At the recent NASFAA conference, I was wandering around Epcot after sessions one day, and noticed this in the International Gateway:

This is on the side of a bridge at the France pavilion facing the boat dock. Maybe 1 in 100 visitors to Epcot will actually see the side of the bridge from this angle, yet Disney saw fit to put a small easel with a half finished boat dock painting and a bicycle on this little ledge.

This is exactly what I’d expect to see on the banks of the Seine.

This is why Disney is the master of the experience. We all strive to deliver an experience of some kind to our customers. Sometimes we even deliver a remarkable experience. Disney takes it to the next level by providing layered experiences so that, for those looking for breaks in the illusion, they find instead reinforcements of the experience.

What would your sales and marketing look like if at every turn, your customers’ experiences were reinforced, rather than diminished?

This is something that came up in a roundabout way at the MITX panel discussion today that I had the pleasure of being a part of, along with Aaron Strout, Chris Brogan, and Brian Halligan, in a discussion of what makes great design.

Great design is more than just sales and marketing. Great design is emotion. When you pick up an iPod, when you look at a beautiful car, it inspires an emotional, visceral response. Your rational mind catches up later, but with great design, you feel it first.

Disney’s touches – which could have been omitted – demonstrate great design, because their attention to detail creates that emotional response. You FEEL like you’re in Paris, or what you’d imagine Paris is like.

I strive in my own work to eventually achieve Imagineer-like skills. Not there yet, but working harder at it.

How do you perceive design? How important are the little things to you?

Related posts:

1. What metrics matter to podcasters?
2. 8 things about me… or at the least, my iTunes
3. A taste of things to come – stolen milk crates and peak oil

Image via Wikipedia

UPDATE:

As of September 1, 2010, Twitter has nuked functions like this from orbit. I now recommend you download and install the free TTYtter software from Floodgap Software that does substantially the same thing but is compliant with Twitter’s OAuth protocols.

The old post is kept below only for historical purposes.

Ever since announcing that I’d basically follow anyone who’s followed me, I had to come up with a way to make this happen in a timely, efficient process. So here’s how I do it, if you want to use this bizarre workflow yourself.

1. Aggregate all the “now following you” emails from Twitter in Mozilla Thunderbird.
2. In Thunderbird, filter all these to a separate folder.
3. On disk, open the Twitter folder in BBEdit.
4. Extract all the lines containing “is now following”.
5. De-dupe, then dump these into a text file.
6. Strip out the Twitter usernames in parentheses.
7. Copy and paste that list into a plain text file I call follow.txt.
8. Run fu.php (a php script) to process those user names.
9. Done!

fu.php is more or less the magic sauce along with BBEdit. I do this once every day or so to sync up new followers, and it works like a charm. fu.php I run in the Mac OS Terminal. This process looks complex, but in reality, it takes all of 2 minutes to do at most.

Here’s the source code:

<?php
// curl twitter follow script

set_time_limit(3600);

function follow($username)
{
$url = “http://username:password@twitter.com/friendships/create/$username.json”;

if (!$curld = curl_init()) {
echo “Could not initialize cURL session.\n”;
exit;
}

echo $url;
if (!$curld = curl_init()) {
echo “Could not initialize cURL session.\n”;
exit;
}

curl_setopt($curld, CURLOPT_GET, true);
curl_setopt($curld, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($curld, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($curld, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$output=curl_exec($curld);

//echo “Received data: \n\n$output\n\n”;

$pile=json_decode($output,true);
return $pile;

}

$handle = @fopen(“follow.txt”, “r”);
if ($handle) {
while (!feof($handle)) {
$users[] = fgets($handle, 4096);
}
fclose($handle);
}

foreach($users as $key=> $value){
$user=ereg_replace(“\n”,”",$value);
$result=follow($user);
print_r($result);
}

?>

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Related posts:

1. My Twitter Follow Policy
2. Why Twitter Matters : It's Your AP Newswire
3. Re-syncing Twitter