The Bivings Report’s Greatest Hits
We started The Bivings Report back in 2001. In its first iteration it focused exclusively on online marketing, and was written primarily by a former employee named Andrew Dimock. Andrew did a great job in those early years of building an audience without much writing support from the rest of us.
In late 2005, we launched a new version of The Bivings Report that had a broader focus. We started writing about the work we do and how we do it, and more generally about the things that get us excited. We also invited everyone in the firm to contribute.
Expanding the scope of the blog was a pivotal moment for us. The blog has built a solid readership and is an important part of our marketing efforts. More importantly, I think the process of writing the blog has made us smarter and better at what we do.
We put up our 1,000th post the other day, so I figured it was a good time to go through the archive and highlight some of our most popular posts and favorites. Here goes:
- Redesigning USA Today – Our design team took a shot at redesigning USA Today. Even though the design is three years old, it is still better than the current USA Today and most newspaper site, in my opinion.
- WordPress vs. Drupal – This post comparing the two platforms still gets hundreds of visitors a day due links and search engines. It is our most read post.
- Comcast and Twitter – Now it seems like every other day someone goes in and mines Twitter for customer service trends. Back fifteen months ago when we did this analysis, it was still a new thing and this post got a lot of attention.
- 9 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Their Web Sites – This was our first truly viral post, and spawned a brief period when I was obsessed with list posts. I could relapse at any time.
- Five Technologies that Will Impact the 2008 Elections - Another post that went viral during our list post phase. This was also the first post from our blog to make the Digg homepage.
- John Edward’s 2: The Campaign Site - I pretty much loved all of head designer’s, Tom McCormick, campaign website reviews (Clinton, Edwards 1, Obama 1, Obama 2, McCain 1, McCain 2, McCain 3, and Rudy). But this one is my favorite because it led to hate mail from a few Edwards supporters who don’t get Tom’s sense of humor.