Notes and news, insights and inspiration from the autonomous collective mind of GS.

You know how different browsers display Web pages differently? From a development standpoint, it takes some massaging and understanding the shortfalls of various browsers to get a page to display the way you would like. When it comes to HTML email, getting your message to display as you would like is a bit more complicated. Web browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome) all use the code you write to display a page verbatim. Email clients, on the other hand (Outlook, Hotmail, Apple Mail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, etc.), insert, update, and neglect code that the developer writes.

… you will go far.” —Teddy Roosevelt

People in the agency world are talking a lot about a new book by Susan Cain called Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.

I’m looking forward to reading it, even though for me it might seem more like a biography.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the future: A place where purchasing decisions are motivated and informed by your online interactions with people far and near via social. This definition may not fit all consumers, but it applies to an audience that is increasing and is changing the way we do business. Are you ready for that? If not, it’s time to catch up. It’s no longer about broadcasting a message you hope will soak in, remember?

As Facebook users grow familiar with recent News Feed changes, it has been noticed that only a portion of all possible content generated by the brands “liked” and individuals befriended there displays in our News Feed. Facebook has decided that we would quickly be overwhelmed if forced to dig through each and every update from all the people and companies in our digital life, so it uses some fancy and semi-secret math to determine which content would be most meaningful to us and that’s what it shows us.

We recently took delivery of our new GS business cards. And they’re impressive. Letterpressed, edge tipped with orange, stock so thick you can jimmy a lock with it.

A couple of weeks ago, 7-Eleven made a bit of a Social Media misstep when attempting to inject humor into a Facebook post. Here’s a screen of the actual status update:

If a business wants to create a culture where everyone contributes equally to a project and in the best interest of the client, then we need to move away from silo-thinking. This article is great because it puts a real-life example to the forefront. It shows that if everyone in a company doesn't work together, the fault will fall back to the customer.

My favorite source for online news, Mashable, surprised me with an article this morning indicating that the latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary includes some unusual new additions (a.k.a. edition additions).

An article on B2B email marketing I read today included this great infographic from Scott Stratten's book UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging.

Now you can read gripping narrative for free on Amazon.com. Not with Amazon’s annoying “Look Inside the Book” feature, but right there in the customer reviews. Encountering ridiculous product listings, everyday Amazonians are responding in non-everyday ways, morphing their reviews into creative short fiction.