Social Media & Blogs ranks above personal e-mail Posted 4/7/2009 by TomB, Acct Mgr

Source:
http://en-us.nielsen.com/main/news/news_releases/2009/march/social_networks__

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	Jammin in Atlanta, my favourite sessions Posted 1/26/2009 by Declan, Acct Mgr

I would like to offer a brief overview of my first web conference with the 352 team.

Day 1, Brandon picked me up at JAX airport and we drove to Atlanta in the scion, we happened to have two GPS systems but we still managed to get lost.  However, I did get to pick the brain of a very talented coder/designer for 6 hours.  We checked into the un-cool hotel (ground floor), while others stayed in the cool hotel, with all the speakers.  Next time I will pay extra to be among the elite.

Day 2, Woke up and had breakfast with Brandon in the adjoining hotel, again we got lost on the way the to “The Louder Milk Center”, which was three blocks from where we were staying, (there is a pattern happening here).

Session 1 -- Making Accessibility Sexy // with Chris Heilmann “Web Developer, Yahoo” and Dan Rubin “User Experience Designer” you can get the presentation slides here http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/making-accessibility-sexy-presentation

I walked away from this session with some notes…

1. How do people with Dyslexia read your web pages?
2. What does accessibility mean?
1. Hardcore testing of your systems.
2. Building Better systems for everyone.
3. Semantic markup
1. This allows Both Humans and machines to understand the same information.
4. Progressive JavaScript
1. Ensure a site is functional even if users do not have JavaScript enabled, and only use JavaScript to add new layers of enhanced functionality.
5. Screen Readers.
1. Screen readers are not just for the blind or visually impaired, users who are illiterate or have learning disabilities use them also.
6. Challenge people to prove you are wrong.
7. Play to your constraints and barriers.
1. Check out the accessible YouTube player Chris built http://icant.co.uk/easy-youtube/
8. Create new style sheets for users with disabilities.
9. Create Close Captioning for Flash presentations and Video hosts.
10. Allow people to access your code and allow them to build.
11. Text to Index
1. You must have searchable text on your site so search engines can find you.

Session 2 -- Marketing, Branding, and Reputation // Chris Perry Executive Vice President — Weber Shandwick // Jason Ford Director of Interactive Services — Tocquigny // John Moore Marketing Medic — Brand Autopsy.  In hindsight I should have attended Darrin Ward’s session of SEO and SEM (he is Irish and also from Dublin).

My notes included

1. Social networking
1. Who are you trying to reach.
2. Who are your audience?
2. Flickr and Twitter can be used by companies.
1. However, my own personal feelings on this is having Twitter accounts for companies is not a great idea, social networking is about people not companies.  People want to follow what other people are doing and not necessarily the companies, so have your staff use twitter to write about what they are personally doing,  (However my caveat is, http://www.twitterfeed.com/ can be used to feed twitter with RSS feeds from blog posts).
3. Blog
1. How do you interact with the outside world
2. Link to other posts that are similar in nature to your posts
3. Become conversational on other peoples sites.
1. However to be conversational, you must know what you are talking about.
4. Post relevant interests that your company represents.
1. Again, I do not want to follow companies I want to follow individuals within a company.  You should not post for the sake of posting, make sure the reader can walk away with something they can learn from you.  Write articles that are relevant to your industry and try to great a conversation with your readers.
2. Good Example of creating conversation that is relevant to our company by Dan        
3. Bad example By Declan – this post has no place on a web design blog, and should be deleted.
4. If the subject is not relevant to the theme of your site do not post it.  You can get a free blogging account here http://wordpress.org/ for non industry related posts.
5. Is Negative press hurting your brand?
1. Survey your customers and ask them how they feel about your company.
2. Jason Ford actually came up with a good point and I agree 100%.  He said allow users to review your product and  keep their negative feedback on your site, some people will say they hate your product because it was a horrible shade of red, but you may like red and if that the only issue with it why wouldn’t you purchase it.
   

Session 3 Design Disrepair //  Jason Beaird Designer and author of The Principles of Beautiful Web Design.  This was by far my favorite session and I happened to get Jason’s book (thanks Ross).  You can see Jason’s slides from the session here .
I didn’t get to take to many notes from this session as it was in the non platinum rooms, there was not much room for writing on a pad and it was very muggy.  But with all these issues Jason managed to keep my attention 100% at all times.  The number one reason I enjoyed this session so much was that he made it personal, he made analogies between a website and a house, because both homes and websites need to be maintained, but sometimes maintenance isn’t enough and the whole house/website needs to be renovated, i.e. outdated content, obsolete code, dysfunctional navigation, lack of scalability.

Overall the event was amazing and I did get to meet some the big personalities, all of the speakers were really approachable and made you feel very welcome, I cannot wait until next year and hopefully I will get lost with Brandon again and pick his brain for another 6 hours.

For next year, I would like to see some more speakers that pertain to what I do – sell web site solutions, so J. Cornelius if you read this, I am available give a talk on selling websites.  I would also like to see Geoff Wilson our CEO talking along with the likes of Lincoln Anderson speaking about Silverlight and Evan Blake talking about .NET development.

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	Twitter: The New Anti-Blog? Posted 11/14/2008 by PeterV, VP, Marketing

I’m sorry, blog, I’ve been neglecting you.  It’s not that I don’t have things to say.  It isn’t that at all.  It’s just that I’ve found somewhere else to say them.  No, it’s not like that.  I love you both, but just for different reasons!

That’s right…recently when I’ve had something to say, a site to share, or a question, I’ve gone to twitter.  Sure, I made fun of it for awhile, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.  It’s not a place to let people know you’re “eating a great rueben” or “in line at airport security (though that kind of stuff does happen).  No, people are actually talking business. 

But it’s not all about what’s being said, but who’s doing the talking.  Twitter gives you a way to meet people you wouldn’t otherwise.  How many worthless conversations have you had at business networking events?  I know I’ve had a few.  What twitter does is give you a way to “eavesdrop” on people’s conversations.  If they’re interesting you can jump in.  If not, you don’t have to follow that person. 

But even with all of twitter’s great attributes, it shouldn’t be a blog substitute.  Here is a quick look at each medium’s strong points:

Blog:

• The obvious first: depth.  This is obviously a huge point.  Twitter is successful partly because it limits what you can say to 140 characters.  However while it’s easy to digest, it doesn’t allow you to get larger points across.  While twitter is a good place to share a cool new site, it doesn’t let you tell people exactly why it’s cool (at least without coming across like the terrible acronyms and abbreviations of a newspaper classified as).  Only your blog can do that.  While twitter can drive traffic to your blog, it can’t begin to replace it.
• More than text.  There are services like twitterpics and other cool tools that help you to share other content, but at the end of the day you’re heading off the site to an external place.  Your blog let’s you go beyond text to embed video, audio, images, and holograms (OK, not yet, but I’m sure CNN is on it!).

Twitter:

• Let’s you engage your audience.  Sure, you can respond to comments on your blog, but your dialogue will be limited to your readers.  When you reply to other “tweeters,” you’ll get noticed by their friends, and then their friends, and on down the line.  This allows you to make connections with people around the world that wouldn’t have found you otherwise.
• Twitter is a poor man’s news aggregator.  Sure, you could go to Guy Kawasaki and Robert Scoble’s blogs every couple of hours, or you could just follow them on twitter.  They’ll let you know when a good conversation is taking place on their blog.
• Customer service.  No, not twitter’s, but rather your own companies.  Twitter let’s you easily monitor keywords to see what people are saying about you.  I’ve heard more than a few great success stories from people who complained about a product who were quickly contacted by the company in question for a resolution.  With your blog that could take a few days while you’re waiting for your site to be indexed, and even then the results are based on relevance, not chronologically.
• Actually interact with industry leaders.  Sure, you can read Guy Kawasaki’s blog, but is he reading yours?  I’m guessing no.  But on twitter, you’ll find people like Guy, Business Week CEO John Byrne, Digg.com founder and current Inc Magazine cover model Kevin Rose and a host of others carrying on conversations with people who would have no chance getting past their receptionists (much less their receptionist’s receptionist).

So at the end of the day, they’re different.  Both are important parts of the social marketing mix.  Twitter isn’t just a new way to update your facebook status.  It’s much more.  But, just like your blog, you only get out of it what you put in to it.  So get out there and start tweeting!  Oh, and be sure to follow me at www.twitter.com/PVR352!

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	Google releases Chrome Beta Posted 9/3/2008 by TomB, Acct Mgr

Google has has become a competitor in the web browser business with the beta public release of Chrome. 

So far in using Google Chrome Beta, I am extremely impressed with the browser.

Here is the key points Google has focused on.  

One box for everything
Type in the address bar and get suggestions for both search and web pages. 
 
Thumbnails of your top sites
Access your favorite pages instantly with lightning speed from any new tab.  

Shortcuts for your applications.
Get desktop shortcuts to launch your favorite web applications.  

My personal two favorite things of Google Chrome so far are

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	Arbcamp (October 18 & 19, 2008) Ann Arbor Michigan Posted 8/22/2008 by Declan, Acct Mgr

Today I got group request via facebook, when I saw it was an invitation to join the “ArbCamp 2008” group, I got very excited, because I attended the 2007 event, and it was incredible. I had not seen anything like it before (well in the US anyway), marketing students where furiously taking notes as Derek Mehraban from Ingenex Digital,  gave a lecture on web marketing. There were groups of people chatting about -- Mobile web, SEO Tactics, Getting Attention in Social Media, Outsourcing, Startup Funding, and a bunch of other exciting topics. This was social networking on steroids, one hundred, plus likeminded people, who had so many interesting things to say, all from different companies and all with a different spin on how their companies went about creating web projects.

Sorry Derek -- I plagiarized this from the Facebook Group

ArbCamp is modeled after Open Space Technology meetings, with a self-structuring agenda and a core principle of adaptability. Our goal is to get techies, marketers, publishers, musicians, filmmakers, businesspeople, poets and academics engaged with one another for a few intense hours. Everybody who attends will set the agenda for the day, with food, meeting spaces, and a basic schedule provided.

ArbCamp is about creating community: the most important part of what we’ll do is discover how we can work with each other.

What:
The annual Arbcamp event goes into its second year. This two-day conference is focused on the theme of Publishing: Digital, Print, Media…

Who:
Arbcamp is for anyone in publishing, whether book publishing, news media, web development, music publishing, digital publishing, printing, marketing, blogging, podcasting, film production, social media, and more.

When:
October 18-19. 9AM – 5PM both days. Events may extend into the evening.

Where:
Morris Lawrence Building at Washtenaw Community College 4700 East Huron River Drive Ann Arbor, Michigan 48105 (see google map)

Why:
Arbcamp is an annual event focused around the idea of making cool things happen in Ann Arbor. Last year’s Arbcamp had over 100 people. This year’s event has been extended to two days and looks to bring over 200 people to southeast Michigan.

Arbcamp 2008 official site http://arbcamp.org (still under construction, you can see the 2007 site here http://www.connectannarbor.com/arb-camp/)

ArbCamp was especially interesting to me because I had just moved to Michigan from Florida and I had no understanding of the local web scene. I had moved from one University town where 352 was by far the largest web development company, to another University town that I knew nothing about – I was standing on the shoulders of giants, I was on a mission – to do in Michigan as other relocated account managers had done in Florida, Atlanta, and Seattle. It is proving harder than I thought, we have some very smart people up here, but I will not back down!! The economy will change and I will be here waiting to embrace it.

I have ArbCamp to thank because I got the opportunity to associate myself with the very rich talents of my fellow Brickyard tenants

Derek Mehraban -- CEO Ingenex Digital Marketing

Ross Johnson – CEO 3point7designs

Brian Kerr – CEO @ Different Chairs

Andrew Miller – CEO @ Your Search Advisor

Dan Cooney – CEO @ Cooney Information Group

Bill Merrill – Principal @ Gordian Labs

If you live in Michigan or surrounding area’s and you have even the smallest interest in the web related technologies get yourself down to this event, it is absolutely amazing.

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	Visualize the Future of Web Browsing Posted 8/6/2008 by JanS, Acct Mgr

Mozilla has launched a collaborative project  that is sure to shake things up in the browser space.  Maybe not today or tomorrow but not too far down the road. Like many open source projects developers are encouraged to think out of the box and come up with new and useful functionality.  No longer is the focus on the developer.  Anything, across the board from unique ideas and insights to mockups and full blown prototypes are being encouraged.

We are seeing technology move more and move into the visualization of data.   I've blogged about a couple (here and here).  There is also a 3D web browser Spacetime and the way cooler Pogo that think along the same lines.  The ideas on Mozilla Labs' Concept Series are no different.  I'm eager to see what comes of this.  Check out some of the other interesting projects Mozilla labs is cooking up.

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	v. Google, n. Wiki, now n. Knol? Posted 8/1/2008 by JanS, Acct Mgr

Knol (a unit of knowledge) is Google's latest attempt at global domination of data.  Wikipedia has become the de facto conflict solver when my wife and I disagree on something (it's great to have a credible source to back me up).  Not to mention the fact that it's generally the best source for information on the net sans the primary source.  That may begin to change.  Google launched Knol - beta recently and I have to say it has a lot of promise.  While it's easy to compare it to Wikipedia or other online encyclopedia sites, it's not an apples to apples comparison.  Rather than aiming to create an unbiased encyclopedic library of information a much more social approach is being taken.  It's more appropriate to compare to about.com.  Think of it as a presentation of ideas from experts on various topics.  You're sure to find a great many differing opinions once the site really gets going.  Ratings and comments provide a way to give the author credibility.  You can even verify yourself with Google to ensure you are who you say you are.  It feels more like a giant magazine/journal article repository where you can decide for yourself.  Add to that AdSense and copyright protections and you have a very interesting service.

The irony it turns out, one of the best resources I found for information about Knol is here.

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	Virtual Worlds Are Making Big Real World Money Posted 6/29/2008 by Geoff, Pres/CEO

We have three clients who recently hired us to develop Virtual Worlds for them.  If you aren't familiar with Virtual Worlds, they are simulated environments where players create an avitar and walk around a "world".  Most virtual worlds allow players to chat and interact with other users and sometimes play multiplayer games.

The three Virtual Worlds we are currently developing are all a bit different in nature, although they are all aimed at children and our clients plan to generate considerable revenue from them.  Some of the most successful Virtual Worlds are aimed at children (Webkins and Disney's Club Penguin, for example), while others are aimed at adults (Second Life and World of Warcraft, to name a few).
But regardless of who they are aimed at, one thing is clear.  Virtual Worlds and MMOs are a huge growth market right now. Check out this chart from Kzero Research showing the growth of several popular Virtual Worlds over the past few years:

(This graphic is hard to read when compressed down, so click here for the full version)



I have a feeling we will have a lot more Virtual Worlds in production in the years to come as more of our clients catch on to this trend!

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	Internet overhaul wins approval Posted 6/27/2008 by Declan, Acct Mgr

A complete overhaul of the way in which people navigate the internet has been given the go-ahead in Paris.

"The net's regulator, Icann, voted unanimously to relax the strict rules on so-called "top-level" domain names, such as .com or .uk.  The decision means that companies could turn brands into web addresses, while individuals could use their names.  A second proposal, to introduce domain names written in Asian, Arabic or other scripts, was also approved."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7476205.stm
Icann's CEO, Paul Twomey, explains the significance

The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones explains the domain name system -- click this link to http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7475279.stm  to view the video and read the article.


Source of article -- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7475986.stm

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	Ann Arbor Startup Weekend Posted 6/25/2008 by Declan, Acct Mgr

Last weekend was Ann Arbor start up weekend, I was to take part but I forgot even though Derek  and I had chatted about it Thursday and I had noted to one of ingenex's interns not to miss it.

What is Start up Weekend -- Startup Weekend recruits a highly motivated group of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more to a 54 hour event that builds communities, companies and projects.

More than 100 bright, talented people will come together to develop and launch 10-12 companies in one marathon weekend. Friday night, the group will vote on ideas and choose the top dozen or so. After that, each participant will choose an idea/team to work on and spend the rest of the weekend putting everything together for a launch. When all is said and done, each participant will be a co-founder with an ownership interest in at least one honest-to-goodness startup.

Now I have my own spin on this idea as it is very impressive, young entrepreneurs can learn a lot from this type of  session, which will be discussed with PVR our VP of marketing before I open it up to the public.

I arrived on Sunday morning and watched all the people working away, setting their new companies.  However, I wanted to draw your attention to 2 companies that came out of the mix, Derek and Ross who I share office space with in Ann Arbor. (Sorry Dan I am not sure which project you were part off, let me know and I will add it here).


Nudge is a text message appointment-reminder service for small business. Small businesses will be able to send reminders via text message so that their clients/customers don’t miss their appointments. Nudge will provide a low-cost, easy to use system to help mitigate revenue loss due to missed appointments. Nudge has launched in a private beta and will be completing their corporate organizational paperwork this week.



Market Monitor is a tool for consultants, designers, and other service providers whose customers want to optimize their website ranking on major search engines based on keyword analytics. It is an affordable but robust tool which produces real-time reports. Market Monitor is in beta.

Both sites are still in beta however  you can go to http://www.nudgethem.com/ and sign up to be notified when the site is fully launched.

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