Qwiki: The Experience of Knowledge

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

Qwiki is exploring a way of aggregating information from sources across the Internet to shape it into an information experience, going beyond merely an information presentation. It’s still in its alpha stage, but it’s a way of getting information that feels flat-out futuristic. If you’d like to get in on the alpha, just let me know and I’ll send you an invite.

Facebook slipped up last week and launched a few features before they were ready. They only appeared for an hour or so, but among the changes were pages with a layout similar to the new personal profiles, as well as the ability for page admins to post to their pages as themselves, rather than as the official page, should they so choose.

Finally, I explained an SEO experiment we’re running on a site to test the effectiveness of adding the “rel=’nofollow’” tag to a particular kind of outbound links.

Heatmaps: Keeping an Eye on Your Visitors

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

This week I continued on covering online tools to track clicks and conversions. Mouse Eye Tracking, ClickDensity, and ClickHeat are some other heatmap and click tracking tools that I discussed. Mouse Eye Tracking even offers a service to measure mouse hovers. They seem easy enough to use and can be valuable tools to help companies/organizations achieve better conversions.

SocMed Ups and Downs: Social Media Monitoring and Delicious

Jeff Burkholder, Inbound Marketing Analyst

This week, I shared a couple of interesting tidbits from the social web. First off, Wildfire Interactive has released a new Social Media Monitor that appears to do for Twitter and Facebook what Compete does for general web traffic. You can quickly and easily compare the growth tracks of followers or likes, with good statistical data to back it up.

Second, the once-great internet portal Yahoo! appears to be continuing its long day’s journey into night, as a leaked document showed that it’s in the process of “sunsetting” (that is, shutting down or selling off) a number of properties, including social bookmark tool, Delicious. Nearly as soon as this news came out, dozens of blogs began publishing tutorials on how to migrate your bookmarks from Delicious to other similar tools. Later in the day, in an attempt at some damage control, Yahoo! announced that they’re actively looking for a buyer for Delicious, rather than planning to shut it down outright. Their reason for rolling it off? That it no longer fits into their corporate strategy. One can’t help but wonder just how well the popular photo-sharing site Flickr continues to fit in with that strategy at this point, too.

Mapping: New Ways of Looking at the World

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

This week I talked about a few little things including Facebook’s graph of relationships between its users (which can be seen high-res here) and some changes to Google’s Maps application for Android. The changes don’t change functionality by much, but the images are now provided via Vector graphics rather than bitmapped graphics, which means the images will scale with no quality loss. The result is clearer, more fluid graphs while zooming in and out, with much less bandwidth being consumed. Because of the lower file sizes for the map downloads, the built-in navigation functionality now provides caching for routes, including possible re-routes, to make it even more threatening to the dedicated GPS devices on the market.

Leadership Keep the Customer Satisfied

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

Steve shared with us tidbits from a number of sources on how to keep customers happy.

1. Understand what matters to them — and focus on that most often. Talk about it.
2. Call them before they call you. Discover problems on their site before they do. Identify if things aren’t working before they come to that conclusion and bring solutions.
3. Make them feel comfortable by overachieving, thinking about their problem when they’re not thinking about it, and letting them know when projects are off-track.
4. Keep up with your education/professional advancement. Make sure the clients know about it in one way or another.
5. Celebrate successes and milestones with clients whenever there is opportunity.
6. Once in a while, throw in something extra.

Today’s Resource Friday gave each of the team members a chance to shine in their respective fields of expertise. Read on for more from all!

Mobile-izing app development

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

AppMobi services provides an XDK to develop applications for mobile devices including Android devices, iPhone and iPad. The service is low-cost and enables the applications to be developed through JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, which is then compiled into a mobile application, which can be run on a mobile device without the need for an internet connection. The XDK provides a JavaScript library used for communicating with the device’s sensors and input methods. The application can then be tested locally on any mobile devices you choose, then it can be published and submitted to the Apple AppStore and Android Market for dispersion. This allows for quick development and deployment without the need to rewrite code for all devices you are developing for.

Making sure cream rises to the top

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

What determines if your great idea survives and goes on to be accepted and implemented? You may have an important role to play in making it happen, and that may be more difficult if you’re not a natural salesperson (and even then, it may not be easy). This week during Resource Friday we talked about an interesting article shared with me by a friend, Marita Skacel, from True Edge Performance Solutions. One of my most important roles at YDOP is to foster a culture of innovation, and I believe that a vital skill for my team is knowing how to promote their good ideas. Great ideas are nearly always collaborative or have evolved through a process of discovery, typically from more than one person and often over time. Often, great ideas are knocked down before they are ever really understood or considered. So to help beat that tendency, we implemented a rule at YDOP that new ideas can’t be criticized or eliminated until they are praised or validated first. While this isn’t foolproof, it does protect the idea for a longer period of time, so people can give it more thought.

The great article Marita sent me (“How to Save Good Ideas – An Interview with John P. Kotter”, by Jeff Kehoe from Harvard Business Review) listed 24 typical negative reactions your great idea might receive and gives practical succinct advice on how you might best prepare for each outcome. We plan to file this and refer to it from time to time in the future.

Content: The once and future king?

Jeff Burkholder, Inbound Marketing Analyst

I shared an article I ran across on SEO. In “SEO Is Dead, and the New King Is ‘SMO’”, writer Ben Elowitz argues that the recent partnership between Facebook and Bing “marks the beginning of the end of SEO”, as people are increasingly discovering information via Facebook, rather than searching for it on Google. This led to an interesting conversation within the team about whether or not this heralded a return to websites focusing more on creating good content, rather than just stuffing webpages with keywords and SEO hacks.

Looking at web design in a new dimension

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

A boring flat web design can be transformed into a more interesting one when a touch of 3D elements are added. The 3D effect can be achieved by realistic photographs, highlight and shadow, visual illusion, and more. This effect imitates objects in real life, and therefore can make a website on a flat monitor screen stand out. Six Revisions has compiled some really nice 3D elements in websites which I shared with the team. Philipp Doms, for example, uses drop shadow behind his picture thumbnails, making it stand out. The shadows adds a layer of depth that the website would look flat otherwise. However, it is easy to get carried away with using 3D effect everywhere. 3D elements work the best when they are subtle.

Mixing up a Batch of sCRM

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

Social technologies have the power to transform your business, not just your marketing. One way we’re encouraging that continued transformation here at YDOP is by moving to a social CRM (or sCRM) system for managing our projects, staying in touch with our clients, and sharing information internally. Today marked the moment we ditched our various address books, our outmoded project management software, and our habit of cc’ing each other on every single e-mail, by implementing a social contact management system. Our tool of choice is BatchBook, and today we walked through its functionality, the way we’ll be using it at YDOP, and what it requires to stay updated and accurate. We haven’t discovered a way to bring “social” to our accounting system yet, but that’s the only part of our business processes that isn’t now deeply social.

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.

The weather may be gray and dreary outside, but the pizza was hot and the topics were bright inside the offices of YDOP! Actually, we have no idea how a topic can be “bright”, but it sure sounded like a good segue, didn’t it?

Would you like to see our menu?

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

Navigation menus are one of the most vital parts of a website. They need to be functional and easy to use, while not being an eyesore. So today, I shared the 2010 trends for website navigation menu from SmashingMagazine.com with the team. Some of trends are:
• Menus with 3-D elements – Who doesn’t like those menus that look like you can almost grab it? Be careful not to go overboard with it because it might ended up looking tacky.
• Speech bubble menus – I think it’s overused nowadays. Although, used properly, it can make the design look fresh.
• Menu items in rounded boxes – Rounded boxes are usually used as buttons on the website. And we love a button that changes its look when pressed, so it looks like an actual, physical button.
• Menus with icons – I really love simple icons that come with the navigation menu. Visual elements can really help the users to navigate the website quickly. But be careful to keep the menu text readable.
• Menus in unusual shapes – Navigation menus can be really interesting and eye-catching when they are in shape of sticky notes, stickers, labels, cards, pins, etc.

Taking the pulse

Jeff Burkholder, Engineer/Analyst

I showed the assembled a site called RowFeeder, which tracks mentions of a word or phrase on Twitter and/or Facebook. The primary purpose of this is to keep tabs on what the social media sphere is saying about you and/or your product. And while there are a number of sites that perform this function, RowFeeder goes an extra mile by directly integrating its reports with Google Docs (they’re also exportable to Microsoft Excel), so that you don’t have to retype the data from some proprietary Flash-enhanced screen.

Motivation and innovation

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

Following Monday’s discussion about being innovative at YDOP, this Friday’s discussion was about motivation as it relates to innovation. I began by reporting on a great interview I heard with Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive, What Motivates Us: Not What You Think. Pink uses research to argue that monetary incentive programs only show benefit to employees in “mechanical improvement.” In Sales, monetary incentives encouraged workers to “game” the system. Most interesting to me was that monetary incentives actually worsened “insightful/conceptual” value from workers. (Hmmm. Does it stand to reason that if I lower salaries, my team will come up with better ideas? Risky hypothesis.)
Three key motivators are autonomy, mastery and purpose. Self direction leads to engagement, but the most powerful motivators are clearly an employee’s sense of progress and self-improvement. We went on to discuss how to develop an atmosphere that is safe for innovators, how to stimulate our innovative brains, and why creativity and innovative ideas are central to the value and survival of our cool company.

Quick hits on social media

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

I wanted to make sure the rest of the team was aware of several developments within the major social networks from the past few weeks:
• Twitter now has its own “tweet this” button and now suggests users to follow
• Facebook updated the layout of photo albums
• MySpace revised its interface to look cleaner and bluer
• Flowtown released a new map of the geography of social networks.
I also introduced members of our team to the concept of unconferences and barcamps, which are events in which participants are far more empowered than in a traditional professional conference. One example is Podcamp Pittsburgh, where I’ve been honored with an invitation to present a session next month.
Finally, I shared the theatrical trailer of the forthcoming movie “The Social Network,” and its not-to-be-missed parody.

Google Wave

At last night’s Central PA New Tech Meetup, I had the pleasure of facilitating a conversation about Google’s latest product with the brain trust of techies in the room, along with the meetup’s organizer, John Caddell. My goal was to get a feel from this group of fellow early adopters about what they like/dislike about Wave so far, and about what they see as the future implications of the technology.

Here are my takeaways on the question, Will Google Wave affect the way business is done?

Google Wave will change project management. It’s clear that Wave is superbly suited for small project teams who need to collaborate on projects, often in real-time.

Google Wave will change how we think about documents. Right now the paradigm within business is that a document is a document is a document. An after-action review, a set of product specs, an informal memo, and a legal contract are created, versioned, and stored in similar ways. The current way of thinking about, creating, and storing documents makes sense for things like contracts and records that are meant to become static. But that way of thinking is inadequate for documents about things like best practices, bios and CVs, and marketing research. Wave will prompt business to differentiate between “static documents” and “living documents.”

Google wave is the wiki for the rest of us. Enterprises currently attempt to create “living documents” (and a management/storage system for them) by setting up internal wikis. The problem is, getting a wiki up and running—and more importantly, getting people to actually use it—is difficult at best. Compared to a wiki, Google Wave is fun. Even if Wave is not completely intuitive and simple, it’s more intuitive and simple than a wiki. The impact of Google Wave on knowledge management should not be underestimated.

Google Wave reinvents the message board. Message boards, forums, and BBs have been falling out of favor throughout the past decade. They’re most alive in the tech community, but adoption within other sectors has fallen off. The similarity of a wave to a message board thread is close enough that Google Wave may make a good modern-day replacement for phpBB and other forum software.

Google Wave makes messages more social. Including someone new in a wave is easy and doesn’t require introductions, unlike adding someone to a conversation taking place between multiple people via e-mail. Wave also allows newcomers to the conversation to catch up by watching how the wave evolved over time, using the (really cool) “playback” feature. What’s more, if you find yourself in a wave with a participant you weren’t connected with before, adding them to your contacts (and thus, to your personal network) is a breeze.

What do you think? Are these predictions pie in the sky? Are there other ways you see Wave impacting business processes in the near future?