Years back I was doing research for a competitive overview and typed in the name of a large toy manufacturer into my browser — I spelled it phonetically and it was therefore slightly incorrect (back then I wasn’t a parent and didn’t remember the correct spelling).

Shame on me? The manufacturer thought so - and in a carefully worded, multiple paragraph error page they told me all about how to spell their name correctly, and how I should click on the correctly-spelled URL to go to the site.

What arrogance! Now that I am a parent, I would steer friends away from this company if a good alternative is present, even though the company in question now simply redirects the mispelled domain traffic to their main site.

The takeaway here is that it pays to open your online shopfront to everyone, as you would offline, especially when many pay enormous sums to gain the awareness threshold of “branded recall ” that might bring customers to your door in the first place.

The best marketers will embrace imperfection in recall if it leads prospects to purchase and blocks fraudulent interception - and these companies will invest in domain names and search engine filings that harness that “imperfect” traffic.

Now that the trend for new “Web” companies to have cool, incorrectly-spelled names, these same potential customers might get punished for spelling brand names “correctly .” Shame on them. LatR…

*I’ll give you a preemptive warning: this blog entry ends with a question, rather than an answer.

A recent article from eMarketer.com throws water on the fervor surrounding socially-oriented, or “Web 2.0,” technology by arguing that media dollars are still directed towards traditional online media, namely banners and search words. This article is flawed.

First off, in a tongue-in-cheek sense, I have trouble with any article that uses the phrase “Web 2.0″ more than zero times per 200 words.

Seriously, though, while the online ad spend is still significant, I was disappointed that said article did not include any perspective on the ROI of social media. I don’t know what the numbers would be, but it seems to me that this is the true value of social media as a marketing tool.

Also, I’d chalk up at least a portion to the online ad spend to institutional momentum, rather than consumer behavior. From the linked article:

“Marketers are aware of the impact that social media marketing can have on their overall program but view it as uncharted territory, not worthy of their budget,” said John Squire, senior vice president of product strategy at Coremetrics, in a statement.

…So why isn’t Coremetrics, or eMarketer for that matter, focusing on charting this territory rather than reciting old figures? Participation in a campaign by civilians is a far more robust consumer brand experience and cannot be ignored.

Wunderman Network Agency Taps Karen Fazekas, 20-year Industry Veteran

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 17, 2008 – RTC Relationship Marketing (RTCRM), a Washington, D.C.–based direct marketing agency, continues its impressive growth with the addition of Karen Fazekas to its Broadcast Production department.

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OK, so when we talk about the delivery that is Wireframes, what we are really talking about User Interface Design. The granularity to which these wireframes should be designed is a topic of constant debate. At RTCRM, we design wireframes across a spectrum of fidelities, depending on the type of project we are working on and the proclivities of other design team members. There are some really good information architects out there that will tell you that wire frames should be as sparse and minimalist as possible, and that most of the information needed to create the interactive experience in question can be realized form flows and maps. While this IA-centric approach is fine for some projects (typically content heavy sites without much functionality), I think there are situations where such a dogmatic methodology comes up short. Many times, we need to create high fidelity wireframes in order to properly articulate an a user experience. This is why I i try to push our designers to be both great architects and user interfaces designers. To me, User Interface Design makes up one third of the User Experience Design equation, with the other two thirds being User Research and Information Architecture. Now that Rich Internet Applications lets us do on websites what we used to be able to do only in software design, the role of User Interface Design is more important in web experience design than ever before.