Archive: December 2008

While corporate blogs are often viewed with a hefty does of skepticism (kind of like state-sponsored media in North Korea), companies can create a trusted and thriving social network. Like all blogs, the corporate kind need to serve up a steady flow of good content to particular a niche and encourage readers to talk back. But their content needs to be free of any commercial influence. A fine example is Children with Diabetes, a Johnson & Johnson-owned social network for families who have children with diabetes. Parents can find recipes, chat rooms, and more. Have any examples of strong corporate social networks?

Dell recently claimed it made almost $1 million in sales based purely on alerts delivered on the micro-blogging platform Twitter, internetnews.com reports. That not a bad chunk of change for text-based post of only 140 characters. From the source:

Dell says Twitter has produced $1 million in revenue over the past year and a half through sale alerts. People who sign up to follow Dell on Twitter receive messages when discounted products are available the company’s Home Outlet Store. They can click over to purchase the product or forward the information to others.

Dell started experimenting with Twitter in March of 2007 after the South by Southwest conference, an annual tech/music festival in Austin, Texas. Conference attendees could keep tabs on each other via a stream of Twitter messages on 60-inch plasma screens set up in the conference hallways. There are now 65 Twitter groups on Dell.com, with 2,475 followers for the Dell Home Outlet Store.

With results like these, others may be quick to follow. But this ripening channel might spoil if “tweets” start turning into spam. Oh, and if you’re still not sure what exactly Twitter is, check out our post Twitter in plain English.

Recently, a developer sent me the following link pointing out gleefully the downward trend in IE 6.0 usage. http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=3. Though I do not think anyone will be sorry to see the end of IE 6.0, as developers we need to understand the end use of our code.

The following link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers compares many different sources for getting a good handle of what is being used in the market (and trends).

Though these stats vary greatly, IE is still generally 70%- 80% in most of the stats I see. Firefox is around 15-30%+ depending on which source you look at. For example, http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp is much more FF friendly in it’s stats, but I suspect they are based on their traffic, not overall web traffic. Their traffic is more web developer oriented.

What can we learn from this? Developers like Fire Fox more than the general public does. No surprise here. We like the add ons, the stricter adherence to standards, etc. BUT the client is not generally a developer. Neither are the people looking at sites.

To sum it all up. As a developer at SolutionSet or elsewhere feel free to use whatever tools you like. But the most important browser to look at your work in is still IE. It is the “standard” out there that all your code should conform too. Too often, developers deliver great work in Firefox, that is untested in IE. I encourage all developers to regularly review all work in IE and actually use is at the primary way to “view” the work currently being worked on.

• Take me out to the ballgame, forever and ever

• Manager achieves full mastery of managerial jargon

• Fire meets desire—a new cologne for burger lovers

• “Not-So-Great Expectations” Do movies spoil love life?

David Armano of Logic + Emotion has an impressive handle on what’s actually important in the lawless boomtown that is social media. In an article published on AdAge, Armano looks beyond the get-hits-quick schemes of “viral marketing” and instead focuses on community building. Here’s a condensed version of his four “C’s” of community:

Content
When considering community initiatives, there are three questions to ask: Where will the content come from? Does it provide indisputable value? Can a regular flow of quality content be maintained?

Context
Context means understanding how to meet people where they are and serving them the right experience at the right time. Well-designed applications and functionality have great opportunities to deliver on context. For example, Facebook’s recently updated iPhone app is perfectly designed for contextual usage on the go.

Connectivity
Communities thrive on squishy, hard-to-measure activities that are relationship-based at the root. It’s not about mass communications but more about the micro-interactions which I’ve talked about at great length. Designing experiences that support thousands of micro-interactions means you are making a commitment vs. trying to produce a one-hit wonder.

Continuity
We launched our Pampers Village which includes a baby name finder, parent blogs, forums and a non-traditional navigation design that tags topics and references relevant products. Communities such as this and others need to be flexible to evolve while still providing a valuable and consistent user experience which can be sustained.

Aside from Facebook and LinkedIn, are you active in any online communities? What keeps you there? Or do you subscribe to the Groucho Marx school of thought: “I would never belong to a group that would accept someone like me as a member.”

Picked me up a Christmas tree last weekend and it’s a real beauty—Noble Fir standing 6 proud feet. Smells great. Now I know that every business is trying to stake their claim in the green movement, but the tag I found on my tree might be the biggest stretch yet:

Um, yeah. That’s what most farmers call “planting crops” to “stay in business”. When you buy an ear of corn, is there a sticker that says a new kernel will be planted in its place?

Mouseprint.org is on a consumer advocacy mission that would make Ralph Nader proud. They hold the often overlooked fine print on product labels and contracts under a magnifying glass and scream bloody murder when something doesn’t jive. Check out these cases on common consumer goods:

• “Surprise Inside” of cereal boxes

• Something fishy with tuna cans

• Peanut butter better mutter the truth

• What a crock—margarine tub trickery

Companies exposed by Mouseprint and other watchdogs wisely come clean publicly, much like Kellogg’s did when their cereal downsizing was spotted:

“This package change is considered a price increase, in that box size is smaller. The reason for the price increase is the rising costs of ingredients and transportation. “

Good to know that our industry has checks and balances beyond internal legal departments—helps keep everyone honest.

• Burgers Without Borders: Remote tribes given taste test

• Siberian ice cream company recession-proof

• JC Penny shows men how to get out of the “dog house”

• Life-saving surgery guided by text messages

Mobile Tuesday, anyone? Before you throw up your arms in promotion-induced disgust, think about the sense it makes. Hundreds of millions of consumers scrambling for holiday bargains in a hard-luck economy—all with cellphones in their pockets. From AdAge:

The concept was born out of research showing that the Tuesday after Thanksgiving is a slow shopping day, as are many Tuesdays throughout the year, said Tanya Penman, founder-CEO of Mobigosee. Armed with that knowledge, the firm aims to encourage shopping with a mobile circular of sorts every Tuesday. An advertising campaign, including radio and outdoor media, will support the launch in 10 cities, in addition to an online presence.

Plans for Mobile Tuesday were well under way earlier this fall, with a major car company, as well as several well-known luxury brands and retailers signed on, Ms. Penman said. But those companies began pulling the plug on the program in September, putting off plans until next year.

Now Ms. Penman is attempting to launch Mobile Tuesday with just three marketers onboard: McDonald’s, Finish Line and RedTag. The company is hoping to attract additional retailers with couponing strategies, in which Mobigosee is paid only when the mobile coupons are redeemed.

For more on the latest/greatest in mobile marketing, check here, here, and here. Oh, and here.

For the everyday computer user, interaction with computers and all it has to offer has been via GUI’s. We have seen GUI’s change from the classic windows 3x in the 1990’s to the much more sleeker looking interfaces of today ranging from OSX to MS Vista to the various flavors of UNIX.

Web interfaces have seen an even more dramatic change. For those who remember the over sized green blinking titles and pink scrolling text of the early days of the Internet, the web 2.0 Ajax Internet of today is a much better place to be in.

So what about the future and what’s going to be the next web 2.0 hype?

Multi-touch interfaces and technologies to support that level of interaction have opened the gate to a whole new area of Natural User Interfaces or NUI’s. What exactly does NUI mean? Simply put, it’s designing interfaces that take advantage of action that come naturally to us, thereby drastically reducing the learning curve to understanding and learning to use a particular interface.

CNN showcased a lot of very exciting and fun new technologies and NUI interfaces during their coverage of the 2008 US presidential election day/night.

I found the following video clip that showcases some of the multi-touch capabilities that CNN demonstrated:

With Microsoft coming out with the Surface, and HP launching its HP Touchsmart PC we could be seeing a whole new era of interaction come alive and may just find ourselves living in a reality that the movie Minority Report introduced us to.