Author Archives | mdunst

mdunst - who has written 11 posts on Polymer Studios :: Web Consulting.


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Is your Web site polite?

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

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HOW PEOPLE APPLY THE BASIC SOCIAL RULE OF POLITENESS TO COMPUTERS There is a well-known documented fact about human behavior: People will tell you what they think you want to hear. For example, if a waiter asks how his service was, people are more likely to give him a positive response. If a 3rd party asks [...]

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Adopting social media for risk-averse companies
(Part 1 of 4)

Friday, December 19, 2008

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Part 1: Dipping your toe into social media This is the first in a 4 part series about how you can start a social media strategy program started in a risk-averse company. In part 1, we’ll start out very slowly and just dip our toe in to some of the basic platforms. I’m sure you have a [...]

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A Prolifiq commercial

Thursday, December 11, 2008

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Recently we launched a project for Prolifiq, Inc., a Beaverton, Oregon SaaS (software as a service) provider that offers a killer 1:1 communications platform for sales and marketing. In addition to delivering a revamped Web site and interactive demo, we also created this web video commercial. The communications challenge Early in our engagement, we could see that [...]

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Get a clue…again

Monday, November 3, 2008

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I read the Cluetrain Manifesto when it first came out around 2000. It was eye-opening and inspiring at the time, and there was plenty of buzz around the main concept that markets are conversations and businesses need to get involved. I haven’t read it since and recently just ran across the Web site (via Jeremiah [...]

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Killer interactive demos: less features, more context

Sunday, October 19, 2008

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Interactive demos are a great way to give your customers and prospects a good idea of what your product is and how it can benefit them. Demos are usually associated with demonstrating features of software or consumer products. And they’re just as effective for selling complex services or conceptual ideas. Demonstrate how your product solves the [...]

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Electoral College Prediction Tracker

Thursday, October 2, 2008

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This is a great little info viz widget. Width of columns corresponds to number of votes each state has. Rows correspond to the predictions of various media outlets. Even Fox News shows Obama ahead. Strange, NYT shows McCain ahead by quite a bit. (Sorry the width of the widget doesn’t fit on our blog). This is [...]

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Credibility on the Web

Thursday, December 27, 2007

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“75% of Web users admit making judgments about the credibility of the organization based on the design of its Web site.” More from the Stanford Web credibility research

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Banking 2.0: Banks Leading the Charge
(Part 2 of 3)

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

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In part 1, I gave an overview of core Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, podcasts, wikis and social networks. Now I’ll discuss some examples of how several banks are leveraging some of this new technology to initiate and support deeper relationships with their customers. Wells Fargo fosters an informal, ongoing dialogue with its customers Wells Fargo [...]

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Pet Peeve #124: Cryptic Filenames

Sunday, November 4, 2007

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Nine times out of 10, when I download a PDF, Word doc, etc. from a site, the filename is some cryptic string of letters and numbers. I’m sure it makes sense to the code crackers at NASA, but when I try to download a printer template, how the heck am I supposed to find it [...]

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Banking 2.0: Core technologies (Part 1 of 3)

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

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Web 2.0 has been gaining more and more momentum over the last year or so. Web 2.0 involves taking advantage of internet technology for creating, collaborating, communicating and sharing ideas and information. Things like blogs, podcasts, wikis and social networks are helping organizations forge stronger relationships with their customers. But should you use new technology [...]

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