1222North.com

Author: Michael

On Friday, May 8th, artists, entrepreneurs and innovators came from across the country and gathered at the first BigOmaha Conference. This is the first in a series of thoughts we’ve assembled from our experience there.

Focus on Things That Don’t Change
“Plans are guesses. People write them because they make people feel comfortable” - Jason Fried, 37Signals

Business today moves too fast for long-range planning. There is too much volatility and variability in the modern marketplace. You can’t go from A-Z. So instead go A-B, then B-C. Create micro-plans that take into account current information and figure out what you are going to accomplish today, then do that again and again.

So how do you move forward? Create a vision of what you want your business to look like, and focus on the elements of that business that won’t change in three, five, or ten years:

Amazon - Products will always need to be delivered to the customers who ordered them.
Hotels - People will always want to sleep on comfortable beds.
Google - Users will always want to find what they are searching for.

Once you stop fretting about things that will change, you can identify and invest in the things that won’t. That consistency will drive your business upward, and allow you to adapt and stay viable. Make sure you are best at the core element of your business - and stick to it.

Author: John

Just wrapped up a workshop on Mental Models with Indi Young. Here’s a excerpt from the program:

“Those in the field of cognitive research have been describing and defining mental models for several decades. Mental models are the most effective way to align design strategy with your users’ behavior, and to approach your design from the understanding of the end user. Mental models are representations of people’s behavior, philosophies, and emotion around how they accomplish something, regardless of which tools they use.”

After going through the workshop, I can’t say I’m a mental models expert, but I can say it made me think differently as far as evaluating users’ behavior. As great as I think Indi was during this workshop, she had to cut out a lot of information due to the time constraints. We had 3 different group exercises, the first being a (more…)

Author: Almir

According to Hitwise, last week’s visits to Twitter.com surpassed visits to Digg.com for the first time. Hitwise measures visits in terms of ?market share,? which isn?t a very helpful metric (both have 0.021 percent market share, but Twitter is ranked No. 84 and Digg is No. 85). This data is as of last week, when visits to Twitter surged following the much-Tweeted emergency landing of a plane on the Hudson. (Note that these numbers do not include usage on mobile devices, desktop apps, or through other Websites via Twitter?s API).

Today, traffic to Twitter was even higher with everybody feeling compelled to let everyone else know that, yes, in fact, the U.S. has a new president and that they saw his inauguration speech. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone blogs that Twitter saw five times as many Tweets per second today compared to last week. So maybe those two lines between Digg and Twitter will keep diverging.

For what it?s worth, Google Trends for Websites also shows Twitter catching up to Digg (but not yet passing). Other measuring services, such as Quantcast and comScore, still show a wide gap.

Author: Almir

Facebook and Twitter may be more popular than ever among users, but what are they worth? Fortune magazine?s Jessie Hempel wrote a great article on the struggle of Web 2.0 companies to come up with viable, profitable business models.

Author: Bethany

Imagine this: You run a company that is in dire financial straights, so much so that you’ve sent your CEO to Washington to beg for a bailout. Sales are down and not looking to go up anytime soon. What do you do? You cherish every customer you have, and especially try to take care of all those people who love your brand so much they’re promoting it for you, right? Embrace Web 2.0, build your community, find new ways to market? Apparently not, if your name is Ford. Instead, they’re suing — that’s right, suing — people running Ford fan blogs for using their trademarks without permission. And what’s more, they didn’t even tell their Digital Communications guy that they’re doing it. So much for fostering community.