Now’s the time for organizations to get started with Google+. We don’t recommend committing major resources to Google+ just yet, but it’s smart to prepare for a future in which Google+ becomes mainstream.

The social media team for the State of Missouri knows what they’re doing. That’s one of the reasons we’re so proud to have them among our app users. Before they started using Measured Voice, they had developed a strong and consistent brand across not only Facebook and Twitter, but also YouTube and Flickr. When they [...]

Steve Jobs was great. He was wonderful. He was incredible. He made beautiful things. He showed us what humans can do. He was magical.

Larger images in Facebook’s news feed signals the growing importance of imagery within social media content strategies. Just as social media has required more organizations to develop stronger copy writing operations, it is starting require them to develop graphic editing skills.

Amazon’s Government Cloud allows government agencies to experiment much more online while spending far fewer taxpayer dollars.

It’s been over a month since Google launched Google Plus, its latest foray into the world of social media. Our official guidance to clients on Google Plus from the day it launched has been simple: wait.

A brief guide to some of the first hacks based on 1.USA.gov data created by us, bitly, Socrata, and Helmut Hissen.

A continually updated list of official U.S. government agencies and programs that use Tumblr.

Mark your calendars: on July 29th, from 10am to 6pm, we will host a hack day in San Diego at the Ansir Innovation Center as part of the nationwide 1.USA.gov Hack Day. RSVP on Eventbrite! Why this hack day will be awesome The 1.USA.gov Hack Day is designed to encourage coders, entrepreneurs, and curious citizens [...]

Yesterday, we were proud to launch We are Sekisui, a beautiful little site created to help the rebranding efforts for a long time client. As the site indicates, Sekisui Medical acquired the diagnostics division of Genzyme Corporation on February 1, 2011.  As a result, the newly formed Sekisui Diagnostics need some help communicating to existing [...]

Hate to break it to you, but QR codes are actually pretty useless. In my colleague Jed’s words they are, “a solution looking for a problem.”

A few years ago, a solid content strategy and some basic SEO best practices would carry you a long way, but not any more. Authentic content is the next step in this evolution, accommodating for social media, ubiquitous computing, and the real need for brands to maintain a meaningful dialogue with a consistent voice.

Bringing out the “show” in your Facebook “Show and Tell” not only allows your existing fans insight to multiple sides of your business (thus building loyalty and engagement), it also increases the likelihood of that content spreading to potential new fans. If you post content that’s interesting and relevant to your business, it’ll endear your business to users.

At a dinner party recently, I was seated next to someone who asked my advice on a recent business decision. He had decided to pass on an offer from a “Brand Management Expert.” Interestingly, it had nothing at all to do with the $300/month this person wanted, but was instead motivated by the belief that what this person was offering to do was unethical.

Some organizations mistakenly change their voice and style when using a new social media channel. We explain why we hope government organizations won’t make that mistake as they begin to use Tumblr.

We’re happy to have helped USA.gov become the first federal program to use Tumblr. Here’s why we recommended they use Tumblr and how it came about.

We’ve recently heard two way-too-common stories about groups investing real resources in optimizing their websites in different ways, for different (but still very misguided) reasons. Example #1: Make the navigation buttons on the slideshow viewer larger. Optimizing For: Increased use of navigation buttons on a slideshow. Will this strategy be successful? Certainly. What’s wrong with [...]

Everyone understands that delivering a message worth talking about is the reason individuals and companies decided to “join the conversation” in the first place.

I could stop there, but I’ll elaborate. Delivery of data is not analytics. Site traffic reports are not analytics. Click path reports are not analytics. Lists of referring sites are not analytics. Eye-tracking visualizations are not analytics. Analytics requires reporting of data, yes, but it does not stop there. Analytics is the discipline of using [...]

So, you might have heard about the new Facebook Pages features. You can read about it straight from them, if you like, but it boils down to this: Pages now have the basic interaction and notification features that used to be only available to individuals. A few of our clients asked us to outline some [...]

If you’re like most people, you don’t know the difference between an iPhone and an Android-based phone. That’s according to Marco Arment, who recently wrote an interesting piece on why Android-based phone manufacturers are making a mistake by rapidly producing newer, fancier phones instead of creating a single product—like the iPhone—that just works for most [...]

How the 1.USA.gov and Go.USA.gov URL shorteners create a better user experience by including USA.gov in their short URLs.

When marketing your business to a social media audience, structure is just as important as spontaneity. Message planning provides necessary framework for a campaign; without it, you risk alienating your audience with a flood of updates that they’ll eventually ignore. Building a process to execute your social media strategy using both structure and spontaneity can [...]

No matter what type of industry we are talking about, if you have a local business that serves local customers, an intentional online presence is no longer simply a luxury for the willing. It’s gone way past that and clear to the other end of the spectrum–without it, you’re downright neglectful.

We’ve been working with USA.gov and GobiernoUSA.gov on their social media strategies for the past three years. Coming up with voice guidelines is one of the most powerful things we’ve done.

Cut to the chase and admit it: you want people to like you.