If many in our industry are to be believed, copy is somewhat of a optional extra when it comes to marcoms. Or maybe a necessary evil. To be tolerated as long as it doesn’t exceed 30 words or so. Of course you see this most in advertising which has become increasingly image-led over the years. Direct mail still resists, bolstered by the mountains of evidence that copy drives response. And then there’s web.

Look at the usability studies and you’ll see that effective web copy is a case of less is more. Unfortunately many designers seem to take this as an excuse to design layouts allowing not 30 words, but 30 characters of copy – even on highly complex products. Rather than helping to structure the message, all too often copy is seen as the stuff that simply replaces the lorem ipsum in the design.

This is nuts.

It’s copy, more often than not, that visitors to a site are looking for. It’s copy that sells products, services and ideas. Copy is a core part of the experience. This is especially so in B2B where complex arguments must be communicated efficiently, powerfully and elegantly.

This is not a call to have endless scrolling copy on every page you serve. Good copy can achieve its aims in surprisingly few words.

So just as an experiment, on the next site you create – start with the copy.

Gizmodo points to a video of an EeePC 900 tricked out to feature a pretty nifty touch screen interface. Nice. I can’t wait to see what the emerging netbook market turns up by the end of the year, there’s so much going on there right now.

After having it on back order for what seems forever, I’ve recently got Adaptive Path’s new book, Subject to Change. And so far, so good.

Broadly speaking the thrust of it is that you can’t stop things changing but if you start from the perspective of delivering a great customer experience you will stand a better chance over time. Of course, working out what ‘great’ means for your customers is not always simple. And then the real trick is actually doing it. The focus of the book is primarily on product design but the principles go further.

When you consider that in many markets any real differentiation between products is close to non-existent and then factor in the speed of change and the limited attention of customers, a shift in focus could be wise. Traditionally this means focusing on brand but with ever growing disenchantment with brands as all spin, little substance another approach may be better.

Focusing more explicitly on customers’ experiences of marketing leads to thinking about something more immersive that has value in its own right. It tends to strip out gimmicks (never a bad thing). And it highlights the truism that communication is about what the audience takes out not what we put in.

The authors have thoughtfully put up a presentation covering the core themes of the book – it’s half an hour well spent.

Like many people, I’ve owned and used a succession of laptops over the years – not to mention selling them on behalf of a variety of clients. Over that time the screens have got bigger (and better) as have the hard drives and performance for most tasks is comparable to a desktop.

Of course the price we pay for this is that the original computer-on-the-move idea behind laptops has been largely lost from many models. They are increasingly designed to be taken from room to room not country to country. Many are full-on media centres able to store all your DVDs, CDs and photos. Up to a point it seemed that this trend was unstoppable.

Until that is, some bright spark took a fresh look at what most people really use laptops for (web, mail, a bit of word processing etc) stripped away a lot of the extraneous bits and pieces and came up with the netbook.

Basically, netbooks are tiny laptops whose main function is to get users online and allow them to do a few basic tasks. Increasingly using Intel’s new Atom processor and often featuring solid state drives, netbooks avoid the “added value” elements that are normally included in today’s laptops (but rarely used by real live people).

The poster child so far has been ASUS’s Eee PC which was launched with a 7″ screen, a 4 gig solid state drive and WiFi – and has sold hundreds of thousands of units in a pretty short space of time. But the Eee PC is not alone – there’s the Cloudbook, MSI Wind, HP’s 2133 Mini-Note PC and the Noahpad among others with new options from the like of Dell in the offing.

Interestingly, pretty much all netbooks either have Linux as their default OS or offer it as an option. And, despite the still relatively low take-up on other PCs, on the netbooks it doesn’t seem to matter to users. Because netbooks are first and foremost internet devices, as long as you can get web, mail, IM and Skype who cares? And, of course, LInux is free so it keeps the price down too.

The scary thing for those in Redmond is: once people realise that, for what they need, Linux is absolutely fine and that they can get oodles of other applications absolutely free – why go back? In fact, why not install it on other laptops and your desktop PCs for that matter?

Personally, I’m pretty tempted by a netbook, it’d be like a web-enabled Moleskine. But, of course, a 9″ MacBook Air might just prove irresistible.

The world of the RSS reader has become a hotbed of competing products. Whether you opt for readers built into your browser, AJAX desktops or a standalone program, the options are almost bewildering.

Into the fray steps Spectra, msnbc’s very pretty effort that allows you to select from a range of colour-coded channels. These then build into a slow-moving tornado of news (or a tornado-speed tornado if you set it in the prefs). You can then flick through your selections to get an overview of what’s happening and click to get a pop-up with the full story. So far, so pretty.

There are two things that kill Spectra as a newsreader for me:

1. Despite the swirling eye-candy of stories, actually navigating them means using a slider at the bottom of the screen and going through them one at a time in order. As a user, I’d expect to be able to hover over the tornado items and pick a story I want to read without trawling through the rest.

2. Spectra is restricted to msnbc’s content (and syndicated feeds). While this makes perfect sense for msnbc, there’s no way I would want to be limited to a single news source. Add to this that, as mentioned above, the number of unrestricted newsreading options is huge and I can’t see people flocking to Spectra.

Personaly, I opted for the standalone freeware Vienna which allows me to categorise any feed I want to create my own channels, run perpetual searches on us, our clients, even myself (although the pumpkin carving guy with the same name always wins out on that one), plus it has a built in browser. And for full on eye candy, I still like Jonathan Harris’s 10 x 10.

Shame, Spectra is awfully pretty.

Today’s problems are rarely simple (even deciding what to have for dinner can generate a bewildering array of options). And many of today’s marketing challenges present problems within problems. A lack of visibility is endemic. Seeing the actual problem is difficult let alone finding a solution.

Tricky problems are, of course, par for the course for the world’s spooks. And when they are not developing nuclear deterrents in the shape of wristwatches, they also come up with some pretty nifty approaches to problems in general.

The following is the Phoenix List, an approach developed by the CIA to help agents with central intelligences pick apart the problems they face. It’s split into two sections, one for the problem, one for what to do about it.

Defining the problem

1. Why is it necessary to solve the problem?

2. What benefits will you receive by solving the problem?

3. What is the unknown?

4. What is it you don’t yet understand?

5. What is the information you have?

6. What isn’t the problem?

7. Is the information sufficient? Or is it insufficient? Or redundant? Or contradictory?

8. Should you draw a diagram of the problem? A figure?

9. Where are the boundaries of the problem?

10. Can you separate the various parts of the problem? Can you write them down? What are the relationships between the parts of the problem?

11. What are the constants (things that can’t be changed)?

12. Have you seen the problem before?

13. Have you seen this problem in a slightly different form?

14. Do you know a related problem?

15. Can you think of a familiar problem having the same or a similar unknown?

16. Suppose you find a problem related to yours that has already been solved. Can you use it? Can you use its method?

Coming up with a plan

1. Can you solve the whole problem? Part of the problem?

2. What would you like the resolution to be? Can you picture it?

3. How much of the unknown can you determine?

4. Can you derive something useful from the information you have?

5. Have you used all the information?

6. Have you taken into account all essential notions in the problem?

7. Can you separate the steps in the problem-solving process? Can you determine the correctness of each step?

8. What creative thinking techniques can you use to generate ideas? How many different techniques?

9. Can you see the result? How many different kinds of results can you see?

10. How many different ways have you tried to solve the problem?

11. What have others done?

12. Can you intuitively create a solution? Can you check the results?

13. What should be done? How should it be done?

14. Where should it be done?

15. Who should do it?

16. What do you need to do at this time?

17. Who will be responsible for what?

18. Can you use this problem to solve some other problems?

19. What is the unique set of qualities that makes this problem what it is and none other?

Of course, launching your next product is unlikely to have the same complexity as overthrowing an unfriendly state or stopping Ethan Hunt abseiling in and nicking your secrets but some of the above might prove useful.

Just remember: you didn’t get it from me.

How much trouble is Vista actually in?

Just lately it seems to be one thing after another. First there were the stories of people “upgrading” Vista to XP. The the whole Vista-ready debacle and the resulting class-action lawsuit. And now we have panic setting in over the end-of-life of XP.

To get around the end-of-life problem according to a report on Silicon.com, Dell and HP are preparing to use the downgrade rights that come with Vista to carry on supplying XP preloaded on new machines. If this receives significant take-up it could be a real blow to Microsoft – new machines are the main route to upgrade for the vast majority of users and the one that will deliver the best Vista experience.

Of course it is almost inconceivable that Vista will fail. Windows as a whole still tops 90% market share and within that Vista racks up just over 14%, dwarfing OSX and Linux. It could be simply a case of allowing users to stall for time until Vista’s problems are ironed out. But with with the next version of Windows slated for a 2010 release (that’s if it comes out on time – a big if based on the experience of Vista/Longhorn) it is conceivable that people may leapfrog Vista and go straight from XP to Win7. And with the suggestion that Microsoft may delay the XP end-of-life date, this may become a very real possibility.

Of course, although bad, this would not be the worst possible outcome for Microsoft. That scenario is one where there is a wholesale shift to Linux allowing users to abandon paid-for licensed software for good. This last week has seen the release of the latest version of Ubuntu which is estimated to already have over 8 million users and offers the most Windows-like user-friendliness of the Linux flavours. Even Apple has been posting impressive sales results for its PCs – 51% more that the same quarter last year and an increase running at some five times the industry average. And, should we get to a ubiquitous web model where all that users need is a browser then all bets are off.

But back to today. Yes Vista is in trouble but I can’t see this as the tipping point for a wholesale migration away from Windows per se – not yet anyway. Personally, I think Microsoft would be mad not to extend XP’s life – no user wants to be forced into an upgrade (especially one that is receiving so much negative publicity), it will simply reinforce the view of Microsoft as an unhealthy monopoly.

In the meantime, to celebrate the release of Vista SP1 there’s this little gem which, depending who you believe is either ‘ironic’ or ‘moronic’ – you decide:

The lesson here: never, ever do a corporate song.

Some microsites are little pieces of joy. Some are functional ‘more info’ affairs. Then there are those that turn you from being positive and excited to being frustrated and annoyed.

Naming no names, but take the Canon 450D site. Now, to declare my allegiances, I own a Canon 300D (in fact it is my fourth Canon) plus a bunch of lenses and I am beginning to think about upgrading. As such, I’m pretty excited about the brand spanking new 450D.

So today I got sent the regular You Connect email which contained an invitation to go to the Let’s Play site and take a look at the 450D. Perfect for a Friday afternoon I thought and off I went.

The site opens with the obligatory preloader counting up. But on my Mac it counted one number per second (without saying what it was counting up to ). I tried a different browser, same thing. Then I tried a PC which sat blank screened for ages before finally counting up at a reasonable speed.

Lesson 1: give your audience a clear idea of how much longer they are going to have to wait so they can decide whether they should bother.

Then we get to a choice of whether to ‘play’ in the city with an urban-looking woman or the mountains with a fleeced up guy. Hover over the nav and the two models change places, the one at the back going nicely out of focus. Now, while this is pretty, if this was the reason for the preload time it really wasn’t worth it.

Lesson 2: remember your visitors come to the site for a reason, don’t let the eye-candy get in their way.

I clicked ‘city’ and was introduced to a nav device that promised that I could pan round an image and the click a hotspot to zoom in and discover more. I was also introduced to another preloader (a progress bar this time). And I waited again. Finally, it opened the image with the urban model poised to take the shot. As I moved my cursor the the edges it allowed me to pan around the image. There was one hotspot. Just one. No choice, no real interaction. I started to wonder why Canon didn’t simply run a fully preloaded animation or a video or anything but this.

Lesson 3: if you are going to offer the audience choice, make sure there is some element of actual choice involved.

So I clicked the hotspot and, in the process, activated the third preloader of the experience, this time a spinning wheel of dots (at least there is variety while you wait). This (after a while) activated another animation that placed the viewer inside the head of urban woman as she moved in for the shot. She shoots, she scores and you are then presented with a new screen and a stack of photos that allow you to flick through the camera’s features – all illusion of the original idea now (thankfully) gone. Of course what you are left with is the most standard of microsites (and not a particularly interesting one at that).

Now don’t get me wrong, having an immersive microsite experience can be a really lovely thing. And it certainly suits the Canon photography brand (and actually, Canon did a much better job on the earlier 400D site). But this was just painful (and would have been even if it worked faster). As with doctors, the first rule of marketing must be “do no harm” – a rule this site could do with heeding.

I still love Canon cameras, but I’ll think twice before responding to their marketing again.

You know how it is, sometimes when you’re trying to come up with ideas you get stuck. Just plain old-fashioned stuck. Everything you think of comes back to the same worthless thought you had an hour ago. You can see only one route to a solution and frankly it’s heading nowhere. And, of course, the deadline isn’t getting any further away.

While I cover a couple of ways out in Cracked, there’s a really useful one that wouldn’t fit in: oblique strategies. Originally oblique strategies was a card deck created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt to help jog the mind when the fog of work pressure descended (details here).

It consists of over 100 cards (or as the deck terms it “Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas”) and the idea is that when you get stuck you pick a card at random and consider your problem in light of what it says. And they are oblique. So flipping my own deck at random gives me, “Go to an extreme, come part way back.” Now of course, if you are stuck that might be just the help you are looking for. What is the extreme consequences of the problem? What would be an extreme solution? How far back would we need to come to create a workable answer? Work that train of thought until it goes no further and then select another card.

While there are a few such creativity decks around, for me oblique strategies works because it doesn’t try to solve the problem for you. It still gives you room to think. And it can take you off in unexpected and useful directions.

You can still buy the physical deck (it comes in a lovely understated black box) and costs £30. But you can also download it free as a widget for Mac, PC and Linux.

Don’t say I never give you anything.

You can now download your free, gratis, for-absolutely-no-money copy of Cracked: a small guide to big ideas. Originally created as a printed book for internal and client use, Cracked is a guide to creative problem solving. In it I cover some ways to approach marketing problems, a bit on audiences and then a bunch of creative tips, tricks and techniques. I’ve reformatted it for screen and it weighs in at 472Kb.

I’ve licensed Cracked under Creative Commons which basically means that you can do what you like with it as long as you credit me as the original author and offer the same rights to anyone you pass it (or derivative work) on to. Click the license badge on the front cover for full details.

Take a look, see what you think. There’s a clickable email link on the last page where you can get in touch and let me know your thoughts. And, of course, if you want to see any of this stuff put into practice, you know where to come. Enjoy.