iDEA JOURNAL

Information Technology (IT) companies that provide managed services generally describe themselves as managed service providers (MSPs). They are engineering companies at heart. In the early stages, a real focus on providing service  brought enough referrals from happy customers to start the company growing. But, marketing a technology company is very different than providing service. To really succeed over the long term, MSPs need a growth strategy beyond the referral base. They need a process of finding and converting new customers. The difficulty is that most potential customers are already working with someone, and there is no visible trigger as to when a company will switch providers. It takes a creative strategy and commitment of time and money to raise awareness of their service.

2017 was the year of some iconic Ad fails. Yet as we move further along into 2018, it’s almost as if brands are fighting for last place. It’s apparent not everyone learned from the lessons of advertising failures that preceded them.

Not all brand fails are created equally. Some might be as simple as a Photoshop oversight that adds a limb or two, to A-list celebrities, but others are less forgiving. Recently, Snapchat and Heineken played with fire and got burned.

Flying can be—correction—is a stressful ordeal. Cue the long lines, people lugging around luggage bigger than they are, everyone trying to figure out where their assigned gate might reside, and then, of course, hoping your luggage actually arrives at the same destination as you. Even if you’re someone who only brings one small bag when taking flight, there’s no avoiding having to walk by, stand in line near, or even just sit in close quarters with people who are trying to fit an extra bag of who-knows-what into luggage that never should have made its way into an overhead bin in the first place. The pressure we feel when it comes to flying is bad enough without all the other baggage (no pun intended)—other people, security factors, and whatever else heightens your personal anxiety needle pre-takeoff. But one man on a United Airlines flight this past week dealt with the kind of stress associated with a crime committal—not an airplane flight.

I deleted Twitter from my iPhone. I think that the app’s time has passed…. well, that and I needed the space to download an app I might actually use in the near future.

Instagram, as much gripe as we gave them at the start, has officially overtaken Snapchat in the realm of social media photo and video updates, especially when it comes to Stories. In case you hadn’t heard of either of these apps’ storytelling features, it goes like this: both Snapchat and now Instagram allow users to create compilations of photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours. And because everything on social comes down to who’s doing what best, we may as well come right out with it: Instagram seems to be winning this rat race.

Right after they released it, we wrote a post on Instagram's newest sharing feature, which lets users post up to 10 photos as an album in one fell swoop. Before this update, users were limited to one photo per post... now, if you've got something (or something[s]) you want to share a bit faster, and all at once—well, no fear. Instagram Albums has got your back. The new feature though, as with almost every single other feature released by Instagram in the past year and a half, has gotten some backlash—which should be no surprise. Does this mean Instagram is going to remove the feature? We’ll take a guess that the answer to that is: probably not. As with most of the other new features that received initial backlash. Users eventually got over it. If they REALLY, really didn’t like it then maybe they stopped using the app. However, last time we checked, the number of users on Instagram seemingly continues to grow.

Fact: social media is ever-changing. We've said this before, and quite honestly, this fact becomes more and more true with every passing alteration to our favorite apps and websites. Instagram, however, is the most recent of our classic app favorites to do something wild... and some people aren't too crazy about it. Mind you, this is not the first time users have had an adverse reaction to a decision made by Instagram higher-ups. In fact, we wrote a piece a few months back when they first changed their logo, which you can find here. But if Instagram has proven anything since that other big change back in May, it’s this: people won’t seem to stop using the application no matter what. So what’s new in the world of “Insta” today? Let’s dive in.