Walking home I passed two young professionals talking about the website LinkedIn. One lady said, “I don’t get it.” The other lady responded, “LinkedIn is your online resume.” To which the first lady replied, “Oh!”

Some companies spend millions on marketing to make sure we say the right thing when a friend or co-worker asks. Others, like LinkedIn, do it without any marketing at all. I wish I could say LinkedIn has a super clear value proposition that is easily known and repeatable by the lowest common denominator, but that’s not the case for LinkedIn. I’m not totally sure why the lady I passed was able to give a response that would make LinkedIn executives smile, but she did, and that’s what I want to focus on. Let’s call it the telephone challenge.

Whether you’re a large corporation, website startup, or student group, the real test of how clear your branding and marketing are is to listen to how your lowest common denominator explains what you do to someone else. By lowest common denominator, I mean someone who should realistically know what you do, but is the furthest away from the business or group leaders. For example, if you are a student activities office, the lowest common denominator would probably be a commuter student.

If what you’re hearing isn’t what you want them to say, you have three options…

1. Expend a lot of resources to make sure what is said is exactly what you want them to say.
2. Make your message ridiculously clear so that it is almost impossible to mess up if explained to someone else.
3. Do both.

Ideally #3 is the best option, but most of us don’t have a lot of resources to expend on marketing and branding, which leaves us to focus on making our messaging ridiculously clear. Here are some tips…

• Don’t try and sound too smart, you’ll be the only one who gets it and people will end up using their own words, not yours.
• Don’t try and use too many buzzwords, it’ll sound that way.
• Don’t try and fit everything in, it’ll be confusing and long.

Once you’ve put your messaging out there, listen to what you hear back. Be on the front lines with your end users. Then, and only then, will you know if what you want the end user to say is what they are actually saying.

In your work, have you ever overheard a lowest common denominator talking about what you do? If so what did you hear?

“A true salesperson isn’t trying to sell you something, they are simply trying to show you a truth about the world that you don’t know about yet.” – This American Life 

Today a friend, Adam Ace, invited me to go see The Pee-Wee Herman Show on Broadway. Adam and I originally connected through our touring on the college market. He is a rather expressive comedian known for his red outfits and red speedo underwear. At one conference, he’d forgotten his underwear and asked if I had anything that would be just as funny. It just so happened I had a pair of SpongeBob SquarePants boxers in my suitcase (don’t ask).

Having grown up watching Pee-Wee on TV, I wasn’t sure what to expect seeing him live on Broadway. After 90 minutes of laughs, smiles, and flashback memories, Pee-Wee didn’t disappoint. The show did a great job of mixing original show elements with current themed jokes. Pee-Wee himself looked like he hadn’t aged over the last 20 years.

Though a friend, Adam got us on a sorta VIP list to meet and greet with Lance Roberts who played The King of Cartoons as well as an up close photo-op with Pee-Wee (Paul Reubens).

It was also interesting to see a lot of young kids sprinkled throughout the audience laughing along side the adults. With a new Pee-Wee movie coming out, I suspect we might be in for a bit of a Pee-Wee revival for a new generation.

After the show, we stopped to “water the plants” at a humous Charmin store dedicated to making sure NYC has an enjoyable place to go to the bathroom. I didn’t even have to go, but I did just because it was that funny of an experience. Nice work Charmin. There isn’t anything too unique for NYC.

"The diary industry tried for 20 years to convince you that milk was good for you and the sales went down. Then they tried "Got Milk" and the sales went up."

"Here’s to the crazy ones. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."

via @kprentiss

Every year big box retails host large “back to school” marketing campaigns to drive sales. In a slap to the face of higher education goals, Target’s using its national brand to promote “beer pong” equipment as essential college gear. We’re joining Cindy Kane and Jeff Jackson in using this blog as a platform to protest this type of marketing by Target and other big box retailers. Please use the image below to repost to your blog or email list and help spread the word that this is not ok.

I’m not a very good designer compared to really good designers, but give me an idea and an image and I’ll mesh it and recreate it with the best of ‘em.

In talking out the Georgia Highlands Campus Directory adoption strategy with Donny and John, John asked if we had a website badge they could put on their Student Life page for people to click on to go to the Campus Directory.

Several other schools have links that guide people from the student life page to the Campus Directory, but beyond the Red Rover logo, we didn’t have a website badge customizable for each school.

But the value was clear and so I set out to create a badge.

I started by exploring a few popular blogging sites for creative badges. Then Googled “Website Badges” and stumbled on this badge that I really liked:

The hover banner was the part I liked the most, but I had never created one before. While de-constructing the major pieces of the badge, I found the hover banner effect was a combination of drop shadowing and black triangles at each corner:

After some more customization for GHC, I put all the pieces together to create their final badge:

The angled logo for GHC was done with a tool called Picturesque for Mac.

Lastly, I’m a huge fan of doing design and layout work on Keynote for Mac. Not at all what it was meant for, but works wonders for me.