The success of our new economy will largely rest on how well companies start honest, open dialogues with their consumers. Period.

No more wordy positioning briefs. No more boardroom marketing speak. No more talking at the consumer. No more conferences on whether social media and marketing matter (BTW, they do.). Success begins with honest open dialogues, and honest open dialogues begin when one person listens and the other gets a chance to speak. Today, it’s the consumer’s turn – and companies that want to thrive in this economy better start listening – or at the very least, start getting used to shutting up a little bit.

It’s no big surprise that graphic designers tend to produce their best work when they feel invested in it.

Being relegated to only delivering on the tactical needs of a business, designers can get burned out quickly, leading to decreased productivity and ultimately a nose-dive in creativity. Finding ways to keep them invested is really the challenge of any design manager. You can encourage this by providing opportunities for them to collaboratively develop creative strategies around the business objectives that dictate the work assigned.

By nature, designers tend to be individualistic – …

How your brand is perceived can make all the difference to your bottom line.

Imagine driving down a highway on a sunny day.  Listening to the radio, your knees steadying the wheel as one hand checks your blackberry and the other holds a non-fat latte,  all while going about 75mph.   Two years ago, that’s pretty much what our economy looked like.  But while we all had our heads down, something happened.
Pretty quickly, that sunny day turned dark and stormy.  Suddenly, we found ourselves slowing down, dropping the phone, setting down the latte, and white-knuckling the steering wheel.  In the face of uncertainty, logic tells …

If your still on the fence about whether your brand should be on Twitter – it may be time to reconsider your social-marketing plan.   According to Nielson, Twitter reached 18.2 Million unique visitors last month.  That’s up an astounding 1,448% from last year.  Also up was the average time spent on the site – 175% more than the same time last year.
If these numbers don’t sway you, consider this – most users aren’t even on the website.  Instead a large majority of users utilize third party applications such as Tweetdeck …