Taschen is a remarkable publishing house that produces a wide range of generally excellent and impressive books. Their $200 DC Comics book, for example, is a thing of beauty that’s an absolute must-own for any comics fan.

Anyway, their Web site allows you to look inside some of their books in significant depth. For example, through this link you can leaf through Guidelines for Online Success. There are sections on interface and design, technology and programming, marketing and communication — all sorts of good stuff.

Flipping through the pages, I found lots of interesting things. Like on page 32, where they say in their list of Do’s and Don’ts: “Do provide a skip intro button.” Well, in my mind that begs a bigger question: If you need to have a skip intro button, do you really need to have an intro at all? (I’d love to see actual stats from a number of representative sites as to what percentage of visitors hit the skip intro button.)

What really struck me, though, was the final paragraph of the intro to the marketing section:

Two words: Be confident! That’s right, be confident about your work. If you believe in your work — that will make them (the enemy, the client … a necessary evil) believe in you. If you show an ounce of doubt about your work, then they will leverage that doubt into a whole Pandora’s Box of problems by jumping in with both feet and telling you how to design the site. “I always liked the colour red; can you make the site red? And make the text bounce like it’s dancing?” No! You see, every client wants to be a designer but nature never blesses one person with both artistic skills and the gift of spewing forth utter BS and lies. Make sure they don’t cross the line … be strong! For you are the giant key to your own success.

Wow.

Martin Hughes and Jordan Stone of WEFAIL wrote that, and I suppose if you want to be a complete and utter schmuck of a design snob and be at war with clients constantly while you try to pick their pockets so you can do whatever it is you want to do anyway that has less to to with the client’s business and more to do with your own shallow need to rack up another award … well, I suppose that’s the way to go. For my $.02, though, I’d rather work with a designer who has confidence that he or she is working in service of the business goals of the client.

Takeaway for marketers: Your client should be a partner not an enemy. If you’re looking at your clients as enemies, you need to go find another line of work.

Weekends tend to be when I clean up my office, usually to get ready for the week ahead. Occasionally I dig into a pile of magazines that would make Homer and Langley proud and skim them before relegating them to the recycling bin.

This morning, I ran across this letter from the editor from the November 2010 issue of Fast Company. It’s a case study that’s must reading for anyone involved in any form of social media. Here’s a particularly salient excerpt:

Yes, we received half-a-billion impressions on Twitter. But did that meaningfully change our business footprint and prospects? … The value of this brand exposure won’t be apparent for some time, and even then it will be near impossible to distinguish from our other work.

Half-a-billion here, half-a-billion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real social media impact … or not.

Takeaway for marketers: There’s a mix of qualitative and quantitative in pretty much everything we do all day long. When it comes to social media, quantitative looks nice on a spreadsheet, but it’s the qualitative that carry the most impact.

True story.

Back in early December, I joined a local colleague and two SEO professionals from New York to pitch new business to a global company based here in Pennsylvania. The company was embarking on a Web site redesign and knew the project would take a solid year or more. In the meantime, they wanted to shore up their SEO profile.

We spent a couple of weeks preparing for the meeting and putting together a solid buttoned-down presentation. On December 3 we went in and had what felt like a good meeting; not an A+ home run, as those meetings can sometimes be, but a solid B or B+ for sure.

The next steps were clear: We were to provide references and additional background (we did) and the company was to provide a range of data from their Web analytics so that we could in turn develop a detailed projected proposal (they never did).

What followed was several weeks of radio silence during which several members of the presenting team followed up with requests for the data. On December 30 I followed up with a lengthy email that said, in part:

If there’s been a miscommunication or an erroneous expectation of some sort as the result of our meeting, I would appreciate knowing about it. If [company name] has decided to change its SEO plans for the coming year, I would appreciate that information as well.

Having been involved in Web development projects large and small over the past 15 years for regional, national and global companies, I understand that conditions can change rapidly and misunderstanding can occasionally occur.

What followed was two more weeks of radio silence. Today I finally brought it to closure:

I’m not quite sure what the issue is over there at [company name], but I do know that if an absolute lack of responsiveness is the way you typically deal with agencies and vendors, then I have no desire to work with [company name] on any level, now or in the future. The profound lack of professionalism and respect for others’ time on the part of [company name] has been deeply disappointing.

And that’s really what it is: A complete lack of professionalism and respect. For whatever reason they evidently decided they didn’t want to work with us. There were a half-dozen company representatives in that room; I would have thought one of them would have had the balls to explain why.

I get it: Pitching new business is part of being in business. Spending time on pitches and not getting the business is part of being in business. No problem. That’s the deal when you go into business.

The other part of the deal when you go into business is that you don’t necessarily have to work with people who have no respect for others on any professional level. In retrospect, I’m glad they didn’t respond right away; if they had, I might actually be in business with these schmucks today.

Takeaway for marketers: Look at the big picture. You may be pissed about something today, but in the longer run it may be one of the best things that’s ever happened to you.

B2C Marketing insider posts a pretty good article today, but I think they’re missing a sixth pillar:  Conduct a communications audit.

In other words, play the role of a customer and a potential customer. Interact with the Web site. When you sign up for an email newsletter, what’s the site telling you? Is there a welcome message? What about an unsubscribe message? When you place an order, what’s the cycle of communications that results? How often are customers receiving email? Are potential customers leaving the site asked why? What about people who abandon their shopping carts?

Takeaway for marketers: Markets are conversations. That’s Cluetrain 101. Are you having a conversation with your customers (and potential customers), or are you selling, selling, selling and selling?

PC World is reporting that MySpace is laying off about half its staff.

Back at the end of 2008, according to information consolidated by Web-Strategist.com, MySpace had more than 110 million active monthly users. At the time, Facebook had about 120 million.

Back in the beginning of 2008, according to Web-Strategist, MySpace was “the largest Social Network in North America [with] a dominant position as media site, primarily aimed at youth, giving them the opportunity to relate to brands and bands, as well as self-express.”

Facebook? “The hot talked company Facebook has the highest growth rate, and at Forrester we predict it to achieve the same number of registered users as MySpace in Q4 of 2008, or early 2009 given the current growth rates.”

Takeaway for marketers: Complacency is so 20th century.