Last Sunday, The New York Times Style section featured Gwyneth Paltrow’s new newsletter/blog project, GOOP.

GOOP (Gwyneth’s initials, although we never find out what the double O’s stand for) features G-Palt’s wisdom on everything from family-friendly recipes to assembling a fail-proof mommy uniform. I visited the site Sunday morning right after I read the article, and I signed up for the newsletter (who wouldn’t want banana-nut muffin recipes and fashion advice and from Gwynnie?).

But apparently the GOOP team wasn’t expecting the article to run that Sunday. In the Style section. As the lead feature.

Fair enough. I’d give them some time to scramble for more server space.

A few hours later, same error message.

And today, four days later, same error message.

Where is Gwyneth’s web team? How many hundreds, thousands, millions of subscribers have they lost from this oversight?

UPDATE: Strangely enough, I just received a newsletter from GOOP, as though their “something went terribly wrong” never happened. What??

TAKEAWAY: Crazy that we even have to say this, but it’s never okay to skip any form of testing (load testing, browser testing, user testing and re-testing, etc.). Never. But especially when you know you are about to receive national media attention.

–Britta

Confession: Up until this week, I’ve been building production schedules in Excel. It’s something I started in my early 20’s at Ammirati Puris Lintas, where I wore miniskirts and three-inch heels and tracked 100 unique print ads a month for the Dell account.

(That was before my eventual transition down to the creative floor, where, as a copywriter, I wore red corduroys and green Nikes and got to hang out in the creative lounge dreaming up campaigns for Montblanc and Marriott. Life was much better on the 35th floor.)

After hammering out dates for a July launch only to realize that a September launch would make much more sense, I loathed the thought of reworking the entire schedule. Which is when my brilliant partner Ian informed me that everyone else in the office uses ConceptDraw to build their production schedules.

Is this a print vs. web thing?

Lured in by the pretty colored lines that show intersecting milestones, I downloaded ConceptDraw and got to work. I endured multiple crashes and some annoying usability issues, but I got through it. And the launch date still wasn’t quite right.

Which is when I realized just how much extra work I had been creating for myself as an Excel devotee (er, dinosaur). Because a Gantt chart calculates the total number of days for each project phase, all I had to do was plug in the new launch date and—presto magic!—the schedule updated itself. It even knew the difference between work days and weekends.

Sometimes it’s shocking to realize ways in which you are (i.e. I am) behind the times. I use Mint.com on my iPhone. I Twitter occasionally. We play Pandora in the office on our George. I’m a slave to Basecamp and Backpack for project management, and can even work my way around Dreamweaver. So why was I still using Excel for my production schedules?

Because that’s the way I’d always done it.

Which goes to show that just like our clothes closets (i.e. miniskirts and chunky heels), our Applications folders could use a seasonal assessment.

Meanwhile, I wonder if could still rock the red cords?

–Britta

After re-posting this story — Content Management Systems Just Don’t Work — forwarded to me by the ever-capable robotics ninja/programmer/genius/good guy Gabe Hollombe. Destry Wion RT’ed and mentioned on Twitter to “see comments” in said story.  The story, written by Clay at Sunlight Labs, argues that it’s more cost-and-feature effective to hire a programmer to make a custom CMS, than it is to work within the constraints of an off-the-shelf solution.

*Having wrestled with many CMS solutions, from Vignette to WordPress, I concur, “Do you concur?”

But if you keep scrolling—past the last period—the story continues and evolves. Different CMS aficianados shot back in the comments and a meta conversation began to bubble and brew. This, and that 100 dances in 100 days in 100 locations video, are the reasons I love the web. First, I get a well-written/researched article about CMS solutions vs. custom development and then (bonus), I get content threads splintering off into: new solutions, the question of what a CMS is actually supposed to do, security issues, costs and “power pie.”

Personally, I don’t put too much weight into how many ✮’s an article has, how the author is ranked or the number of Diggs a story receives—if there are a lot of comments, my interest is piqued. When the story touches a nerve it is passed around and as it is passed around the POV changes and as the POV changes we get a sneak peek into what others see, feel and know/don’t know.

Today, we are in such a rush to present the latest nizzer info we have found, or broadcast triumphantly from our cardboard podiums that we forget the benefit of this web thing is the iterative, additive nature of the conversation. I too am guilty of the simple “cool article dude”, comment. But when an article educates or inspires and the ensuing comments build atop what the article started—that just lights my fire.

So go on, create/find an interesting story, Tinyurl it, tweet it through Tweetdeck, push it through Friendfeed and into the Facebook-Twitter app. Perhaps the story will get blogged about, and then pushed to Digg and/or mentioned in other blog posts, which will get pushed into Facebook again and LinkedIn. Don’t stop that process; just don’t forget, as Destry Wion reminded me—a lot happens past that last period.

–Ian

I was just barely 30 pages into Adam Gopnick’s Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life when I was arrested by the following paragraph:

“The frontier America of Lincoln’s youth was first of all a rhetorical society, where the ability to speak in public, at length, was central to social ambitions; giving a speech in 1838 Illinois was the equivalent of putting on a play in 1598 in London, the thing you did into which everything else flowed [emphasis mine]. (We are, by turn—and a writer says it with sadness—essentially a society of images: a viral YouTube video, an advertising image, proliferates and sums up our desires; anyone who can’t play the image game has a hard time playing any game at all.)”

Ouch.

Think the woes of New York Times and other old media companies have anything to do with this?

How ready are you to port your content into the stream where nearly everything flows?

—Jonathan

It was only a 20-second fill before the top of the hour during NPR’s Morning Edition today, but I laughed so hard I nearly plowed into the bus that had suddenly stopped in front of me.

Here was what host Ari Shapiro said: “Author Jane Austen might be rolling over in her grave. A book called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies promises ‘all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action.’ And there’s the film: Pride and Predator. The New York Times says it will ‘Juxtapose brooding aristocrats with a brutal alien that lands in 1800s-era Britain, attacking residents and leaving them with neither sense nor sensibility.’

A quick search later in the morning revealed that, yes, there is a whole industry that marries literary classics with aliens or the undead.

Mashups of seemingly disparate concepts are nothing new, just look at what Harry Turtledove has done with historical fiction and his classic “Guns of the South.”

And now, they are part of the backbone of most user-generated content on the internet. I wonder, though, is the world is really ready to see what happens when Lizzie Bennett meets the living dead?

— Jonathan

This article about in Boston.com about how “slackers” have (supposedly) skated past the recession drama-rama brought up good points but contained a few logical flaws. For me, it was an “I see both sides of that coin” moment.  A feeling very similar to my experience of spelling the word, “environment” (en-vahy-ruhn-muhnt), and the aggravation I have with that damn sneaky “n” continually masquerading as if it belonged there. Damn “n”.

Follow me here…this got me thinking about:

1 . If the creative’s blurry line between self-satisfaction/work/ and moving fast leaves them lacking foundation or the relevant experience that taking the long road does. And how big company management may lack the ability to move fast due to bloated infrastructures.

2 . How companies are very clearly run by the creatives or the management. And how this is usually established right on the home page.

Razorfish — (wait, wait let the dots load) = creatives.

OMD —  (very “us” focused) = management.*

3. If the question of, is A better than B, really the right question? The question more aptly may be, who can adapt to the new rules faster, cheaper and better.*

The bet on red: management focused companies use their six-sigma certifications and good ol’ boy handshakes to hire creatives, reduce overhead and change their culture from tortoise to hare.

From Boston.com article (comments)

“When Atlas shrugs, these lightweight Gen-Xer types will be the first to fall off his shoulders.
I love the fact that i work my posterior off to pay for these slackers, and yes, they are slackers, to fritter their collective lives away tipping at socialistic windmills and thinking small. If our fore bearers did this, we’d be wearing skins and living in yurts…and yelling our opinions at each other!! Mr. Scharfenberg you are the perfect O-bot!! America’s call used to be “aim high.” I fear it’s being changed to “aimless.”

Or, the bet on black: creatives harness their understanding of ever changing technologies and multi-tasking to build viable, profitable businesses.

From Boston.com article

“We brought you the Internet, worked on green technology, and filled the ranks of Teach for America. We crossed the color line, ate local produce, and bought secondhand clothing. We lived in smaller spaces, drove smaller cars, and took the subway to work.”

*Either one of these bets could prove successful over time but we don’t have time. There is that old adage that you can have two of the following the three elements in a product or service, but not all three.

✓ Cheap

✓ Good

✓ Fast

This new economy has made fast, or better put “nimble”— a prerequisite. And this leaves “cheap and good” sans parapets, with new positions to defend.

Creative led companies have to stick to their guns but must learn to diversify clientele, services and strengthen their management foundation. Translation—balance time spent on market research and projected cash flow with Twittering about the napkin quality at your local watering hole and submitting things to Found Magazine. Creatives need to understand that hiring one suit with an MBA to play bad cop isn’t going to cut it. There needs to be internal adoption of business fundamentals. This is where “good and cheap” get put under a microscope and where big business has a leg up.

Management led companies on the other hand need to figure out “fast”, fast. (See the well-worn example of 37 Signals.) Creatives already have that figured out. By the time you’ve had your 4th meeting about the corporate redesign and deciphered that usability study, they have redesigned the redesign.  Management needs to buy into a new culture of transparency and make sure their new message/service resonates with a new management style. Translation = they should take the photos of senior management in the old “suit-and-tie semi-circle” off their site. (I’m not sensing insights, ideas or results by viewing this photo. Instead I’m intimidated.)

The race is on. We are figuring it all out too. Place your bets and tip the croupier.

—Ian

Word nerds love anagrams, from the simple rearrangements of:

Elvis = Lives and New York Times = Monkeys Write

to the dizzying symphony of this quote from Kurt Vonnegut:

Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn’t mean we deserve to conquer the universe. = A masquerade can cover a sense of what is real to deceive us; to be unjaded and not lost, we must, then, determine truth.

Why do we believe in anagramming?

Eat Media = Idea Team

Ian Alexander = Adrenaline Ax

If you want to make your own anagrams, head over to Anu Garg’s fabled Wordsmith.org and get cranking. The truth never hurts.

— Jonathan

Have you heard the story about the $300 million button?

You can read the story here, but essentially, a flaw in an e-commerce site’s form was preventing users from following through on their purchases. The fatal flaw was that the site was requiring users to register before they could enter their credit card.

Shoppers were jumping ship left and right, and the retailer couldn’t figure out why. Finally, they conducted user testing (smart!) and realized the mandatory registration was scaring people away.

As one shopper confessed, “I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something.”

The solution? The designers added a “continue” button that allowed shoppers to go through with their purchase without becoming a “member.” The result? An additional $300 million in revenue each year.

So what does independent radio have to do with this?

You ready?

Here it is.

STOP TALKING.

It’s the rookiest of all the rookie mistakes. How often do we hear the volunteer dj say, “Well, I can’t think of anything else to say, so I guess I’ll play some music.”

But don’t they realize the only reason we’re tuning in is for the music? Because every other radio station in our listening area is playing overproduced pop, teenage screech or the ever so predictable Pink Floyd/Led Zeppelin/Eagles merri-go-round?

If they would just stop talking, maybe we we’d actually turn the radio on every once in awhile instead of listening to Pandora all day. If they just stopped talking, maybe we’d tune in on membership drive day and kick them a few dollars.

Sometimes the best answers are the simplest.

Stop talking.

There’s your $300 million button, indy.

–Britta

Amazon.com is doing its part to reduce wrap-rage.

What’s wrap-rage, you may ask?

You may not have heard the phrase, but you have certainly experienced it. Think of the last time you bought a memory card for anything. The product itself is tiny, but the last one I purchased came in a triple-layer hard plastic clamshell that was all but impossible to crack without power tools. DVDs are a pain too, but you truly have not experienced wrap-rage until you’ve tried to unbox a child’s toy.

Wrap rage is very dangerous. In 2001, there were 204,000 injuries attributed to product packaging. That’s more than double the number attributed to skateboards. Consumer Reports even issues “Oyster Awards” for the most fiendishly designed packaging. During one recent test, a Barbie doll took 15 minutes and 10 seconds to extricate from its Inferno-like rings of protection.

Amazon.com is helping reduce wrap-rage at the source by introducing  “frustration-free packaging.” While the product list is still quite limited, it does include memory cards and many of the more diabolically-mummified Fisher-Price toys. Gone are the plastic clamshells, wire twist ties and miles of tape. In their place is a simple cardboard box mailed in a simple envelope. Huge added bonus: much less plastic in the waste stream.

Thought for the day: Can people easily reach the information on your site, or is it caught in the electronic version of the plastic clamshell—visible, but teasingly just out of reach?

If you’ve ever watched an episode of Hell’s Kitchen or Kitchen Nightmares, you have seen (and heard) the F-bomb machine that is Gordon Ramsay. It takes a lot of moxie to walk into someone else’s business and tell them they don’t know their a*$ from their elbow, but episode after episode Ramsay does it. While both shows are entertaining, Kitchen Nightmares showcases some quality project management and problem solving skills bloody relevant to content strategy solutions.

Here is the flow of the show:

1. Assess the problem as an outside observer—Ramsay inspects the restaurant, staff and food.

*Content strategists need to find the root of the problem. Is the design struggling due to limitations with the CMS? Is the CMS choking because of an IT issue? Is the content irrelevant because of usability issues?

2. Inspect the systems being used to manage the team/projects—Ramsay watches the way employees interact and inspects the physical and interpersonal ways they distribute information from management, to the front of the house staff, on to the back of the house staff and back to management.

*Content strategists often play the role of cartographers. They take migration maps, design specs, software limitations, internal politics, wishes-on-horses, the beggars-that-ride and put the puzzle pieces together. When they are one of many vendors on a project they must stitch together vendor and client systems from: Word, Excel, online collaborative tools, Visio docs, XML, forwarded emails, IM’s and phone calls. It ain’t always fun and it ain’t always easy.

3. Remove/replace unproductive team members. Simplify complicated systems. Create authenticity, transparency and accountability—Most of the F-Bombs and “you Donkey” comments are saved for this portion of the show, this is when Ramsay gets hands-on with the staff, operations and makes projectiles out of overcooked salmon and soggy veggies.

*Content Strategists are most effective if brought in at the outset of a project but often they parachute in during the middle of a project. When that happens, identifying your strong and weak links is essential. Create new transparent systems and get all vendors, team members and management focused on the same goal.

4. Give the new system a test run. Assess. Repeat—Chef Ramsay’s new menu is usually a struggle the first dinner service. There is usually push back from management and staff but in the end he reviews, adjusts and makes it work.

*The process of creating a content strategy is…a process. It is a living, fluid monster that learns and moves and occasionally leaves a little present in the middle of the room for you after a long day at work. The ongoing execution of a content strategy takes work, in our experience at least two cycles, before finding a balance between stakeholder/content creator/editor and end-user. Be patient. Execute one, cohesive strategy. Have lots of paper towels on hand.

A successful content strategy consists of many sciences, oftentimes multiple vendors and the ability to be both uber-macro and atomically micro. Though Information Architecture doesn’t embrace all categories it is incredible useful for the heavy lifting, “whose bucket does this go in”, decision-making.  Here is a great outline and introduction to Information Architecture sans F-Bombs and cockroaches.

“In today’s fast-paced world, everyone’s looking for a shortcut. It can be very difficult to convince people, particularly senior mangers with little hands-on web experience, of the importance of taking the time to do research and develop a solid strategy…The immediate perception of progress feels good but often comes at the expense of overall efficiency and effectiveness. Since information architecture forms the foundation of the entire web site, mistakes made here will have a tremendous ripple effect.”

Morville & Rosenfeld
Information Architecture-for the World Wide Web
1998

—Ian