3 thoughts for the week of January 18, 2009 (good v. great, content sharing & designing cats)
January 20, 2010//Last Updated January 6, 2013
- With the start of the new year, we have spent a decent amount of time thinking about how we want better ourselves, our business and our work. All this has left us pondering what takes something that is good and then elevates it to the level of great. A very influential book that we read before starting our business was Good to Great by Jim Collins. This book identifies elements and processes of great business. But what are those elements that make a design “great?” One of our twitter friends, @cweekly, summed up the difficulty of this question pretty well, with “yeah, hard to put a finger on it beyond “I know it when I see it’.” So, we want to throw it out there again: how do you know when a design has surpassed good and is truly great?
- You know marketing. You got your ads, your brochures, your billboards. You know about networking, SEO, and even this new fangled social media. You’ve pretty much got your bases covered, but you might be missing a piece of the puzzle. When it comes to creating value (i.e. power) on the web, content is king. For this reason, some marketing or web consultant has probably suggested that you start a blog for you business website. There are other ways, however, that you can put your content to work – content sharing. This is where you create content (articles, videos, etc.) that will be of interest to your target audience to distribution via other sites that will in turn build your reputation and drive people back to your business. This can be done via specific content sharing sites (e.g. YouTube, Squidoo). But you can also get similar benefits by doing guest posts for other peoples blogs. See if you can contribute articles to the sites of organizations you may belong to, vendors you partner with or even blogs that you follow and admire. Have good content, will travel.For more information on this topic, check out the following articles:
- As you may know by now, we are cat aficionados here at 3thought.
And we’ve come to realize that cats are also aficionados of design. Based on some tweets we’ve come across, we think there are others of you out there who know what we mean. They intently watch how the mouse manipulates graphics and often try to offer suggestions with a strategically placed paw on screen. They often forcefully art direct by sitting upon arms as they are working the keyboard. And they always have to be close to you and your work. We’d love to hear some stories about how your kitty “appreciates” your work.
Posted in 3 Thoughts, Blog