It’s official: Attention to the design of your annual report yields dividends, literally! The study by the University of Miami’s School of Business Administration finds that “prettying up” a company’s annual report can cause investors to place a higher value on a company.

Of course, we would go one step further than the “prettying up” referred to in this American Public Media Marketplace segment, and assert that an annual report that honors the CEO’s vision and expresses the company’s brand will deliver superior return on investment. And here is a mere handful of examples…

It was arresting to hear Doug Edwards, the former director of consumer marketing and brand management at Google, on NPR’s On the Media yesterday. He recalled this conversation with one of the founders of Google, Sergey Brin, around the time that Google launched Gmail and users feared their emails were being read to facilitate advertising placement:

“I went to Sergey and I said, ‘We’re getting all these emails about how upset people are with the privacy issue. We need to address that,” and he said, “There is no privacy issue.”

This encounter speaks to the essence of what constitutes an authentic brand. One of the challenges Read the rest of this entry »

I attended a discussion about urban art in the community with visiting artist Lavie Raven at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art last night. To be honest, I was there to support some of the great people that are tirelessly investing energy in arts education in our community; but didn’t really expect to personally, much less professionally, take many juicy nuggets of insight away from it.

Leave it to them to inspire me in spite of myself.

Lavie and fellow panelists spoke to the rush that graffiti artists get from their work. The high generated from writing on a wall – “writing” being more than just words and more than just “tagging” your name with a spray can; but investing in the color, contour and soul of a message that can inherently cross cultural barriers.

Someone in the audience asked if teaching urban art is basically teaching kids to be better vandals, which struck a chord with me because the conversation had led my mind to such a different space. My first thought was, “Wow, if that’s true, maybe I’ve been studying to be a vandal my whole life.”

No, I’ve never done graffiti. But I have been researching art, cataloging my own emotions, and trying to find the perfect words to say exactly what needs to be said ever since I can remember. And now I’m at a place where we’re working every day to strategically develop design and message as eloquently as some of these writers brand themselves. The biggest difference is that our expression of creativity is legal.

It’s so important that we (being the community at large) don’t push these artists away from their amazing raw talent and vision, but appreciate it, help them hone in on it and occasionally look to the writing on the wall for a little inspiration…

I want to say a quick “thank you” to Nebraska Humanities Council, Kent Bellows Studio & Center for Visual Arts, The Union for Contemporary Art, and all of the folks that made the event happen and made me think.

I love being reminded of how easy it is to be enlightened and humbled in a city like ours if you just open your eyes.

At a firm like ours, it’s likely that we’ll fancy ourselves “young” professionals for a lifetime, regardless of our ages. (Although I’m safely nestled in my mid-20s, I’m well aware that I’ll be booted from the official category in due time.) That is neither here nor there.

The point is that WE are HERE – smack dab in the center of cattle country in a spot that most big city dwellers couldn’t point to on a map. We are Read the rest of this entry »

We use WordPress every day and know its ins and outs. Needless to say, we’re quite smitten with it. Here are the top 5 reasons why:

1. It’s friendly and smart. WordPress is friendly with users in just about every way – even if lots of people are making updates at the same time. You see only what you need to see on the back end (and we can make it clear where each word, picture or link needs to go so there’s no need to play guessing games).

Plus, it’s dynamic: if one change needs to be made in several places on the site, WordPress can do that automatically to save you time.

WordPress is friendly with search engines, too. It’s awesome with SEO right out of the box, and we can make it even better. (Note that by “we,” I mean “Thad” – our resident web genius.)

2. It’s customizable. A WordPress site can get as fancy (or as simple) as you want it to be as long as you’ve got a someone creating it who really knows their stuff. All fields are customized to the individual site so that even the web-shy layman can make changes. And you can make magic happen, too… Like placing a video on your site perfectly with just one little “Vimeo” number. Check this out:

3. It’s expandable. You’re never locked down. Our answer is (believe it or not), “Yes, you can make changes and add that later.” You can always build on ideas and integrate improvements big or small.

4. It’s social. WordPress integrates social media, blogs and discussions incredibly well. It can even pull comments from other websites that link to yours into your site’s feed and a good developer can make it look seamless.

5. It’s safe and sound. At its core, WordPress is secure. It’s an open source site built by the community of people who love to do this tricky web stuff and are really good at it.

(This may sound like a WordPress advertisement, but it’s really just a love letter.)