Author Archives: Roland Smart

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 [...]

Personalization: MySpace vs. Facebook

This is a re-post of an article I wrote for Sprout Inc.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of MySpace, which no other social network has been able to replicate to date, is personalization. Personalizing a user profile on MySpace represents a desire that’s deeply woven into MySpace’s culture and community. This is one of the reasons [...]

Digital Think In Artificts

For those who were unable to attend the NPR Think In, I’m including some of the artifacts that were produced during the event here.

Here is the presentation we built to provide background on NPR, define the five focus areas of the workshop, and structure the day:

The a video player below will allow you to play [...]

Visualizing The NPR Ecosystem

This is a repost of a contribution that I wrote for the NPR Digital Think In Blog:
To understand NPR and it’s member stations, you have to understand the ecosystem they live in. The unique opportunities and challenges that NPR faces are very much embedded in this space which includes the NPR Foundation, the NPR board, [...]

The NPR Digital Think In,
Exploring The Future of NPR’s
Digital Media Distribution

Back in April, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Kinsey Wilson and Jennifer Dunworth from the NPR Foundation to discuss the role that digital media plays at NPR. They were on the west coast for an annual NPR retreat that I’d participated in the previous year. I was especially interested in reconnecting with [...]

Working With Sprout Builder

In the last few weeks things have been fairly quiet here on the blog mostly because I’ve been doing some traveling and because I’ve been working with Sprout Inc. the company that makes Sprout Builder. Sprout Builder is a tool that allows designers to build rich, and engaging online experiences without writing a single line [...]

Could not connect: Lost connection to MySQL server at 'sending authentication information', system error: 32