Jon Litwack

Shameless Self Promotion

// November 10th, 2009 // No Comments » // Stuff

Ad Lounge featured me in a mash-up of their latest event. Check it out at http://adlounge.ca/mta

Playing with LiveStream

// October 1st, 2009 // No Comments » // Stuff

Beautiful Twitter Visualization

// September 30th, 2009 // No Comments » // Stuff

GoodMorning! Full Render #2 from blprnt on Vimeo.

Dave Gray on Game Usage in the Workplace

// September 23rd, 2009 // 3 Comments » // Stuff

Dave Gray presented some core concepts surrounding a book he’ll be publishing soon. Check out the video I took of the presentation. Unfortunately it cuts out after 45 minutes or so at which point Dave gets into the concept of co-evolution in a knowledge working environment and then actual usage of gaming in facilitation/ideation environments.

The image to the left is courtesy of Aaron Williamson over at Shift and Share. His take on the session at – http://shiftandshare.com/?p=115

I’ve put this video up really quickly so that people who couldn’t attend could get a glimpse of what they missed so I’ve skimped on a lot of the context. If anybody wants me to delve into it, just ask for it in the comments section. My apologies for the amount of buffering you’ll have to do.

Dave Gray – Knowledge Games @ OCAD from Jonathan Litwack on Vimeo.

5 Reasons Why I Moved Back to Wordpress

// September 22nd, 2009 // No Comments » // Stuff

Ok… I’ve gone the Custom build route, the Wordpress route, the Drupal route, and now back to the Wordpress route.

Why did I end up sticking with Wordpress?

1. MUCH better selection of themes – for those of you that remember what this site used to look like, I hope you agree
2. When you install it, even after moving from testing to production server, it just works. No need to set up cron jobs and the like, no need to set up workflows. It’s good to go out of the box
3. Unlike some of my PHP developer friends like Ashok Modi (@btmash) and Stephen Scholtz (@stephenscholtz) I am not in a position to leverage Drupal to its full potential and do all the fun things I intended to do with it
4. There’s far less work to do to get SEO friendly URLs
5. I don’t have as much time to post content and therefore rely on whatever support my iPhone offers and there’s just too many WordPress plugins that work seamlessly with the iPhone

Re-design-ated and it feels so gooooooood

// June 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // Stuff

Took a while but I finally upgraded Drupal to version 6. Took me a year but I did it.
I ALSO decided to revamp my design (by which I mean choosing another theme), and I’m quite happy with this one. Check the footer for the link back to the file if anybody wants to use it. I did have to hack the page.tpl file slightly to get the logo to work the way I wanted it to… But it all worked out in the end.

I’m off to bed, ciao!

Cbab and I attempt a Podcast

// May 26th, 2009 // No Comments » // Stuff

Pilot episode of [insertnamehere] from Jonathan Litwack on Vimeo.

*Streeeeetch*

// January 15th, 2009 // No Comments » // Stuff

Yep… It’s been a while again… And mostly because my domain’s been down.
Why was it down?
Fake reason: I attempted to bounce back all of the spam I’ve been getting lately.
Real reason: My credit card got upgraded and took forever to come to the bank where I needed it.

So that’s pretty much it for the past while.
I’ve made a lot of strides with Last.fm and my practice has been growing. So much so that they’ve asked me to step down from my UX duties and take on Social Media full time. Not sure I want to give up the thing I’ve been helping build for two years, particularly at a time when our past two years of UX have helped us build a TON of credibility in the industry, but oh well.

That’s pretty much the start of ‘09 in a nutshell.

Toodles for now,
Jon

The supposed “Gospel” of web 2.0

// April 14th, 2008 // No Comments » // Stuff

This entry is going to sound rather preachy, and how much more fitting could that possibly be considering the title, and the context that I’m about to deliver.

I’ve been perusing the supposed “blogosphere” as of late, particularly within the realm of “social media” and pardon me if what I’m about to say is out of line, but I feel like I’m being spoken to by a born again christian. The type of born again that wants to flaunt bible verses in your face, but doesn’t have the context to back any of what they say up with relevance.

Everything is personal branding this, executive blog that, enterprise 2.0 app the other thing… Why isn’t anybody standing up and saying “So What?”.

This stuff has been around for a long time. Blogging has been around since the advent of webpages, executive blogs are realistically a matter of corporate transparency, and enterprise 2.0 apps defy the true interconnectedness that the emerging trend of semantic web is supposed to offer. In other words, get a real job, stop trying to coach executives to do work that they shouldn’t be doing (unless they’re already doing it, in which case they don’t need your non-executive help), and stop building apps that restrict data to a Content Management System.

If you truly want to embrace the “Concept” of web 2.0, start looking into things like pareto’s long tail, think higher level strategy in the form of holistic campaigns, and stop trying to monetize from buzz words.

I make a living from providing my clients with real world solutions that may or may not leverage new technologies. I’ve been offering low jack solutions for the better part of a decade now and I don’t intend to change it. The more we attempt to market the crap out of web 2.0, the deeper we will fall into the next pit of unrealized equity. Stop selling solutions you don’t understand. It’s all data at the end of the day.

Rant complete.

The reason why your Facebook solutions always blow up in your face

// April 14th, 2008 // No Comments » // Stuff

I’ve been chewing on some strategy work lately for some automotive brands that we work for, and while coming up with specific strategy/tactics I’ve quickly realized the differences between ideation on social engagement strategy vs. site engagement strategy.

I’ll try to break er’ down for y’all. (More after the Jump)

A traditional strategy works within the following structure:

Goals are your business outcome, they are what you want your communication strategy to achieve.

Strategies are defined once you have identified your goals. They are your general approaches to accomplishing your business outcomes.

Objectives are the measurable tasks that you will undertake to realize your strategy.

Tactics are the tools you will use in order to achieve the objectives that you have laid down.

This model has worked for centuries if not millenniums and has been implemented in countless wars, business models and other fine places. Today’s issue of social engagement turns this model on its ear and flips the order a smidgen into the following structure:

Goals (Same as always)

People – The most important aspect of social engagement is the people you wish to engage with. It is therefore a far higher priority than strategy as with the wrong target audience a strategy can be completely useless, or worse (and more commonly) it can blow up in your face. This aspect of this new methodology is an ever changing one and requires constant research and analysis.

Objectives take on a slightly different role as this methodology maps from target audiences downwards; therefore, objectives must be mapped in order to create strategies to support them. They become mini-goals in a sense.

Strategies become dependent on the objectives that were created as a result of target audiences which were determined by over-arching goals.

Tactics can almost be classified within this realm as Technologies as your tactics will typically be a statement of which platforms you intend to use to carry out your strategies. Therefore, I typically label this part of the methodology Tactics/Technology.

So that, in a nutshell, is the POST methodology (People, Objectives, Strategies, Tactics). If you want to learn more about it, there’s a new book out about it at http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell. Leveraging this methodology and focusing on your audience in an ever changing light should alleviate you of some of the typical blowback that marketers get when they try to market the wrong product, to the wrong people, on the wrong platform.