SmartSymbols^tm

We have officially released a symbol set for books: “SmartSymbols Offers Advanced Marketing Solution for Book Publishers and Authors“. It looks like this:






Here is the excerpt from the press release:

“This new industry-focused symbol set organizes real time social network and social media content, book reviews, interactive maps of the story’s geographic locations, calendar of events, video based author bios and both written and audio book excerpts for display across any number of Web-based environments including: ecommerce sites, publisher and author Web sites, blogs and mobile devices.


SmartSymbols™ social media marketing support includes real time feed capabilities from Twitter, Facebook and blog/RSS. SmartSymbols™ is the only author and book publishing marketing tool to combine traditional internal marketing material with external social media marketing strategies, bringing the total book community experience to all points of distribution.”

You can see a full demo here: http://www.smartsymbols.com/demo.html

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“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” -Steve Jobs


Boris Evelson from Forrester Research wrote a great summary on “How to differentiate advanced data visualisation solutions“. It’s clear, specific and to the point - great resource and a check list.

Also, I recently saw a great presentation by Stephen Anderson, “Eye Candy IS A Critical Business Requirement“. It explains, very convincingly, why design details are so critical not only to how the product looks, but how it functions.

These articles, combined with Steve Job’s famous quote and the teachings of Edward Tufte always make me stop and think every time I create any kind of chart, picture, or any type of data visualization.

Source: Edward Tufte’s Website

All this reminds me that it is so critical to have our diagrams, icons and fonts created in such way that they are just fun to look at and explore. This is critical - they have to be fun to explore. If they are not - it does not matter how efficiently we compress data into the diagrams, charts and dashboards: if people don’t explore our visualizations, they will not find that data, thus rendering our efforts useless.

Do our data visuazations convey a simple message or are they just fancy-looking but useless? In other words: “what would Tufte say?”. Although he probably won’t say anything good, I found this exercise useful. It makes me do three things. First, it makes me ask other people to review my visualizations. Second, it makes me do more research on how a particular problem has been solved before. And third, it forces me take another look, and try to simplify or even re-work the diagrams again and again.

I think this is one of the rare cases when doubt is good, it makes you better while pursuing simplicity and clarity.

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In “How to Build Twitter-worth”, I wrote about the process, the details of using a specific permission-based broadcasting technology - Twitter. The questions and the comments that article provoked however, are mostly related to a larger question - what’s the underlying, technology-agnostic approach?

New Venues for Old Wisdom
Twitter and Facebook, as well as other permission-based broadcasting systems, allow us to utilize the wisdom of super-networkers and communicators more efficiently. I am talking about the likes of Dale Carnegie, and Cicero, while using the laconic approach that, luckily for us, is forced upon us. Why luckily? One - because short entries (emails, blog-posts, whatever) are more likely to be read; and two - it forces us to (at least to some degree) craft our messages before broadcasting them.

Image Source: Wikipedia: Dale Carnegie

OK, What Does it Mean?
As Robert MacNamara told us - “You Can’t Change Human Nature“. In other words, if you learn how to work with human nature, that knowledge is timeless. Which, in turn, means that we can make our knowledge of human nature (as limited as it is) more important and having more impact if we improve the efficiency of that utilization. Translation - leverage technology to utilize timeless knowledge more efficiently.

Image Source: Wikipedia: Cicero

Before Twitter-like systems existed and were widely adopted, we were limited in how we could engage other people and practice what past and contemporary sages have taught us. In other words, there are only so many cocktail parties and sales meetings you can go to. New broadcasting technology allows us to practice their teachings every day, in 15-minute intervals.

Finally
I think at the fundamental level Carnegie taught us to take real, sincere interest in people we are dealing with. Being sincere and truly interested will make us communicate with people in a way they want us to - with respect and appreciation. Maybe that will make us tweet less about us and what we want, and more about them, and what they are interested in.

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Great article on CNBC.com today about consumer behavior prior to product purchasing (great article name too): “Study Reveals What’s Really Going on in Aisle Six“. The article talks about different aspects of what makes consumer make the final buying decision, but it also has this very interesting quote: “[m]ore than three-quarters of the shoppers took time to do research before heading to the store, typically an hour or more”. In other words, it confirms, once again, the fact that people do a lot of research before buying a product, whether that is happening online or at a brick-and-mortar store.

The question is, why is that after doing all the research in front of the computer, consumers often time end up driving to the store and buying the product there? I would venture to say that they need to look at a product in person, look at other products and compare, use the coupons, i.e. - interact with it and get the complete story.


This is exactly what we have been saying all along (see references below) - give people ability to interact with your product online, and they are a lot more likely to buy your product. Since the shipping is getting cheaper and faster (Amazon, L.L. Bean, even Nordstrom now), the only barrier to buying online is the lack of research and discount coupons. But put this online, next to the product - and you got another converted customer.

Blog post references, with illustrations:
“Secret of the Conversion Funnel”
“New Advertising = Research + Transparency”
“I Came, I Glanced, I Observed - Just Like Sherlock Holmes!”

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