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Creativity, Purple and/or Sacred Cows, RAID, and more

As the days grow longer and the mercury in increasingly-archaic analog thermometers rises, the thoughts of office workers naturally turn to ones of, “Man, I gotta sit inside all day in weather like this?” Granted, the answer to that question is usually: Duh, yes. And that’s often followed by a gentle admonishment of what it means to be an adult and no longer get recess time.

Today, however, we had recess; of a sort. We took our notebooks and whiteboard, our taco pizza and Turkey Hill Strawberry Kiwi Lemonade, and headed out to the blueberry patch outside our office for Resource Friday (when we teach our fellow team members something we know). This week also saw the first RF contribution from new programmer Mike Newswanger, and a swell time was had by all!

SMS Functionality on Websites

Jonathan Arndt, Programmer

Sending short text messages from a website to a mobile device is not difficult. But it does require a few pieces of hardware.

I briefly researched a piece of software from the Ozeki NG company, which offers an easy way to send SMS message through a web interface.

First, you need to have a SIM card (just like your cellular device has) and a GSM modem. The SIM card goes in the GSM modem, which plugs into your computer’s com port. Now your computer can interact with the modem and send messages through a mobile service provider. The software has a control panel to test the capabilities of the modem, and once everything is working, you can automate the process through your own applications (either web or desktop, or anything that can connect to a URL).

Backup Solutions: RAID

Mike Newswanger, Alsø Programmer

Data loss can be a huge problem in businesses, whether big or small. Today I discussed how to protect yourself from data loss issues that can prevent huge losses in both time and money caused by data loss. One of the most prominent methods of data-backup is through RAID. There are many different types of RAID, which use multiple hard drives to create a single (RAID) volume. Some of the most common are listed below. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages:

• RAID 0 (aka Striped): Data is stored evenly between two or more hard drives. The data is “striped” and no data is redundant. The maximum capacity for the volume is equivalent to the number of equal volume drives multiplied by the volume ( n*V ) where “V” is the size of the disks used in the RAID array, with a minimum of two drives. Data access is extremely fast in both read and write, but with no redundancy, if one drive fails, all of the data is lost.
• RAID 1 (aka Mirrored): Identical data is stored on all drives in the array; there is 100% redundancy, which is the big advantage to this RAID type. The array requires a minimum of two drives, but the disadvantages are that writes take longer (since data has to be written to two drives) and storage is limited to V. Therefore, if you would have 4 drives, your total capacity would be 4*V, but in a RAID 1 array, you would only have access to 1/4 that amount.
• RAID 1/0 and RAID 0/1: Require even number sets of disks with a minimum of 4 and are stacked between RAID 0 and RAID 1. For example, the data could be put through RAID 0 (striped) then RAID 1 (mirrored). This array would provide the ability for up to half of the disks to fail (maximum of one per branch) and gives a capacity of ( n * V / 2 ).
• RAID 5: Using three or more hard drives, this array saves data in two places, which allows for one hard drive failure with no data loss. Data read and write speeds are also greatly improved over a single disk’s speeds, but the trade off is you need more disks than some other arrays and more space inside a tower to hold the drives. The total storage space available for use would be ( ( n – 1 ) * V ).

By following these advantages and disadvantages, a small business can create a low cost, low maintenance RAID system to give redundant data to protect against drive failure.

Always Be Testing, Ch. 4

Jeff Burkholder, Professional Gap Filler

I skipped over chapter 3 in my glorified book report of Always Be Testing because it was mostly about how to read the reports from Google Website Optimizer. I didn’t think that would be too terribly interesting to the assembled. Instead, I went on to chapter 4, which delineated a further reason why testing websites are essential: “Inside the Bottle” Syndrome. This is the idea that, as you’re developing a website, you unconsciously proceed on the assumption that everyone who comes to the site will have the same knowledge, understanding and insights into how things work that you do. This is also known as the Curse of Knowledge: Oftentimes, knowledge of something makes it impossible to imagine what it’s like to lack that knowledge.

So, how to combat it? Some would argue intuition, but while “going with your gut” can work really well in some cases, a fair amount of the time, intuition can be astonishingly wrong. That’s where testing comes in: The only real way to know how your audience will react to something is to actually try it out on your audience; then revise it and test again. The chapter ended with a list of perspectives essential for a successful testing philosophy:
– It’s OKAY not to know.
– It’s NOT okay to assume.
– What works for someone else WON’T necessarily work for you.
– There is ALWAYS room for improvement.
– There are NO sacred cows.

How to be Creative

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

Sometimes we might find ourselves stuck on one idea. So today, I talked about some of the techniques for finding inspiration for any creative process. First, I talked about creative mind-mapping. With mind-mapping, we will more likely to explore the ideas that we would not have thought at first. This makes the design/creative result not so obvious, which is more likely to have more impact on the target audience.

Another technique is a visual mood board. This is actually a fun process. It makes the client feel involved, which can avoid a design that is way too far from what the client wants. This technique involves the designer finding random images for clients to pick. The visual process will stimulate the clients better to understand the mood of the business that they’re trying to do. Then we try to find a solution based on the mood that the client describes. Again, with this, we are more likely to come up with a solution that will please the client.

Seth Godin and the Cattle of Psychedelia

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

I’m pretty sure we were the only Internet marketing company in the universe that had a resource meeting in a blueberry patch today, and I found it the perfect environment to wrap up my discussion about the purple cow (and to sample the first ripe berry of the season). I explained Seth Godin’s principle of marketing to early adopters rather than to the masses and incorporating a viral element to your product or service as much as possible. Fortunately, the timer on my iPhone which had rudely interrupted all my predecessors when their ten minutes were up, had “accidentally” popped into silent mode and so I had time to comfortably move on to Seth’s other book, Permission Marketing. And, because I found this subject so interesting, the time just flew by (for me).

I began with the assertion that traditional marketing of average products through frequent exposures in a variety of places rarely finds an ROI on marketing dollars. We discussed the processes that typical conversions are made and we collectively agreed that larger conversions require stages of relationships, and we should design strategies around that expectation. For instance, it isn’t likely that a searcher would find a financial planner on a Google search, call him/her up and invest their lifetime savings all on a Saturday morning. It is more realistic to think that that maybe 3-5% of those individuals would sign up for updates via email or an RSS feed after reading some interesting articles. Later, these “followers” might show up to hear a talk from the author at a Chamber or community event and talk to them afterwards. Of those at such an event, it is likely that they might agree to a personal consultation or meeting. From there, they may have a 75% chance of subscribing to a service. The “conversion” from Google searcher subscriber has stages. As we develop conversion strategies, we need to consider which stages will play out best with which digital platforms: Facebook, e-mail, company website, Twitter. Any good marketing strategy must incorporate this element of relational development to some degree.

Shorter Links, Better Connections, More Video

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

I’ve been exploring bitly.Pro, which enables a short domain name to function as a URL shortener using Bit.ly’s URL-shortening and click-tracking technology. I explained what I learned from testing the service using my kudz.us domain name, and shared what I think the potential value of the service might be. It does improve branding efforts when you tie a custom short domain with a content-rich website—for example, when a reader shares a story from nytimes.com on Twitter, the shortened link uses the domain name nyti.ms. What’s more, the custom URL also improves YDOP’s ability to track brand activity through social media monitoring.

I also shared a new Flowtown feature that can alert our clients when an online influencer makes contact with them or signs up for an e-mail newsletter.

Last, I shared some newly-released statistics about Internet video. The Pew Internet & American Life project reported this week that 69% of adult Internet users have watched or downloaded an online video, while 14% of have uploaded a video. Just three years ago, only 8% had uploaded a video. A full 38% of those who have watched a online videos have watched ones that were educational. Cisco Visual Networking also projected that, from a bandwidth perspective, by the end of this year, 40% of consumer Internet traffic will be video—and that number does not include video shared via peer-to-peer technologies. Cisco also released the fun fact that the size of the Internet as a whole will quadruple in the next four years.