Reid Dossinger

I went to bed last night reminding myself to DVR the royal wedding for my wife on Saturday morning and check what time the NFL draft started later on Saturday afternoon. I woke up, of course, to find that the wedding was this morning and the draft started last night. I joked to a friend that at least my ignorance is well-rounded. When I realized how off I was on these, though, the first thing that jumped to mind was how did I miss that? For at least a month, I've been bombarded with columns, opinions, excitement and mock drafts (only for the NFL...didn't see any wedding mock drafts), and yet nowhere in that information was anything about "tonight" or "tomorrow". It's a strange effect of our current connected world: it's easy to get details and debate, but it's often hard to get the basics. I was at a conference for a few days last year and was out of touch on news, and when I came back, I was hearing tons about Derek Jeter and Christine O...

One of the constant standards among people spouting off on social media is that a Twitter account that is simply a broadcast of links to press releases and other self-serving tweets is terrible. "You have  to engage with your users or you shouldn't be on Twitter," is the standard line. I disagree with this. I really think that having a presence on Twitter is more important than making sure you do it right. There are plenty of places that are only broadcasting the links to their sites that are successful and worth following. It's the same as a website: you'll go to them if they have something you want, not just because they're doing it in the way the experts suggest is the correct way of doing it.  Now, engaging with users/fans and having a clear and focused plan of attack is obviously the better way to be on Twitter. But if you don't have the time, budget and/or creativity to plan out an engaging Twitter strategy, you should still have a Twitter presenc...

At one point in my dad's career, he was involved in purchasing HR services for his company. If the people selling the service couldn't explain the service to the point where my dad and the other people doing the purchasing couldn't understand it, they wouldn't buy it. It seems like an obvious move, but it's actually pretty brave. How often do we agree to something that we don't fully understand because it's pitched to us by "experts"? And before you answer, do you have a mortgage? Or insurance of any kind? Or investments? And you fully read and understand the terms of all those internet services you sign up for, right? Straddling the line between being afraid to look dumb and trusting the people who you expect to be knowledgeable, we agree to many things we don't understand. This is the main point of Michael Lewis' excellent book on the financial crisis The Big Short : complex schemes were put into place that weren't understood even...

A few years ago, there were a lot of arguments about MySpace. Most people hated it, but a lot of people with social media leanings would point to its exponential growth as a sign that it was here to stay; that its flaws didn't matter if so many people kept using it. MySpace has now completely collapsed , being used only by the people who had built up enough community that they couldn't tear themselves away. The lessons? A bad product will always collapse . Now, MySpace could have used their large user base and improved, but they didn't. They just kept grabbing for more and more users and focusing only on advertising rather than quality. And it eventually killed them. Give users exactly what they want and they'll create a terrible product . Facebook has shown that resisting user's demands to have complete control over their own profiles means you can give them a consistent, usable product. They may want to put flashing pink backgrounds and ten concurrently-playing v...

Google launched it's +1 button for search last week. Have you started using it yet? Here's a few initial thoughts: It's about damn time . Google could have done a Like button-type function a long time ago, at least hooked into Google Reader. But they let Facebook beat them to it, and now they're way behind. It's an oddly vague name ...for Google anyway. Google gives things plain but quickly descriptive names, and it's kind of strange that they went with something that's lingo to geeky commenters. I guess they didn't really want to go straight up against the Facebook Like button, but it seems like less geeky web users are less likely to glaze over it, having no idea what it's for. And those are the people that Google would need clicking the button to make it truly successful. Publishers will have almost no choice but use it . While Google says that +1 clicks won't affect search rank, the fact that these votes will end up on search results pages...

I can't overstate the important of the embeddable Like button, whether it's the Facebook button (it usually is), or some other type of combination. In this day and age where content is mostly free, it's a way of paying the content creators; of saying "I appreciate this, give me more of it." It's crucial. But the Like button is confusing. Content creators want the Facebook Like button, because it's really the only kind of button that could potentially bring in new traffic. But why does it have to be just one or the other? What we need is a button that can tap into multiple places or none of them at the same time. It's ridiculous for blogs to have reaction buttons AND a Facebook like button.  There's a lot of API stuff that would have to happen for that to work. But can't a guy wish?

Picture it: the year 2000 on the beginning of the slide down the rough side the dot-com bubble. My boss, an obnoxious but insightful-in-retrospect Brit forwarded me a bunch of emails between a client and our company's IT team and tasked me with "cleaning up the emails" for the client. After a rough, confused start in which the technical team basically refused to help me because they thought the project was stupid, my boss said, "Listen, just throw the emails into a Word document, put in a table of contents, format it a bit and we'll send that to them and see what they think."  It can't possibly be that easy , I thought. And yet, it was. The client was thrilled with version one and we were back in their good graces. It made no sense to me, but I was happy to be done. It wasn't until I was on the client end that I realized what had happened with that project: the client's technical questions had been answered in emails, but in order to refer to t...