You strive to write simple, elegant and accurate code. Reuse is vital to you and you wouldn’t generally think of writing something that is not version controlled. You can think in Java (or C++/C#) as if it were your primary language. You neither fear Databases nor XML. You favor Agile methods for new development. Bonus if you know what a scrum is and brownie points if you have been a pig. You see the big picture. People call you smart behind your back. You have the ability to work on more than one project at once. You are either a technical lead or on the cusp of being one. You have between 4 and 8 years of professional development and you are ready for more responsibility. You want to work in a nimble, flexible and fast paced shop on projects that matter.

If this sounds like you and you want to get involved in high profile, digital and social media solutions, then we want to meet you. Please come armed with examples of tasty projects that you have played a major role in developing.

Apply for Developer positions here.

Matt Rogers emailed me a about great article on best practices for companies using agencies by Sam Decker. The article is called 6 Best Practices for Agencies. The article summarizes some of Sam’s experiences using 10 or more agencies and technology service providers. This (combined with Matt’s suggestion) got me to thinking about what makes a good client for an agency or consultant.

Alignment with Vision

A good agency will spend some time up front learning about the client’s vision for their work before they even pitch. A good client will afford them some of their time. Agencies that go in and try to roll out their entire tool belt without a sense for what the client wants are destined to either fail because they came in too expensive, or scare the client because they thought they were only looking for a customer segmentation exercise and not a full re-branding of the organization with a new TV campaign, a CRM database and a media optimization tool that tells you how to exactly spend your ad bucks. Giving the client a sense for what you are going to propose before you propose anything will allow them to give you feedfront before you spend valuable time putting your pitch together. In other words, be careful not to be that eager puppy with the sock in your mouth who is just happy to be playing tug-of-war with anyone.

They Seek Partnership

Trust is not something that happens overnight, but you want to increase responsibility and data sensitivity as your time passes and the relationship evolves. If your agency is a strategic think-tank, then you want to find a client that shares information like

• Key Performance Indicators
• Past performance
• Campaign results
• Customer data
• Product information
• Profitability data

That data thing is really important! If you are a tactical execution or delivery shop, then make sure that your client is sharing their brand, mission and vision with your team so they can make decisions as if they were spending their own money. Having a client who does not share the big picture indicates a lack of trust and an unwillingness to partner. Tread carefully.

Involvement

The client sponsor should be a part of the agency team and vice versa. Be very leery of situations where the person who ran the pitch process and brought your team on board is going to be “too busy” to participate in the actual projects. Make sure that they assign people with appropriate decision making responsibility.

They need your help

Projects are great, but in order to form an ongoing relationship where an agency can make a difference, you want to seek a client with a recurring budget for consulting. It takes time to iron out the kinks in working together. A client should be willing to give you at least 6 months to figure out how you best work together and to provide them results that make a real difference in their bottom line. That said, your agency’s goal should be to start adding value on day one and continue until the end of the relationship. Your client is paying top dollar for your services. Earn them.

Trust

The client trusts that the agency will deliver and allows the agency leeway to execute their best ideas. What good are your ideas if they end up being diluted of tossed out?

Notice I didn’t say: Knows exactly what they want. Agency folk often converse about the varying degrees of client vision. Most clients are paying for fresh, new ideas, not someone who only does exactly what they tell them to do. If that was the case, what would they need agencies for?

What else makes a good client?

On June 30, 2008, Google quietly made one of the largest non announcements the organic search space has seen. It lacked the visibility of “No Luke, I am your Father”, but has elicited the same kind of response from all of the web geeks that I have given the information. For instance, one of our new media strategists, Mike D, said “WHAT!!? HOW!!?”. After a trip to snopes.com turned up nothing, we soon began furiously googling for keywords on full on flash sites to assess the impact. A search on “peasant quest” turned up the mostly flash Videlectrix game portfolio site. The peculiar thing is that similar searches on other game names did not return the site. So like any good team of computer geeks on a mission, we killed a few hours playing Duck Guardian instead of solving the mystery.

Everything we have been told about search engines is about to be flipped on its ear. WOW! Now Google can read and crawl your Flash .swf files, but do not expect Digital shops to start recommending that everything changes to Flash just yet.

While Google may be able to crawl flash the following questions are still shrouded in Googley secrecy

• How much of the site can Google crawl?
• Which pieces is Google indexing?
• What are the most important parts code wise?
• How will results be displayed in a Google search?
• Can Google take you to specific “pages” within a flash app?

Since paging within a Flash application is not as cut and dry as an HTML site, it is not clear that whether Google will be able to find specific pages within the application. In order to judge the impact, we will need Google to provide a text cache for a Flash site. This is unlikely to happen for until the other (hahaha what other?) engines catch up. Until then, it’s a whole lotta test and learn.

When talking to marketing managers, the subject of segmentation often comes up. The conversation can seem forced and usually takes a turn from casual talk about business to a certain bitter formality, probably because now we’re talking about data. These marketing managers have never tasted our variety of data! Theirs is all crunchy-creamy like the grubs on Fear Factor. Yuck!

Expensive : Complicated : Useless

These are words they have used to describe segmentation! Further investigation usually reveals that their segmentation study was conducted so long ago that no one really remembers why. In one case, some muckety-muck told a group of analysts to do it and so they did exactly what he told them to do. No one really knew why it was being done.

Of course then nosy consultants like me come along and ask the question. Why did you do this segmentation? What does it all mean? It used to shock me when they would say that “it’s just the way we have always done it”.

Segmentation is not about grouping data for the sake of grouping data. Segmentation should have purpose. It should be used to solve a particular problem. It is useful for determining sales regions/territories, marketing message and campaign optimization, risk management, web visitor behavior classification etc etc etc.
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Each morning when I come to work, I try to steal a few minutes of time to read four web comics. I have tried a bunch of others, but I find that these are the ones that give me a mental boost that kicks off my day in a way that caffeine cannot. In other words, “clever” is my morning drug of choice.

Looking at my LinkedIn network of over 200 people, most people have been at more than one organization. If you take a random sample and interview you are bound to hear politically correct stories like

• I wanted more money.
• I felt under appreciated.
• I did not get along with my boss.
• I found a better opportunity.

Or you might find out that the person felt like they had their soul sucked out by Dementor kisses. Glassdoor.com is the place to air their filthy laundry about employment experiences anonymously. Registered users can review their previous position and talk about the benefits and gotchas of the employment experience. Registered users can also see the salaries for various positions within the companies.
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During my first year at the agency, I had the pleasure of working with strategic mastermind, Justin Holloway, now with Dye, Holloway, Murray in London. We were working on a pitch and he was explaining the brand identity of Trader Joe’s. He summarized it as a company that sort of brings the epicurean delights of society to the common man.

Trader Joe’s specializes in being an affordable gourmet store. They eliminate the middle man by producing their own foods with vendor partners. If the food does not meet their quality standards, they have no problem with axing it or making it unavailable until they find a new partner. They carry very few brand names and will often carry a brand name until they can clone it to their standards (like Nutella). The shocking thing is that the industry average for product development is 9 months. Zara is rumored to be able to develop a product and get it to market in 2 weeks. When I first read about Zara, I thought not only is this a fantastic model, but it is a lot like Trader Joe’s.

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We rely on the Internet to do everything from communicating with our friends, families and colleagues to choosing a new cappucino maker. A good deal of the technology we provided for your webbing enjoyment is free, but supported software with guaranteed uptime generally does not exist without a revenue model (for long). Companies like Yahoo! and Google provide us with oodles of free tools without so much as having to say “Oh Toodles”. We know the juggernaut model. They sell ads and they roll in dough. So when people complain about Yahoo or Google tools being down, I am sympathetic because whether the notice it or not, those companies are earning money by having you as a user. But what about those that do not have a revenue model to speak of? Read the rest of this entry »

YASMMeT /yaz’ met/ 1. (acronym) yet another social media messaging tool

Plurk is the latest yasmmet. It’s clearly a “competitor” to the popular twitter system. Twitter essentially is an open version of popular instant messaging platforms like MSN Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger. Plurk has an opportunity to capture social market share, [Notice that I did not say anything about revenue share as neither currently has a revenue model to speak of] primarily because twitter is horrible about stability.

Plurk has had the benefit of watching twitter flop around like a fish on the beach, but twitter has a big head start. Plurk’s user interface is a lot different. Twitter’s advantage is that most of its users are already longtime instant messenger users and bloggers who understand the technology and have easily adopted and embraced its value proposition. Because Plurk takes a few times to get used to, it puts it at a huge disadvantage in a space where people will give you about 90 seconds before they decide if they want to pursue something– unless they get some of the Twitter elite to convert people.

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