Found this old link in my drafts. This guy’s rad. He’s on twitter, too (@thesambarnes). Check him out for yourself; start with this article:

Estimating time for Web Projects more accurately: Part 1 | Web Project and Website Management advice | Web Project Management Addict | thesambarnes.

Aki Spicer (@akispicer) works for Fallon as director of digital strategy. Right now the webs are abuzz about this deck, and rightly so–it is a fantastic read.

When it comes to wrangling the brand in this very connected, very noisy digital world, planning and its practitioners sit dead center in the middle of this marketing shift (“Shift Happens” … Great deck. Really.). And it’s not just a matter of connecting new dots of interactions in Facebook and twitter. Indeed, it’s about holistic thinking that sees all, commanding new tools for analysis and execution, and really understanding the change from telling to listening.

Nike+ dashboard screenshoot

Perhaps the best consumer example of digital’ promises–to bridge concepts and ideas to usable form. Just brilliant. From R/GA’s site on Adeek’s Agency of the Decade award:

Digital Campaign of the Decade: Nike+
If there was a knock against Nike Plus from the ad world, it was what it wasn’t: an ad. Which was, of course, the point. Created in 2006, it defined how a brand can build a self-sustaining platform by giving customers an easy tool—a chip in their shoe that connects to their iPod music player—to track and share their training progress. Nike Plus takes “Just do it” and actually helps runners get it done. Since its launch, Nike Plus runners have logged more than 100 million miles—enough for more than 400 roundtrips to the moon. It’s little coincidence that Nike steadily increased its running shoe market share from 48 percent in 2006 to 61 percent in 2008. Along the way it created something for brands to aspire to: a product experience that reinforces the brand message.

Full Adweek article.

But it made me wonder, is the fax number on a business card a symbol of the everything archaic and deprecated in the new world of digital? If so, what does its prevalence on cards say about how we (don’t) prune and weed our communication garden? What else lurks out there by default? What’s being neglected or missed altogether because something else is taking up space and we assume it’s OK?

Then I decided to take some measurements. Fax numbers readily appear on 78% of the cards I gathered. That’s nearly four-fifths of modern marketing professionals putting forward the idea that complete contact information includes a fax number. Stunning. Sure, it’s just on their by default. It’s part of the InDesign template. It’s part of the shell-run the company bought years ago. Certainly I have many of my own variety of unintentional, undesirable artifacts (and behaviors, for that matter) unnecessarily occupying space in my own life. But there’s no fax number on my card, that’s for sure.

As I noodle my experiences and observations from this week’s event and consider digital’s role in entertainment marketing and promotion (and beyond), I can’t help but think that the fax number on business cards may be a good starting point to think, a framework even.

On your next run of cards, have them strike the fax number. Perhaps replace it with your professional instant messaging ID or blog address or LinkedIn URL. Or don’t. That would be fine, too. And I promise I won’t record them in my contact manager.