Brian’s Random Thoughts – August, 2015

It’s been a busy few weeks here at Strong Coffee as summer winds down. We’ve got some cool projects on the go and we’ve had a bit of time to experiment with new technologies and tactics. One of the best places to discover new ideas and technologies is on Twitter. My Favourites section has grown quite a bit in the past few months as I stumble across and bookmark cool articles and ideas. I thought it’d be fun to browse through some today…

The Agency of the Future

This is a really interesting article talking about what marketing agencies might look like in the future. The idea of being somewhat specialized and extremely agile really fits with the way I think. The idea of a group of smaller, niche agencies coming together to work on a project over a larger, all-encompassing agency is something that we’re seeing more and more of.

Where Have all the Younger People Gone?

Simply Measured has a really good blog filled with data and ideas. Their Internet Trends Report from June has all sorts of good nuggets in it. Most intriguing to me was the data on social media usage among the 12-24 age group. I’m surprised that Facebook ranks so high (although it dropped a bit from 2014).

Everything You Need to Know About A/B Testing

We regularly turn to A/B testing when creating landing pages, ads and e-newsletters. Although many people have an idea of what it’s all about, very few know enough to actually do it. This blog post from UserVoice is a really good review of what A/B testing is, why it’s important and what you should look for.

Content Personalization

This blog post from HubSpot really got me thinking about a lot of different things. The idea of being able to tailor content to meet the needs of the visitor is interesting but it’s not without it’s flaws. There’s also some good data in there about how consumers feel about controlling the content that they see. I like the information on channels and content based on the buying cycle stage. Cool stuff!

Google Analytics Custom Reports

If you have any interest in analytics (and how to better understand the data), Avinash Kaushik’s blog is pretty much made for you. This dude is super smart and he’s good at laying out information in a way that makes it relatively easy to understand. He’s actually had a couple of really good posts as of late – one talking about Google Analytics Custom Reports and the other talking about his See-Think-Do-Care framework. I’ll quit rambling and just let you click the links and read them…

Facebook Investigating New Notes

This is the article that I found most interesting of all. Facebook is finally looking at redeveloping their Notes application. The current Notes are basically a glorified version of Notepad. Facebook is looking at adding a ton of functionality to Notes in hopes that they can take a bite out of the blogging CMS market. The New York Times Facebook page has been using the new Notes for a few weeks.