A large mushroom pie and an equally large Hawaiian tantalized our taste buds while the scintillating conversation barraged our brains. Check out the topics talked about at this week’s Resource Friday!

Say ‘Goodbye’ to FBML

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

Facebook is making some slight changes to their developer platform scheduled for implementation by the end of the year. A few changes include dropping a few rarely-used FBML tags, not allowing FBML to edit pages directly, and removing a few uncommon REST API function calls. The biggest change here would be the change for not allowing FBML on Pages, which means that any content published on your Facebook page will have to be hosted outside Facebook and pulled in through an iframe. Hopefully this will pull some server load off Facebook’s servers to allow for faster page loads.

Quick hits on social media

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

The launch of Facebook Places is the big news in the social media realm this week. With Places, Facebook is stepping into the territory pioneered by FourSquare, BrightKite, Gowalla, Loopt, and others. As currently implemented, Places causes a new rash of privacy concerns–by default, our “friends” are free to check you in anywhere and everywhere, even if you’re not actually there with them.

On the other end of the spectrum, a dead-simple service launched this week called OhLife. OhLife is essentially a Web 2.0 diary, where you’re e-mailed with a prompt (“How did your day go?”) each evening and can journal by simply hitting “reply.” There are no privacy settings, because it’s one hundred percent private.

Finally today, we discussed how the trifecta of owned, earned, and paid media has been joined by a category called shared media. An example of shared media would be when a customer uploads a photo to your Facebook page. The photo is theirs, yet the page is yours, so the media is shared. The rise of shared media as a fourth category leads to all sorts of changes in the marketing and PR world.

Jack Welch on team management

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

Jack Welch is said to be one of the most studied CEO’s of the 20th Century with his 41 year track record with GE. Today, I brought some of Jack’s key leadership insights to the YDOP team. The first point is that whatever company has the best players wins the game. That’s true in sports and in business. I reminded the team that I believe that YDOP is fortunate to have an amazing team – each one of YDOP’s players. They’re all talented, innovative and positive people. I’m thrilled to have each of my irreplaceable members serving our clients at YDOP. Every day I go home, proud as can be of the amazing work I see coming out of our agency. I’m not just saying that – I really mean it.

Welch describes top people and the personality traits found in them. They have generous spirits, not envious or negative, and filled with energy. They love to see other people grow and participate in that as possible. Welch’s description made me think of our group around the meeting table doing just that: helping each other become more knowledgeable and inspired. That’s what we do for one another on resource Friday. Another key take-away from Welch is his emphasis on candor. Unless a company is brutally honest with itself, it won’t differentiate (the word that makes Jack’s approach controversial) between it’s top 20% employees, it’s necessary 70%, and the 10% which need to be fired or reassigned internally.

Waving the checkered flag

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

Today I showed the team a website called “Which Loads Faster?” This website compares the load speed of any two websites you want. When you arrive on this website, you can choose to compare some of the big-brand websites (like Google vs. Bing) or you can enter your choice of two websites. Whichloadsfaster.com then will show you the load speed of each website. Furthermore, if you click “more”, you can analyze each page in details. Whichloadsfaster.com can be very helpful to show you what it is that makes your page load slowly or what you can improve. The website itself is very user-friendly and very easy to use. So check it out!

SEO vs PPC: Apples and … slightly different apples

Jeff Burkholder, Engineer/Analyst

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with infographics. I love how they can more easily illustrate a complex bit of statistical math and reasoning…but I hate the way that they throw out a lot of the subtlety of those original metrics in favor of being puffed-up and flashy. I believe there’s a relationship between the rise in their use throughout popular culture and the fall of good journalism; but, I digress. Reason I brought that up is because I shared an infographic with the team today, one that shows the relative strength and usefulness of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) versus Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC). Among the more interesting statistics it pulls out are:

• When someone is searching for something (as opposed to buying), they are most likely (42%) to click on the top-ranked organic result. Compare that with 23% clicking on a PPC link, or 8% clicking on the second-ranked SEO result.
• 62% of searchers click on a result on the first page. 23% click on a result on one of the following pages. 15% try a different search or search engine.
• According to Nielsen.com, there were 10.5 billion searches in July 2009 from people in the United States alone. This is up by about 106% from where things were in December 2005 (5.1 billion).

Overall, it shows that SEO usually has more of an impact and a better ROI than PPC, but with the increased prominence of PPC results in search engine results, one must not ignore them.

After this week’s flurry of activity serving our clients, we all relished the chance to sit down together to enjoy some stromboli, and some time to teach each other more about our respective fields of expertise.

Twitter Shortening and Dark-Roasted Google

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

I shared with the YDOP team that Twitter is testing a system that will shrink all URLs in all tweets. Even URLs already shortened with a service like bit.ly (or kudz.us, if you read last week’s post), Twitter will shrink the link to one that uses their new short domain, t.co. Some links, however, will only appear as shortened versions of the URL—Twitter uses the example of amazon.com/Delivering-. While Twitter is thinking of this as a way to protect users from malicious links, on the whole I think this will be bad for our clients who are heavy users of Twitter for sharing links to content on the Web.

This week Google announced that the latest iteration of its search system, Caffeine, is now fully implemented for all users around the world. Caffeine puts a high emphasis on content that is recent and up-to-date. Google also began a pilot test of including twitter updates in AdWords advertisements.

Sysomos announced the results of a study that showed, among other things, that the majority of bloggers are age 21 to 35, about evenly split between men and women. Four percent of all bloggers worldwide are based in Pennsylvania.

Facebook Insights and Safari Reader

Jeff Burkholder, Engineer/Analyst

I decided to take a break this week from the book I’d been reading for my Resource Friday materials, and instead talked a little bit about Facebook’s revamped Insights platform. This was introduced at Facebook’s f8 conference back in April, but finally went live this week. Largely, Facebook is trying to position themselves similarly to Google’s Analytics, and allow website owners to get (anonymized) demographic data about their visitors.

I also talked about the “Reader” feature in the new 5.0 release of Apple’s Safari web-browser. With this feature, depending on what sites they browse, visitors may see a “Reader” icon in the address bar. Upon clicking that, an overlay window appears that shows the plaintext of the article, along with any specifically-related pictures, but removing all the other clutter from the page. It’s a really slick idea and implementation. I referred to it as a sort-of “TIVO” version of websites, in that it doesn’t delete ads and the like, but makes it easier to ignore them.

Facebook APIs

Mike Newswanger, Programmer

This week I taught about some of the capabilities of the Facebook API for marketing strategies and application development. The API can be used for communication with potential clients, expanding your client base through recommendations and suggestions by current clients, and connecting the data on your site with your clients.

The API can be implemented in different ways, and its functionality can be quickly deployed. For example, the like buttons that you see on many sites can be added to your page to allow Facebook users to help spread knowledge about products offered.

A Few of My Favorite Sites

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

I love looking at some great website designs out there for inspiration. So this Friday, I picked and shared some of the websites that I like and talked about what it is that makes them beautiful.

I can’t tell you enough about how I love simple, clean and contemporary design. Clean design is really easy on the eye. It is easy to navigate. Today I shared some of the websites that are using a grid system to convey simple, clean, contemporary design. Some of the examples are Davroc, Jam Restaurant and SD Workz. Simple and clean grid design makes the website clear, organized, and again, easy to navigate. They really prove that the grid is not only important in print design, but also essential in web design. With some added punches of color and subtle texture, those websites proves that a simple grid-based design doesn’t have to be boring.

People who want friendlier design can also get a clean design by adding subtle texture. Freedom Tree Farms website proves how powerful a subtle texture can be. But keep in mind, things are good in moderation, including the use of texture.

Faith Meets Science

Jonathan Arndt, Programmer

As YDOP is working on the Knights of the 21st Century website, it seem suitable to share information on some mobile applications that are currently being used for men’s ministry and discipleship.

There are three specific services from Back to the Bible that are available for your mobile phone, and computer.
– 411God is a telephone call. A 1 minute long message, everyday at a pre-scheduled time.
– SMC, See Me Change, is a text message. Just a simple Bible verse. Everyday. And you’re even encouraged to text back to share how you applied this verse in your life.
– Nudge is an E-mail message. Everyday. Short devotionals written by men and women who are in similar life-stages as yourself.

More information about these discipleship tools can be found at

http://www.411god.net/lbc/