As of December 09 online social activity of consumers around the world was at an 82% increase in time spent on social networking from the year prior. On average, users spent more than five and a half hours a day on networks such as Facebook and Twitter. So what does that mean for businesses today? What does it mean when customers continue to adopt social technologies at a blinding speed – yet organizations big and small aren’t able to keep up.
Since rapid adoption of social networking enables users to connect …

Source: Brian Solis
10 Steps for Optimizing Your Brand for Social Search
1. Modernize and socialize your site to complement the experience visitors expect in 2010
2. Optimize the site and all social objects for traditional, social, and real-time search
3. Create meaningful and personable social profiles where consumers are active today (pay attention to where they will be tomorrow as well)
4. Establish an editorial calendar to produce and distribute relevant content for every network with cadence
5. Add social connectivity to the home site to facilitate maximum engagement (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Google, …

 
 Guest Post by Ivana Taylor, Third Force
How do you feel about new software applications or new ways of doing business? Are you eager to try something new or do you prefer the tried and true? Sometimes I feel like I’m the only person in the world who hasn’t complained about Vista or the new user interface of Office 2007. I love to see how art and engineering come together to make computing fun and easy.
This is why I’ve decided to examine 5 up-and-coming applications – and how to turn them …

 
Guest Post by Brenna Ehrlich | Mashable
It’s a new year, which means it’s time to make resolutions, take on fresh challenges, learn new things and change our lives for the better. Perhaps you want to lose 10 pounds, travel more, or get the job you really want?
Mashable has been building a vast archive of how-to guides on everything from professional networking to planning a vacation online — what better time to release a combined list than at the beginning of a new decade?
If you’re looking to improve your life in 2010, …

With the new capabilities of the downtown office, The Savy Agency will focus on building its brand while continuing to serve their local and national clients. Over the last few years, Downtown Bend, Oregon has continued to attract top tier businesses seeking the beauty and diversity the community attracts, and was listed by Inc. Magazine as one of the top 10 cities for doing business.

Like creating anything without a plan, creating a website with little or no strategy doesn’t work. Since I come from a background in lean, I find that utilizing the principals of lean in the design process helps both the client and designer achieve optimum results, while paving the path for a happy client-designer relationship.

Every organization possesses its particular niche that has value in today’s new digital marketplace of ideas. The global web presence has made it easier than ever before for organizations to create and publish their expertise in the form of web based content such as press releases, blogs, email marketing, micro rss such as Twitter, and social networks and platforms like Facebook. Organizations can gain credibility and loyalty with customers, employees, investors, and suppliers through unique web based content that can be delivered targeted directly to their audience while expanding their reach to new markets.

This afternoon Savy completed the initial design phase of the Harmony 4 Women branding project. We’ll use Savy’s 10-step design process to narrate the project from first meeting to design finalization. We hope this post will provide insight into how a typical branding project with Savy works, and also to perhaps help you prepare for your next project with Savy.

Since recently launching the SavyConnect email marketing platform, we’re of course immersed in the most important aspect of email marketing, the concept of permission. We thought we’d share what actually equates as “permission” with your email marketing campaigns.

Design challenges are inherently complex – and every project has their own particular knots to untie – but over the years, experience has shown that better service design depends on overcoming four crucial problems that are common to all projects:
How to get closer to consumers; how to collaborate across every part of the organization; how to create a strong narrative that inspires key people, and finally, how to conquer the fear of failure.  Hand in hand with identifying the problems each project shares has gone the development of techniques to tackle and …