How did a six-plus minute video on wealth inequality get to be a viral hit with over 4 million views? Marketplace’s Krissy Clark does the leg work to figure it out. Basically, a “red state designer” creates the video on his own time based on a study from some Duke marketing professors and George Takei of Star Trek fame, publishes it to his massively huge Facebook account (3.6 million likes).
After that, the video was picked up by Upworthy and Mashable and a wonky viral hit is born.
Meet the Obama campaign’s $250 million fundraising platform.
Kyle Bush discusses building the Obama campaign’s online fundraising platform on top of Blue State Digital’s existing platform. After the building the platform the Obama team performed 240 a/b tests to perfect it. The difference between the original form (which is pretty standard industry fare) and the optimized form is above. And the difference is striking.
Also, if someone in your organization asks, “Why can’t we do that?” Pat of the answer is that the Obama Campaign employed 14 front-end engineers, with six dedicated to online fundraising.
What do CEOs need to know about Pinterest? The answer is, “nothing, really.” But this is a nice cheat sheet for anyone starting up a Pinterest account for their brand.
What CEOs Need to Know About Pinterest [Infographic] – SocialTimes.
“There are two Americas. There’s the America of dirty Levi’s, the land of old myths. And then there is the land that the immigrants see: Apple, Pixar, Times Square–a country of creativity, a place where anything is possible so long as you can dream it.”
– Veda Partalo, planning director for Fallon ad agency
via Fast Company Cadillac Turns To A 28-Year-Old To Reinvent The “Standard Of The World
This is an interesting take on American marketing seen through American values. from one of the advertising world’s rising stars. The article is worth a read to see how Partalo and Fallon are subtly changing the image of Cadillac, which has been on an upward trajectory for years now. They’ve ditched sex appeal and suggestion in favor of tapping into more complex emotions and desires of car buyers — almost exclusively male car buyers, it seems.
As a side note, check out the comments in the article itself. There’s a lot of discussion on whether the author spent too much time on Veda’s age and looks. I’m leaning toward “yes.” As with a lot of Fast Company pieces, there’s a lot of fawning over looks, image and the product itself — Slater practically makes love to the Cadillac he’s driving.
It’s funny, Fast Company is basically an amalgam of Forbes and Esquire. It’s a formula that I find simultaneously repugnant and incredibly alluring, which is why I’ve been a subscriber for several years.
How Gojee Got 300,000 People To Sign Up For Its Site In A Few Short Months via Business Insider:
Everybody thinks that pushing the most information possible gives users more information so it’s a better method. But our platform is that if we reduce aggressively the amount of information you’re provided, but make it much more relevant, you can help people make a decision much faster. That’s how we build the food dynamic.
The founders of Gojee have some interesting ideas about how the web will work after the convergence of desktop, laptop, tablet and phone. In addition to bringing content down to its essence, they believe the web should be “delightful, emotional and fast” and they’re working on a cartoon project that will make the site more emotional and help them tell stories.
I agree with their premise that web content needs to find a place that relies less on information and more on emotion and storytelling. Adding a cartoon vertical to a food site sounds pretty wild and it will be interesting to see if Gojee can pull it off without it seeming distracting, tangential or gimmicky.
Original source for article and photo: Business Insider, How Gojee Got 300,000 People To Sign Up For Its Site In A Few Short Months
via The Seductive Danger Of Half Measures, by Aaron Harris on TechCrunch:
Keeping a conscious eye on what the point of a test or iteration is, not just to itself, but to your overall plan and mission how building a certain number of tutors in a given area influences student activity and community creation, in my case, rather than just the number of tutors removes the halfsies quality of a test. Rather than continually shifting a business strategy to reflect the results of a single test, aggregating data across a set of them, and altering your strategy accordingly creates consistent momentum for your company where the success or failure are equally useful.
Within that framework, there needs to be set decision points – moments where you predetermine that, based on given sets of data, you will make a decision.
The London Transport Museum has put up a collection of 7,000 posters dating back to the 1930′s for users to browse, allowing them to search by artist, theme, date and color (or colour, as the case may be). The collection includes a fair share of inforgraphics from the 1920s and beyond demonstrating the advantages and widespread use of mass transit at the time. As Treeugger notes, the use (or overuse) of infographics today is clearly nothing new.
Source: Think Infographics are New? At Londons Transport Museum, They Date Back to the 1920s via TreeHugger