Leadership: Mobile Marketing

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

With Verizon’s announcement that it will be selling iPhone 4 in February, an expected 9 – 12 million users of new iPhones are expected to come on line in the next twelve months. This may open a new opportunity for local/moblie marketing for specific vendors, like restaurants and local service providers with real time, real place specials to be had. Coinciding with this anticipated mobile use and geo-mobile opportunity, Apple announced its own mobile advertising product, the iAd. Agencies like YDOP or any sophisticated “code it yourselfers” can make an ad and submit it to Apple for review, similarly to submitting an application to the Apple store. Mobile ad networks allow all types of targeting capabilities which, combined with the power of local, could prove to be an interesting way to reach out to customers (or just one more annoying interruption to Daniel Klotz’ iPhone crossword).

Metrics: Facts and Questions

Jeff Burkholder, Inbound Marketing Analyst

I shared with the crew a list of social media facts intended to blow minds. I think I succeeded in keeping the rest awake during this time.

I also talked about the new Q&A website, Quora. No, not Quorra, Quora, and we discussed how using a Q&A site could be beneficial to some of our clients.

Design: Eye of the Beholder

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

I shared Anne Holland’s Which Test Won, an interesting website that reports the results of A/B testing from various companies, with the group this week. Every week, this website posts two versions of a page that was A/B tested. The results are interesting to study because they show that your gut feeling about how your website perform is not always right. Therefore, it is important to always be testing.

I also shared an article about how visitors’ eyes move on a page of a website from Eyetrack III. Although this research was done for news websites, I believe our team can learn a lot from this result to make our clients’ websites better.

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.

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.

Due to vacations, conferences, and the like, we decided to push off Resource Friday and move it to Monday. We were all looking forward to it. Who knows, this might be the first step in rehabilitating Mondays! Soon, people could be saying, “Y’know, I don’t understand why these old Garfield cartoons are always so down on Mondays, when we all know it’s the best day of the week!” They could be going to Sunday morning brunches, anxiously counting down the hours until Monday rolls around again. We could all be saying, “TGIM!” …Nah.

Part of the team

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

Today at resource Friday I asked three questions to stimulate thought about some subjects that I wanted my team to be thinking about. I warned in advance that all three of these could trigger very long conversations that we wouldn’t be having. The first question pertained to YDOP: “If YDOP would go out of business, what would be missing in the world?” The answer to this question helps us to connect to our bigger purpose. The second question: “If you left YDOP today, could you be replaced?” And, “what efforts could you make to change your involvement at YDOP to make yourself irreplaceable?” The third question: “Can you easily think of things that YDOP has that you/we haven’t directly worked for?” And, “are you maintaining the discipline of gratitude?”

They were heavy, but inspiring topics – and we look forward to unpacking them together.

Not wishing to let the team down, I brought more than questions – much more in fact, as I has just had the amazing privilege of hearing Terri Kelly talk about her job as CEO of W. L. Gore and Associates. (Ever hear of GoreTex?) I explained the culture of Gore that was needed to maintain a climate of innovation. They kept a smaller feel to each location in order to maintain a collaborative, peer based leadership model. The Gore family created an environment where innovation was nurtured by encouraging members to help each other become all that they could be, focusing on the work environment and belief in the individual. I explained that Kelly’s example of Gore was especially inspiring to me as it modeled many attributes of YDOP’s culture now in our early years. I’m really grateful to be working with such an awesome team in a great work environment. Who gets to say that these days!?!

Quick hits on social media

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

• Facebook has announced August 23 as the day custom tabs shrink to 520 pixels, which is the standard we’ve been designing to for the past two months.

As social media users get more overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information they are expected to digest, tools like Feedera help the most-shared content rise to the top and appear in your inbox in a concise daily e-mail.

• Google has enabled users to switch between accounts with two clicks, offering an alternative to the tactic of using two different browsers for two different user names.
• Nielsen released data reflecting that the share of time U.S. Internet users spend on social networks has increased 43% over one year ago. Average users now spend 23% of their online time on social networks.

No lies, just statistics

Jeff Burkholder, Engineer/Analyst

I talked to the group about an analytics service that not only provides realtime stats (that is, see how many people are logged into your site right now, but also allows you to track individual user paths through your site, rather than giving you aggregated data, like Google Analytics. I’m doing some experimenting on this for now, but it’s something that I think could be useful for our clientèle.

I also talked briefly about why Email Open Rate is an increasingly bad statistic for marketing metrics. Largely, this stat is based on the number of times a call-out to a web-based 1x1px image that’s included in an email is accessed. Anytime someone opens the email, the image is downloaded, and the number of downloads is tracked as the number of times the email was opened. Except that most modern email programs don’t automatically open images anymore, but instead ask you if you want to download them. Also, people who do their emailing via text on a mobile device, or who look at the subject and snippet line of their email prior to actually opening anything would skew the numbers. People who monitor marketing metrics may want to start looking for a new method of tracking…

Sign Up!

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

Here at YDOP, we always try to make sign-up forms on the websites that we created as simple and less intimidating as possible. Dzineblog.com has a very nice a compilation of great sign-up forms which shows people that filling out a form doesn’t have to be a nightmare.

I think these are some great elements that you want to consider to have on your sign-up form on your website:

• Neat and spacious fields (PSDThemes, for example). They make the form look more friendly.
• Big and simple icons that indicate the fields, like the ones on Nibbledish They help the website visitor visually.
• A little blurb on the form page about why people should sign-up.
• Interesting or witty sentences on the form, like on PopScreen or Roboto
• Alternative to captcha. Captcha that is not easily readable can frustrate people. So some of these websites use simple mathematical questions for the visitors to answer to avoid spam.

So, make your sign-up form interesting!

Spam and the blacklist

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

As internet use and electronic forms of communication increase in popularity, spammers are sending more messages as well. While some email accounts get very little spam, others can be flooded with thousands per day. One reason for such a huge difference in number of spam messages received is based on email blacklists.

Many email providers will utilize one or more blacklist service to determine whether or not a message is spam. There are many ways that this is determined:

• The sender or the sender’s domain has behaved in ways that would represent a spam server (i.e. many emails being sent out in a very short time)
• The email message contains links to domains known to be fraudulent or inappropriate for web audiences
• The email message originates from a domain known to be fraudulent or inappropriate for web audiences

If a message is flagged as spam by a blacklist, the message will be rejected by the receiving server, and the sender will get a message back. Note: There are also spam blockers that work on a rule basis on the receiving server and the user’s client, such as Outlook, that can catch emails based on the sender or content. These will not return an error to the sender.

]]> http://www.ydop.com/resource-monday-august-9-2010/feed/ 0 http://www.ydop.com/resource-friday-july-2-2010/ http://www.ydop.com/resource-friday-july-2-2010/#comments Mon, 05 Jul 2010 18:34:04 +0000 Jeff Burkholder http://ydop.com/?p=1130 Surfing Personality, Google Me, Web Telephony, and more

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…

]]> http://www.ydop.com/resource-friday-july-2-2010/feed/ 4 http://www.ydop.com/resource-friday-june-18-2010/ http://www.ydop.com/resource-friday-june-18-2010/#comments Fri, 18 Jun 2010 20:07:01 +0000 Jeff Burkholder http://ydop.com/?p=1056 Linux, Radioactive Cell Phones, Pink Horses, and More

Despite the lack of pizza and our fearless leader at this week’s Resource Friday, the topics continued to be intriguing, thought-provoking, and engaging. Read on for more!


Ubuntu and Us

Mike Newswanger, Programmer

For resource Friday today, I went into basic network file server security. Using a Linux-based server, users and groups can easily be added or removed to give people access to what they need and keep them out of where they shouldn’t be. The Linux platform offers free licensing solutions, easy scalability, and very little hardware resource requirements. Combined with phenomenal reliability and overall security of the system, Linux makes sense to be the basis of a server.

Many services that are not built in to standard Linux builds can be downloaded and configured in a matter of minutes, including:

• Apache, PHP, MySQL to use to host intranet services for within the company.
• Samba to manage file shares across multiple operating system platforms
• SVN to keep files versioned so that changes can be tracked

Everything You Think Is Wrong

Jeff Burkholder, Engineer/Analyst

I ran across Cory Doctorow’s review of Dan Ariely’s new book, The Upside of Irrationality, and shared some of the thoughts with the team. I primarily talked about the human predilection toward adaptation to extreme emotional stimuli, and how we tend to approach things we really like and really hate in precisely the opposite way from how we should.

I also dug more into Ariely’s blog, and found an interesting study about how items on eBay that have a story attached to them — not information about the item, but an emotional (and fictional) story that evokes the item — can increase the selling price of that item. A pink toy horse that was picked up at a garage sale for $1 was coupled with a story of a woman whose daughters (who played with a pink horse) had died long ago resold for $104. This study showed that people are more apt to “buy into” something if there’s an emotional response coupled with it, regardless of the (ir-)rationality behind just such an action.

Getting Burned

Jonathan Arndt, Programmer

There were some articles of interest on Slashdot this past week. One reported that mobile devices in California are now required to carry a warning label indicating how much radiation they emit. Another article explained how a certain retailer in Australia has been engaging in some dubious practices surrounding selling iPads.

WordPress 3.0, Evernote, and more

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

WordPress has released its 3.0 version, and I gave the team a tour of the new features. I also shared how instead of immediately beginning work on 3.1, the WordPress team is taking the next three months to focus on everything around WordPress itself, including documentation, support forums, integration with other platforms, and the way it plans future releases. The combination of that outreach with a shiny new 3.0 version should give WordPress a further boost on its path toward becoming one of the most dominant content management systems in use today.

I introduced the team to usertesting.com, which provides Web developers with inexpensive user testing services. For $39, developers can specificy the demographic background they are targeting with the site and have a sample user who fits that mold use the site to perform set tasks. Testers provide the developers with a video of their experience using the website as well as written notes of what they liked and what problems they ran into. This service makes usability testing easier and more affordable than ever.

This week I was searching for a clean and elegant tool to use as a digital notebook (a sort of “junk drawer” for ideas and bits of information). I started out with a version of TiddlyWiki that had been customized to be compatible with the iPhone, but I wound up settling on Evernote, which I now heartily commend to those who need to keep track of (and organize) lots of random ideas and bits of information.

It was a relatively slow news week on the social media front, which is probably the only reason Tweegle garnered as much attention as it did. If Twitter and Google got married and had a ridiculously ugly child, Tweegle would be it. Avoid it.

Inspiring Design and Trends for 2010

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

Today, I showed more websites that I find inspiring. Last week, I was talking about how a grid system can make a website simple, clean, and contemporary. So today, I showed more inspiring websites that also have a similar style. Parallax Design Group‘s website breaks up the layout in simple colorful boxes. The logo is overlapping the boxes, making the grid feel softer. Gravitate Design Studio uses boxes in a slightly different way. The boxes are stacked and overlapping each other, giving it a casual look, but the corporate colors keep it professional.

I also shared some of website design trends for 2010. One of trends is the use of little icons to replace text. One of the recent projects that YDOP has is to redesign one of our client’s website. I created some icons to use in some sections of the website. Everyone at YDOP agreed that they make the website look better. Those icons help a lot because the reader identifies images faster than text. They also give a visual interest to a long page of text. These icons can make a website friendlier and easier to navigate.

]]> http://www.ydop.com/resource-friday-june-18-2010/feed/ 0 http://www.ydop.com/resource-friday-may-28-2010/ http://www.ydop.com/resource-friday-may-28-2010/#comments Fri, 28 May 2010 19:23:22 +0000 Jeff Burkholder http://ydop.com/?p=943 Logo design, Facebook privacy, mobile marketing and more

This week saw the departure of Lead Programmer David DeCarmine. While we’re sad to see him go, we’re excited for him about the new opportunities and challenges he’ll face in his next job. Regrettably, this also means the end of our supply of homemade apple butter. We’ll just have to find some way to carry on. On the bright side, we’re very excited to add Mike Newswanger to the YDOP team and look forward to his Resource Friday contribution next week.


Logo Design Essentials

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

I found this article from when I was in college about developing a logo. I thought it would be interesting to share since we were talking a lot about branding and logo this week. So today, I talked about 7 criteria for a good logo.

1. A logo has to have distinctiveness. A distinctive logo will not create confusion for the audience.
2. A logo has to be memorable.
3. The logo has to have good visibility. It has to be readable in different situations.
4. Next is usability. A logo has to be able to be translated well on different applications, like business cards, billboards, websites, merchandise, etc.
5. A logo has to have universality. We need to keep in mind whether the logo is reflective of what the company does.
6. Six is durability. Do not design something that is limited to a specific use/function/time.
7. Last but not the least is timelessness. A logo that is not outdated does not need to be changed, therefore, will be more memorable to the audience.

So keep these criteria in mind when designing a logo.

Facebook Privacy Changes

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

I walked the rest of the YDOP team through the Facebook privacy changes that were made in recent weeks and that are soon to be rolled out. In my mind, there are three key implications for the businesses, schools, and organizations we serve.

1. The ability to click a single button and block all Facebook applications will pave the way for many skeptics of the social networking service to embrace it. I have friends who’ve been on Facebook since it was limited to college students who have lamented what they see as the demise of Facebook from a simple, elegant site (one that broke away from the clutter and chaos of MySpace) into a commercialized time-suck full of notifications about friends’ achievements in Mafia Wars and Farmville. They will love the ability to block every stinkin’ application and get the “purist” Facebook experience they want. At the same time, the ability to block all applications will appeal to individuals who have so far avoided Facebook completely. A Facebook without applications is much more safe, closer to LinkedIn than MySpace.

2. Two long-standing best practices on Facebook remain unchanged. First, never write or share something on Facebook that you don’t consider public. Nothing on Facebook is “private,” it’s simply “not yet public.” Second, divide your friends into lists, and use those lists to give sophistication to your privacy settings. For instance, I block any friends in my “Professional” list from seeing my religion and political views.

3. Counting on Facebook as the provider of information about your customers and fans is looking like an increasingly bad idea. Facebook is making it easier for its users to shut out businesses who use Facebook applications, Facebook Connect, and Facebook pages and groups to keep tabs on their customers and communicate directly with them.

Always Be Testing, Ch. 2

Jeff Burkholder, Engineer/Analyst

I continued my survey (aka “book report”) on Always Be Testing, about Google Website Optimizer (for more on this, see last week’s Resource Friday post). This week, I focused in on the idea that knowing what to test is more important than even being able to test. GWO assists in the testing process by serving up different versions of sections of pages (or even completely different pages altogether) to site visitors, then allowing you to find which method produces more site conversions. You could also see what garners more clicks, longer “linger” time on a page, or just measuring whether or not visitors do anything different, depending on what version of the page they are served. Best things to test are headlines, as that’s what most people are initially attracted to/repulsed by. However, you can also set up tests that involve different calls to action, fonts, product images or reviews, form fields, or even shopping carts. All-in-all, it seems a very powerful tool, despite its free price point.

Mobile Marketing

Jonathan Arndt, Programmer

Today, I talked about how CSC (Common Short Codes) and SMS (Short Messaging Service, aka “texting”) can be the most profitable part of an ad campaign. Mobile devices are present in 87% of U.S. Households, and 96% of mobile phones can send and receive SMS messages. Not only that, but the response and opt-in rate for SMS ads can be two to three times that of other means of communication, such as e-mail or direct mail.

Even senior marketers say that they feel that are not reaching their campaigns are not reaching their full potential. These same senior marketers say they do not feel they have good insights into consumer behavior. But companies are starting to run structured scenarios, and listening to the results. And these structured results can be quantified, and can help marketers get the results they are looking for.

“Remarkability”

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

Naturally I was concerned when Daniel logged into Facebook and announced that he was going to talk about his privacy. What would I learn (that could be potentially visually traumatic), and how would I follow his ten minutes on our Resource Friday at YDOP? But it turned out relatively PG and a great lead in to my subject of “being a remarkable employee who helps in leading a remarkable company that has remarkable service offerings.” It’s remarkable that I finished up in eleven minutes (just one more minute than my alloted time-slot), and everyone remained awake (one of the few advantages of being company owner).

But seriously, I carefully hired each of the amazing individuals around the table because I believe in their ability to be remarkable and to take a leadership type role in helping YDOP to become a remarkable company. That’s not just some huddle, grunt and run to the field ploy. I mean it, and did my best to cite specific examples of how this could work. We’ve been told by more than one local business person and even by a highly qualified business consultant that we have a unique and (if I don’t mind saying so), remarkable service offering available to our clients. There really aren’t other companies offering the type of approach that we bring to the table; and when well suited companies/organizations learn of our offerings, they typically hire us. But the paint will quickly wash off of Seth Goden’s purple cow – and in our case, that could be in a fairly short time-frame (when other companies start using our unique approach and model our systems and offerings). The race to remain remarkable will only be won as YDOP’s incredible staff chooses the risky path of setting their sights (sites) on being remarkable!

]]> http://www.ydop.com/resource-friday-may-28-2010/feed/ 0 http://www.ydop.com/resource-friday-may-21-2010/ http://www.ydop.com/resource-friday-may-21-2010/#comments Fri, 21 May 2010 18:38:40 +0000 Jeff Burkholder http://ydop.com/?p=929 Leadership, website testing, viruses and more

Due to some client meetings, our Resource Friday schedule has been a bit haphazard, but we finally got together again on Friday, May 21. Here’s what we talked about.


Leadership Simulcast Recap

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

This week at “Resource Friday” I served up something like one expects at a pot luck dinner – little of this, little of that. It was a sordid collection of relevant insights I gathered from a leadership simulcast I had attended a week earlier. The YDOP team acted interested as I rambled several dozen pearls of wisdom from famous names like Jim Collins, Mark Sanborn, Tony Dungy, Dr. Jim Goodnight, Chip Heath and what’s-his-name. Oh yeah, John Maxwell.

Saying smart things that smart people have said (and I wrote down to remember) makes me feel smart — especially when I hear myself saying them. It’s like singing in the shower, except others get to hear it and I get to see their expression. And today was my day to say things like, “walk slowly through the crowd.” (I paused and looked downward solemnly as I said it – sort of monk-like). Or (sorry J Maxwell for stealing this), “when you connect with people, you can influence them.” (With this one I pushed my eyebrows downward and stiffened my lips as I looked out over the crowd of 5 employees). My highlight was when I said “be clear about your stop-doing list.” This was Jim Collins’ contrast to our typical “TO DO” list. He suggested that an individual creates priorities for their time. He also recommended that we “start with the brutal facts” (about this time, Daniel signaled that I had spinach in my teeth) and we reflected how YDOP needs to always be honest about herself, about core competencies and her strengths/weaknesses, and to continue to focus primarily on being valuable and irreplaceable to the clients we serve.

Always Be Testing, Intro & Chapter 1

Jeff Burkholder, Analyst

As part of my professional development, I’m reading the above-mentioned book, by Bryan Eisenberg & John Quarto-vonTivadar with Lisa T. Davis, which is a background-info and how-to guide for Google’s Website Optimizer.

In 1923, Claude Hopkins, author of Scientific Advertising, wrote, “Almost any question can be answered cheaply, quickly, and finally, by a test campaign. And that’s the way to answer them–not by arguments around a table. Go to the court of last resort–buyers of your products.” Hopkins’ advice from nearly 90 years ago is just as valuable in today’s world of internet marketing.

The book talked about how’s there’s been 3 primary “waves” of analytics, which I likened to the dawn of literacy. At first, analytics consisted of IT guys looking at the basic webserver logs. This is akin to medieval monks and scribes; a relatively small, specialized group has control over the information, and are the only ones who can interpret or understand it. The second wave featured the growth of more sophisticated — and grossly expensive — web analytics tools. This is similar to the spread of literacy to the upper class, while the common man remained largely unable to afford — let alone interpret the information. Now, we’re in the midst of wave 3, in which the tools have become easier-to-use, largely free, and available to pretty much everyone who has a website. But while everyone can look at this data, the “winners” of this phase will largely be the marketing innovators and prolific testers who understand how to use this information. The book then went on to recommending a continual cycle of testing, measuring and optimizing, with the ultimate goal being to please your customers, however they react to your site. In fact, with this in mind, the book points out that it would be better to see your customers not just as Hopkins’ “court of last resort”, but as the first and only meaningful court of resort.

Color and Psychology

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

My first projects at YDOP have really made me think about colors and psychology. When I was researching about it, I found some interesting facts about how colors can affect us physically and mentally. For example, offices are usually painted blue to increase employees’ productivity. This was interesting to me because I don’t usually associate the color blue with productivity; blue is well-known for its calming properties. Yellow paint tends to evoke erratic behavior. And inmates in prison who act violently are put into a room with soft pink paint to subdue them. Hmm, I’m wondering if we should paint our office blue…

Facebook: Community Pages and 0.facebook.com

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

It seemed really important to bring the team up to speed on Facebook Community Pages and how they’re affecting YDOP clients. My two key points were that there don’t seem to be any good reasons to worry at this point, and that Community Pages should motivate our clients to continue improving their Wikipedia pages in the ways we have encouraged and coached them to do so. One of our clients has a Wikipedia page that is viewed around 1,700 times per month. With the creation of Community Pages, the number of people viewing that same information is likely to be significantly higher.

I also alerted the team to a trend of companies highjacking the Google Places listings of their competitors. The trend adds value to the service we already provide our clients of helping them verify their listings. [Update, 5/27: Google has now taken steps that make it harder for malicious individuals to change the Google Places information of another company.]

Last, I explained Facebook’s new site for cell phone users, 0.facebook.com, which I think will go far in bridging the digital divide in the social media world, since a near-majority of people from homes without Internet access do have cell phones.

Viruses and the Mobile Web

Jonathan Arndt, Programmer

Today, I talked briefly about virus and worm propagation on mobile devices. Most mobile carriers have an app store where users can go to purchase and run custom applications.

Although there are security checks, applications in the app store are not necessarily trustworthy. Compared to other ways of distributing software, using one of the popular app stores is a quick and easy way of getting a piece of infected software into the hands of a lot of people. Even if only a few dozen people download it, the time/payoff ratio is attractive to writers of virus-type software.

The source article for the discussion can be found here: http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/coming-wave-mobile-attacks-051710.

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