Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Public Acknowledgement

How to Design a Conversation of Impact http://t.co/pS1DsOazjY — Valeria Maltoni (@ConversationAge) October 21, 2014 As more professionals join the ranks of participants in public streams, we are seeing the evolution away from site- and even blog-based back and forth comments to messages in social networks. Distributed conversations -- i.e. where we happen to be browsing -- may be more convenient, especially on Twitter, where the back and forth could happen within hours and in some cases days. How do we signal the listening part in public, in stream? A few options for consideration: using @ replies to signal our... Read more →

Lessons in Creative Output from Eric Schmidt

How Google Works from Eric Schmidt This deck by Google Executive Chairman Eric Smith has been making the rounds. Success has a way of drawing attention to itself, and few would deny that Google is a top business, and one of the three best global brands# to boot. It is then worth keeping a few of the ideas front and center: know the competition, don't follow it -- so many organizations get stuck on this point; in other words, keeping an eye on what others are doing should come second to keeping an eye on how your company is closing... Read more →

Audiences, Product, Media

Every week I share five to seven links to stories that provide data points to business and technology trends. This week, we take a look at making sense of audiences, figuring out a way to build better products, and making media people want to consume. Making Sense: Understanding Audiences Jean Tirole and Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motiviation. Marginal Revolution [via]: Thus reward has two effects a pure incentive effect (holding information constant) and an inference effect. Notice that the inference effect depends on the context. Generation Flux's Secret Weapon. Fast Company: "There has always been a psychological contract between workers and... Read more →

Ze Frank on BuzzFeed's Video Production Process

In Content is not king; People are, Faris Yakob says: stealing from Duncan Watts and Henry Jenkins and many other smart people - you cannot create content that will be successful, that will earn attention, that will be shared. You can only create content that has a better chance of being successful. Even more so in the stream - where content has many different functions beyond simple consumption. I agree with Faris, the depth is in the exchange, in other words, what we/people put into the action of sharing, and not so much in the thing that is being shared.... Read more →

To Become Better at What you Do

What Clients Don’t Know (and Why It’s Your Fault) by Mike Monteiro – An Event Apart Austin [corrected file] from Jeffrey Zeldman on Vimeo. This presentation by Mike Monteiro# is worth watching in its entirety. He covers a lot of ground, including the RFP process and how to approach it -- that alone is gold. Of particular note is the bit at the end where he emphasizes the need for better communication between designer and client: Your job as a designer and a communication professional is to figure out a way to get your point across. The relatioship between designer... Read more →

How to Design a Conversation of Impact

We all have our fair share, most of us probably agree that there must be a more productive way to run many of them, especially since they occupy a large chunk of worklife. Meetings continue to be both a curse and a blessing of working with others, especially in larger organizations or across teams. A recent story on Quartz# puts a dollar sign on the lost productivity in bad meetings: A Bain & Company study of one firm estimated that one weekly meeting of an executive committee created 300,000 hours of extra work—including the prep, additional meetings, and followup that... Read more →

Learning About Creativity from John Cleese

We have something in common -- all of us who focus on creative work and John Cleese -- and that is when we are in the creative flow, we need uninterrupted time. This means no multitasking and that the slightest bit of interruption sends the whole thought process back to square one. Likely, we also have more in common. Cleese provides more thoughts on what he learned about being creative. Paraphrasing from the video: When composing late at night and getting stuck on a sketch, he would just go to bed; the solution became immediately apparent in the morning, fresh... Read more →

Growth Hacking

In a short post about growth hacking and media, Om Malik# quotes BuzzFeed founder, Jonah Peretti, on the announcement that he has appointed growth czar Dao Nguyen as new publisher and draws the parallel between Growth czar and circulation manager on the Web. “She’ll lead publishing for the social web, in the most modern sense, where data science, the CMS, technology, and a deep understanding of social networks, mobile devices, and digital video matter most.” Which reminded me of the now ancient (in Web years) post I wrote in 2008 titled Publishers Beware, User Experience = Circulation Online. This part... Read more →

Write for Real People

Reading a story about the NewYorker.com# redesign [via] in Fast Company#, we can draw some parallels to what makes a site successful -- and that is what is typically behind the scenes. Because a great experience often results both from what you put into it and what you take away. This means eliminating attrition both for staffers and internal teams so they can do things better: update the tools: in this case, the content management system (CMS) so it can handle increased workload -- the editors and producers of NewYorker.com now have a more robust, user-friendly CMS, can publish more... Read more →

Renting, Reusing, and Repurposing

Growing up in Italy it was fairly common renting an apartment, reusing items like clothing and shoes for years, and repurposing raw materials for example by making scarves out of the material of skirts when we were done. I remember when I embroidered denim to cover up holes from use and washing -- when pants finally gave up, I kept the embroidery as a memento, like the image in this post, which was a rendition I made up as a teenager (Disney with an attitude). Sharing among siblings and family members was a good way to be responsible with resources.... Read more →