Author: Howard Yermish (page 6)

The other day I was on a conference call with lots of very talented people. The discussion turned to usability and simplicity. The following quote emerged.

Perhaps you run a tire store, and your customer sends a message with the subject, “Tires.” Just imagine for a moment, looking through hundreds of emails and seeing the subject, “Tires.” Might make you want to scream.

Just a quick post to invite you to the Philadelphia Business Journal’s Social Media Summer Camp. Here is the schedule of the sessions: Wednesday, June 2nd: Social Media 101 (featuring me!)

By checking in on Foursquare, we were doing exactly what Carrabba’s wanted us to do: share our loyalty and eating preferences with our network of friends. And the promise that Carrabba’s made to the community on Foursquare was simple: If you check in more than anyone else, you deserve dessert.

Here is the thing about ratio. You want to have the ratio of followers (those who follow you) to those you follow as 1:1 or better. If you have 20 followers and you are following 10 people, your ratio is 2:1. New users to Twitter typically have the reverse – 10 followers and following 20 – 1:2. If you are trying to follow tons of people, Twitter “stops” you at 2000 people (a ton) that you can follow. So once you follow 2000 people, you will need to have 2000 people following you before you can follow more people.

Every time I receive an email marketing message, there is a cumulative psychological effect. This can be positive or negative. In an effort to improve your email marketing efforts, you need to stop thinking about the size of the list and focus on one perfect customer.

I’ve been using TicketLeap for my events for over a year now and I’ve been very happy. It doesn’t matter whether your event is for 5 or 5,000 people and there are no ongoing monthly fees. They are an Internet company, but located locally in Philadelphia, founded by a couple of Wharton graduates. So if you are having an event, give them a try.

Looking at Mashable’s recent post 5 Simple Tools for a Paperless Office, it struck me that they left out something very important. You have to engineer your business processes to stop generating new paper. So my simple tip is don’t have a printer.

It is hard to fight the default behavior. Most people like toasted bagels. The person behind the counter, faced with a rapidly growing line is looking for ways to speed things up, so he skips a step or two. It is only a bagel.