Douglas Karr's Articles on Martech Zone
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Yahoo! What the heck is a 52451930?
Today I received a beautiful email from Yahoo! requesting my feedback from a case that I recently submitted with them. I don’t remember submitting a case with them… though I have been working with the fine team at Del.icio.us recently. The email itself is designed well, as is the landing page with the survey to fill out. Here’s the problem……
- Content Marketing
Don’t be a Punk, be a Hunk and Chunk Your Content
That stunk, sorry! Hopefully, it got your attention. Dan Zarrella has an excellent post on chunking your content. I’m repeating some of his advice and throwing in a little of my own. Chunkless: There has been a tremendous amount of research on web visitor behavior and how they read and transverse articles and pages in a web browser. A common…
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Prapta: Everything In Life is Here
My first sponsored post is for Prapta, a social networking website that notes “Everything In Life is Here!” They may also be the first to be able to claim “Everything in Social Networking and Web 2.0 is Here!” These folks have been hard at work for sure! Everything in a review can’t be rosy, though, right? Although the application ran…
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Thunderbird Arrives! Some features are killer, others should be killed!
My assessment of the latest release of Thunderbird. An incredible email client with a few, very painful flaws.
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Even the Big Boys forget Usability!
I wanted to write a short note on some frustrating usability issues I’ve noticed with a couple of applications. According to Wikipedia, in human-computer interaction and computer science, usability usually refers to the elegance and clarity with which the interaction with a computer program or a web site is designed. The first one that I’ll provide is actually a Usability…
- Content Marketing
5 Marketing Lessons Learned from Curse of the Golden Flower
My son and I rented this amazing movie, which got me thinking. The 2006 Chinese historical drama Curse of the Golden Flower, directed by Zhang Yimou, tells a story of palace intrigue, secrets, and betrayal within the imperial family during the Late Tang dynasty. While it may seem like the film has little to do with modern marketing, a closer…
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This was the ol’ classic Can of Worms
When you hit that 30th comment on a blog post in a single day, you know that you struck a nerve! Wow! When I decided to post about my recent dissatisfaction with 37 Signals, in no way was I trying to hit the front page of TechMeme or have Jason Fried personally tell me off. Those of you that have…
- Sales and Marketing Training
Avoiding the Featuritis Trap: How to Prioritize Features and Reduce Creep for Happy Users
In their insightful blog post Features vs. Benefits from the Creating Passionate Users blog, software designer and author Kathy Sierra astutely breaks down the perils of “featuritis” – the tendency of products to accumulate more and more features to the detriment of user experience. Sierra’s post, which she graciously allowed me to draw from for this article, lays out some…
- Marketing Tools
I Canceled My Basecamp Account Today
In the past, I’ve been a fan of 37 Signals. They were ahead of their day in user interface design and simplicity. Their book, Getting Real, still impacts how I develop, design, and build product requirements. Since last summer, I’ve utilized a Basecamp account to track several projects and clients. While reading the 37 Signals blog over the last year, I’ve noticed…
