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The Digital Balancing Act

Digital Strategy is a practice of balancing the pros and cons of new technology with user’s expectations and ever intersecting touch points. Last year (2010) was touted as the “year of mobile,” and I would have to agree. Many companies and brands began to see the value of interacting with their customers and users on [...]

New Pavement to Pound

A common practice during any economic downturn for business development leaders is to turn to their colleagues and say, “let’s pound the pavement.” The problem with this statement is it doesn’t address what the “pavement” is.  When looking at reaching new customers, pounding them is not the best way to win their loyalty (in most [...]

Dissecting Google’s Own URLs

Every SEO consultant will give their own opinion on what the most optimal URL structure is. This is a topic to never consider closed, as search engines continually refine and improve their algorithms to attempt providing the most relevant and valuable content to people.
Google more than likely follows their own best practices, so let’s look [...]

How To Ruin Your Reputation In 3 Days

And Not Even Need To Plan Ahead
Often when considering your digital strategy it is focused around an order of priority: 1. Branding & Marketing, 2. Sales, 3. Customer Support, 4. Communications, 5. Operations, and after that there’s no time left in the day to address other things that may seem less important, but if unaddressed [...]

Business Intelligence Applications

For years we have been working with our clients to normalize and centralize their data, and then study their organizational work-flow to understand how to best visualize and use that data for sales, marketing & opperations. The market has been hard pressed for good solutions in this area; most are too generic, or too niche [...]

Creating Digital Assets

The business perception of software has been very product centric due to release cycles and packaging – it comes once a year, in a box, on a shelf. The web began to change that for many companies as they saw how software could be developed, and improved upon while it was, and is being used. [...]

Brand Bombardment

Brands are blasted into our lives every day. We see billboards, commercials, magazine ads, web ads, spam, etc and we identity it quickly and appropriately file it in our brains. However, brand bombardment is much more omni-present than our conscious may realize.
Below is an episode of the Jay Leno Show boiled down to just [...]

Digital Strategy and Silos Don’t Mix

In an impromptu meeting this morning at Pondry, we began discussing how many companies still approach their marketing and communications as roles, isolated in individual silos. It’s like the age-old issue of product data being wrapped up in Operations when half it’s value is in selling the product to new customers, and the Sales team [...]

Anything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Right

It seems ten years ago companies were having the CMO’s nephew design their website; Before that it was the CEO’s son advising him on his next laptop purchase. The way of conducting business evolved and rather than seeking out experts, they deferred to those utilizing the new technology that they knew. Unfortunately, who they knew [...]

Social Media Connects Brands with Users

More facts are in to answer what everyone is asking: do users really connect with brands via social media marketing? We rarely talk to anyone who would say they don’t need a digital strategy. The reason being? People know it’s working.
Case Study: Hewlett-Packard
Last fall HP embarked on a massive internal over-hall, focusing on digital strategy [...]