1. They are easy to write
   We don’t need to worry about things like facts, paragraphs or writing style. Just bang out a point and a sentence or two to convince the reader.
2. Content is king
   Or so I’ve been told. In the interactive world, impressions to your site matter. An easy way to do that is through blog post or articles. When you lack inspiration, just come up with another top 10 list.
3. They don’t require tricky things… like facts
   Research is tough, why bother, just make broad generalizations and people will believe them anyway (e.g. “Impressions to your site matter”). Besides, they are reading your post, you are the expert.
4. You are busy
   We are all busy, so why waste your time reading something that requires concentration. If you wanted to do that you’d buy a book or a magazine.
5. Twitter only allows 140 characters
   So people must not like to read anymore. One of the great things about not having editors and facts is that logical failures (like the one in previous sentence) go unnoticed.
6. People search for them on the internet
   See the chart below. I’ll leave the interpretation of the data to your imagination. But believe me search engines are important.
   
7. People retweet top 10 lists
   They really do. Honest. Heck here is a picture of a top 10 search results on twitter. Some of these have been retweeted.



8. It makes the reader feel smart
   Readers may think to themselves, “This is easy, I could have written this” (note, they are probably correct). So instead of a smug journalist, you come off as smart, but not-too-smart-for-his/her-own-good blogger.
9. Counting is fun
   We learned to do it as children, and unlike Calculus and Algebra, it’s something we actually use every day. People usually put a weak point in #9, to reinforce the strength of their 10th point. For proof, watch David Letterman’s top 10 countdown.
10. Top 10 lists can drive comments to your site
    People can think of one you forgot to include and say “Hey Brian, great list, but you forgot to talk about engagement. Social media is all about engagement these days”.
    If I missed any reasons, please do this below and prove me right. If there are no comments, I’ll just assume my list was perfect and you found no flaws in it.

Summer is here and so is the last SpokeFriday at our current office. It has served us well the last two years, but it is now time for Spoke to move on to bigger digs (a block down the street).

If you haven’t been to one before – SpokeFriday is our monthly happy hour to gather friends of the agency and to make new ones. As a virtual agency, the majority of our creatives work off-site so we use these happy hours as an opportunity to gather our creative teams, clients, friends of the agency and anyone else who is in St. Louis who would like to attend. Come for networking, drinks, appetizers or just to meet some friendly people in St. Louis.

• RSVP on Facebook
• Tweet about this using #SpokeFriday tag

Tonight I was looking at Google analytics for a client’s site and something jumped off the page in a big way. One of our client’s has consistently averaged around 12% of their traffic from iphone visitors. This is a high traffic site (for a small business) and they target mostly consumers and luckily we built their site without any Flash. Why does that matter? Adobe Flash, which is used to deliver 90% of the videos on the web (and other site content as well), doesn’t work on an iPhone.

Seeing this number I decided to do a random sampling of four other clients accounts and they had 1.25%, 1.5%, 4.4%, 11% of their traffic from iPhone visitors. Some of these sites have a large of amount of visitors from iPhones.

What does this mean to you as a business owner with a website?

• If you are using Flash on your site, find a way to make it work without it. ‘Degrade’ your site gracefully so iPhone (and now iPad) users don’t experience a big blank spot or are unable to use or navigate.
• Another option is to create a mobile version of your site so it works well (and more quickly) on mobile devices.
• If you are in the middle of designing or building a website, look at your audience and decide how many of them are likely to use your site from an iPhone, iPad or similar device. If the number is significant – avoid using Flash or make sure you have an alternative – your users will thank you and the numbers of iPhone and iPad users are growing.

Note: Since this site primarily is targeted to a marketing audience, I’m intentionally not getting into the HTML5 versus Flash debate. If you want to do that, feel free to post a comment below or via a reply to me on twitter.

#SpokeFriday time again. As usual drinks are provided and this month’s edition has special meaning because it’s Dan Klein’s 50th Birthday.

If you haven’t been to one before – SpokeFriday is our monthly happy hour to gather friends of the agency and to make new ones. As a virtual agency, the majority of our creatives work off-site so we use these happy hours as an opportunity to gather our creative teams, clients, friends of the agency and anyone else who is in St. Louis who would like to attend. Come for networking, drinks, appetizers or just to meet some friendly people in St. Louis.

• RSVP on Facebook
• Tweet about this using #SpokeFriday tag

Dear Social Media gurus, ninjas and jedis’ – SXSW Interactive has been around since 1994. Long before Twitter, foursquare or your blog. In fact, this year’s topics were crowd-sourced – so stop with the complaining that the sessions weren’t what you wanted and go meet someone in the hallway, blogger’s lounge or trade show.

Why are people complaining?

Well, one reason is because people like to complain. But there are legit reasons as well. This year, SXSW crowd-sourced some of the sessions topics and speaker choices, so people voted on some of the sessions and we ended up with some weird titles and topics. That’s ok though, because with 10 or sessions going on simultaneously, you always have a lot to choose from.

Apparently a lot of these weird titled sessions sucked. I don’t know, I didn’t attend any of them. I think the problem is actually a little deeper, it’s with the audiences that attended them and what they are trying to learn.

The tale of two conferences…

Interactive / UX / Design Conference

This was my first time attending SXSW and I had a great time. I learned a lot and it was a whirlwind of amazing activity. If registration for next year was open right now, I’d book it. Yes, I was that impressed. I attended several great sessions, one or two good sessions, and one truly awful session.

First and foremost, I’m an interactive director at Spoke, I manage design, brand and user experience for the sites and campaigns we build. Being a geek, I attended tech, interactive, user experience and designer type sessions that appealed to my geeky nature. Overall, my goals in attending SXSW were:

• To learn things I can use for our clients at Spoke, both in interactive marketing and social media.
• To meet people that I’ve only talked to through twitter and deepen relationships that were established online.
• To recap my experiences on this blog and drive traffic to this site.

I had a great geeky time and from a random sampling of comments on twitter and friends there with me who do what I do – I think they did too.

Social Media Conference

I’ve read and heard complaints from people who attended social media discussions, panels or crowd-sourced sexy titles that failed to live up to the hype.

I think there is an obvious reason that the Social Media sessions suffered – the people complaining are probably doing it right to begin with. They have either heard the content before, or they think they know it all already. Let’s face it, there aren’t a lot of new tricks in social media day after day. Some general rules apply (and don’t change very often):

• Engage with people.
• Interact.
• Don’t be a jerk.
• Don’t use it as push marketing tool.
• Have compelling content.
• Have a consistent brand voice.
• Gain an audience, not just followers.
• Try to get stuff to go viral (those sessions always crack me up, because viral usually happens organically and no one can predict what will and what won’t and every expert I’ve met has said the same thing).

Do these sound familiar? They should, because interaction on social media is pretty much the same as interaction in the real world (make it personal, develop relationships, don’t just yell at strangers and hope they listen).

Sure there are case studies to learn, funny stories to share, adversity to deal with and plenty of other reasons to go to social media sessions, but these topics can be less compelling if you’re a professional. Maybe experienced social media session gurus, jedis and ninjas don’t get as much out of the sessions because the content is often just preaching to the choir?

The Alternative?

A few friends who purely work in the social media world went to SXSW to meet people, make connections, blog and party and didn’t attend any of the sessions. Guess what, they got exactly what they wanted to out of SXSW, had a great experience (unless they got turned down for a VIP party) and will be back doing the same thing next year.

So if you find the content of sessions not up to your high standards, blow the sessions off and go to the blogger’s lounge and meet some people. Hopefully you’ll gain some new insight.

As for me… next year I’ll be learning about some geeky new way to control your mind using only a browser… and at the end of the day we can meet up at the next party.