Giraffe Forum

Do not act based on anything you might read in this article. It is purely for information purposes only.
Information is the “communication or reception of knowledge or intelligence,” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. But that’s not how most organizations see information; written information in particular.
When most organizations say the information on their websites […]

The Internet thrives in information-rich societies. Traditional communications and marketing thrive in information-poor ones.
The job of marketing and advertising was much easier in the Twentieth Century. It could inform people of genuinely novel things like cars and soap powder, microwaves and computers.
People lived rudimentary lives back then and these new products and services […]

Information overload, news fatigue and WADD (Web Attention Deficit Disorder) are creating a brutal landscape on the Internet.
“Web users are getting more ruthless and selfish when they go online”, the BBC states in a review of a Jakob Nielsen report on web habits. “Instead of dawdling on websites many users want simply to reach a […]

Organizations have an overwhelming desire to own and control. Even within organizations, each unit/department is constantly trying to prove that it is important.
The intranet emerged as a classic organization chart structure. Each unit wanted its own website and everyone wanted a link on the homepage. Each unit was not so much concerned with helping […]

On the Web a new type of customer is rising. One more and more immune to marketing happy talk. One that wants facts before emotion.
In his seminal book, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins explores the idea of the sustainable ecosystem. In one game of life there were three players: suckers; cheats and grudgers.
Each player […]

The web customer is not a fool. The specific reason they are on the Web is to compare and evaluate. Give them the facts.
Some airlines have an incredibly underhanded approach to pricing. Aer Lingus is an airline I fly with almost once a week. It is dramatically better than it was five years ago, but […]

The web brand is useful, clear, simple, interactive, and most importantly, customer-centric.
“Google has knocked Microsoft off the top spot and been named the most powerful global brand of 2007,” Gemma Simpson wrote for Silicon.com in April 2007. “It’s the second year in a row a tech brand has beaten household names such as Coca-Cola, Marlboro […]

The Web is changing the whole nature of marketing. The visual and imagistic is in decline; the useful and functional is on the rise. Google is the biggest brand in the world. It makes most of its revenue from advertising, and yet it has never sold a visual ad–only text ads.
Even with the growth in […]

Customers buy complexity in the same way they buy insurance. It’s a bet against the future. They think they might need all these extra features at some stage in the future. Joshua Porter of User Interface Engineering has a very interesting piece on this trade-off:
People are reluctant to make trade-offs because they can’t predict what […]

A Jupiter Research study confirms the importance of online reviews. “33% of Internet users find their buying decisions being influenced by sites with consumer generated reviews and content”, according to Searchengineguide.
While this is interesting enough, although not that new, Searchengineguide concludes with a point that goes beyond interesting. It might be critical to your online […]