Spoiled Rotten, But I Love Her

Before you ask, no, this is not a blog post about my wife. This is 80% about Trixie, the dog that my wife and I adopted through For Our Friends, one of Long Island’s animal rescue organizations. Our dog, originally named Peggy Sue, was picked up wandering the streets in the Bronx and brought to a kill-shelter. At just 9 months old, she quickly found herself on the euthanasia list. Why would any shelter put such a young dog – or any dog – on the list? They’re overcrowded.

When driving out to Glen Cove to meet our dog, I remember driving past a woman walking a dog on the leash. The dog was so eager, it was up on it’s hind legs pulling as hard as it can. I turned to my wife and said, “I think that’s our dog.” We knew we were in trouble already.

Trixie now has a great yard to run around in, gets to go on walks to the ice cream store in the summer where they serve ice cream for dogs. She’s even sweet talked her way into sleeping in our bed! Sure, she has her faults, but its all part of her personality. My wife and I are always thinking about the life we’ve given to Trixie.

How You Can Help

Now for the other 20% of this post. There’s a fundraising event coming up called Unleashed that is organized by Pet Peeves (client at work), a not-for-profit organization that raises awareness for Long Island’s animal shelters and rescue groups. I’m asking you for your help:

1. Join Pet Peeves for their fundraiser, Unleased, on April 5th at Crest Hollow Country Club. There will be cocktails, food, networking and most importantly, the money goes towards a great cause. Information is available from their website. If you can’t make it to the event, there are links for donations as well.
2. Help spread the word about this event. Share the link to the Pet Peeves website on Facebook or Twitter – or even just email it to someone who loves pets.
3. Connect with Pet Peeves on Facebook or Twitter.
4. You can even do what I did here and write about the life you’ve given an animal in need on your blog or Facebook Wall and ask people to donate to Pet Peeves.

I have to thank everyone at Pet Peeves for my dog. While writing this post I found out they they help fund For Our Friends, the organization that connected us to Trixie. We really can’t thank them enough.

The Deception of Numbers

In the world of marketing, social media and advertising I see some interesting stats almost every day as well as convincing case studies. Seeing a statistic such as, “[insert marketing tactic] increased clicks by 400% for [insert industry] in 2010″ really tells me I might want to consider trying [insert marketing tactic] when working with similar clients in [insert industry]. In the same sense, a great case study that illustrates a successful tactic someone used is also very convincing.

A Little Back-Story

Last fall, with all the talk about mobile barcodes and QR codes I was curious to know more information. There was a lot of data and statistics about the ages and gender of the average barcode scanner as well as what types of industries were scanning the most. What I couldn’t find was any data that told me how many people have ever seen or heard of these barcodes and what percentage of people were actually scanning them.

Over the next few weeks I set out to survey people and find out for myself. Through various sources I was able to drum up 400 responses and created the QR Code Awareness Infographic – the summary of my research. Recently, I did more research on the influence of Foursquare and created another infographic to summarize my responses.

On both infographics I’ve had many questions about who was polled, how I asked the questions and how I contacted the participants among many other questions. I wasn’t put off by the questions and always answer them the best I can, but the way some of the questions were asked made me feel like I was being questioned for some kind of crime.

The Infographic vs The Case Study

Think of this from a different angle – a case study. What if I said, “In 2011, we deployed a QR code for [insert client name] across all print material and resulted in a 300% increase of [insert metric]“? Case studies are facts – a series of actions that eventually added up to results. There’s nothing to question (assuming the case study revealed enough details) and I don’t think anybody expects the exact same results if they tried something similar.

My Question For You

Infographics and statistics provide data that is more broad while a case study focuses on one success. Which holds more weight for you: Do you trust the broad data collected from hundreds of people or the one example of someone who had success?

Tablet Envy

My recent interest in tablets came on suddenly and I’m not even sure why. I know that I don’t have a real need for this gadget, but I can’t help but to think it’ll make my life better. Even if I decide to get one at some point, I’ll need to decide if Apple’s iPad 2 is right for me or if I should stick to Android.

I’ve been reminding myself over and over again that I do not have a real need for a tablet. I have my iMac in the living room as well as my Droid smartphone. If I really needed to access the web from my couch on a larger screen, I think my wife would give up her laptop for a few minutes. (She’s really nice, I’m sure she’d let me.) Internet access is available to me anywhere in my house as well as virtually anywhere outside of the home. Email, calendars and social networks are usually within reach at all times.

As a user of Apple’s products for years, I believe that an iPad 2 would offer an excellent user experience. They have a lot of apps and developers tend to create apps on the iOS platform before Android. On the other hand, many of the Android tablets such as the Xoom or the soon to be released Galaxy Tab 10.1 have some better hardware features than the iPad 2. Where Android falls short is in the apps category, but in general the apps I use are all there.

After I go through the whole Apple vs Android debate I go back to the debating whether or not I really need one of these. Will a tablet drastically change my life? You tell me.

Welcome to Life After Digital

First, let me welcome you to my blog. At the time I’m writing this, I’m not even done configuring this blog and getting all the functionality I want in here. Many people know me as the Digital Strategist at Austin & Williams Advertising, but there’s much more to me than may work life. My hopes with this blog is to share more of what I do outside of work. I love travel, wine and great company, but in recent months, I’m most looking forward to fatherhood.