And so it begins…Search advertising guru, Bill Gross, is bringing what he does best to Twitter. Announced today, his newest brainchild, TweetUp, will allow people to bid on key words to improve the ranking of their Tweets. Accordingly, TweetUp will also measure retweets and clicked links to organize Tweets by popularity.

The idea is for users to be able to quickly and easily wade through the multitude of useless information on any particular subject to see Tweets that have been deemed useful and/or originated from a knowledgeable/credible source. This also works in the opposite direction by giving users who are trying to build a following or establish themselves as subject-matter experts, a (quicker?) way to break out of the crowd. The question is: are people willing to pay for this and will the mass of users on Twitter take kindly to paid placements?

Here at TPI, we’re pretty big fans of Twitter both for ourselves and for our clients. Generally, we see it as a quick and easy(er) way to engage a target audience and establish credibility as an expert. Of the major limitations of Twitter ( 1) sometimes 140 characters really isn’t enough, 2) it’s a long, slow climb to the top and 3) the difficulty of locating useful Tweets) TweetUp has the potential to knock out two of them. Two out of three ain’t bad.

So what do you think? Would you pay to get your Tweets to the head of the line? As a user, would it bother you to know that some Tweets have been bumped up by $$?

For the most part, the idea behind sending holiday cards to clients is about showing appreciation and spreading a little goodwill, right? So does it really matter if your good intentions arrive on actual paper? The answer: maybe.

At the risk of looking cheap, lazy and/or impersonal, e-cards are best left to businesses who fit one or more of the following criteria:

• Tech/Web Companies
• Environmentally-Related Companies
• Environmentally-Conscious Companies*

*Good rule of thumb here is whether your business walks the walk on evironmental responsibility the other 365 days a year in ways that are recognizable enough for your clients to be aware of them.

Done well, an e-card from a business like those described above can be an even better approach  to spreading good cheer in a personal and fun way than traditional holiday cards. Speaking of…take a gander at what we drummed up for our ‘09 holiday card! (Tooting our own horn? No, not us!)

I recently had a client ask me if email marketing was dead. He was interested in considering it as part of his marketing strategy, but he wondered if it was “you know, old, and not effective anymore.”

Au contraire, my friend. Email marketing is alive and well, and still gaining ground as an effective marketing tool. Let’s look at some supporting evidence:

• 73% of email marketers say they are planning to increase email’s priority in their future marketing plans. eROI (2009)
• 50% said they’re more likely to buy products from companies who send them email, whether their purchases are online or at a place of business. – Epsilon “Branding Survey” (Feb 2009)
• 80% of Marketers Report Email Is Strongest Performing Media Buy Ahead of Search and Display. – Datran Media, “Marketing & Media Survey” (2008)
• 44% of email users said email inspired at least one online purchase, and 41% said it prompted at least one offline purchase. – JupiterResearch’s The Social and Portable Inbox (2008)

Pretty impressive stats. I also explained to the client that I had just received an email coupon from a favorite retailer that very morning and was planning to make a purchase on my lunch, as I often do. Seriously, my inbox is liquid gold for retailers.

So knowing that email marketing is alive and well, let’s look at some statistics related to email marketing best practices:

• Get to the Point With Your Subject Line. Emails with shorter subject lines significantly outperform emails with longer subject lines. 38 to 47 characters is the average number of characters that show up in the subject line of 57% of all U.S. email recipients’ email programs. – Epsilon (2009)
• Just Say No to Hump Day. Open rates are highest on Mondays, Tuesdays, and the weekends. – MailerMailer (2008)
• People like email with coffee and sandwiches. A recent eROI study found that 49.4% of marketers testing email find sending mid-day (10am-2pm) to be best, while 31.5% find start of the business day (6AM – 10AM) best.
• Beware of Frequency Freakout. A Jupiter Research Study showed that 40% of respondents stated the #1 reason they stopped subscribing to opt-in emails was because they were getting too many offers. While there is no magic number for how frequently you should send an email, the largest percentage of marketers choose to send weekly.

Wondering how MS’s new search engine Bing has been doing in the month since it launched? Okay, well just pretend that you are…

A not-so-surprising report from J.P. Morgan tells us that the search engine is having trouble swaying people away from their usual search habits. No shocker there, it’s only a month old, and old habits/homepages/installed search toolbars are hard to break. But here are a few interesting highlights from the study:

• 59% of respondents had heard of Bing. Of that group, only 42% had tried it.
• Of the group that had tried Bing, 61% used it five times or less in June, which seems to suggest that people were interested in test driving it, but not making a permanent change.
• Interestingly, the people who gave Bing a try were primarily users of Ask and AOL, not Yahoo or Google. Only 10.6 % of surveyed Google users gave Bing a shot, whereas 25.8% of AOL users were willing to consider jumping ship. And really, if you wake up and find yourself using AOL, you should jump ship. Jump into any waters. Anywhere. Save yourself now…
• Despite the fact that the buzz around Bing (how many onomatopoeias can you use in one sentence?) was focused on design and reorganization of content, the interface was not what turned people on the most. 38.3% of surveyed Bing testers said that the relevance of the results was the greatest strength of Bing. Which validates what Google and search engine users have been saying all along…It’s relevancy that matters.

These are some important facts to think about, but I’m not ready to throw in the towel on Bing yet. I for one love to see competition in the search market because it drives innovation and in general, just makes things more fun and interesting. One important challenge that this study points out is that most people are unwilling to switch search engines simply because they are happy. 63% said they saw no weakness in their current search experience. It’s going to take some serious innovation powerful marketing to cause a breakup in search relationships for people who are already satisfied with their search experience.

As you’re browsing a site you may come across a term or phrase that you’d like to know more about. For such instances, most browsers now come with a search toolbar. If you have a handy dandy search toolbar you can highlight that word or phrase and drag-and-drop the text in to your search box. Try it out.

Two main reasons that I use this: it is faster than typing out a long phrase AND it keeps my last copied text. This is especially useful if you’ve got something to copy and paste over and over but you don’t want to lose it with each search. For example, if I’m browsing Thoughtprocess Interactive and I want to know more about search engine optimization:

… it can’t hurt to encourage people along.

… Well, sorta, anyway.

I  get a ton of fwded e-mails, making me wise to the ways of the world.  Now I know better than to get back in the car while pumping gas, microwave food in plastic containers, or help strangers in need because any of these could kill me. 

But this one was different… I actually learned something new.  Something that I would never have learned if not for the power of e-mail.

Read on:

Whoever looks at the end of your aluminum foil box?  
You know when you try to pull some foil out and  the roll comes out of the box. 
Then you have to  put the roll back in the box and start over. 
The darn roll always comes out at the wrong  time.
Well, I would like to share this with you. 
Yesterday I went to throw out an empty Reynolds foil box and for some reason I turned it,  and looked at the end of the box. And written on the end it said, Press here to lock end. 
Right  there on the end of the box is a tab to lock the roll in place. 
How long has this little locking  tab been there? 
I then looked at a generic brand of aluminum foil and it had one, too. 
I then  looked at a box of Saran wrap and it had one too! 
I can’t count the number of times the Saran wrap roll has jumped out, 
when I was trying  to cover something up.
I’m sharing this with my friends. 
I hope I’m not the only person that didn’t know about this.   

Today I ran into a problem with IE7 where I could view the source of a webpage. It was not working when I would right click the page > View Source, or by going to Page > View Source.

After doing a couple of google searches, it turns out you have to delete your cache by going to Tools > Delete Browsing History > Delete All. You must then refresh your page in order to view the source. I really didn’t spend much time researching how or why this happens, but hopefully this will save someone a few minutes and a headache.

Yet another reason to stay as far away from this browser as possible…

I admit, this post will be useless for most readers of this blog. But if you happen to be an Actionscript programmer… I had a minor epiphany today from which you might benefit.

Since I started writing AS3 code, I’ve generally viewed the mouseChildren and mouseEnabled properties of the InteractiveObject class (and by extension the Sprite class) as relatively superfluous. They existed as little more than a recourse for when something accidentally got ‘in between’ the mouse and a button that needed to be pressed. And in a sense that is true. But I realized today that those crafty AS3 creators had bestowed upon me a much more substantial tool than I’d first realized.

Fundamentally, these two properties are straightforward. Setting a Sprite’s mouseEnabled property to false tells that Sprite to not bother interacting with the mouse. In other words, to stop dispatching MouseEvents such as MouseEvent.CLICK. Likewise, setting a Sprite’s mouseChildren property to false tells the children of that Sprite to stop dispatching MouseEvents. By default, both properties are set to true.

The magic comes by virtue of the fact that these two properties work independently of each other. If a Sprite has children, setting that Sprite’s mouseEnabled to false does not prevent the Sprite’s children from dispatching MouseEvents. Similarly, setting the Sprite’s mouseChildren to false doesn’t prevent the sprite itself from dispatching MouseEvents. Why is this cool? Let me count the reasons:

• Sprite ‘flattening’. It used to drive me nuts that that a button made of multiple sub-elements (label, hilight, border, icon, etc) would have an indeterminate MouseEvent ‘originator’. That is, the target property of the MouseEvent would be ‘label’ or ‘highlight’ or whatever depending on the exact pixel over which the mouse rested, rather than simply ‘myButton’. I found myself putting invisible ‘mousetrap’ layers in my buttons to sit on top of everything to fix this. It turns out I don’t need to. By setting myButton.mouseChildren = false all the button parts become a single unit, collectively dispatching MouseEvents with a target of ‘myButton’.
• Group disabling. Need to disable a whole group of buttons? Make them siblings and set the parent Sprite’s mouseChildren to false.
• Event-bubbling simplification. By setting a container Sprite’s mouseEnabled = false but leaving mouseChildren = true, you prevent the ‘middleman’ from sending unnecessary MouseEvents to high-level MouseEvent handlers. Imagine a calculator, with multiple keys, a display screen, a surrounding ‘case’, a nice little Texas Instruments logo, whatever. If I add a MouseEvent.CLICK listener to the high-level calculator object, I will receive all of the various key clicks, but I will also receive events from the other child elements… the display, the case, the logo. Even if I set those elements to mouseEnabled = false, the calculator Sprite itself will still trigger its own MouseEvents when I roll over them. By following up with calculator.mouseEnabled = false, the high-level listener will now only receive events from the children that matter, and will not be encumbered with ‘false positives’.

Given this greater understanding, I almost wonder why the AS3 creators chose to set the default of mouseEnabled to true. After all… aren’t there generally far more ‘passive’ display objects on the stage than interactive ones? I’m sure they had a reason, and it’s probably one that I could find by Googling around a bit… but enough is enough. Hardcore geek session over.