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Never before have we been empowered to do so much with so little. In the day of platforms, APIs, and cloud based services, entrepreneurs can take a fresh idea from concept to market leader overnight. New markets continue to be created and old markets displaced by more eager, nimble and creative competitors.

Great examples of this trend are Craigslist, Mint and Hulu. The environment, parties and outcomes are different with each company, but each contains its own series of lessons on how great strategic vision and user experience allowed an entrepreneur to challenge the establishment.

The media coverage of Craigslist has been long and numerous and the impact they’ve had on the newspaper industry has also been well covered. What tends to get overlooked though is how simple of an idea Craig Newmark had. He wasn’t the first to have this idea. His execution isn’t even the best, but in the end it doesn’t matter because he changed the way we think about the want ads. When Craig started his newsletter and later site, he didn’t wait for the perfect strategy to displace an industry or the perfect pitch to investors for financing. Instead he fulfilled a personal need and through numerous events and decisions ended up with a service that now receives over 49 million monthly visitors. All of this from a common idea with an imperfect implementation. What’s the lesson to learn? Speed and timing matters. By pushing the site out early Craig got a jump on the competition and began to build traffic sooner.

The story of Mint is shorter, but just as exciting. Mint.com began in 2006, born from the frustration of an employee from market leading financial software and services from Intuit and Microsoft. Aaron Patzer, Mint’s founder, believed the existing options hard to use, overly complex and riddled with artificial limitations. His idea was simple - build a package that would provide a great user experience. In the day of entrenched departmental turf wars and office politics, the competing corporate products suffered from feature overload and are an organizational nightmare. Mint didn’t do much more from a website feature perspective than your local bank’s website. It only did it better. Much better. Mint saw the opportunity and seized it. Though Mint has done extensive development in-house, what drives the numerous connections to everyone’s local bank isn’t even of their own doing. It’s an accessible platform within the banking industry, one that was and still is available to competitors that provides those connections. Again, Mint didn’t create an revolutionary idea. It was their execution of the idea and the speed at which they innovated that grew the user-base to 500,000+. The interesting twist with Mint is that near the end of 2009, Intuit bought them for 170 million. Proving that a better user experience and a few years can have a great return.

Hulu, a video portal began during a sea of alternative video sites. As YouTube, Google Video and Vimeo dominated page views, critics questioned the viability of a new service, even though it was backed by a group of media conglomerates. What the critics failed to value however was the leverage inherited by being both the content owner and distributor. Hulu has used this leverage, along with great user experience to become a market leader. Interestingly, as one of many industries facing increased pressures and threats of piracy, the creation of Hulu shows that the movie and television can have success embracing the internet. The Internet - threat turned resource and distribution outlet. Within the great user experience they incorporated in short and relevant advertising, something that many of us now skip with our DVRs.  By accepting the realities of the Internet, they managed to turn a threat into a revenue generating channel. Sometimes framing a challenge into an opportunity changes everything.

Craigslist, Mint and Hulu - All sources of inspiration to us at dynamIt. The chance to help design and build out such a game changing service makes it easy to get out of bed in the morning and hard to clock out at the end of the day. Do you have the next big idea? Let’s talk.

We’re looking to add another designer to our team:

A designer who works for dynamIt will:

• Be well versed with Adobe Creative Suite: Strong knowledge of PhotoShop, experience in Adobe Illustrator and knowledge of Indesign.
• Have a strong understanding of Usability & Web Trends: Experience with user interface design, knowledge of best practices & examples of this in a portfolio or live site/application design. They will also be up-to-date on web trends and design tactics with examples.
• Have Basic Programming Knowledge: We’re not looking for a developer, but the designer should have the ability to design for web with a knowledge of the boundaries and how to design for execution by a programmer.
• Have a Strong Portfolio: We’d like to see more web work than print.
• Be eager to learn, with a passion for design & the web. The designer should have a strong internal drive for industry knowledge and be committed to furthering the craft.
• Experience is important, but personality is key. Our culture is what drives us, and we’re looking to build our team with someone who both fits and contributes to it.

The position is full time at our office in the Arena District in Columbus, Ohio.

If you meet this description and are interested, please submit a resume along with portfolio to work@dynamit.us.

About dynamIt
dynamIt is a digital agency based in the Arena District in Columbus, Ohio. We work with clients and brands on digital initiatives that include strategy, design, user experience and development. We influence communication and commerce.  Client work includes Charley’s Grilled Subs, McGraw-Hill, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), American Electric Power (AEP), Columbus College of Art & Design and the Ohio State Medical Center (OSUMC).

Back in November, dynamIt was contracted to develop a site for Sister Schubert’s Homemade Rolls. Find it here: http://www.sisterschuberts.com.

This company has an interesting problem, because they ship a perishable product they must require that two-day shipping is used on every order. This makes shipping to far-away places expensive. Sometimes, it can even be more than the total price of the order. Yet, people still buy.

Then, another one of our clients saw this site in our portfolio and being from Alabama, the home of Sister Schubert’s, was familiar with these rolls. He talked our ear off on exactly how good these rolls are.

Then, I found these rolls at WalMart and had to purchase a pan.

I now see the light. I baked the pan of 20 rolls and in one sitting consumed 17 of them by myself. Needless to say, they are delicious.

So, I have been tossing this new product offering around in my head. I like to call it dynamIt Peace of Mind. It is quite simple really, all you need is an existing website that is at least moderately attractive and functions well, and some expendable budget.

It works like this. You select the plan that fits you the best. Then, you pay dynamIt, a quality web engineering and design firm, $X per month. Before you know it, you begin feeling better about your web presence. That all there is to it.

It is sort of like the placebo effect for web. Because you have a qualified web firm listed under your operating expenses you figure your website must be getting better. Makes sense, right?

Yes, it sounds crazy, but from time to time in working with clients we hear stories that are not far off. Recently, we were told by a corporate organization who was not too familiar with CMS that their last campaign site cost them about $35,000 annually and that afforded them two updates all year!

Luckily, dynamIt takes a different approach. More to come on this soon.

But seriously, if you are interested in dynamIt Peace of Mind, you know where to find us [wink].

Michael Paull

• URLs will become less important as more people find things using social bookmarking services and searches.
• A major service outage or security flaw in a cloud productivity tool such as google docs will set back professional acceptance of cloud-based programs.
• Browser War II will break out and heat up as Safari, IE, Firefox and Chrome begin to duke it out to be application platforms. MS will behave better for having learned from IE4, 5 and 6 experiences.
• Flash Web sites that don’t need to be flash will fall out of favor.
• Twitter will be bought by a huge company and will cook the goose that lays the golden egg. Three years later an open standard for ‘tweeting’ will allow distributed services to interact. This will be the beginning of the end for text messaging and email.
• Yahoo will be bought by a company that is heavily into non-Web media and begin to whither away.
• The economy will force the news outlets that survive to innovate online and stop cranking out the same crammed, awkward, kitchen-sink web sites they have been for fifteen years.
• Change we can believe in: the Obama Administration will release an executive order banning autoplaying videos on page loads.
• People will realize that ’social media’ has become a redundant term and stop using it. Media production skill sets will begin to merge.
• Version-oriented Web design/development will be considered ’so 2000′ as the acceleration of changes in browsers/platforms, Web ecosystems and audience expectations make incremental change the norm for Web sites.
• Education gurus will begin to get hip to the Web and stop locking kids out and start going in with them. This will be a very good thing.
• Your Web site’s URL will be mydomain.facebook.com.
• Pictures of people you sort of knew ten years ago will become so common a part of your daily life that it will stop being weird. Also, if you apply for a job and don’t have more than 500 pictures of yourself chugging beer from a plastic cup online somewhere, the employer will worry there is something wrong with you and skip you.
• A mob of angry developers and usability freaks will picket Newscorp until Myspace is stopped once and for all.

Nick Seguin

• A couple uses skype and digital signatures to get married whilst in different countries.
• People stop calling what it is WE do ‘new media’ and understand that it is here and now, thus it cannot be new.
• Google says “screw you” to cloud computing, kicks things ‘up’ a notch and develops solar system computing.
• My mom will get on Facebook.
• dynamIt stops using local productivity suites completely and migrates to Google Docs exclusively.
• I blog once a week.
• JavaScript Ninjas, nuff said.
• Schools will realize what Google actually is, stop teaching rote memorization and begin to teach APPLICATION of facts as opposed to recitation.
• Non-profits get social media, develop personal and consistent relationships with people, donations go up.
• People realize the difference between web and IT (ok, maybe not in ‘09, but one can hope)
  
• The economy forces brilliant people who are out of work to innovate: new web apps are born and the beginning of the answer to the energy situation is unveiled.
• Someone develops an iPhone Twitter client with follow and retweet functionality.

Phil Franks

• Design on the web will continue to turn away from the web 2.0 style, and push more towards the the ‘grunge’ or ‘minimal’ look
• Twitter will probably be bought, and there will be more adoption by people who may have been skeptics.
• There will be a new site on the web, Phil Franks Design, with a killer portfolio.
• Facebook will be your key to almost every site on the web with Facebook Connect.
• The iPhone will have Flash enabled, so we can totally experience ‘mobile web’
• Voice recognition and touch technology will be developed more in the coming year, and we might see a cool new product from Apple.
• Streaming video on the web will be going straight to people’s living rooms, and it will become mainstream.
• More companies will realize how valuable mobile web is, thus more useful iPhone apps and the like will be developed.

Steve Kemper

• Microsoft’s “operating system in the cloud” will be less cool than they anticipated, but will become widely popular by default.
• IE6 will remain the bane of my existence.. (IE8 will be released, and no one will care).
• Facebook will merge with CitiGroup and Enron and will thus rule the world.
• Google Docs, GMail, and GoogleTalk will all remain in “beta”.. for some reason.
• JavaScript Ninjas > Flash ActionScript Developers.
• Twitter will be purchased by JP Morgan Chase, which will in turn merge with Microsoft, causing another Cold War. (Let’s get serious, corporations run this world..)
• I will go broke using Chipotle’s new online ordering system (especially if they get a site redesign that works on the iphone.. or maybe even an iphone app?)
• TV networks will suffer from even lower ratings and will scramble to stay afloat as more and more people turn to free, web-based services like hulu.

Bobby Whitman

• dynamIt becomes a household name with the likes of Google and Microsoft.
• I will get burned somehow because I use Google Docs exclusively
• I will find some new API that I can’t live without
• Mozilla Ubiquity becomes ubiquitous
• The A&E show Intervention features a mac-obsessed individual. So, basically, any of YOU could be the subject.

Is there a Social Media Dress Code? Should there be? Is it situational? Does it matter? Should it?

I say no. If I’m heading down to a big law firm, a big company or walking into a half-century-old PR firm who buttons up, ya, I pull on the suit and rope on the tie. While I do dress according to my day, I can’t wait to stop. I understand that traditional business is suited up, dressed to the 9s and perhaps a bit more conservative and structured. However, Social Media is about channels of connection, it’s about brand championing, it’s about reaction-engagement-participation. Social Media is about common language communication and time and space shift*.

I contend that dressing Social Media in a suit actually inhibits it. Think about it like this - are you more apt to give a real answer in a focus group observation room with 1 way mirrors and a camera or in a cafe, at your home or somewhere you feel comfortable? Is your conversation and thought process more natural when you’ve ironed your shirt and lint-brushed your trousers or when you’ve pulled on the sweats and are sitting in a more ergonomic chair not worrying about wrinkles and dog hair? The point is, for Social Media to be effective [read: gain valuable insight, true connection, trust and reliance] it needs to be second nature, unobtrusive and comfortable.

To that end, were I heading a large company/department looking to at least explore and hopefully implement a Social Media campaign, I would actually feel more comfortable talking with someone “dressed down”. 1. Social Media is trendy - I expect domain experts and thought leaders to reflect this 2. Successful Social Media implementation is not a toe in the water, it is commitment. As described above, someone consulting on this and coaching my people toward a positive result and experience should fully embrace the realm and “personality”. I’m pretty sure clients/customers would rather be talking to someone “like them” horizontally than a suit from above. As Cone points out, 93% of Americans expect companies to have a Social Media presence. 93% of Americans (all of us consumers of something and clients of someone) do not wear suits.

Again to the time and space shift* - Social Media pieces aren’t used in a conference room or in a board meeting (well, some are getting tweeted out!) but on breaks, on the run, on the road, after hours. Social Media is used/produced around life. If that life happens to be a business professional meeting, then by all means rock the double-breasted. However, just because you’re used to seeing a suit doesn’t mean that your clients and customers want to talk to you in it = your SM campaign doesn’t need to wear one = the thought leaders, domain experts consultants and participants in the field probably won’t be wearing them… at least not all the time.

*(time and space shift is Dave Berkus language)

What do you think? Should big corporate get used to seeing backwards hats, jeans and sneaks when they’re learning about the world of Social Media and how it can and will connect them more intimately with their clients, industry and (the way things are heading) the world?

one.

nick @NickSeguin