Author Archives: Roland Smart

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 [...]

Case Study: Carrott Cloud Backup & Recovery

In the Summer of 2009, while I was still on the board of the San Francisco Chapter of the American Marketing Association, I met Mehrdad Saberi at one of our events after the Ad:Tech conference. He shared with me a remarkable story about a business that he had built from the ground up that has [...]

Recent Business/Management Lessons

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been collecting some ideas that are useful in pulling apart business problems. In this post, I’ll share some of them:
Oxygen Mask Situations
In the past, I’ve written about how strategy is more about saying “no” than saying “yes”, but it’s rarely easy to explain the complex of reasons that [...]

Ads Follow Consumers

Since the dawn of online display ads in 1993, advertisers have struggled to reach web surfers. In 1993, ads were served on portal websites such as Yahoo! and AOL. At that time display ads were simply digital versions of print ads and they were available to everyone who visited the page. Fortunately, today’s ads are [...]

The Social Media Eco-System For Brands

This is a repost of an article I wrote for Sprout.
The wave of social media adoption is continuing to bring new brands online and as this trend unfolds the social media eco-system is changing to absorb the new participants. In this post, I’ll share a simple diagram that can help make sense of how the [...]

How Online Display Ads Are Served

First off, I rarely click online display ads. That said, I am interested in finding ways to make them more relevant. In principle, I would be willing to click on ads if they exceeded a certain relevance threshold. For the mass market, there is clearly an economy for these ads such and their price is [...]