This post was written by Marianne Amoss, Fastspot’s content strategist and resident writer.

What is the next generation of admissions marketing? And how can we integrate Web marketing and print marketing? These are questions that plague universities and colleges across the country, as they struggle with the cost and manpower required to keep materials updated and accurate—and see classes of increasingly Web-savvy students coming through their doors. When Tufts University considered these questions, they naturally turned to Neustadt Creative Marketing, which had worked with the school on undergraduate admissions for the schools of arts and sciences and engineering and on a university-wide brand strategy.

Tufts is a highly selective private university in the suburbs of Boston. NCM, a seasoned expert in providing marketing services to educational institutions, knew that Tufts would be ripe for a smart, creative approach. They launched an extensive, five-month-long market research project among prospective students and their parents to start to answer that question. Out of that research, NCM defined a series of marketing goals that altered the messaging strategy that Tufts was using, says Mark Neustadt, principal of NCM. What did they settle on? A relatively unconventional plan, says Neustadt: an “integrated program that abandoned the traditional package of print materials entirely and replaced it with a three-times-a-year magazine which coordinated with an admissions ‘microsite.’”

Once Tufts adopted the report’s recommendations, NCM brought Fastspot in on the project; the two companies collaborate frequently under the name Door No. 2. Together, the two teams worked together to design and develop the magazine, concept the stories, write the first issue, develop the Web design, architect the Website, build it, load in the content, and finally launch the joint project on 11/11/11. Fastspot also created a new virtual campus tour for Tufts, which launched at the same time.

The magazine, named Jumbo after the school mascot, is now published online and in print three times a year and mailed to students in the admissions funnel. The site and magazine are run on Fastspot’s BigTree CMS, a user-friendly content management system that allows the Tufts admissions staff to easily update admissions information and keep up with trends without assistance from their internal IT team. “Viewbooks can take over a year to develop and are very costly and difficult to update,” Neustadt says. “A three-times-a-year magazine is relatively economical to update and can be much more responsive to changes going on in admissions.”

It’s important to note that this program does not completely do away with print—or migrate everything to the Web, Neustadt says. “A lot of people think that’s what this is all about. This is not about eliminating print. But what is has done, which is incredibly exciting, is create a print program that is consistent with the pace and the energy of the Web.” Tufts now has an admissions microsite that is essentially separate from the main site; Door No. 2, which loads in the content for each issue of Jumbo (with minimal tech support), serves as “managing editor,” helping ensure that the content is consistent, professional, and on-strategy.

Since launch, the site has been enormously successful. Analytics show that the site is getting lots of traffic; the dean of admissions, Lee Coffin, often gets several dozen comments on his blog posts. “One of the successes of the design has been the integration of social media and the content,” says Neustadt. And Tufts has gotten students involved, creating a student group whose charge it is to create new content; you can see student-generated photos and content throughout the site. “Tufts has a superbly run admissions operation, and they are at a point in their evolution as an office where their staff feels energized and capable to take this on.”

There are lots of moving parts, and they all mesh together, seemingly effortlessly, from the print magazine to the Web to the social media. As Neustadt puts it, “It’s a smart approach to print.”

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When the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore Maryland approached Fastspot to help solve one of its core challenges, allowing online visitors to browse its collection of works, we jumped at the opportunity. Here is a recap of some of the hurdles, surprises, successes, and failures that we encountered during the course of the project, with insights from Curt Kotula, Art & Technology Director and the lead designer on this project, and Ben Plum, Interactive Designer & Producer and the lead developer on this project.

UX Challenges
The Walters Art Museum has a huge online collection containing thousands of images. Just like the artwork featured in the images, you can’t count on a consistent image aspect ratio. Images range from the absurdly wide to the ridiculously tall, creating a huge layout challenge for us. You also can’t just crop a work of art—it’s impossible to set a standard size, and one solution will not work for all situations.

We attacked this problem on two fronts. First, when browsing, the artwork thumbnails are organized into columns instead of rows, allowing the variety of image sizes to cascade down the page without wasting space. Second, the artwork detail page is organized in such a way that the supporting content flexes and shifts to fit the aspect ratio of the image; wide images span the width of the page with content below, while tall images fill the left side with content to the right. Our goal was to let these beautiful images be the focus no matter what shape the artwork happens to be.

Browse Simple, Make it Stick
The best part about visiting a museum is stumbling upon a piece of art that sticks with you long after you leave. We felt that browsing the Walters’ online collection should also provide that experience. When the project started, there were over 7,000 items in the collection (currently there are over 11,000!). Increasing users’ access to this impressive body of work and overall “browsability” are two of the main objectives for the project.

We engineered several distinct browsing experiences to promote discovery and surprise. Users can browse by category, material, date range, location in the museum, creator, place of origin, tags, and popularity in the community. We engineered browsing options for a variety of audiences, and these options are presented in a simple and direct tabbed interface.

How Many Clicks Does it Take?
Have we mentioned how big the Walters online collection is? Paged results are a necessity when dealing with thumbnail images. Too many images would cripple older computers or take too long to load over a slow Internet connection. Too many pages make larger result sets a bear to navigate.

We asked ourselves: How do you navigate seventy pages of image based results with the same ease and control that you navigate three? How do you conveniently navigate a thousand individual works of art? We decided to throw out the traditional design pattern of numbered pagination (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 … 450), instead opting for a custom solution based on the ease of drag-and-drop. We engineered the pagination system to give the user fine-grain control; the user can step through smaller result sets with the “next” and “previous” buttons, while large result sets can be quickly navigated by simply dragging the handle to an exact page or piece of art. Every result in a particular set is now easily accessible—no more skipping 10 pages at a time just to get to the center of the set.

Community Organizers
Another challenge was that the previous version of the Website offered user curation tools—they are popular with teachers and museum staff but were not well-utilized outside of those audiences. The ability to organize and curate art isn’t just an important tool for educators; it also helps art novices and children alike begin to analyze and appreciate art by making their own connections.

We needed the barrier of entry to be low and the result to be useful and fun. We decided to use Facebook connect rather than managing our own user system, allowing anyone with an active Facebook account to get started quickly and easily. Finally, we branded the curator feature “Community Collections” and brought recent collections to the homepage to promote the feature and encourage sharing.

Programming Challenges
Modern museums have internal database systems for cataloging and archiving collections. The most popular choice for large institutions seems to be the Museum System by Gallery Systems. We don’t doubt that TMS is a fantastic offline collection management system, but simply put, the Web extensions offered are lacking and don’t seem to be a primary focus of the company. Customization options are limited and the default layout is a generic, confusing mess. The result is a hard-to-navigate online collection that isn’t particularly attractive and tends to look a lot like competitors.

Fresh From The Oven
We decided early on to throw out the generic box mix provided by Gallery Systems and work with the Walters database team to create our solution from scratch. We knew right away that we didn’t want to expose the entire TMS database to the Internet nor did we need the massive amount of information it stored. What we did need was a second database that only contained the information necessary for the new online experience. We used our own content management platform, BigTree CMS, as the core technology that drives the site and engineered a scheduled synching process that eliminates double work.

The Fruits of our Labor
Many at Fastspot would argue that this project was one of our most challenging—and most inspiring. We were lucky to have a fantastic team at the Walters to work with, and they gave us a lot of room to flex our UX muscles and explore possibilities. We insisted on keeping things as simple as possible, even as we tried to integrate more complex functionality, so as to always let the artworks remain front and center. More importantly, we re-envisioned what was possible for a museum to offer its online visitors. Through a diligent process of refinement, a willingness to throw away things that weren’t working, and a constant focus on the visitor’s browsing experience, a wonderful new interface and interactive experience emerged.

So far the new Works of Art site has received glowing feedback, and users have jumped right in and started doing what the Walters Art Museum and all of us at Fastspot hoped they would do: delighting in the experience of exploring art.

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Your website’s main navigation, the primary navigation presented to users who first arrive on your website, should do several things, and do them well.

The main nav should be simple. The language, the organization, the placement, the size of the font—everything—should be simple. This is the most useful element of your site, and much like a doorknob or the power switch on an object, it should not be overly complex.

The main nav should tell a story. If you are a college or university, you don’t want to start your nav with “Giving.” You need to tell your story first. Many schools show just how desperate they are by making “Admissions” or “Apply Now” the first link in their main nav. This is bad. Just like a first date, you want to convey confidence and let your user get to know you before you move in for the big smooch.

The main nav should be mature. Nothing screams institutional conflict more than a main nav that is all over the place. A classic example is a nav that is one part general, one part categorical, and one part specific. Main navigation should be consistent in how it groups information; this is to aide users who are learning to use the system as they begin to navigate the site. Placing inappropriate links into your main nav is a quick way to lose user trust and degrade the user experience.

The main nav should start with the largest parts of the funnel. For example, you don’t want your main nav to be all about the specifics. Users will naturally click into sections as they seek more specific information. If they are looking for filet, they will click into the meat tab. If they are seeking lettuce, they will look under vegetables. Give them time and space to find what they are seeking in the natural order of the information.

Your main nav should be short. If you give users too many options, they will have option overload. A main nav that has more than 7 tabs or links is bordering on too big and should set off alarm bells about the overall hierarchy of the information. Remember, your main nav needs to tell a story—so if you overload your visitors with specifics right off the bat, you aren’t letting them read the big picture story.

Your main nav should be useful. It is easy to assume that all things important must go into the main nav. This is a knee-jerk reaction born out of misguided thinking by uneducated information architects or nervous clients. This is simply not the case. The main nav should be the foundation, and it should not have to change down the road. You should not have constantly changing content in your main navigation. There should be other, more visually impactful areas for including these somewhat temporary initiatives within the overall page or site design.

While we may come to think of the main nav as the thing that users see first, this is not true. Users see the features and other more brightly and boldly presented content first. They only move to the main nav when they have shifted from a browsing to a searching mode. The features and other more visual callouts you design for your users are for them to explore and interact with; they let users know what you are saying is important, what is hot, new, happening. They are your breaking news, your highlights, your top stories, your VIPs, your special differentiators. Your main navigation is a set of tools in a toolbox that you want your visitor to understand implicitly and feel confident using to effectively drill down to the specific data they are seeking.

Let’s break down the main navigation in a few sites to explore these positions in more depth.

Example: MailChimp

MailChimp.com Homepage

If you look at MailChimp’s home page and pay attention to where your eye goes, you can see that the most important messages being conveyed are not the main nav, but rather that you can sign up for free, that you can manage email and newsletters easily, and that there are some cool new things happening. Only after scanning these elements do you seek out the main nav, and now your mindset has changed. You are no longer scanning to get a sense of what MailChimp is; you are now going to follow a logical set of pathways to seek out information that is of more specific interest to you. That may be pricing, features, or places to learn more about the community, such as the blog or the support section. But these main nav items are not trying to sell you on the best parts of MailChimp—that is the main page’s job, and the brand, and the marketing messages, and everything else. No, the nav is there to get you where you want to go, now that you know MailChimp is something that interests you.

Example: Southwest Airlines

Southwest Airlines Homepage

In the case of Southwest, there are a ton of things going on, yet the main nav is quite simple—Air, Hotel, Car, Vacations. To the sides, sitting back sightly, we have Special Offers, Travel Guide, and Rapid Rewards. A nifty drop-down menu gives you immediate drill-down options to skip an unnecessary page reload and to quickly let you see what information and functionality resides within each section. Yet, similar to MailChimp, the main nav is doing its thing, and the rest of the site is presenting the hierarchy, directing your attention, making sure you see the special deals and have quick access to certain portals, etc. They don’t try to do it all in the main nav. With such a complex set of user experiences, they have actually presented you with a myriad of navigational “types”—which allow you to “learn” the way to best use Southwest’s site and not be left at the mercy of internal groups playing a turf war over the website’s nav.

Example: Mint

Mint's Homepage

Surely you’ve heard of Mint.com for managing your finances, right? No? Oh—well, if you check out their site you’ll see they suspect you might be a newbie as well, and they will help you get a quick glimpse of what they are about before offering up a helpful main nav geared toward a pleasant introduction process. Here’s what happens when you land on mint.com: You see right away that Mint is the best free way to manage your money, you can get started for free, it’s safe and secure, has bill reminders, gets lots of good press, and works on various devices. Great, you’re in! Now you head to the main nav to learn more. They opt for a two-option main nav: What is Mint? and How it Works. Pretty simple. Of course there are all sorts of other navigational options sprinkled in that you start to see if you haven’t already found what you are looking for, and typically these supplemental navigational elements cater to specific user groups—in Mint’s case, Canadian users, people seeking information about the company, or existing users who want to log in. Most importantly, they assume you don’t know them yet, and they present their offerings in ways that make sense and have a sense of pacing.

Example: Lego

Lego's Homepage

Lego has a fantastic landing page—it invites you right into its online game experience “Lego Universe” while also promoting other featured aspects of the Lego brand, like the Lego Club, My Lego Network, Featured Products, and quick links to highlighted product lines like the Star Wars line, the “Games” line, and the MBA series of toys. Once you are past the initial experience, you are ready to dive into the specifics—and here you have the main nav stepping up and ready to play its role. You have Products, Games, Create & Share, and Shop. Four links. Simple. And a story is being told; you understand that Lego is a brand that is about playing, creating, and sharing as much as it is about selling you small interconnecting plastic blocks. They don’t put LEGO Universe into the main nav, even though one could argue that it seems this is a big push for the company right now. Rather, they feature it in appropriate places. This is also a critical act of restraint because in one or two years, the LEGO Universe may not be the main feature, and it would be wasteful to need to redo the main nav every time a point of emphasis needed to change for an organization.

We try to impart these lessons to our clients at the beginning of every engagement, because much like a house, if the foundation of your main nav is not strong, you risk putting your entire site’s structure and integrity in a compromising position that may need to be readdressed in the near future. And when all else fails, remember that you can rely on your analytics data to truly tell you if your website visitors are going where you want them to go and finding what they want to find. That’s the beauty of the Web—we have data to base our decisions on! Now, this doesn’t mean that the entire process of how we expect to use websites won’t be shifting in the near future, as main navigation gets replaced with interactive elements that involve finger swipes more than the click of a mouse. But visual design, composition, and the inherent ways a person’s eye moves and the way the brain processes information is and has been pretty much the same for the past few thousand years, so don’t mess with evolution and human nature unless you have a pretty convincing argument to do so.

Now go forth and navigate!

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The other day, as I was sitting in a presentation where major project findings were being shared, the subject of Website visitors came up. One of the members of the client side team stated that it would be almost impossible to implement the findings and recommendations into anything cohesive, because that would mean setting a preference for one type of Website visitor over another. He continued by stating that a Website must try to be all things to all people … because so many different people use their site (this is a higher-ed site serving students, faculty, researchers, staff, media, community, etc.). Therefore, our mission was impossible. Of course, we disagreed. As unfair as it might seem, you must prioritize your audience and cater to those priorities, or you are setting yourself up for big problems. Often, these are the very problems we are called in to correct.

As I watched his face contort as our response was gently doled out, and as he was identified as the perpetrator of exactly the thing that creates runaway, out of control, sprawling messes of Websites, I did what I often do: I tried to think of a metaphor to assist in the visualization of the situation.

Let’s say you are having a party. You are expecting a variety of guests and some family members. Each segment of your guest list will prompt you to do things you wouldn’t typically do to prepare. For example, you know Aunt Debbie only likes Grey Goose, so you make sure you pick some up for her. (Or you clear the cabinets, depending on Aunt Debbie.) You also pull out that hideous ceramic bulldog statuette your mother-in-law gave you for Christmas last year because you have a bulldog and so now that’s all she gets for you, and you place it on the coffee table so she doesn’t know it lives in the basement in a box. Now, you don’t line these things up by the front door and shout, “Look, Aunt Debbie, I got you booze!” or “Look, Mother-in-Law, I love that hideous statuette so much I keep it here by the front door all the time!” But you do place those things where you know Aunt Deb and your mom-in-law will be sure to spot them. You get the point.

You also spend a fair amount of time worrying yourself over areas of your house you normally never pay attention to, especially the entryways and areas in the house everyone is most likely to congregate. While you no longer pay attention to your foyer, you do realize your guests will, and you want it to look nice. While your pride and joy is the game room you’ve built yourself in the basement, you recognize that most people will be taking in your whole house, as they move through it – so you can’t rely on some deep dark hidden cool thing to provide the positive experience you are looking to give off. Plus, you have to recognize your game room will only appeal to some, and if these “some” aren’t the majority of your guest list, don’t count on it doing all your work for you.

Continuing with this metaphor: You make some assumptions. Let’s say this is a neighborhood party, where your guests will vary in age, and you also have some friends and co-workers stopping by. You make sure the X-Box is ready to go for your pals because, let’s face it, you’ll be stuck being the hostess and chatting up your neighbors.

As you can see, it’s actually ALL about the audience, and you can’t treat them all the same. Your friends don’t expect you to spend the whole party talking to them, because they realize it’s a neighborhood party and you have obligations to play hostess to your neighbors. It’s almost unnatural for us to treat all people with equal importance in the real world, and yet in the world of Websites, it’s a common infraction.

In fact, it would seem rather kooky and even rude if you seemed indifferent to your guests’ preferences and just put out what you liked to drink and eat. A party of Amstel Lights and cheese sticks might float my boat, but come on. I don’t think my guests would stick around, let alone come to my next party.

By catering your information architecture and your content to your expected guests’ interests, you show that you are a gracious hostess who is going out of her way to make a positive experience. I might even go so far as to say that if you DON’T go out of your way, you may come across as snobby, self-absorbed, and rude. You have to realize who your target audiences are and prioritize them. Otherwise, you are doomed to failure. So don’t take it personally, people. Just realize your Website is a party. Now go throw a good one!

Got some good party-throwing tips? How do you find ways to deal with the variety of audience types and set priorities? Do you think it is important?

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Just as Americans have finally started caring more about what they put inside their bodies than what they cover them up with, Website teams are finally caring more about what they are saying than what things look like. Let’s face it: Healthy eating, and healthy content, takes work. It’s much easier to roll into a fast food joint and order up a few Flash effects, snazzy animations, and some hot sauce than it is to sit down and make a delicious and satisfying batch of content. You know the old saying about how you’re always hungry 15 minutes after eating Chinese food? (Personally I’m usually too full to move because I overindulge in the MSG carb wonderland, but I digress.) The similarity is obvious – crap might taste good for a few minutes, but it won’t be good for you in the long run.

Creating good content is not easy. Like most good things, it takes planning, hard work, some possible failures, and even paving some new ground. It’s not typically popular to work hard and sweat out the seemingly small things – not in today’s “super size for less” society. Unless you are selling shit in a taco shell, your audience actually does care about the quality of your content. They want to know that you are working hard to “know” yourself. They don’t want happy meals, movie posters, huge fancy animations, or more blogs than you can shake an extra large milkshake at (sorry, couldn’t resist). They want an experience, authenticity, caring, quality. They want you. And if you serve them up a double dose of grease and “we can turn you into tomorrow’s leaders” (inspired by the higher ed universe), then you will lose. They will smell the fry tray a mile away and never even nibble on the sweet edge of your bun (geez, OK, sorry, this metaphor has LEGS I tell ya!).

I think it’s almost funny how many people pass up great opportunities because they don’t want to do the hard work to get to know themselves and then do the extra hard work to tell their story to the people who are sitting in the booth asking to hear it. It’s so much easier to throw some manufactured meat onto a piece of bread, and it’s so much harder to plan out a truly nutritious meal. But nutrition is what good content is – it’s fuel for the mind, energy for the imagination, inspiration for the spirit.

Let’s work even one more food metaphor in here while we’re at it – how about the local/seasonal/organic movement? Why has this become so popular? Well, lo and behold, stuff that is in season, fresh, and not covered in chemicals actually tastes better and your body actually feels better when you eat it! Holy Whoppers! Yep, it’s true. There is no denying it. And now back to content: Yes, dear reader, the same applies. We care more about what is happening right now, right here, and not bathing it in a bunch of preservatives or unnecessary adjectives.

So, the secret to great content?

Do the work to “know thyself,” and then tell your story to the world.

Be unabashed, bold, full of personality, proud, willing to make some mistakes along the way, and always full of nutrition.

Resist the urge to use the high fructose corn syrup of the marketing world (cheap effects, generic statements, overused jargon).

Stick to the basics and let them sing. You have no idea how amazing broccoli with a little lemon juice is until you’ve cleansed your palate of the junk and feasted on real food.

Just do the same with your content, and you’ll be surprised at how wonderful the results will be – for you, and for your audience.

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Jumping at Fastspot

Here are the golden rules to live by when creating content for your website.

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There is a fatal flaw in many of the content management systems (CMS) out on the market today. I refer to it as the 10/90 failure. The CMS has naturally evolved to provide complex functionalities that are desirable to about 10% of its eventual users, often created in response to the request of developers and more experienced computer users. In an effort to continue to offer more advanced functionalities (or often simply a case of over-engineering from the outset) you end up with an interface and set of tools which alienates and confuses the needs of the remaining 90% of the users. So you cater to 10%, in spite of the needs of the 90%.

The balance between usability and complex computing and data management is the stuff of legends. It can make or break a product, a company and to some degree the client who is making the purchasing decision. One must never underestimate a system’s inherent “like-ability”, just as hiring a wildly unpopular or disruptive staff member can upset the entire balance of a team. Let’s not forget the ongoing demise of MySpace in favor of Facebook, which is often credited to the overly complex customization options available to MySpace users (which resulted in a noisy and often disjointed virtual space). People who use systems like order, they like processes that make sense, and they like visually appealing interfaces.

When considering CMS options, it is critical to evaluate the needs of your 90%, ensuring the CMS meets those needs, before you focus on the needs of the 10%. Otherwise you end up catering to such a small set of your resources that you will never leverage your total potential. It is assumed that the 90% will get on board, go to training meetings, read the manuals, suddenly develop a love for complex interfaces and terminologies like “null”, and become nimble CMS users. This is a dream seldom realized.

Now I’m not advocating you forgo the needs of your most computer savvy and technically minded subset, simply that you ensure those tools and interfaces are not “required reading” for the 90%. A good CMS should separate the tasks of the masses and the tasks of the experts – they should not share the same user space. Your developer tools should be clearly indicated as “for geeks only”, and the things that are user friendly for the rest of us should be front and center. Trust me, your IT developers won’t care if they have to click through a few nicely designed screens to get to the parts they want, they probably won’t even notice. But if the reverse is asked, you can assume much of your 90% will be intimidated, get confused or become overwhelmed, choosing to opt out of whatever task they had tried to undertake.

I think about the things I enjoy doing everyday. The ones that have succeeded and become part of my daily routine are those things that offer the lowest barrier to success, and even provide a little encouragement and fun along the way. We’ve all seen the success of the iPhone over most other smart phones, and now the iPad over the straggling competitors in the tablet market. Apple has excelled in providing the best user experience for the majority of its users. Sure there are a small fraction who will prefer an Android device or a tablet that allows them to hack into it and do very specific things, but this is not the needs of the majority. The majority usually need to perform more generalized tasks, such as updating content, or adding a new publication to a bio, or perhaps starting a FAQ or setting up some other online resource. Many simply want an easy way to work with words, pictures, video and documents. Simple needs, which should not require tasks akin to launching missiles to achieve.

In a society dominated by personal voices and the social networks fueling constant self-publishing, it is an absolute imperative that every team member is empowered to publish, moderate, discuss, interact and share the things that are important to them, in a way that encourages frequency and consistency. If these aspiring publishers are part of your team, are you giving them the best tools possible? I recommend frequent brainstorm meetings where team members (representing the 90%) are asked to write down the top 10 things they want to be able to do online everyday. Then make sure your CMS is allowing them to do those things.

Have a good tip for determining what makes for a good CMS? Have a CMS you love and want to world to know about? Have a CMS wish list item you’d care to share? Leave a comment and let us know your thoughts!

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When it comes down to it great storytelling wins. Every time. A great story will trump great effects, great technique, great design, great production, anything else. Really good storytelling gets the viewer or reader emotionally invested, and once you have someone emotionally invested, you have them hooked.

Great storytelling should be the goal with everything we create for our clients, to tell their story in a compelling way that allows room for the audience to get invested. A huge component of storytelling is the content, the language being used, the titles of sections, the way phrases are organized, the pacing of the writing. I think this element is often overlooked in the interactive design industry, as we all focus on code and composition and usability and mobile and the list goes on. When do you ever stop and say, let’s discuss the story?

It’s the story that will leave a lasting impression of the brand or the company or the application, not the pieces and parts that house that story. It’s like we focus on the stage set, the costumes, the music the orchestra is playing, the lighting and the effects, the change from scene to scene and the props the actors are using, but no one ever provides a script. We expect our clients to give us this. The script I refer to is copy (and often photography too). This makes little sense. Every project should have a specific process carved out to address the story, or script, or copy. Maybe if we think of it more like a story and less like pages with words on them for Google to index, we will start creating more compelling experiences.

Here are a few examples of companies who tell a great story – and they tell the same great story across all their storytelling vehicles. If you know of some other examples, please leave them in the comments.

Zappos

MailChimp

Jet Blue

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I was going to write a post about the recent campaign Stamats created for Drake University, but most relevant points have already been made in the media. It’s an interesting discussion with no clear cut lines, and it brings up the question of how in touch we are with our teenage target audiences? Stamats makes the case that this demographic “gets” the sarcasm in this campaign, whereas the adult public’s reaction is based on an inability to see it as anything other than degrading (no pun intended).

What do you think? Can a D+ campaign be seen as anything other than crappy grades, thus causing brand damage? Or does the campaign present an edgy and “with-it” perspective that will get appropriate attention and consideration from the target audience (prospective college students)?

If you want to do more reading, Mark Neustadt recently posted to his blog about the campaign, and he includes links to other relevant press coverage, as well as Stamat’s defense of the campaign.

Oh and my take? I guess I’m too old, I can’t get past seeing D+ as derogatory, but I’m willing to be proven wrong.

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There are lots of good posts out there on how to give a great presentation, but how do you put a good one together? How do you take your audience on a ride with your content even as you are hula-hooping and doing all your other best saleswomany tricks to give it enthusiasm, conviction and clarity? Below is a breakdown of how I took what was sure to be a stinker of a presentation and turned it around.

I was preparing for a huge upcoming presentation, and I mean a big one! This would take our company to the next level, and I really really wanted it – it was fun, big budget, good client kinda juicy project and I wanted it bad. I had my slides, I made sure I covered the big picture elements from our proposal, and I took a look at it all and thought, “This is total shit”. My presentation was going to be boring, slow, labored and I would end up red faced, hands in pockets, sweating and wishing my hour was up within the first 5 minutes.

I could tell because I was bored just looking at it, why the hell would the client feel any different? So, I deleted that presentation and started over. I asked myself the following questions and came up with a presentation that was a million times better. Ask yourself what you would answer to these questions (I’ve included my answers so you can imagine how my slides shaped up) and then try making your next presentation about your answers and less about regurgitating factoids about how many awards you’ve won, how you execute the concept, relevant case studies blah de blah blah blech.

1. What is one of the most creatively inspiring things you ever saw in your life?
- Pictures of the cave paintings at Lascoux, France.

2. Why?
- Because humans have been using imagery to communicate for thousands of years and it’s beautiful to look at. It still tells its story.

3. What freaks you out?
- Outer space.

4. What amazes you?
- Language.

5. What excites you about your job?
- Problem solving.

6. What makes you special?
- I’m funny and use great metaphors to communicate concepts.

7. How do you make the magic happen?
- I mix process, fun, creativity, listening, problem solving and talent into a big bowl.

8. What scares you?
- Failure. But without it I’m doomed.

9. If you could invent a toy, what kind of toy would it be?
- Something that turned music I was listening to into a palette of oil paints and wherever my eyes moved marks would be created. Hey – it’s a dream, ok, not something I really could invent.

10. What is one thing that you are bad at?
- I can’t focus on details, or maybe I can’t stay focused for long enough to deal with the details.

11. What makes you mad at clients?
- When I see horrible sites and stupid marketing and dumbed down ideas catering to the lowest common denominator assuming that they are stupid.

12. What do you provide to your clients?
- Solutions that make them more honest, more organized, more respectful to their audiences, and more likely to succeed.

13. What is something you want everyone to know about you?
- I love dogs.

Now, I realize this is kind of random but trust me – start putting your presentations together from a different mindset, entertain your audience, tell them something they didn’t already know. After all, this work we do is as much about relationships as is it about the work, so let them get to know you – how you think, what your passions are, and let the great work follow.

Oh yeah – I use Keynote to put my presentations together and I love Flickr, Google Images and iStock for finding images to use. Remember, pictures can say a thousand words. Skip the bullet points – say it with pictures on screen and speak your points with your voice.

Got any amazing presentations you’ve given, or tips to get there? Do share. After all, I showed you mine

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