Thursday, 7 March 2013

[UPDATED] The Business-to-Business Sales Tax Discourages Investment in Minnesota

Update 8 March: Victory! – Dayton drop b2b sales tax proposal

This morning at the MHTA legislative action briefing, I heard many stories of Minnesota based companies planning out-of-state moves and employment changes ahead of Governor Dayton’s proposed business to business sales tax.

Here is the message I sent the Governor, my state senator, and my state representative.

“For the last 10 year my small business has helped Minnesota companies make strategic investments in innovative technologies. The B2B sales tax discourages my clients from engaging my services and therefore discourages investing in Minnesota’s future.”

I encourage you to send a similar message to your representatives.

Tuesday, 5 March 2013

Client Launches: ExperienceLife.com Now Responsive

From the official press release on my recent work with the ExperienceLife.com team

“‘Our goal is to provide readers with a positive, consistent experience and easy access no matter where they are and regardless of their chosen device, be it a desktop computer, laptop, e-reader, tablet or smartphone’, says Jamie Martin, Experience Life’s digital initiatives manager. ‘Mobile traffic to our site has increased significantly over the past two years, with more than a third of our traffic coming from smartphones and tablets. Our new responsively designed site allows for the flexibility readers want and deserve.'”

Also includes this quote from me:

“One of the most cost-effective ways for web publishers to make sure their sites offer real functionality no matter their users’ choice of platform or screen size is through responsive design.”

Monday, 4 March 2013

Fine, I’ll admit that email is scheumorphic.

  • ‘Forward’
  • ‘CC’
  • ‘BCC’
  • ‘Signature’

All of these elements are carry-overs from, not only an archaic communication model, but an extremely bureaucratic one. One where high value is placed on traceability and formality. I suspect those two concepts by themselves result in higher communicatations costs, reduced message volume, and higher default priority.

Do we have a communication interface that reflects our current world? One where communication is casual, informal, cheap, and 99.9% of it is unwanted, unactionable, and otherwise unnecessary?

Email’s IMAP protocol could still support this, it’s the interface on the client side that requires the most significant updating.

And I don’t mean echoing the interoffice envelope.

Taking Stock

“So if you are in the position to have somebody else handle your flow while you tend to your stock: awesome. But that’s true for almost no one, and will (I think?) be true for even fewer over time, so you need to have your own plan for this stuff.” – Robin Sloan

A continuous stream can so quickly turns into background static. Just turn on any radio station or cable news station for proof. So much inane, meaningless, chatter between overly dramatic transitions to maintain attention and distract people from taking stock.

Infrequency has the benefit of being a novelty. Additionally, from what I see in this new publishing world – there’s an inverse relationship between frequency of publishing and positive impact on reputation.

I predict that if these real-time marketing channels (tumblr, twitter, facebook, et al) stick around another 5 years we’ll see a thriving industry of part-time, entry-level people dealing with it. Hell, I predict that these hired hands will handle most internet interactions for their clients. The role somewhere between personal assistant and PR agency. Especially those clients who feel the potential disruption of their own psychological flow is too significant to risk.

Perhaps, this is even something true fans will do out of their love. This final scenario may be the only saving grace for social media as we know it.

P.S. Proving my point, I was just pointed to Robin’s post this morning and it’s more than 3 years old. Significance continues to trump timeliness.

Sunday, 3 March 2013