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I’ve discovered that one of the best ways to generate a creative spark is to find a creative a cool environment to work.

I’ve been working intermittently out of the lobby of the W Hotel in San Francisco for the last couple of days. As fans of the W chain will know, they use interior design, materials, audio/visual (and even scent) to craft a provocative experience for their guests. The W known for being hip and attracting the same with their clientele (myself excluded!)

The lobby at the San Francisco W is a little loud and there is constant action and people milling about—basically there’s a lot of distractions. Nonetheless, I’ve been able to get a large amount of work done, both in quantity and quality. I’m finding that the environment is inspiring and clearly conducive to getting work done.

When you get busy and under pressure there’s a normal inclination to hole up in your office, seek quiet, and hole up with the familiar. The last couple of days have shown me that contrary just may be just as true. Working somewhere new and cool may be just what you need to get you out of your creative funk.

Unfortunately I’ll have to wait until August of 2009 for the W Hotel Boston to open…

I watched Once on a cross-country flight and was totally blow away. It’s a simple and unfettered love story set to music—an almost perfect Indie film.

This is a movie you need to see if you haven’t already. Granted, the acting is a bit wooden, and it’s shot in that grating docu-style that is so popular among independent movies. Nonetheless, the story is gorgeous, the music is memorable, and you will be thinking about the ending long after the closing the credits.

In what some are calling the best moment from the Oscars, here are the lead players from the movie (Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova) performing “Falling Slowly” that would eventually win “Best Song”.

The New York Times Online recently launched a neat online tool – The TimesMachine – that lets you browse their issue archive stretching back to the 1850s. You can see the newspaper layouts in their original format (something Google news doesn’t offer).

I did a look-up of October 25, 1872 – one hundred years before I was born. It doesn’t seem like too much was going on outside of the Horace Greeley campaign, although it’s hard to tell because there are no real headlines! I suppose the headline is an invention of the modern newspaper…

More big sites should do what LinkedIn.com is doing: testing a working design concept in real-time—with actual users. The site is testing a new homepage design (which is very good, BTW). There’s a very clear call to action soliciting input from their user community. Clicking on the ‘send your feedback’ link opens a pop-over window with a text box for comments.

I’m surprised that more websites don’t put feedback loops like this into practice. Granted, the site owners probably receive a ton of junk to sift through, but I’m sure they are lots of great insights and commentary that will go a long way towards informing their design decisions. It’s also think that the simplicity of the text boxes results in more candid feedback and is much more user-friendly than a poll or survey.

It would be interesting to learn how the LinkedIn design team plans to assess and act on the data…

I was recently asked to give a brief presentation on the elements of interaction design and web strategy. Distilling all the aspects into a thirty minute presentation was a daunting task! After some deliberation, I decided that the most sensible way was to break interactive design strategy into three elements:

• Concepts: Basic components of interaction design strategy—key “sound bites” and practices
• Process: The five stages of strategy development with their individual artifacts
• Deliverables: Examples of primary deliverables (wireframes, task flows, prototypes…)

Here’s presentation via Slideshare.net.

Over the weekend RDVO launched the new Gillette Young Guns Website. It’s an update to the original site we launched last year. The site is a Flash-HTML hybrid website that’s updated every week with the latest driver information, race results, and general news. It’s quickly becoming one of the most visited NASCAR fan sites on the web.

It’s a really great site that solidly supports Gillette’s growing NASCAR promotions. The site was a 2007 MITX Award winner for Best Entertainment/Sports Website.

The new website was refitted and updated with a number of new features and functions. Two new drivers—Denny Hamlin and Clint Bowyer—joined the Young Guns and now prominently featured on the site. We also developed driver-specific screensavers that are automatically updated with news, driver updates, and other exclusives. There is a wealth of multimedia, images, and text content tailored for NASCAR fans.

We also extended out existing multimedia features and content, including our Google Maps-driven track locator. Several new community and content features are planned for later this year.

Congrats to the combined Gillette and RDVO team for pulling together a great new site!

The Semmys are annual awards that highlight the best writing in search marketing. There are 15 categories ranging from Analytics to Search Tech to Social Media.

Reading these articles gives you some insight into how complex and analytical search marketing has become. To be good, search marketers need to balance creativity, technical know-how, and strategy. This stuff is far more useful than the pricey Forrester research.

Some of my favorite posts from the winner’s circle:

• Web Analytics Demystified, by Avinash Kaushik: An extremely useful and insightful article on the fundamentals of Google Analytics and how to use them to your advantage.
• Google 2.0: Google Universal Search, by Danny Sullivan: Interesting thoughts on the Google’s future as a universal search system–seamlessly integrating news, blogs, videos, and ads.
• The Future of Communications – A Manifesto for Integrating Social Media into Marketing, by Brian Solis: Protracted essay on how social media will change the marketing landscape and how marketers can take advantage of it.

A couple of weeks ago I posted about CNN’s use of the Perceptive Pixel’s magic wall. The Wall has created quite a buzz among interaction design geeks and there’s been quite a bit of coverage since.

Tuesday’s edition of the Washington Post has a nice article about the wall, calling it the “gee-whizziest TV-news gizmo since the animated weather map”.

Some more good links:

• All things CNN
• Gawker Readers Don’t Get It
• NY Times Calls Super Tuesday Night of the Touchscreens

The Audi R8 ad was one of the best of a bunch of ho-hum Superbowl ads. What a sweet looking car!

Thinking through your campaigns like an information architect is a useful way to plan and optimize your search marketing campaigns.

Like websites and applications, campaigns are more effective when they follow a logical flow. Solid IA is not only helpful when planning and classifying campaigns, it’s also useful in structuring the reporting framework. Logically ordered campaigns support more practical reporting and can help search marketers to optimize campaigns.

PPC campaigns follow a strict hierarchy. The top node, Account, contains the billing and administrative information for the account’s owner. Campaign is the next level. Google allows for up to twenty-five campaigns per account. Campaigns are structured around a specific product, concept, or theme. Meta data and setting like geographic targeting, language, and budget are set on the campaigns level.

A campaign may include dozens of specific Ad Groups. Ad Groups contains the components of campaigns, including ad creative (text, Flash, video, etc.) and the keywords and search phrases that will spawn the ads. Ad groups represent the campaigns sales concept. Consideration must go into their structure and organization—properly structure ad groups are the heart and soul of successful PPC campaign.

The lists below illustrate the high-level IA for two campaigns that are focused on the same concept: New England Patriots memorabilia. In the first instance, the ad groups are organized around the players and the memorabilia type constitutes the creative and keywords.

The second campaign structures ad groups around the memorabilia type with player names functioning as creative.

While I can’t say which approach would be more effective, ad group structure clearly plays a major part in campaign approach and, ultimately, the success of the PPC program.

Campaign: Patriots Memorabilia (V1)

• Ad Group One: Tom Brady Memorabilia
  • Ad Creative: Tom Brady Hats, Tom Brady T-Shirts
  • Ad Keywords: Tom Brady Keywords
• Ad Group Two: Randy Moss Memorabilia
  • Ad Creative: Randy Moss Hats, Randy Moss T-Shirts
  • Ad Keywords: Randy Moss Keywords

Campaign: Patriots Memorabilia (V2)

• Ad Group One: Hats
  • Ad Creative: Tom Brady, Randy Moss
  • Ad Keywords: Tom Brady Keywords, Randy Moss Keywords
• Ad Group Two: T-Shirts
  • Ad Creative: Tom Brady, Randy Moss
  • Ad Keywords: Tom Brady Keywords, Randy Moss Keywords

Taking some time to map campaigns using basic information architecture can help advertisers structure their campaigns more effectively. At RDVO, we sketch out our campaigns using a basic hierarchical template that helps us visualize the information relationships in our campaign. By visualizing campaigns using an information architecture approach, we can better structure campaigns and ensure that the campaigns are logical and optimized. This technique also helps us communicate campaign strategy to clients.

Try it for yourself! You can download our PPC information architecture template:

• PPC IA Worksheet VSD
• PPC IA Worksheet PDF