Dave Knox over at Hard Knox Life just posted this great slideshow on Content Marketing by Helge Tenno. Although I strongly dislike the addition of “two-dot-oh” to the end of any term, I will admit the Agency2.0 he speaks of at the end of the show sounds pretty appealing!

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The first few slides call out the development of online marketing. “2007 was all about rich media and customer participations”…”but 2008 is ..all about a range of different ideas coming together and forming a new kind of marketing changing the way brands connect to their consumers”.

The ideas are the following:

1. Culture
2. Technology
3. Mobility
4. Activity
5. Ineffective
6. Emotional Research

A few statements worth calling out:

Content isn’t king. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

The application itself is not a goal at all - it’s an obstacle between the user and their goal.

we tend to throw out the most meaningful and most revolutionary if we ask people about their preferences.

Content marketing = participating in activities facilitated by the brand.

Slide 13 states that “most products and services are actually developed by users, who then give ideas to manufacturers”. The premise (and this is one I called out in my recent review of Accidental Branding,) is that the best products are designed to address specific problems. If that’s the case, obviously why not give users the empowerment (and the forum) to help drive innovation for you?

As a developer, I probably shouldn’t like the comment that the application is not the goal. For me, though, effective marketing and strategy is not about jumping to implementation. A client shouldn’t want “a widget”. They should want “a means to drive traffic from the social networking space”. A widget is one way to do this. By assessing what the user goals are, we can work to achieve those goals, and they’ll be satisfied. But unless we determine the rationale behind a decision, we have a hard time assessing its success (and risk having an unhappy client in the end). I maintain that the decision of the best technical solution to a business need should be left in the hands of we web geeks, who have been eating, drinking and sleeping this stuff for a loooong time!

This notion of “don’t tell me what you (think you) want” is raised later in the deck as well. I can only attribute the reason that we ‘throw out the most meaningful information if we ask people their preferences’ to a lack of self-awareness or willingness to be honest. My biggest concern with a blanket statement like this is that some organizations may take this as justification not to solicit or incorporate feedback from users at all.

As someone who espouses user-centered design principles, this whole idea of “content marketing” makes sense. People are doing to “do” stuff and talk about it. Why not facilitate these activities by offering something to talk about? I am currently listening to “The Anatomy of Buzz” and Jeep Jamborees are mentioned. There is a certain demographic that buys Jeeps and has a certain lifestyle. Why not support them in their activities? We are an experiential society, and people who go off on a Jeep Jamboree weekend are your best brand advocates. They will converse among themselves, further establishing that brand loyalty, and also tell others about their experiences.

I love the idea that we are looking at establishing relationships with consumers, as well as between them. It’s no longer about focusing inward on creating that ultimate pitch: it’s about a facilitating a personalized experience for each individual based on his own needs and desired level of interaction.

As a previously scheduled post on accessibility and indexability went live, a few folks pointed me to some news on searchable/indexable swfs.

A few of the articles I checked out:

1. Google Now Crawling and Indexing Flash Content
2. Improved Flash Indexing (Official Google Webmaster Central Blog)
3. SWF searchability FAQ

I will admit I referred to the articles with a critical eye; google has been flirting with retrieving some amount of content from .swfs for quite awhile. Yet for the first time, I got a sense there has been real progress.

The premise is that Google and Yahoo! spiders will access the content via an enhanced Flash player. This enhanced player will give the search engine spiders the ability to navigate within the Flash experience, and access and index associated resources.

This is an exciting prospect, as until now many site designers were resigned to duplicating the content that was available from within Flash on the HTML page wrapper that housed the Flash. This followed the web development strategy of ‘progressive enhancement‘, where a non-flash-enabled site visitor (like the Googlebot) would be able to access at least the core content, and the more capabilities the visitor possessed (CSS, rich media), the more enhanced their experience. In addition to potentially increasing maintenance costs (to ensure the two versions were in sync), implementing this method is sometimes not feasible at all, depending on the complexity of the application.

I was eager to see how what I knew about Flash accessibility best practices came into play, and eagerly read through the documentation. As I did so, however, I found I had more questions than answers. In the Google Webmaster Central Blog, there is an intriguing statement:

we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.

When I first read this, I believed it meant that some links may not be followed. This makes sense from the standpoint that a button with no associated text would essentially be a hidden link, and following it may inaccurately represent the content of the site. However, the statement actually focuses on the generation of anchor text. I am not clear where this generation would take place; perhaps in a virtual buffer of all the Flash content? How does the content of the link (assuming that it DOES get followed) get associated with the overall Flash content (since there is no anchor text).

Another consideration is the use of tabindices. When coding Flash for accessibility, tabindices may be used to specify reading order. Is this something that search engine spiders will be aware of? Equally, there is a recommendation in the Google docs to “consider replacing the text within an image.. [to make] ..less informative content.. invisible to [Google]“.
This statement made me question of the sophistication of this enhanced player. For years, Google has managed to determine that items such as copyright statements are not significant content items. So why now are they unaware of this fact now that the content is coming from a .swf? The recommendation to move content from an accessible to an inaccessible form seems terribly shortsighted and irresponsible.
We are now quite sophisticated in using semantic markup for html pages to offer search engine spiders some information about the relative importance of elements.I can only assume that all text being pulled from a Flash element is given equal weighting. If this is the case, as is noted in the Adobe Developer Center documentation we will certainly need to see “best practices emerge over time for creating SWF content that is more optimized for search engine rankings”.

Another major challenge in opening applications up to search is being able to direct the searcher to the relevant section within the experience. This is also a concern with accessible PDFs. Much of the documentation recommended the use of deep-linking. However, it’s not clear to me how the spider is made aware of these deep-links. I will admit that my own exposure to deep-linking with a flash experience is limited: we did this for the People’s Choice Awards site, where querystring parameters were fed into the .swf using flashVars. While the Adobe Developer Center documentation mentions this practice (”you can create multiple HTML files that provide different variables to the SWF and start your application at the correct subsection”), I hadn’t been aware that google supported variables in their search result URLs…

There was also some mention made that external files linked to from within the .swf will be indexed, but separately. The implication is that the contents of a data file will show up in search results, separate from its presentational format (and overall context). While I assume this will be resolved in future releases, a diligent developer will likely want to ensure their “include” files are not accessed on their own. I believe my colleagues did something similar when we launched the Wal-Mart Halloween Flash/HTML Hybrid site last year. They did some great work with deep-linking and history management, and handled orphan content loading (I refer anyone interested in the specifics to Toby Miller). My concern is that based on how this functionality was announced (that developers did not need to do anything for their swfs to be indexed), there will be little motivation to ensure content is always delivered in the proper context.

Obviously, I am very interested to see if this development will enhance the experience of users of assistive technologies. Sadly, I’m not sure it will, as the major breakthrough has been made with the enhanced player. Unless Adobe also plans to work with makers of assistive technologies, I don’t know that any of these benefits will be realized. If anything, site designers may stop some of their earlier practices (textual alternatives).

I’m very interested to know if any of the accessibility properties and best practices have made it into this enhanced search — how great would it be if the use of these properties increased the weighting of content!

A few minutes ago, JenniferLaycock recommended her ~1500 twitter followers check me out. Evidently she’s cultivated a good trust relationship with them, for my number of followers immediately increased!

Thanks Jennifer, and welcome new readers!

The final session of the day that I attended was on strategies for blogging and social networking marketing. Some of the content was similar to the viral campaign session I’d attended earlier, I liked the use of the one specific case study to frame their work.

Right away speaker Bill Balderaz of Webbed Marketing laid out the three things you need for success:

1. a compelling hook
2. the right channels
3. identify client goals

In the case study he shared with us (Shizuka New York), the compelling hook was “bird poop facials”.

A good litmus test to whether or not your idea is compelling- would you talk about it at dinner? a new CEO hired from a competitor? Nah. But bird poop facials? Sure!

Bill mentioned four specific channels to consider:

1. SEO Press release
2. Blogger outreach
3. video
4. Social networks

I wasn’t really familiar with the terms “SEO Press release”, but it was quite interesting. Bill mentioned that they will search for specific phrases on search engines to ensure the uniqueness of their phrasing. That way they can be sure that when monitoring buzz or search queries, all the results are directly tied to their efforts. He did acknowledge that the most newsworthy your story, the more likely a journalist will snap up the idea and write about it in their own words. In this case, your carefully chosen phrasing is lost.

Through the presentation, Bill was very diligent at showing us the “before and after”, highlighting the importance of analytics and establishing your measures for success. We looked at google news, which had 2 links to the company in May, and roughly 50 post-campaign.

Blogger outreach is refers yet again to really figuring out the type of influentials to tap.

As for social networking, Bill said that they did not try to build for or leverage all the social networks. He said they actually received the most traffic from StumbleUpon, which was a surprise to me. I didn’t realize it was such a bg player. He also acknowledged that like it or not, you can’t ignore mySpace.

Supposedly CNN ran this story on the front page one day, but still 46% of the traffic came from social networks. While CNN gave a one-day spike in traffic, the networks were overall more significant.

Someone asked about the time this campaign took, and he said the video shoot was the biggest task, coming in at about 10 hours. The rest of the campaign and marketing was about 40 hours. In the end, the company saw traffic increases from all sources, not just referring sites. People weren’t just clicking on links they had presented to them; bird poop facials at Shizuka had reached a point where people were talking or thinking about them, and motivated to seek them out.

He talked some more about some compelling ideas and hooks, including the work they did for Hatteras networks (the cash cow), or the scantily clad etymologist at HotForWords.com

While I don’t know that this session really offered me many “strategies” for blogging and social media marketing, I did find the session interesting. I appreciated the focus on the results achieved, and how they were managed. I still feel in many ways that analytics is still in its infancy, and I appreciated the approach that was taken to demonstrate the campaign’s success.

I just read a review on TinyPaste on Techcrunch. TinyPaste is considered “tinyURL for text”. The idea is an interesting one: just the other day my coworker Jay Donavan (@getdonavan) was musing: Twitter needs an inline thesaurus that automagically finds short synonyms. Words over 10 chars offers suggestions. Wouldn’t that rock?. The 140 character limit may sometimes seem just a little light, which is why often tweets will consist of links to “go read what I have to say that’s longer than 140 characters”.

However, there’s one difference. Often if someone shares a URL via twitter, they also give some description of what they’re sending (at least, I hope they do, or generally I don’t bother following). TinyPaste would effectively do away with that, since the idea would be that it links out to the entire idea.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t assume that everyone who follows me on twitter wants to read EVERYTHING I have to say, to the point where they’ll follow a link to get there. Not to mention the fact that I use twitter extensively on my phone, and won’t follow a link anywhere.

In the end, twitter was intended to be a quick and dirty communication medium. The more we extend it, the less of its essence and purpose is retained..

Last night I was on LinkedIn, and someone was inquiring about how to make a site backwards compatible for IE6. While I’ve been working on the web for close to a decade now, I forget that for many people, their development has really picked up in the era of IE7, and they are often shocked when they are forced to look back at IE6.

One particular area that people seem to struggle with are transparent pngs. Since every browser except IE6 supports alpha transparency, there is a strong desire to move forward with using pngs to achieve transparency. A quick google search for “transparent png ie6″ brings up a cool 721,000 results. Yes, there are plenty of work-arounds, which work to varying levels of success.

Ah yes, youngsters, I remember a day before alpha pngs were an option, when we used transparent gifs. And people were ok with this, they looked ok.

I fired up photoshop to prove I still had skills. Here it is — how to make rounded corner images as transparent gifs.

Jagged edges

Smooth edges

Gifs are limited in their color options, which makes for a small file size. The challenge can be how to display a gif on top of a background without those rough edges. It’s really quite simple, I’ve achieved the same effect with expensive commercial products like photoshop as well as free programs like gimp.

There is a pre-requisite to have some idea on which color background your image will be sitting. Because alpha transparency is not available, you need to fake it.

Step 1: Create your image.

Step 2: Create a new layer beneath this, with the same background color as what your image will be sitting on. This doesn’t need to be exact (particularly if the background is patterned), but the closer the better.

Step 3: Export for web (in Photoshop CS3, this is under File > Save for Web and Devices). You must select gif as the export format, with transparency enabled. In Photoshop, you have several options for the color table: Perceptual, Selective, Adaptive, or Restrictive (web). Do NOT select “restrictive”. (There is a useful article on the Web Developer’s Journal on what the differences in these tables mean.). You can see below the number of colors being used in creating the images based on the color table selected. This is really the secret to it all; the additional colors allow for a smoother “blend”.

So now we know what colors are going into our image, but we have a background color specified — that’s not transparent!

Step 3b: Select the pixels from which you want to “remove” the color.

Using the eyedropper tool, select the background that you want to remove. In the color table, you will see the colors you have selected is highlighted. Click on the icon at the bottom that will “map the selected color to transparent” (the checkboard patterned icon). The color in the color table that was selected will change to a “mixed state” view. This is an indication of which colors in the original image will not be rendered in the saved image. You will also be able to see the results of this in the preview pane (which is important if the color exists in the image other than just in the background!)

Step 4: Repeat as desired
You can play around with the number of colors not to include in the export. Generally, the more colors, the smoother the edge. However, when the corner is placed on a background of more than one color, you may need to be more aggressive in the amount of transparency.

Step 5: Save as .gif and enjoy!

Note: some people may think that the restrictive color palette is better, since there are fewer colors. As it is, the gif is a nice lean file format. In this example, the restrictive palette image was 228 bytes, and the selective palette with transparency came out to 365 bytes.

Recently, Mark Scholl tweeted I need a new picture to satisfy business purposes.. While I realize now that he probably meant a photo of himself, he’s “the search guy” to me, so I first thought that he wanted an icon that represented what he did.
When we think of search, we think of that trusty magnifying glass. But is that really appropriate today? When was the last time you ’searched’ for something online and had to try really hard to find it? These days our bigger problem is weeding through the huge results set. The problem now isn’t finding something, it’s filtering to find the best thing.
So what’s an icon for a filter? Other than a sieve, of course. The first thing that comes to mind for me is that little org-chart icon, with the boxy-thing above two other boxy-things. But does that really capture “search”?