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.

Back in the day (I’m talking about 3 oil changes ago) managing incoming inquiries meant getting up on Google’s search engine results page (which was achieved by white text on white backgrounds, spamming your meta tags and building 30 websites and linking to yourself).  It also meant buying Adwords (I’ve got some great stories for another blog), and for the brave, getting a company Facebook page.

Let’s use company X for example.  Company X makes Xpills for middle aged men.  They help us grow hair, have energy and remember to take our Viagra.  They’ve got their super X website all WordPressie and Fontie cool.  They’ve got their Facebook page with 1,500 old geezers following them and testimonials from men around the world who have added inches to their self esteem.  Their company leaders are blogging about trips to the Amazon rain forest and discoveries of new revolutionary products and Brazil’s best hotel deals.  They’ve even got 2,000 middle aged male followers of their @geezer-tweet.  There are local reviews on 17 different sites, and at least 47 mentions on 30 other social media channels.

Now let’s say I’m interested in learning about Xpills.  How will I discover all things “Xpills” online?  What will I stumble upon (I don’t ask that in the dot-com sense)?  Herein lies the rub of Web 3.0 – we’ll call it “user pathways,” and the bigger the company, the bigger the challenge:  Organizing “all things web” and serving them up as helpful user pathways with well timed “calls to action.”

I became keenly aware of what I’ve since called “user pathways” when I bought my first toy jeep on a popular eCommerce site.  While checking out, I was asked, “Do you want batteries for that?”  Of course I wanted batteries.  What, are you crazy?  Christmas morning, new jeep, no batteries?  I’m no dumb dad.  “Yes,” click to add batteries.  Back button 3 clicks to the home page, if I had been served up the same question – I would have ignored it.  User pathways matter.

A decade ago when I accidentally built a website that changed my life, I accidentally asked the right questions:  “Who’s coming to this site,” and “What do they want?”  Since that time, every successful consultation I’ve given has asked those questions.  Projects that have successfully answered those questions and then built and designed around them have gotten wonderful reviews from visitors.  It’s all about the end-users and their journey of discovering you, one click at a time.

While “Who’s coming to this site” may remain the same question, “What do they want” has changed a bit.  What searchers find outside of your website is also growing exponentially.  That’s scary.  The winners in the next round will be those companies that can creatively engage an online community and creatively/effectively provide user pathways that dance in and out of social media mentions.  I might need some Xpills to get my head around this challenge.