By Kimberly Reyes (@CommDuCoeur)

When Presidential nominee Juan Manuel Santos swept the election last Sunday, June 20^th, the landslide victory meant more to the Colombian people than just a new President: it marked the largest voter turnout in Colombian history, and demonstrated the overwhelming power of social media to unite people towards achieving a common goal. Read More-->.

By DJ Edgerton (@wiltonbound)

We talked yesterday about hyper-communicators and we mentioned Guy Kawasaki as an example of this new breed of media personality. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Guy (somewhat controversially) uses ghostwriters for a lot of his tweets. I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with that but one of the byproducts of this approach is Guy and his team produce a lot of tweets each day. After a while, they can feel like the digital version of Cliff Clavin from Cheers.

Of course, Guy is not alone. There are numerous uber-tweeters sharing their pearls of wisdom on a daily basis. And there are also lots of spammers out there. After a while, even using a tool like Tweetdeck to manage your Twitter consumption can become an arduous task.

Organizing the information you want into a manageable data flow isn’t just a challenge restricted to Twitter either. Popular blogs like Techcrunch and Mashable post literally hundreds of items each week. Sure, you can view these with an RSS reader but after a while the temptation to just hit that “Mark All As Read” button becomes overwhelming. Read More-->.

By Sven Larsen (@zemoga)

I’m catching up on some reading thanks to a few business trips. One of the volumes I was most looking forward to consuming is Ken Auletta’s GOOGLED, a comprehensive history of the search giant. While I’m just a couple of pages in to it so far, I can tell the book is going to provide some unique insights.

A passage from the book that really caught my attention was a quote from Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian. “The internet makes information available,” opined Varian, “Google makes it accessible.” It’s a concise summary of Google’s business but it also captures the essential struggle for all of us in the digital communications business – how to take raw data and turn it in to something compelling for consumers.

It’s my strong belief that as social media becomes more and more integrated in to our lives, accessibility will become more and more of an issue. Already, we’ve seen celebrities (both real and web versions) deleting Facebook pages and declaring Twitter blackout periods. In almost all these cases, it’s not the constant demand for content that these services require that is cited as the problem. It’s keeping up with the massive flow of information the other way. With literally millions of tweets and Facebook postings what are we supposed to pay attention to? Read More-->?

We’ve written about the “primacy of content” and how it’s one of the themes that has been emerging from all the conferences and events that we’ve been attending lately. Another theme that’s occupied a lot of the discussions is the “conflict” between “traditional” and digital agencies.

The argument goes that “traditional” agencies (i.e. big firms like Publicis or Ogilvy) are faced with the choice of developing digital capabilities in house or farming them out to an agency that specializes in digital work. The sidebar to that argument is how involved the digital agency should be in the creative portion of the work. Should they have joint ownership of the branding efforts? Or is their role similar to a production house on a television commercial, more about execution than strategy? Read More-->bout execution than strategy?

(www.flickr.com/photos/ camkage/3813697594/)

Is it time to move your business to Hollywood?

Yesterday, we attended the CLICK conference in New York City. The event had several interesting discussions but none more so than a panel on whether agencies were turning into product manufacturers. As the discussion progressed it became clear that many agency people are thinking of themselves as creators of consumer products (even if all these products are in digital form) from apps to blogs to traditional web sites. Almost all the panelists reiterated a common refrain of the season – traditional interruption based marketing is dead (or at least in severe decline) and anything an agency creates on behalf of a brand must give the consume real value. Read More-->st give the consume real value.

If you work in Information Architecture you will love this video

On Adobe.tv you can see a 1 hour video explaining the features and how to use an upcoming Prototyping tool called Flash Catalyst (known as Thermo), an excellent option to explore on Interaction Design with high quality functional prototypes.

Check out the video here.>

Image source: atpm

As mentioned in a past post entitled “What is Information Architecture?”, one of our goals is to organize the features or requirements requested by the client in a logical structure. This allows the Dev team to understand the hierarchy and flow of contents and functionalities of the project. Read More-->.