“To build your innovation muscle you need motivation, practice and success”
When I recently spoke to Michael Bednar-Brandt, he made innovation initiatives sound quite a bit like practising for a marathon. Or rather, he made it crystal clear how innovation programs can easily fail if they are not treated more like a corporate fitness program instead of an innovation magic pill.
Michael works as Business Innovation expert at Oracle. Based out of Vienna, Austria, he has over 20 years of experience with innovation programs at both startups and large corporations and is a self-proclaimed corporate innovation demystifier. He is also our expert of the month.
Read moreBuilding and managing a web project is a big, complex process — one that branches far beyond the phases directly in front of us.
On one hand, there’s the multi-disciplinary nuts and bolts work of creating the site itself. But beyond that, there’s the connective points — the ideas, the strategy, the decision making, and the upkeep. Even if you’re an expert in your field, it can still be a struggle to find context across the entire project landscape.
With The Web Project Guide, Corey Vilhauer and Deane Barker teamed up to bridge those gaps to help understand how each stage of the website process fits in with the next.
Read more“Great. Now you can ask ‘would you like fries with that ?’ in seven languages”
This is what CJ Walker’s family and friends jokingly told her when she graduated as a linguist. Back then in the ’90s, the job market wasn’t exactly booming with demand for people trained at modelling and documenting language, but much has fortunately happened since then.
Following extensive work on user manuals and technical communication jobs at Alcatel, HP, the European Union, and Microsoft, in 2007 she founded Firehead, to focus exclusively on content recruitment and training. Since then, she has actively helped shape the content strategy community, trained and placed people in content jobs around the world.
She also helped organise the very first content strategy conference in Paris in 2010 and is our expert of the month.
Read moreThe Internet has a larger footprint than the airline industry, yet we continue to build new digital marketing campaigns, launch new domains, use high resolution for video calls and insist on impressive visuals on our digital presence.
Fortunately, thinking about website carbon reduction is actually win/win. James Cannings is Chief Sustainability Officer at digital agency MSQ and has been working with environmentally sustainable digital leadership for longer than most.
In a recent member conference call, he shared how sustainability also impacts our digital work, where to start, and the 3 layers in building for sustainability. In this post, you’ll find my notes from the call, slides, recording and links for your to make progress on your digital sustainability journey.
Read moreThis is not just any random piece of content you might find on the Web. You probably found it by clicking a link from another site or from an email, but I assure you that I wrote it.
Just to clarify, given the huge rise in content, much of it written by machines, this piece of content is actually written by a human and based on a collaboration led by Angus Edwardson from GatherContent and several of our peer group members who work with content and content creators every day.
As you’ll see, content is not just content and while this specific piece of content might look timeless on your screen (you didn’t print it, did you?), much is changing when it comes to how we work with content and how we consume content.
Read more“People tend to look at the wrong numbers and misinterpret the results”
Robert Petković is known to get to the point and in our conversation, he’s straight-talking as expected when we talk about his take on digital marketing in 2021 and his background as one of the first full-time digital analysts in Croatia.
Today, his role is higher level as Digital Analytics Director at Pro media group in Zagreb, Croatia, where he focuses on data storytelling and website analysis for large corporates.
In his own words, he frequently draws on his psychology background to help understand human behaviour and from talking to Robert, it’s clear that we’ve come a long way in the past 20 years when it comes to website analytics, but we also still have a long way to go.
Robert is our expert of the month.
Read moreWith spoken content fast becoming a preferred way to get information, how will you prepare your content when navigation becomes negotiation and when links, calls to action, and breadcrumbs become a matter of aural and verbal gestures?
Preston So has written the first-ever book from A Book Apart about voice interface design. It's also the first-ever book to hit bookshelves about voice content, with everything you need to know about voice content strategy and voice content design.
In a recent member conference call, Preston joined us for more about what's inside the new book: Voice Content and Usability.
Read moreIt is an incredible surprise to most people when they see just how large their digital estate has become over the years. Clearly, if you don’t have a grasp on your domains, it can have far-reaching consequences, both legally and financially.
Gavin Colborne from Little Forest in the UK has worked with this issue for almost a decade. He recently shared his latest and greatest thinking on the problem in a member conference call. As he said:
Existing domain management approaches often come up short. In a nutshell, it’s all about brand protection.
Read moreContent strategy in 2021 is changing as we are improving our understanding of both writing for the web and how content is consumed in today’s world
When I recently talked to Michael Andrews, I wasn’t surprised that we would talk about content, but I was reminded of how the explosion in channels is having a big impact on content. Michael shared his latest thinking on how customers are beefing up their content game and how we are moving away from web pages towards content as a living system.
Michael is Content Strategy Evangelist at Kentico Software, where he advises global enterprises on how to innovate their content practices and operations. Today he is based in Arlington, Virginia, but he has also lived and worked in India, UK, New Zealand and Italy. He is our expert of the month.
Read moreGreat content doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It gets bogged down in teams, organizations, silos, and process.
Beth Dunn is a content leader, speaker, coach and author of the new book Cultivating Content Design. In the book, Beth helps you break the vacuum seal and bring unity and joy back to content. She gives you the power to fundamentally change your organization’s approach to great content—with the tools and team you already have.
Read moreSustainability is the big thing and will be for the coming years, but what does it really mean? What do I need to do with my company, my team, myself?
In a recent member conference call hosted by Hamburg-based Christina Rahtgens, she covered how you can start your sustainability journey today and helped us understand the big picture.
Christina works as Managing Partner at Silvester Group, one of Germany's leading stakeholder relations firms. She covered how to level up your corporate social responsibility (CSR) footprint, and provided a glimpse into a rapidly changing topic that is clearly relevant for all of us.
Read moreInnovation rarely happens alone and many innovators are involved in various clusters and innovation partnerships, but what are really cluster business models, how can we design better ones and how does it help us accelerate innovation?
Victor Haze is International Ecosystem Director at Health Valley in the Netherlands and has recently co-authored an extensive report (220 pages!) on the topic of cluster business models and how it creates value impact.
In a recent member conference call, he gave us the inside story on how he has been exploring current practices of cluster business model development and developing a robust strategy toolkit to develop better cluster strategy and cluster business models.
Below are my brief notes from the call. Thanks to Victor for such a monumental contribution to the global community on cluster business models. It’s clear that Victor is kickstarting a wave of cluster business model innovation projects and ideas around the world. As we’ve said for a decade: Sharing is caring!
Read more“What are the key skills that Amazon or Google are looking for?
My conversation with New York-based Neal Stimler quickly turned to our shared appetite for learning and trying to understand what’s next. The top skills in high demand by the tech giants do shape much of the strategic initiatives and innovation happening. Understanding the key skills also help an interdisciplinary talent like Neal work with organisations to bridge the gap to the next level.
Neal now has almost a year under his belt as an executive management consultant in his firm Stimler Advantage. I’ve worked with Neal for over a decade and first met him when he with The Metropolitan Museum of Art in various content and digital roles.
He’s also worked a year as Head of Public Engagement at Auckland Art Gallery in New Zealand and worked as a consultant with Balboa Park Online Collaborative. He’s our expert of the month.
Read moreAs a product leader, how do you change the culture of a group of engineers to be more customer-centric? Lauren St. Jean is Senior Product Manager at German neobank N26 in Berlin and recently hosted a member conference call, where she shared her experiences trying to change how backend teams think.
A little over a year ago, Lauren started working with a backend platform engineering group composed of component teams. Talking to them about a customer mindset and beginning to think of their area of responsibilities more holistically and focused on customer problems rather than just improving performance, was greeted with less than optimistic enthusiasm from many engineers.
Read moreThere is nothing better than shared purpose, shared values and value created for all involved. But how does that actually work? You have probably heard of community gardens, co-ops and other community-based initiatives where people come together, put in an effort and everyone gets an output. But how can that work digitally? Does it even work?
When everything we build digitally has some sort of commercial angle or way to create more value for the organisation building it, is it then true commoning? Or is commoning in the digital world quickly on its way to becoming the next greenwashing fad?
Helle Jensen is Experience Director at digital agency Valtech and in a recent member conference call, she shared examples of good, bad and unexpected angles on commoning in a digital context. You might be a part of it already without even knowing it. Helle discussed whether commercial commoning is actually commoning or just a fancy loyalty scheme and if psychological commoning is a trick or a treat.
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