Aaron Gerdes

Well you’re in your little room
and you’re working on something good
but if it’s really good
you’re gonna need a bigger room
and when you’re in the bigger room
you might not know what to do
you might have to think of
how you got started
sitting in your little room

Hi there! If you’re coming across this site in the next few days, you probably got a hold of one of my handmade business cards at South by Southwest Interactive.

In case our meeting is fuzzy, here’s a recap: I’m Aaron Gerdes, and I lead a small web team based in Seattle. We design, build, and market user-centered web applications and tools. Also, I had a memorable pair of shoes.

Lately, we’ve worked extensively in the online gaming market. It has been a blast getting to know a very tight industry and our great clients in it. Our work has taken us into the strategy, UX, and technology of video-on-demand, community building, and affiliate marketing.

You can reach me best at the conference via http://www.twitter.com/aarongerdes.

Hello 2009! I’m excited for what you’ve got in store.

2008 was a great year. I was blessed to start working with Kendall, Eric, Tim, Dave, and Ben. These folks made a great team and a great release of our main project. You five are awesome.

Continued work with the great Aaron Russell and Joseph Sheedy was exciting too. I learn lot from you guys. Aaron remains my longest-time collaborator. I’ll lure him over here from England somehow.

Lots of work went in late 2008 to the new version of DeucesCracked.com. What rolled out on New Year’s Eve was the first increment of some game-changing stuff that I’m excited to get in the wild soon. The guys at Deuces are awesome to work with: customer-focused and agile.

Plus I can hit Rob with a Nerf dart across our desks.

2008 was a great opportunity to fine-tune working in user-experience with less artifacts. Moving faster to browser-based, semi-functional mock-ups brought higher-quality feedback and faster revisions.

This year I’m looking forward to making new contacts at SXSW (my first year attending). Aside from release schedules, the calendar is still pretty clear (Event Apart is penciled in, too).

It’s a good feeling. In that blank space are some awesome moments.

I’ve kept this Paul Graham quote close over the past few weeks, it’s been lending me lots of inspiration each time I see it:

Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems© that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

Read the full article here.

You brand is defined by the consumer, not by you – I think everyone can agree with that. In the same breath, most marketing pundits will add the fact that you can no longer control your brand – an assertion I am not sure goes hand in hand with the first one.

You brand gets defined by the UI (User Interface) of your company, the interface through which your customers and prospects interact with your company. That interface gets determined by pre-sale activities – i.e., advertising, retail layout, retail personnel attitude, telemarketing, sales people’s knowledge of the industry, etc -, as well as immediate post-sale activities – i.e., packaging, ease of use to set up the products, available help options, etc. -, and the long term post sale activities – i.e., telephone support, return policies, warranty policies, on-site support, etc.

Francois at Emergence Marketing totally nails what I was getting at in my earlier post about how the lines are blurring between marketing, product development, and user experience (UX)!

I got tipped off that my name was recently registered in the .net domain. (There are a few other Aaron Gerdes’ out there)

I realized I never locked up the .net and .org relatives of aarongerdes.com—luckily .org was still available.

Just a friendly reminder to register all the main TLDs for your name.

If I didn’t have mine, the first few results for my name would include an anti-foreign aid essay written by a highschool student in the Midwest. Eep.

Cleaning out old starred items on Google Reader, I came across this quote from a McKinsey article in a post at Emergence Marketing:

“Once a fairly discrete department within the organization, marketing is more and more often being asked to fulfill a far more significant, strategic role with implications for the entire enterprise.”

This made me think of catching up with an old colleague recently. As we filled one another in on recent projects, I noticed a pattern—that my clients have needed solutions at the intersection of product development, marketing, and usability.

The nature of delivering products or services via the web and word-of-mouth over tight-knit communities has been making those fields difficult to separate.

_Found via The Brand Builder Blog

Today I tried calling my Senate representative, Patty Murray, to request that she support the Internet Radio Equality Act.

I was greeted with a robotic message that said “You have been forwarded to an automatic voice messaging system. The mailbox belonging to [Senator Patty Murray’s office] is full. Goodbye.”

That’s representation for you.

Maybe a blog is a better way to do my part to create support? Save internet radio.