Aaron Gerdes

On our way to our first trip to Paris.

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.

Ze Frank reviews the news everyday on The Show. It’s excellent comedy with a very edgy and intelligent approach. Today’s episode delivers an interesting look at branding and what mental twist it takes to desire to be associated with a tragedy.

Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems, (c) 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.

Paul Graham

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. Ack.

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.

The Internet is like this, multiplied by a million.

You know this already, but just a friendly reminder that the Internet is a two way street. It gives customers a huge audience to publicly share their experiences with you.

Treat them right!

Speaking of niche marketing, the New York Times ran an article about three weeks ago on how The Gap is struggling without a niche:

Gap has served up a steady diet of simple, unobjectionable casual clothing designed to appeal to everyone. [..] In an era of niches, when exclusion is as vital as inclusion, Gap has become an anachronism: a single chain, selling only its own brand, with one point of view, chasing shoppers from birth to death. [..] Indeed, consumers are abandoning the chain in staggering numbers. Sales at stores open at least a year, a standard measure of a retailer’s health, have fallen or remained stagnant for 28 of the last 30 months.

I found the article through Duct Tape Marketing, which has some great commentary:

Attempting, intentionally or accidentally, to appeal to all is a sure way to kill sales and buzz. Find a way to narrow your market focus to the smallest niche possible and you will no longer need to worry about competing on price.