Posts in ‘Uncategorized’

Facebook is taking a trick straight out of David Copperfield’s playbook today.  I’ll call it the “Vanishing Post Act”.  Let me explain.  It all started last week.  I uploaded a post to promote a sweepstakes on a page with over 40,000 fans. The post shows up on the page and I move on to my next task.  20 minutes later I check back and POOF!, the post has vanished!  I refresh the page (thinking I did something wrong) and the post reappears.  This happens a couple more times on different brand pages, but I brush it off as an issue with my browser (don’t even get me started on Firefox).

This morning, however, I’ve discovered with certainty that it’s not just me or my browser. Last night, before I left work, I made a post that looked something like this:

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In the fast-paced world of today’s internet, the only thing that seems consistent is change. This is especially true when working with Facebook. The premier social network maintains it’s lead by constantly developing new web technologies and attempting to perfect existing feature sets. We love to see new features (most of the time!), but as a web developer, you get a very uncomfortable feeling every time you find out there will be updates to a service you are currently using. If your web design and development uses any web services at all, you probably have first hand experience of the havoc that can be wrought when API changes are implemented.

Fortunately, Facebook has made it trivially easy to manage the inevitable changes to their API. All changes are grouped into monthly migrations and listed in their Web Developer Roadmap, so that at any given time you can quickly see what changes are in the near future. Knowing what changes will be implemented in an API and when may help you sleep better, but running your production code against their production code is the only real test. Facebook excels here as well, by letting you manually opt-in to their breaking changes before they are officially implemented. You can do this by navigating to the Advanced page in the settings for your app and setting any of the items listed under the migrations section to enabled.

Good luck and happy testing!

A few weeks ago, I was working on a web application that uses jQuery Mobile.  This app contained an unusual form that would make an AJAX call to validate the user’s input, grab some data, and display a confirmation message in a div.  The web application uses that input later to customize their experience.  None of this was a problem until we realized that a user might want to go back and change their information during the same visit.

If you’re a web designer or web developer and have ever worked with jQuery Mobile, you may already know where this is going.  When the user returned that form, the AJAX call would fail to update it, even though I could see the request succeeding in Firebug’s network traffic tab.  After considerable frustration and a big cup of coffee, I noticed that jQuery Mobile reloaded the page containing the form the second time around, despite the existence of a copy it cached in the DOM only seconds ago!  This resulted in two distinct copies of the form trying to use the same ID’s: a sneaky, invisible doppelganger and the visible one.  The script was only able to poll and update the hidden one, because it was higher in the DOM, resulting in AJAX calls containing stale data, and useless DOM updates.

Data-ajax decorator to the rescue!  Putting data-ajax=”false” on an element such as a form or a link prevents jQuery Mobile from using its caching magic when the user performs an action that would take them to another page, and instead reloads the DOM.  In this case, it also banished the doppelganger form, allowing everything to work correctly.

We think every woman out there will agree that today should be the day most celebrated every year.  National Chocolate Chip Day is probably the second busiest day at the gym or the busiest day in your local grocers baking aisle. 

To take our minds off of all that web design and development work we’ve got cookin’, we thought we’d share a recipe that our very own baking extraordinaire (and web developer extraordinaire), Stephanie Raumschuh uses as her fall back all-time favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe.  Enjoy!

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Have you always longed to play music on a stage for an audience?  Well your chance has finally come…sort of.  A few months ago a new social music site launched called Turntable.fm. I know what you’re thinking, but this is no everyday music playing website.  There is no limit to how much music you can listen to, unlike Pandora who allows you to listen to a whopping 40 hours a month, in which I personally go through in less than a week.  Turntable.fm allows you to make your own private channel or join in on someone else’s channel that you may like, while chatting with all your fans, or new found friends in the room!

Once there you select your avatar and create your own playlist, which can be anything you want in Turntable’s huge library of tracks or you can upload your own.  You can also bookmark songs on other sites and if you like a song that is playing you can buy it right there from iTunes or add it to your own playlist.

The beauty of this social music site is that you can choose if you like the song that is being played or not…it’s either “Lame” or “Awesome”.  The more “Awesome” points you get the closer you become to changing your avatar to something bigger and better, if the song gets “Lamed” too many times then that song is skipped and the next person DJing” gets to play their song.

Simple enough right?  Well there is one downfall…for the moment you need an “invite” from a Facebook friend in order to play music or join a room, but once you’re in, you’re in!  You can start inviting friends each time you start to play music!  Enjoy!

UPDATE: Now you can take turntable.fm to go with it’s new iPhone app.  It offers all the same features as the online version but fits right in your palm.  It’s easy, just log in with Facebook and up pops all the rooms you are used to seeing!  I’ll be in the Top 40 room!

iPhone Screenshot of turntable.fm

Surprisingly enough (even to me!), I think not.

This morning James called my attention to a really great column from Al Ries that was published at adage.com a few days ago, “Long Slogans are Absolutely, Positively More Effective Than Short Ones.” Now, we work on the web where it’s a commonly agreed upon fact that your homepage  has about three seconds to grab the attention of a viewer before they move on to something else that will, so right away I start running through all the reasons I disagree with Mr. Ries:

• Long isn’t catchy
• Long is too hard to remember
• People lose interest before you’ve made your point
• Long is too complicated

You can preface all of these arguments with “usually” because, of course, there are exceptions to every rule, but generally that’s where I stand on slogans. Short, simple and straightforward win the day.

Then, about a quarter of the way through the article, Mr. Ries gives a list of short slogans that he deems ineffective, followed by this statement:

Short slogans like these, in my opinion, are not very effective. And it’s not because they’re short; it’s because they’re not very memorable.

Hmmm. He might be on to something there.

So what does make a slogan memorable? According to Mr. Ries: Emotion.

Sure, slogans should be as short as possible, but there’s a trade-off. Slogans should be long enough to contain some words that knock on the right side of the consumer’s brain. The emotional side of the brain as opposed to the left side, the logical, analytical side.

Sold.

Check out the original post to see some  examples of both “good” and “bad” slogans, but here’s one of our own:

Our “official” slogan is “Strategy. Creativity. Technology.” That is absolutely the most succinct and simple way to describe us, but if I asked you what is was tomorrow, would you remember?

Now consider our homepage. We have a short little Flash animation that automatically runs  if you’ve never been to the site before. It mimics someone typing in a word processor (which sounds boring, but actually isn’t – I swear ). At the climax, if you will, the screen reads “Thoughtprocess Interactive: a blend of strategy and creativity with a dash of techie geek.” “Geek” is then replaced with “chic .”

This is clearly a play on our tagline and essentially boils down to the exact same thing. But, I have never heard anyone refer to or even comment on our tagline. This 48 second Flash animation on the other hand gets rave reviews. It’s truly rare for a new client not to mention it in our first conversation.

If Mr. Ries is to be believed, that’s because the second example adds in just a handful of additional descriptive words that inject a little warmth and playfulness: otherwise known as emotion.

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.