5 product design mistakes you need to avoid
Apr28

5 product design mistakes you need to avoid

Recently, I gave a talk on digital product design at Google’s Mountain View headquarters to a group of aspiring entrepreneurs and product veterans. While the audience asked a ton of great questions, I was surprised by how many of both audience types approached me afterward to thank me for sharing (what I thought were) fairly basic mistakes that stand in the way of great product design. Perhaps those points weren’t so basic after all. Here are five common mistakes that I believe stand in the way of successful product design. Follow these tips and you’ll start building better products in no time. 1. YOU are not the audience The good news is, you are not going to be the only person who uses your product. The (sort of) bad news is that what you are making needs to extend way beyond your individual comfort zone. Realizing that you are not the audience helps in two ways: First, it helps you see that not everyone uses a browser or an app the same way you do. Taking the time to understand the use-cases for your intended audience can do wonders to focus your initial feature set. You would be surprised how often the phrase “well, I do things this way” or “I like this” comes up. Just because you don’t like the color blue, doesn’t mean it’s wrong for your product. Second, you don’t have to be your target audience to design a great product. If that weren’t the case, I never could have worked on experiences like Rent The Runway (I will never rent a dress) […]

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Vocus is marketing automation for the top of the funnel, via 60M Twitter buying signals
Apr24

Vocus is marketing automation for the top of the funnel, via 60M Twitter buying signals

Most marketing automation systems start with known users. Some cutting-edge new systems can also nurture unknown prospects who visit your site but choose not to identify themselves. Few, however, focus on the very top of the funnel: buying signals in social media. That’s exactly the key differentiator Vocus touts for its marketing automation system, which is almost unknown in the industry but already has more than 8,000 small and medium-sized business customers. “We are actively searching Twitter for buying signals,” Vocus product manager Anil Yasyerli told me last week. “For example, if you’re an SEO agency … there are millions of people looking for SEO help. We find these conversations that are going on and then hand them over to our customers.” There’s a reason that almost no one knows that Vocus does marketing automation. In spite of a claimed $28 million in marketing automation revenue in 2013 and a projected $40 million in 2014, the company started out as a government services agency in 1992, moved into PR in 1997, and only moved into the marketing automation space in 2011. Vocus already owned the popular PRweb press release site and the HARO (Help a Report Out) journalist service at the time, and entered the marketing technology space via acquisition of both an email marketing system and Engine 140, a Twitter social media marketing solution. All of that complicated history means that one of the mid-sized marketing automation vendors by revenue isn’t well known in the space. (By comparison, Silverpop, which IBM recently acquired, had perhaps $90 million in annual revenue, and Act-On, one […]

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