Jumo: Getting Social About Causes

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

A new social network launched this morning. Jumo is focused on connecting people with other people and with organizations to make positive change happen in the world. It’s a little bit like a big collection of nonprofit organization Facebook pages, except more focused, more powerful, and more open. I’ve been keeping an eye on Jumo as it has been in development over the past year, ever since learning that it was the latest project of Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook and director of online organizing for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. The marketplace of social networks is getting crowded, and it’s hard for a new service to take off. But if there’s one right now that has a change and could provide real value, it’s Jumo. I encourage you to check out Jumo, and while you’re there follow LIVE Green, one of YDOP’s favorite Lancaster-based nonprofits.

Other items I shared at Resource Friday today was that Facebook has added a way for page administrators to send a mass fan invitation to its e-mail list, and an obscure Google search command, “allintitle:”, which was a big help to me on a project this week.

“Wait, *how* many people are still using IE 6?!”

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

Have you ever wondered how many people still use old versions of IE or how Chrome is doing as far as market share? W3Schools shows records of browsers, operating systems, and screen resolutions used to browse the internet in percentages, and it breaks it down monthly and contains records all the way back to 2002. This not only shows the current usage statistics, but also trends as to how traffic sources are changing.

Gallery: Church Websites

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

Today I showed the team a showcase of church websites that is compiled by Vandelay Design. Clean and simple with a touch of grungy texture detail is a common trend that I saw throughout the list here. The target audience of these websites is likely to be younger generation. But be careful not to overuse the grunge texture because it can look cliche. I like how most of the websites look simple and clean, making them user friendly. I also like the use of WordPress for some of these websites. It encourages more interaction and strengthens the social aspect of the church, which works well for their target audience.

Boosting the Crowd

Jeff Burkholder, Inbound Marketing Analyst

I brought to items to the group this week. First was information about a new Twitter statistic site called Crowdbooster. Like Klout, this site takes a look at your tweets and tells you how influential you are. This version of that idea, though, is much more graphical in nature, and lets you see at a glance how many people have retweeted your tweets, and how many people have seen those retweeted tweets. The service is still in beta, so not everything is completely solid. There’s a feature called, “Follow Builder”, which helps you find others who could be interested in your tweets by entering keywords, but it’s a bit glitchy yet, and they’re currently soliciting comments for a reporting system down the road. Otherwise, it looks like a potentially useful tool.

I also talked to the team about how Google has revised their algorithm largely due to the actions of one man. Read more here and be sure to check out the NY Times article referenced as well.

When Faith Gets Social

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

My participation in this week’s Resource Friday was very different from previous weeks, as I cited a very different type of source than I typically use (like books, online articles and blogs). I referenced a recent experience that has truly rocked my world. Three weeks ago when my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, my awesome team at YDOP met behind my back and organized what would become an incredible blessing to my family. You guessed it – a blog: WeCareForLori.com. Because of my wife’s current and my past involvement in the dressage industry (an equestrian sport), a very popular website, Dressage Daily picked up the story, bringing exposure to the site from a lifetime of fellow equestrians from around the world. Meanwhile, churches wanting to support us pushed out the link and garnered more thoughts and prayers than we could have imagined. That’s where, to me, it got really interesting — when faith moved across social networking.

What is fascinating is that “church people” have language they’ve learned to use among themselves. Others who aren’t oriented this way or haven’t been raised in this type of culture may feel alienated or confused when they read this sort of thing. When faith goes social, I believe “religious folk” (who have ears to hear) have a new classroom to learn to communicate more carefully and sensitively.

At the same time, faith has a new opportunity to express it’s power — at least that’s what happened in our case. As friends, family and complete strangers came along on our horrible cancer journey via this blog, we saw honest expressions of faith in God from so many people. And, God obviously moved in so many people that we were overwhelmed. Cards, gifts, volunteers, meals, encouragement and more than 300 visits a day to the website were driven by a Force, whose power was best represented in a video of my wife the night before surgery. It was obvious that something more than human determination was behind all of this. I believe that a blog like WeCareForLori was like a magnifying glass is to the sun. It concentrated the love that comes from above through the hearts of so many people that came together — and focused it directly on our family at the worst of times. It demonstrated the power of when faith gets social.

The past few weeks have been a bit of an emotional roller-coaster for the YDOP family. Lori Wolgemuth, Steve’s wife and our regular fount of sunshine around the office, was recently diagnosed with a severe case of breast cancer. (For those who wish to know more, you can follow Lori’s path to recovery at WeCareForLori.com.) Despite that, though, the team continues to move forward in both serving our clients, as well as serving each other heaps of knowledge!

Emma

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

Today, YDOP began a strategic agency partnership with Emma, a powerful e-mail list management, e-mail marketing, and survey service provider. Our clients will be able to send amazing-looking e-mail updates to their customers from an incredibly intuitive user interface. I gave the team a tour of the agency dashboard and of Emma’s capabilities.

Kinect

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

Having only been out for a little over two weeks, Microsoft’s Kinect is quickly becoming a very popular Xbox 360 accessory. While it was designed to be used with the Xbox, multiple users have found unique uses for the device using open-source drivers paired with computers and the Kinect. One of the first examples of this was the creation of a 3D camera based off the cameras of the Kinect. More recently, a team of two posted their work: an application that follows a user’s arm, mapping the arm movements to the skeleton of a 3D object resembling Kevin, the Snipe, from Up. The bird follows the arm movement, and although it is relatively slow to respond, it is very functional, and it is only the first round of developments for the Kinect. I think we’ll be seeing a lot more than just gaming from this device in the future.

Twitter

Jeff Burkholder, Inbound Marketing Analyst

Popular scuttlebutt this week has it that Twitter is preparing to roll out a free analytics feature. This is quite exciting for dataheads like myself, who want a more quantifiable way to look at Twitter accounts. No word yet on when this will actually be released; earlier reports had said sometime during 2010, but we’re rapidly nearing the end of that particular window.

I also mentioned that Google’s Apps offering for domains has expanded its features to include basically all Google features. So organizations that use Google as their official email handler can now also have pretty much anything else Google-related on their domain as well.

RealEstate

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

An article from Today, we took a look at examples of nice websites in real estate business, as compiled by Vandelay Design. Here are some of my favorites.

Coconut Grove has a very simple and clean website with a big photograph as its main focus. The result is very high end and contemporary. Another one that I like is PreviewNaples. It has a big call-to-action for people to search home listing in Naples. The clear call-to-action makes the website easy to use. Cantera Real Estate also has a clear search function beside an appealing picture of a landscape. Featured listings on the homepage also work well in enticing people to click and see their listings. Hillwood Residential does a good job with design details on the website. A luxury feel is achieved by the combination of its simplicity, details, and great pictures. See Vandelay Design for more inspirations.

With the weather looking chilly, windy, and partly cloudy, we decided to eschew our customary pizza this week, and instead comforted our souls and our stomachs with chicken corn noodle soup. It was a definite switch, weather-wise, for part of the team, who spent the first half of the week at the BOLO conference (hosted by Agencyside) in Scottsdale, AZ. Despite the change in climate, though, our minds were full of new information to share with the team.

Stay on target… Stay on target!

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

Online display advertising continues to get more powerful and specialized. Today I explained how retargeting makes it possible to advertise on massive sites like Yahoo, USA Today, or New York Times with a budget as small as $1,000 a month. If a person spends time on an organization’s website but doesn’t make contact or otherwise “convert,” it’s now possible to target that person with highly individualized ads on other sites they regularly visit. Retargeting often involves the use of online display ad networks, so I also explained the current state of the ad network industry.

May the [mojo] be with you

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

The highlight of this week’s visit to BOLO2010 in Phoenix for me (beside the sun and seeing my Phoenix friends) was hearing Bo Birmingham, editor at large of Inc Magazine. I shared portions of his great stories, mostly from his book, Small Giants, which I intend to read as soon as I knock off the other 12 books Amazon has recently delivered.

I was most inspired with his description of “mojo,” a common trait that all his “great” companies shared. It is the business equivalent of charisma.

An inspiring story played a major role in his presentation around the history of Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The owners were committed to making the best sandwiches in the area, ones which people would rave about. The company had charisma and a clear direction the first ten years as they became hugely successful and the following years when they choose to stay local and develop a cluster of remarkable companies.

YDOP has mojo! We show it in our brand and people recognize it when they meet us. We help businesses reach their objectives online using great insights, and we’re really excited about that! We know that our competition doesn’t deliver strategy like we do, or the broad insights about how to help organizations succeed. We are unusually involved in professional development. The most descriptive words for out agency aren’t “creative or digital.” They are “insightful and adaptive.” It’s our mojo!

I find your lack of [data] disturbing

Jeff Burkholder, Inbound Marketing Analyst

One of the most valuable sessions I encountered at BOLO was about a topic called, “Quantitative Attitudinal Audience Segmentation”, also known as, “Huh, what was that?” In a nutshell, as presented by Susan Baier of AudienceAudit, this is a method of helping companies to better engage with their customers. A dirty little secret about much in the way of current thought processes behind web design, is that there’s a great deal of guesswork that goes into determining how people will react to and navigate through a website. Quantitative attitudinal audience segmentation replaces that guesswork with hard data, yielding better results, happier clients, and a competitive advantage. This process utilizes the advantages of modern technology to quickly, efficiently, and cheaply survey a company’s customers, analyze the results, and better target the company’s marketing messages to them. I discussed how this process could be used with our existing client base to better their results.

Now witness the firepower of [these] fully armed and operational [online tools]!

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

Today, I shared some miscellaneous useful online tools for web design with the team. First one is Maki. Maki enables you to overlay your design mock-ups of your website on top of your website in the browser. Then you can check if the design elements on the website you have online match up with the mock-up. For example, you can check whether the placement of the logo is correct or not, or whether the space between the header and the body text is roomy enough.

Color Scheme Designer lets you choose a color or enter a specific color you have in mind, and then gives you variations of color schemes. It also provides you with a sample of a basic web page using the chosen color scheme.

Last but not the least is FiveSecondTest. It lets you upload a JPG file of your webpage, have people look at it for five seconds and answer some questions you posted. It also provides NavFlow and ClickTest which can help you figure out whether your website is easy enough to use or not.

If only you knew the power of the [Wordpress.org plugin directory]!

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

WordPress makes itself very easy to extend by offering over 10,000 plugins on its wordpress.org home site. The plugins can be installed into a WordPress platform very quickly and easily. Some things of note that the WordPress plugin directory includes:

• Ability to search for plugins and sort by relevance, user rating, or popularity (number of downloads)
• A tool that polls users to determine compatibility between versions of the plugin and versions of WordPress to make sure that the plugin you are downloading will work

In addition to listing the plugins, the site also provides users with developer-provided installation instructions, screenshots, and FAQ about the plugin. These tools make WordPress even more flexible and powerful than it is out of the box.

It’s been an interesting week, with part of our team working off-site. But the best thing about working for an internet company is that you can work anywhere you’ve got the internet! Check out what the team shared this week for Resource Friday.

Site of Personality

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

It isn’t rocket science to understand that the best websites are built with a “who’s coming to the site and what’s on their mind” reference. But that goal becomes more and more complicated as you peel back the layers of a hypothetical audience’s characteristics. Early on, we’ve built sites ready for each (imagined) persona: middle-aged businessman, thirty-something housewife, etc. With the help of Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg’s Call to Action, I’m encouraging the team to drill down even deeper by carefully considering personality types of our target(s).

As we considered the Methodical, Spontaneous, Humanistic and Competitive types, we ended up identifying our own styles of searching. Recognizing the diversity in the room made me understand why it is so difficult when we are all in the room giving opinions about one webpage! We all have different things that are important to us. The Methodical wants detail and needs things “business-like.” As representative of the Spontaneous searcher, I tend to emphasize that sites must be (above every other trait) be quickly understood and relevant to what I want (now!). Our resident Humanist seems to think the need to be personal, relationship oriented and somewhat open-ended trumps my need for “easy and fast.” The Competitive surfer wants information served up in a rational manner, and looks for probabilities and guarantees. Building websites that perform is no easy task, but drilling down into the psychological characteristics, motivations and fears of our potential audience allows us to make sites for our clients that out-perform their competitors’.

PC, Phone Home?

Jonathan Arndt, Programmer

This week, I brought the team up to speed on OpenVBX, which is a phone system for business. OpenVBX can help developers build rich, high quality Internet phone and SMS applications.

While YDOP may not be in the position to use a full-featured call center operation, it could still be helpful in certain circumstances to help us automate certain common or repetitive calls.

The Keys to Network Security

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

Today, I described how to use public and private key sharing for individual users to access SVN repositories stored on a local machine. This allows for full security implementation (each user has his or her own account), while allowing a hassle-free check-out and check-in process.

The public and private key sets are like a lock and key, with the public key stored on the server and the private key stored on the user’s local machine. When a connection is attempted, the private key is compared against the public to determine whether or not the user has correct permissions to access the server. If the user’s key matches, there is no further interaction involved, and the user can securely connect to a server.

(Social Media) Potpourri for $100, Alex

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

This week the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on a study from Bloomfield College concluding that “only 15 percent of prospective students” use Twitter to learn about colleges. My reaction? “What do you mean, only 15 percent? That’s huge!” We’ve long been advising our clients that Twitter is the place for engaging a small but elite group of digital influencers. Whereas many Facebook users do not also have a Twitter account, almost all Twitter users also have a Facebook account. And a blog, and a YouTube account. Twitter users are the kind of people most likely to leave comments on your website. They’re most likely to spread the word about your brand. And, importantly, they’re likely to be heard and respected. So fifteen percent of incoming students is a large pool in which to find significant influencers. It’s a bigger pool than we had expected.

In other news, YouTube announced this week that it is now offering a “YouTube Ready” designation for vendor companies that offer the service of transcribing videos. This designation will make YouTube more powerful than it already is in search, by instilling confidence in content producers toward the companies that offer to transcribe captions for their videos, and also by elevating trustworthy vendors who will transcribe accurately, rather than writing inaccurate captions simply for the sake of SEO.

Google has officially announced that it is developing a social network to rival Facebook, to be called Google Me. When I told the rest of the team that Google says they’ve learned important lessons from the releases of Wave and Buzz, my words were met with laughter. If Google learned its lesson, my colleagues said, they would stick to search and stay out of social networking. So it goes. Facebook continues to threaten Google with their Open Graph, and Google is now threatening Facebook with Google Me. The fight between these giants is worth watching.

In survey results released this week, 59 percent of respondents said they check e-mail first in the morning before doing anything else online. Eleven percent said they check Facebook first.

No Time Like the Present

Jeff Burkholder, Engineer/Analyst

Big news out today in the realm of website statistical analysis. And yes, numbers-focused people like me only enhance our air of geekiness by getting excited about news like this. Google’s blogging platform, Blogger, just gained a new feature: near-realtime statistics.

Big whoop, you say? Yeah, maybe. This sort of thing is probably only useful for the blogs that update multiple times an hour with breaking news and whatnot. However, if Google can bring this information to the Blogger platform, there should be little difficulty in bringing this realtime information to their regular Analytics offering for all websites. That’s where this gets a little more interesting. Up until now, Google’s subtly hinted that they believe that users simply aren’t interested in realtime stats. This seems to fly in the face of that; so is a broader roll-out on the horizon? Time will tell…