Aaron Gerdes

Kathy Sierra has an great post about constraints and creativity at Creating Passionate Users.

Constraints can be your enemy, but when it comes to creative breakthroughs, they can be your best friend.

Big ass budgets and tons of time don’t necessarily produce better products. Some of the most addictive games, for example, are extremely-constrained programs like Tetris. Contrast that with a full-motion video, 3D realtime graphics, surround sound console game. Yes, they’re apples and oranges, but Tetris and some of other “old-school” (which meant old tech) games are often more fun than the movie-studio-budget games from the big companies. My secret hope is that developing games for mobile phones will put a huge constraint on developers — just like the old days — and bring back some of the creativity it took to make something fun without relying on all that media and processing power.

Reminds me of a what Francis Ford Coppola said about the famously expensive and drawn-out production of Apocalypse Now: “We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.”

One final quote from the CPU post:

This blog and many others have talked about constraint-driven creativity a lot, but I wanted to emphasize again that it’s not just about inspiring (or forcing) creativity, it’s also about getting something done.

I need to put that somewhere I’ll see it often. Thanks, Kathy.

An article in BusinessWeek titled “Web Numbers: What’s Real?” (Found via Emergence Marketing) describes the difficulties of measuring website traffic. And there are many.

Anyone who’s tried to decipher the stats for a website, even when presented via a reasonable visual model, know that there’s lots of confusion. Often lay-people use the word “hits” to describe a visit to the site: in fact a hit occurs each time a file is downloaded as a user views an entire page (your page has several files, including the page itself and images). “Page views” is the technical term for the grouping of files that makes up a page — but then hopefully your users look at more than one page.. how do we determine that?

There are methods and tools to determine the above, but beyond that, it gets messy. The problem becomes huge when you have a website that uses heavy Flash content, or deliver content via an RSS feed, or AJAX (similar to what Gmail uses, where the page doesn’t always reload when there is a “state change”).

The article shows the impact of these shortcomings on Silicon Valley:

The dirty little secret of Silicon Valley is that no one knows exactly who is going where on the Web. That flies in the face of the impression that online advertising is the most dependably trackable ad medium of all time, a big reason spending on Web ads is expected to grow 33% this year, to $16 billion. But confusion over traffic measurement could cast a chill over the Web 2.0 craze. Valuations for startups such as Facebook Inc. and YouTube Inc. appear to be doubling every few months, but those numbers are based on traffic figures that could be misleading.

That’s an excellent point, but it matters for small businesses too: working on a more limited budget mandates you keep the performance of your website (and other marketing) accountable.

What tools work, and how can you interpret their data? I’m working on an intro to managing your website metrics and getting valuable information to improve bottom-line results. Stay tuned.

Copywriter extraordinaire Bob Bly questions if branding really works in B2B (a common question from the direct marketing side of the coin).

He quotes Gordon Graham, a B2B copywriter:

Certainly ‘branding’ has SOME value in terms of positioning and making any company look like a together, prosperous firm. But real, solid branding has to be earned, not just claimed.

Real branding has to be earned. That’s an excellent way to put it. Gordon goes on to give examples of misdirected branding efforts masquerading as real branding, but his second sentence really nails where branding is valuable.

In the comments, Derrick Daye offers some insight on what leading organizations have achieved when they earn their brand status:

• Increased revenues and market share
• Decreased price sensitivity
• Increased customer loyalty
• Additional leverage with vendors and retailers (for manufacturers)
• Increased profitability
• Increased stock price, shareholder value and sale value
• Increased clarity of vision
• Increased ability to mobilize an organization’s people and focus its activities
• Increased ability to expand into new product and service categories
• Increased ability to attract and retain high quality employees

I think the answer is a resounding yes. I’ve seen all sizes and types of businesses leverage their existing brand (not just redesign!) for improvement in the areas listed above. The question shouldn’t be if branding works or not — “you cannot not brand”. The question is are you branding on purpose?

Think of things that get stuck in your head. Things you can’t get off your mind. Chances are a few songs come to mind. Or worse — jingles!

Humans have excellent audio memory. Duct Tape Marketing provides a list of easy ideas for making sure that you connect with both earballs and eyeballs.

I particularly like #4 and 5:

#4. Audio marketing materials – Tell your story, make a case for your business, interview a client – burn it to a CD and pass it out

#5. Hold teleseminars – pick out a topic a month and hold a teleseminar

For an organization normally so agressive, their campaign to get Apple to lose some of their toxic manufacturing materials is unusually supportive of its target.

They’re encouraging Mac owners to use their creative tools to build grassroots media that urges Apple to make some changes. Is Greenpeace trying a new approach or just high on the Steve Job’s kool aid? I’m anxious to see if they attract more flies with honey and user generate content than vinegar.

Found via Creating Passionate Users.