Author Archives: Roland Smart

Getting Back To Social

My blog has been quiet for several months due to the fact that I’ve been a very very busy bee. After helping take Sprout through a critical business pivot towards the ad space and launching their new AdVine service, I accepted an opportunity to lead product marketing at Involver. I’m thrilled to be part of [...]

Product Naming 101

Naming products is a somewhat rare opportunity that holds unique challenges and opportunities. In the last year, I’ve had the pleasure of working on two such projects (QuickRak and AdVine) and am writing to share some of what I’ve learned. I hope this will come in handy when you’re ready to name a product of your own.
First [...]

The Nokia Ideas Camp & Thoughts On Innovation

I recently had the pleasure of attending Nokia’s annual Ideas Camp in Santa Cruz California where I spent almost three days rubbing shoulders with some super smart, fun, and inspiring people. Besides making some great connections, getting feedback on QuickRak, and playing quite a bit of ping pong, I learned a ton about Nokia. In [...]

The Ideas Project: Advertising & Personal Data

A year ago, I was thrilled to contribute an idea to the wonderful Ideas Project regarding how marketing is changing and this week I’m excited to contribute to the project again with a question of the week. Here’s the question:
Can you describe a future in which you would voluntarily share your personal data online in [...]

Making Short Video Explaination Stories

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I try to tell stories visually whenever I can. There are several reasons that I do this including the fact that our ability to process information visually predates our ability to do so with language. The visual centers of our brain are much older than our language processing [...]

The Wallet Prototype Revisited

In this post I’ll follow up a post from over a year ago in which I discussed a wallet prototype that I designed and fabricated. To recap, I never had a wallet that I felt was well designed for me so I decided to design one of my own. I had a couple of key [...]

A Prototyping Conundrum

A good friend and I are working on an invention that we believe will solve a problem faced by urban bikers. I can’t say much more than that, but that’s probably all you really need to know in order to consider my prototyping conundrum. It deals with a common problem, I believe, that arises when [...]

Building Brands on Social Networks

I recently produced an event for Sprout entitled Building Brands on Social Networks and am writing to share some of the presentations and content from the half-day summit. We had an overwhelming response and ended up with a packed room, which was very exciting. I hope you’ll find value in the assets below.
I also want [...]

A Useful Web Strategy Tool

This is a quick post to share a simple web strategy tool that I learned about from Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group. Incidentally, Jeremiah is speaking at an event I’m organizing entitled, Building Brands on Social Networks. It will be taking place in San Francisco on Feb 4th, in Silicon Valley on Feb 18th, [...]

Are Facebook Apps At The Core of Effective Social Networking Strategies?

This is a repost of an article I wrote for Sprout.
As marketers look for the best ways to build brands on social networks they’ve experimented with a wide range of strategies from friending campaigns to network ad buys, but what efforts are most effective? A recent study by MarketingProfs shows that branded applications top the [...]

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