It’s been three months since I passed the torch of the Director of Production to Denise Lao and moved into my new role as Director of Business Development.  As the year closes, I have been spending a lot of time practicing our new capabilities presentation which is called “Bringing it to Digital.” 

In the presentation we talk about the three Ps which are People, Passion, and Process. We also talk about  how we work and how we plan and how we activate.  In any organization these elements ultimately are driven by the quality of the project management team. My grandfather, a WWII Commissioned Officer, wrote to me when I was in basic training at Ft. Sill, OK that the non-commissioned officer(NCO) is the back bone of any successful operation because they can command soldiers effectively to follow the battle plan and adapt if necessary if the battle dictates it.

Like those sergeants who drive soldiers through training and into combat, I believe the Project Managers are critical to success in a digital operation like the one Flightpath is engaged in. So, as I look back on the year I wanted to celebrate these three Ps, so exemplified by our project managers and take a moment to blog about what a privilege it was to lead and manage that group in ’07 and ‘08.

PASSION. NYU management professor, Dr. Arthur Matthews, encouraged me (and Director of Technology Alex Lindgren) to become a playmaker and give the staff opportunities to make plays. Well, we have some great finishers on the project team here at Flightpath. This past year when given the opportunity, the project managers passionately earned their PMP credential with the esteemed Jack Davis of Knowledgemovers.  Since then we have adopted new cutting edge tools like Liquid Planner that will give us a competitive advantage in managing resources and schedules in constantly evolving new ways.

PROCESS. These project managers helped build a Project Management Office with other new processes and procedures that help the company be more efficient and drive client success through team resourcefulness.  Together, we 

• developed a sophisticated hiring process (see blog post: Hiring 2.0) that has yielded promising staffers many of whom have already been promoted into new roles
• detailed training programs and manuals for new hires
• we instituted a continuity process for the hand-off of projects during vacation or training time that has kept us on track for our clients
• numbers and schedules became more important and more available through a dashboard,
• we began conducting in project reviews and serious after action reviews aka “close out meetings” which helped us continue to evolve the process by learning from what we did right and what we could do differently.

And there’s so much more, I can’t put it all in this blog post.

PEOPLE. Deanna is so good at her job, clients send her cookies. Denise is so good at her job she gets invited to party with famous people like Paige Davis (see her blog post about that night :). I am confident that our newest PM, Jonathan, will receive similar gratitude from clients for his digital excellence as he learns from the best in the business.

But it really is their individual drive and determination that I am so proud of. They consistently exhort the staff to display the team resourcefulness we talk about as part of Bringing it to Digital. I had the opportunity to work very closely with the best project managers on the planet. I wanted to publicly say thanks to them, thanks to Jon Fox for giving me the opportunity, and wish them good luck as they move into the new year with new leadership.  It gives me great confidence to know that when I give new clients “permission to believe” in bringing it to digital we have a great Project Management Office that can consistently deliver superior digital solutions and take the ball across that goal line.

And a Happy New Year to everyone! 

Flightpath knows its effectiveness as an interactive marketing agency in New York and for the U.S. relies on delivering messages that generate responses.

We accomplish this with holistic creative concepts that include images and words.  The process is constantly active for us, but each team member supports a certain objective. 

I write web copy at Flightpath, so my objective is to make sure the individual words and the entirety of the copywriting we present are honed for the audience we want reading--but who is that audience?  Who is reading?

Smart copywriters know that writing for the web is not about only about writing; it's about reading, too.  If your words remain unread, your copywriting is a failure.  

Of course, even smarter copywriters are now thinking, "Everything I write for the web gets read.  Search engines are crawling alllllllll over my work." 

Search engines are the first audience. 

Search engines send their spiders over the pages I write and they determine how relevant the copy is to particular keyword phrases.  My goal is that when someone enters one of these relevant keyword phrases, the search engine suggests the page I wrote. 

If the search engine does not read my copy the way I hope it will, the constructive effect is that I have written something unreadable, because the intended audience--my live readers--will never see it.

Search engines are the gatekeepers to my live readers.  Strong SEO copywriting, the kind a competitive interactive agency needs to provide every time, must respect that all the creative sparkle in the English language is nothing but pretty dust if the first audience fails to read what I want it to read. 

People are the primary audience.

Once the search engines suggest my copy, people are reading what I write.

People read very differently from search engines.  People, live readers, read maybe a third of the screen--but people comprise the audience that delivers the energetic response Flightpath needs. 

My goal when I write for people, then, is not to get them to read every word--but to get them to read every idea.  When people absorb good ideas, Flightpath can shape their imaginations.  The effect of my words on this audience is how Flightpath uses copywriting to motivate interaction between our clients and their customers. 

I need my primary audience to read just as much as I need my first audience to read--the skill is knowing which words engage both.  

The audience determines the words.

I use certain tricks that make the reading easy, but most of my results are because I know the audience determines the words. 

I write for my search-engine audience and I write for my live-reader audience, but the meaning and response each audience gives to those words determines their efficacy. 

The smartest copywriters understand the dynamism of effective web writing and write so that every audience reads exactly what the writer intends.  

Let us know in the comments--how do Flightpath's words speak to you?  

At Flightpath, we aspire to deliver web solutions for our clients that go beyond a functional solution and actually inspire surprise and delight in users.  With that background in mind, I’d have to say that I was shocked when visiting the U.S. Department of State’s web site dedicated to passport renewals.

• Messaging and iconography on the site was clear and to the point.

• Form fields were well laid out and error messaging was self-explanatory

• Editing information was hassle free

• It was easy to save and print information

Overall, they took a process that I found incredibly daunting in the offline world (would I have to go to the post office? a passport office? what were the fees? what were the required methods of payment) and used the web’s inherent ability to forge a unique flow based on my own personal needs (expired passport, at my disposal, issued within the past 15 years) to make a bureaucratic experience surprisingly delightful.  Nice work!

I start this piece by making one assumption--everyone is a Facebook  user. 

Isn’t that what makes social communities great? When they have hit a critical mass of users? Your entire community of close friends, family, coworkers, old college buddies, business acquaintances, and that girl you met at the Digital Wednesday’s networking event are all hanging out together in your Facebook friends list.

Now let me ask a rather blunt rhetorical question, “Would you invite all of these people over for Thanksgiving dinner?” Let me put things into my perspective.

My father just recently sent me a friend request, which unfortunately is still sitting in my inbox, after seeing me over Thanksgiving. My girlfriend’s sister rolled her eyes for denying her friend request after I tried to explain, “My Facebook page is really just for work purposes.”

My friends list is quite small, only consisting of coworkers and a handful of close clients. I have deliberately kept my personal   life separate from my Facebook one. This is not out of fear of possibly inappropriate content, but of the calamity that would occur if all the pieces of my social life melded into one unified bucket.

There is a huge opportunity for Facebook to expand its breadth from simple social networking into a true relationship management tool. No one   has just “friends” in his or her life. We dissect our social life mainly into family, work, and play. How are these very distinct aspects of our real social life going to interact in this digital social stew? I understand the argument—interpersonal transparency can be the catalyst for social discovery; however, we manage the relationships in our lives differently than how Facebook currently presents it to us. 

About a year ago, Facebook added a new feature that allowed those of us who have 5,000 friends to manage that immense data slurry into user-created categories. However these user-created categories are little more than a light contact list-building tool. This is the first step in the direction that I propose below. 

Facebook should allow you to designate your own categories for people in your friends list. Each of these created “friend categories” could have a separate sub-profile page where a user could design a page around that unique social interaction. This could simply all boil down to a privacy setting. You allow one category of friends to see a certain module on your profile. If a friend on your other list views your profile page, they would simply not see the module.

If you created a category of friends called “business networking” Facebook could finally be used as a quasi-Linkedin without the fear of your business prospect seeing pictures of you at the MTV beach party in Cabo last summer.

This would open a huge opportunity for Facebook to capitalize on the business side of our social communities. Lord knows as much as we all love Linkedin, there is little "social interaction" beyond the prospect of upward career mobility, which does not usually make for great conversation. 

I wish I could create a friend category called “work” and use Facebook as an internal communication and content management system. Most companies  already use Instant Messenger as a more efficient way to communicate internally than email. IM poses its own set of similar issues. If you use the same IM username for work and at home, while you’re at work your friends outside of the company are just one tempting click away to distract you. To circumvent this whole issue I have created a IM  account specifically for work—but, if my idea happened, I wouldn’t have to.  

Facebook would do the filtering for me, and I could finally become digital friends with my girlfriend’s sister, my coworkers, my clients—and my dad.  

A few weeks back, I saw a designer give a presentation called "Whatever happened to the Art in Design?". This was at The Future of Web Design conference, an event that brings together folks who are leaders and pioneers of the field.

He spoke about adding more traditonal creative elements into designs to make them more attractive and interesting. The examples shown included designs that incorporated some hand-drawn ornamental elements and various other decorative sprinkles. A bit less than what I expected from a presentation with such a profound title, though it did call to mind soemthing that I've considered myself over the years.

Moreso than any other field of design, interactive designers find their way into the profession through varied educational and professional routes. I arrived here through a traditional graphic design background (packaging, branding, print). In the early days of the web, it seemed a natural progression. As technology rapidly advanced, so was born the age of the web design specialist, and more recently the Interactive Designer. Somewhere along the way, I've always felt that something got lost in terms of the way Art is involved in traditional graphic design and theory vs. web design.

To take a course in graphic design history, one will see it evolved quite naturally along with the trends of fine art, culture, and, in the 20th century, psychology and sociology. Naturally, design on the web has escalated the need for sociological and psychological theory to be applied, as usability has become a major factor. So what has gotten lost in the shuffle that causes decent, usable websites not to be viewed in an artistic light? Published items and advertisements from ancient times through the 1990's currently hang in the MoMa, celebrated for high aesthic value coupled with precision-perfect functionality.

One issue could be what is perceived as a short lifespan for digitally published items vs. print. A packaging designer may put consideration into a project so much so that the package becomes a keepsake, while a web project will usually come with an agressive activity schedule and lifespan, it can capitalize on "the moment", though it's treated like disposable silverware. A major website, however, can have a lifetime of up to 3 years, certainly comparable to our packaging in this day and age. There are a few sites I've come across that do show a greater level craft, attention to detail and typography that certainly escalate their status beyond a well-built site to something one can look at and say "THAT is a work of ART!". Unfortunately, most of these sites fall into a by-designers-for-designers category, and rarely find their way through the thicket of agressive marketing campaigns and onto the larger stage.  As the industry matures, I'd like to see this level of design acquire a value to marketing in balance with the lot of "2.0" trends that businesses salivate over.  The "Interactive Artists" would be in demand in the same way that superior print designers have been by luxury brands, and web design may finally find its way into cultural signifigance.

I often check out qbn.com, which regularly showcases talented designers who's work spans multiple mediums, often stretching into fine art. It is great inspiration, and supports the theory that great design fundamentals can apply to any form.