I Heart Buffalo - Almost Ready for Launch

IHeartBuffalo.com is a project I have been working on for the month or so. The basic concept is to build a successful business around the idea of promoting Buffalo, NY. Expect more on this in the next week.

What Super Mario can teach us about business

When I got a Wii last year, for my birthday, the last thing I expected was that the game I would play the most would be a game from 1990. It’s a testament to how well the game is designed and how nostalgia will work for the information generation. When your older and playing Super Mario you realize that a few things in the game made it so addictive. Also that we can actually learn a lot about life from the way the game is set up. Continue reading »

Pepsi, Obama, and Marketing to a generation

Yesterday Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States, and this is a really great time to be an American citizen. It also apparently is a great day to be an ad agency working with a client that has a red, white, and blue color scheme. Enter Pepsi and their ad agency, TBWA\Chiat\Day.

Pepsi rolled out a new logo a few weeks ago. Initially the new logo received mixed reviews. However, when you look closely at the new Pepsi logo, it does two things. Continue reading »

I really like Hype Machine

If you’re like me then you listen to a lot of music while you work. One of my absolute favorite things about music is finding new artists. Hype Machine is a great tool for this. Hype Machine pulls mp3s from music blogs and categorizes them in an interface that allows users to listen and favorite songs. All while recommending artists based on what other users have searched. The value in this is I can look up a group I have heard of and listen to a few songs and decide if I like them. All in an interface I can take with me on any machine (AKA: the service lives in the cloud). Continue reading »

Can we improve the in-store shopping experience now?

So I did my Christmas shopping last week and it was awful. I am not sure I can put into words how much I hate going shopping when I HAVE to find something. So why is this?

Shopping in a mall or at various shops in a city basically comes down to roughly categorizing in your head what the store sells and do I need to go there to find what I am looking for. My objective in going to the mall was to find North Face Apex Gloves (love that site by the way) in extra-small, brown. The caveat and reason for going to the mall is that if there was a comparable pair by a different company in that size and color I would buy those too.

I’m sure at this point you ask why don’t I just buy them online, good question. I attempted to do this but couldn’t find the size and color combination from the vendors on the first page of a Google search. This post isn’t about buying products in a store vs. on the web. The virtues of that ARE already very well documented. I want to make going to the mall, shopping market, or a shopping corridor a better experience. Continue reading »

BethMunro.com now live

BethMunro.com, the personal portfolio of a Buffalo artist, was relaunched this week. I worked with the artist to design and program a site to show her work. The site is a minimalist two column layout that makes viewing the artwork the focus of the experience. Typography used on the site is Georgia for the body copy and Today Sans-Serif for the navigation and treatment of BethMunro.com. This site was a fun project for me because the look appeals to my design sensibilities and its always fun to work with a Buffalo artist.

Marketing With Twitter

Marketing with Twitter (or any other social network for that matter) is all about one thing. Creating Community.

How do you do this?

In my opinion you simply find like minded users, basically customers in your demographic, and write posts that relate to them. If you sell sports related t-shirts you write about the sports teams you sell shirts for, if you run an auto repair shop you write about new cars, maintence, rebuilding old cars etc, and if you operate a market you write about what your store is doing to make itself better and sales or coupons that are only available on the web. What this does is expand your brand and allow you to ease your readership into your marketing messages. It’s also extremely important to reply to friends about anything, even a simple congratulations can go a long way towards a potential customer checking out your message.

Some examples of what is being done on Twitter after the jump. Continue reading »

Press for Buffalo Sports Tees

Last October I was contacted by the editor of INcite Magazine for an interview about Buffalo T-Shirt Companies. INcite Magazine is a full-color 35 page magazine with sections featuring money, love & relationships, Buffalo, music, fitness & nutrition, technology, fashion & style, and an insightful cover story - for the Fall ‘08 edition, the “Brain Drain.”

We talked about how Buffalo Sports Tees was founded, what we do, what we sell, and why we do it. The story can be found in the fashion & style section. This was a fun experience for us being that it was our first print media coverage. Pictured from left to right are Scott Walters, Nicholas Barone, and Peter Cimino.

The article can be downloaded here.

Buffalo Sports Tees on the Radio

On October 25, 2008 I appeared on BuffaloStyle, a program hosted by Christina Abt on the radio station WECK 1230. I really enjoyed appearing on the show and talking about what we are doing at Buffalo Sports Tees.

Below i’ve attached the entire program. You can find my interview around the 17 minute mark.

 

 Buffalo Style [60:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Ask Google?

Quick post. I was doing some searching and noticed a new feature on google’s search result pages. They are offering basic answers on certain search queries that resemble questions. The search I did was for the owner of the NHL franchise the Florida Panthers.

Oddly enough I can only get this to work for the owners of Professional sports teams. It seems that the logic that detects this on wikipedia or a similar site could be used to create similar results for searches like Who is the Prime Minister of France? But it doesn’t yet.

This also signifies a new way that internet users are becoming dependent on google. For a while I and people I know have been using Google to end arguments or to answer simple questions. Now Google can start answering those questions directly in their search results pages. This is cool because it makes it easier for us but also kind of scary for content producers because now I don’t click on their page and they don’t get that pagevew and or ad impression. Google’s goal is to take the world’s data and make it easily accessible with thier ads around it. And they are continuing to improve on that goal.