Open House - A behind-the-scenes view of Manage My Home

Google Powermeter

If there is any doubt that Google is the new Microsoft, check this out. Not only is Google powering the worlds searches but they are now helping you save power.

-Garret, Industrial Designer

Android Nipping At iPhone's Heels

If you’re a developer looking to determine which platform to port your application to next, take these numbers into mind. By the end of 2009, Android will be on enough handsets around the world that the cumulative user count may make the platform much more viable for development. If there’s an Android Market gold rush even half that of the App Store’s, you don’t want to be 25 thousandth app to go live.

At 30 days, the proportion of Android-vs-iPhone user retention is roughly 31% higher. By 90 days, it’s roughly 42% higher. That’s huge.

To read all the details, check it out on Tech Crunch

-Garret, Industrial Designer

How I Spent My Friday Night

We've all been at a party when you get the inevitable question, "So what do you do?". I find it hard to explain online marketing and especially social media marketing to people. It's easier when you work for an established brand. That gives the listener something to latch onto. Manage My Home isn't household name (not yet anyway), so typically I have to explain the site and my job there.

Last weekend, I ran into a friend of a friend and started my spiel - "It's a website from Sears that helps people manage their homes..." I was actually interrupted. He had heard of the site ("Manage My Something" - close enough) and had visited our site for help with his garage door opener.

As a marketer, I couldn't resist doing a little research to find out how he found Manage My Home. Turns out he came across my paid search campaign that launched about ten days ago for our Project Center. Of course I know that people clicked on our keywords and I've got the reports to prove it. Sometimes in internet marketing you never get to meet your customers. It's just a bunch of anonymous people floating around in cyberspace. Randomly meeting a person that saw my marketing, visited the site and found value is guaranteed to give me a warm fuzzy feeling.

Have you seen our paid search campaign?

-Alex, Marketing

Revisiting written work

Nothing humbles a writer like reviewing old work. Taking time and distance away from a piece of writing is akin to undergoing corrective (editorial) eye surgery. When you review an article a month, a week or even a day after adding the last sentence, you often think, "Did I really write that?" Hindsight can be harrowing.

But sometimes it's not so bad. Sometimes a writer just needs to step away and stop fussing with prepositions or second guessing verb choices. Writing holds an astonishing number of traps, not the least of which is that an article can absorb its writer, skewing her perspective. While time magnifies written mistakes, it also sometimes restores perspective, allowing a writer to think, "This article isn't nearly as bad as it seemed when I was deep in its throes."

This week, Manage My Home launched Dynamic Content Experience (DCE) pages. Users searching for a product manual now can click on a link that lets them experience the product more vibrantly on a product page. This page contains germane tweets from our Twitter community, suggested to do's, related products and relevant articles.

I've experienced both sides of editorial hindsight while working with our team to get DCE running. I spent a chunk of time flipping through our content, tagging articles and videos as Editor's Picks for the DCE system. While I came across a few less-than-stellar articles, I found our content breadth to be much deeper than I anticipated. While I definitely don't want to retag all that content (I now need new glasses), I do appreciate the opportunity the project gave me to spend quality time revisiting our writing.

-Erin, Writer