Dan Knutson

Steve Jobs passed away the other day. It was in the wake of media coverage surrounding his death that we were reminded of the Standford graduation commencement speech he gave in 2005. The three stories he spoke of touched us.

On Connecting the Dots Jobs said,

… you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

On Love and Loss Jobs said,

I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

and went on to say,

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

And, on Death,

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

and finally,

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Jobs wasn’t a techie or a designer – he was just good at being true to himself. He followed his instincts and the world followed him. We’ll miss him.

HubSpot set the tone with the waiting music and Dan Zarrella kept the energy rolling all the way through The #smsci Webinar. Let’s get into it.

The 8 Best Practices:

1. Tweet links
2. Identify yourself.  Your profile picture is your online first impression.  Do you think that is important?
3. Write a powerful bio and use key words (Founder, speaker, expert).
4. Give your brand a personality and let your audience get to know you, but don’t over do personal tweets.  #StopTalkingAboutYourself
5. Linguistic Content.  Positive is the most effect.  Negative is least effective. #BeOptimistic (Personal advocate of this one)
6. Don’t over tweet.  10 tweets in 5 seconds  #TheBestWatToGetUnFollowed
7. Utilize combined relevance.
8. Use social call-to-action.  Tell your audience what you want them to do such as comment on this post.

Innovative, touting fuel-sipping technology (okay, 22 mpg isn’t exactly fuel-sipping, but it IS a truck afterall), and all wrapped up in a nice social media bow – the F-150 EcoBoost Challenge is pitting eight drivers against each other to see who can achieve the highest mileage and bring free gasoline from Shell to their respective cities.

Apple charges developers 30% of revenues generated on the iOS market.

Facebook charges developers 30% of revenues as well.

Google recently launched its own In-App payment service and revealed they’ll be charging only 5%. This is big news. If they stick with a similar fee structure for developers on its new gaming platform, Google Games, there could be a shift in the platform wars.

The online publishing arena has seen many developers bypassing Apple’s 30% revenue cut on iOS publications by utilizing web-standard HTML5 functionality. This allows them to publish to the web and consumed on any HTML5 compatible platform – a nearly universal standard. What they lose in exposure on the iOS marketplace, hopefully they can make up for with increased consumability on other platforms.

Recent HTML5 publishers include The Financial Times, Amazon’s Kindle Cloud Reader and Walmart’s VUDU.

Working with BBDO Proximity Minneapolis we assisted in developing the user experience for Aviva’s social strategy and philanthropic efforts under the umbrella of their Youmanity program. Chief among them, its Status for Youth Facebook campaign asks users to share their status in exchange for a say in which of four charities benefiting youth should be awarded a $100,000 gift. The campaign encourages users to ask their friends to do the same, and then offers mechanisms for competition, ranking whom among your network has netted the most influence.

We’ve been lucky to work with space150 on a number of projects and always found them to have an efficient process, top-notch talent, smart planning and the best UX team in town. Each project we’ve worked with them on has been enlightening, fun, and a learning experience where we’ve put together smart solutions that are well received by their equally-bright clients.

Known for their practice of rebranding themselves every 150 days, and throwing a smashing party for each launch, they’ve finally been recognized for their efforts nationally by being named an Ad Age Small Agency of the Year.

More at AdAge.com.

Social media marketing is popular but not critical.

Uptake of social media marketing among small and medium-sized businesses has become widespread. Research has suggested it’s a cost-effective, easy-to-use marketing channel that can boost customer acquisition as well as fulfill other marketing goals. But most small businesses still don’t see social media as a necessity.

More than half of the small-business decision-makers surveyed in June by small-business insurance provider Hiscox said they used social media for business purposes, but a plurality also declared that it wasn’t necessary to their business. Just 12% considered it a “must.”

At the same time, though, 50% of respondents said the marketing tool they could not do without was word-of-mouth. Just 4% said the same about social media, even though the goal of most social media marketing efforts is to create word-of-mouth.

Nearly two in five respondents said word-of-mouth was the main way they got business, and another 42% cited word-of-mouth in combination with other marketing promotions.

While offline forms of word-of-mouth remain critical for all brands, and certainly for small, local businesses, social media also plays a valuable role by giving customers a wider voice for their recommendations and helping to amplify that voice beyond their immediate circle of friends, family and colleagues.

Among those small businesses that were using social media for marketing purposes, Facebook was most commonly used and was also considered the most effective at growing and expanding the business, followed by LinkedIn.

via Are Small Businesses Apathetic About Social Media? – eMarketer.

A fun analogy discovered over at visua.ly, mapping social networks to characters in a high school yearbook.

Working for The Lawlor Group, we had the opportunity to re-architect the online presence of Concordia University Chicago.

The year-long project had us meeting with stakeholders from every department within the university, students, administrators and the project’s leads responsible for the redesign. Pleasing all parties never proves easy, but in the end, we pulled the content together in a cohesive package digestible by our target user, the prospective student.