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.

So, with the advent of October, there’s a bit of a chill to the air in the mornings. But the conversation ’round the pizza table is still red hot on Fridays! …Yes, that was kinda cliché, but the topics were interesting!

Quick hits on social media

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

Clothing retailer Gap has decided it needs a new logo, and the rotten bit of design it announced has been greeted with heavy backlash from customers and spectators chiming in across the social web. I’m fond of the conspiracy theory that Gap created a bad new logo on purpose, knowing that it would spark a huge pool of new suggestions. If it was their plan to crowdsource their new logo in this way, it has worked out brilliantly. Just look at the quality of some of the suggestions.

Facebook has also overhauled its Groups feature, and the results look extremely useful. The new Groups now combines the best of the old Groups plus the friends Lists functionality. It’s possible to use the new groups as “huddles” of close friends, with activity hidden from your other friends and the rest of Facebook.

Online euphemisms

Jeff Burkholder, Inbound Marketing Analyst

No, not those kind of euphemisms. I shared with the group an article on euphemisms to use in place of social media words. This can be useful for an underling trying to convince their boss that the company needs to investigate social media, without using words like “social”, which have a negative connotation for many business people. For us, these terms can help better explain or describe different aspects of social media to potential clients, as “Increase unpaid search engine traffic” makes a whole lot more sense to a SocMed neophyte than “SEO” would. The article can be found on the HubSpot Blog. I also briefly discussed how there are much better words that can be used on a button at the end of a form than, “Submit”. Research bears this up.

What? When? Now.

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

This week was highly productive at YDOP as we refined time-line systems for production and worked on clarity on customer relationship responsibilities. As our company has grown, we needed to mature in our internal processes. That’s why I choose to continue with my discussion on Dan and Chip Heath’s book, Switch. We discussed the importance of developing “what/when” habits related to the hoped for changes in house. Otherwise, new responsibilities and procedures add a significant stress to employees with one more thing to remember and organize.

I compared this to turning off the light switch coming out of a room. I don’t know how many inches that switch is off the ground, but my muscle memory does. I can’t remember to think about saving electricity, but walking in that direction from that room triggers me to reach out and turn off the light (even if people are still in the room). Creating “what/when” habits within your lifestyle is the best way to change. At YDOP, we are looking for these what/when triggers as we implement new ideas to accommodate the tremendous business growth we are seeing in our company.

The low-down on drop-downs

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

Today, I showed the team a gallery of nice drop-down menu on Six Revisions. Many websites are implementing icons for visual purpose in their drop-down menu. Pure Grips, Porsche, The Famous 4th Street Cookie, and Sunglass Hut are a couple examples of websites that use visual elements in their drop-down menus. I also really like some of the websites that provide additional information for their product, right from the drop-down menu. Porsche, for example, shows a picture of the product plus a short information. Visual elements and uncluttered information can make your website much more user-friendly.

Looking for more control

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

Web servers can be configured to run any number of control panels, with two of the most common being Plesk and CPanel. Having used both, I found that Plesk seems to be more straightforward for non-technical users. The control panel is how everything on the web server is managed. This includes setting up email addresses, hosting domains and DNS ranges. Plesk gives many options to manage these settings and groups them logically in each section.

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…

Today we’re initiating a new series of posts to the YDOP blog that we’re really excited to share with you. Earlier this year, we began carving out a one-hour block once a week for what we call “Resource Friday.” We grab a couple pizzas and then sit down as a complete team to share professional development resources with each other. Here are the expectations:

• Limit per person is ten minutes (we use a countdown timer)
• Talk about discoveries you’ve made in the past week—technology developments, tools, ideas, articles, books, etc.
• Find a theme to follow over the course of at least five weeks at a time, and focus your reading and learning on that

Resource Fridays inspire and push us as a team, and hold each individual accountable for constantly learning and growing. Now we’d like to share brief recaps of the resources we share with you. We’ll be posting these each week.

Object-Oriented Programming Fundamentals

Jonathan Arndt, Programmer

Today I talked briefly about inheritance and polymorphism. These are big words, and programmers use them all the time. But they are not complicated ideas.

Inheritance is the idea that when you build an object, you can extend it. The extension will have the same attributes as the main object, unless you specify otherwise. Polymorphism is the idea that you are indeed able to specify otherwise, so that the extension will have some different behavior than the main object.

Jonathan also shared this gem from a Web page he visited while researching Perl modules for a client” “Write the documentation for a module first, before writing any code. Discuss the module with other people first, before writing any code. Plan the module first, before writing any code. It’s easy to come up with a solution to a problem. It takes planning to come up with a good solution. Remember: the documentation, not the code, defines what a module does.”

Lancaster SEO Meetup Recap

Jeff Burkholder, Analyst

I relayed some of the information presented by Dan Meyer of ProspectMX at the Lancaster SEO Group Meetup (which YDOP is proud to sponsor) earlier this week. Dan started out by looking at some of the major trends for 2010 in internet marketing:

• Your Digital Footprint/Reputation Management – Paying attention to your company’s image in all forms of media by monitoring what people are saying about you on Facebook/Twitter/message boards/blogs/etc.
• Social Media Marketing Enhanced (see below)
• Video, Video, Video – Dan sees the trend of “viral” videos as continuing and increasing
• Mobile Everything - The mobile market is the largest growing segment of internet use. Also, customers are becoming more savvy; when they’re out shopping, they can now price-check on the spot. Their savvy also extends to Internet searches: 40% of search terms in Google have never been specifically searched for before. That is, customers are getting more and more specific about what they’re precisely looking for.

Dan also noted that in the marketing world, Internet media is the only one that’s really measurable. There’s no way to tell with any amount of certainty how much business is generated by a billboard or a television advertisement, but you can tell how many times an Internet ad has been seen, clicked on, and often how many of those clicks have led directly to sales. In regards to social media marketing, Dan brought up the fact that Facebook is huge. In fact, 95% of people who participate in social media have a Facebook page, and in the past year, there’s been a 48% increase in women who have some sort of social media profile. All of this points to the fact that businesses that are afraid of using the word “social” in relation to business are increasingly going to be left behind.

Taking conversion optimization from good to great

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

Having moved on from bludgeoning my team with lists of characteristics of a great company (Good to Great, Jim Collins), I’ve began the tedious journey of understanding how to have good to great conversion results on client websites.  I’m loving it, and loving Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg’s book, Call To Action, which was the source of my contribution this week. I shared how a conversion is typically made up of many steps, which can be demonstrated on a decision/navigation flowchart, but the persuasive aspects of keeping visitors motivated enough to take next steps through your flowchart is—well—complicated.  I was left with the emotion that I had in my first year of marriage, my first month of cockatiel ownership and the other weekend figuring out my Verizon bill.  It’s complicated.

But, as with spouses, exotic birds and website visitors, understanding is key. (You may notice I’ve dropped the Verizon example at this point).  What motivates them?  What are their fears/concerns? What do they value and what is their mood and mindset?  It is important to keep interest at each step through polite enticement, and careful consideration of what has motivated their last action.  As Eisenberg wisely points out, empathy is the best guide, and the reality of your website’s offering/value is solely in the mind of its users. Plan a great experience for them through every click.

Spawning worker scripts in HTML 5

David DeCarmine, Lead Programmer

With the ever-increasing demands of emerging Web apps, concurrency is becoming a hot issue. This week I brought the team through a particular development in the upcoming HTML5 standard termed Web Workers (http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-workers/current-work/). Currently a draft recommendation, Web Workers allow you to spawn background scripts that run parallel to your main page (similar to spawning threads in a desktop application).

The main uses for these workers is to be able to execute tasks without stalling the main application. An example might be to pull in and parse traffic information for an online map while the user is still navigating around it.

Worker scripts are relatively safe as they can only receive data through the postMessage() method and don’t have any access to the main application data. They are contained within their own JavaScript files and are created by instantiating a new Worker object and passing in the URI to its script.

Some examples of Web Workers can be found on the WHATWG site (http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-workers/current-work/#tutorial) and the Mozilla Developer Center also has a nice little tutorial on getting started with Web Workers (https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Using_web_workers).

Five Categories of Social Media Uses

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

I shared a dense and brilliant blog entry by Jay Baer on what would happen “if we stopped lumping everything under the term ‘social media,’ and instead focused more on the specific outcomes that socialization of business can produce.” Baer suggests five categories of social media uses:

• Social PR & Influencer Outreach
• Social Campaigns & Apps (social media marketing)
• Content Marketing & Thought Leadership
• Brand Communities
• Social CRM

As a team we discussed which categories of social media usage YDOP currently focuses on, and where we would like to build our capacity.