Also, if you know of a gallery not mentioned here, please leave a comment and we’ll add it no questions asked.

Number of checkins 7 day period after superbowl:

Data courtesy of Trendrr.

As you can see, Starbucks appears to be the big winner here with a huge margin on number two- McDonalds. To be honest these stats show the lack of penetration foursquare has in most markets. Location services aren’t quite there yet and few businesses can actually leverage them in a way that creates a return on the time investment.

That said, how is your business leveraging Foursquare, Facebook Places, or Gowalla to get to engage customers? How could these companies have done better?

The quality of our ideas depends only on what we build them from. What we’ve seen, what we’ve heard, what we’ve felt. To have better ideas, we need deeper experiences. But most importantly, like stoking a fire, we must constantly add more fuel to keep the fire burning. When we stop, old materials build nothing but old and uninspiring ideas.

What does this mean for the mantra we hear from all the advice we read online? The mantra that says: “Don’t watch TV, don’t spend too much time reading, don’t play games, don’t waste time on Twitter. Stop reading blogs and mucking about on facebook– if you want to be successful, you have to produce. ”

Screw that.

If you want to have stale ideas, follow this advice. Put nothing in, get nothing out. When you burn more fuel than you add, what do you expect to happen? You sputter out into a life of mediocrity.

But if you want to build something truly innovative and meaningful, do the opposite. Great stuff in, great stuff out- Just like a sandwich.

Watch captivating movies and mind-bending TV shows. Read incredible books. Listen to great music in your car instead of marketing podcasts. Play exhilarating video games. Study your idols. Drench yourself in ideas. Go somewhere you’ve never seen. Walk to the top of a mountain and hurl yourself down it on skis. Consume what the world has to offer, and do so unapologetically. Become a connoisseur of the best things other people have done. Absorb everything the world has to offer you. Do this for as long as you can afford.

Only then will you have collected the inspiration needed to produce something original you can be proud of. Something that gets to the core of what you’ve been meaning to do all along.

So what do you do when your business doesn’t understand the havoc they might wreak when pushing for website changes? Let them know how the changes will affect the site, and things you can do to help lessen the damage if possible. Here are some examples:

• Changing domains. Your company might switch from one domain to another as part of a rebranding effort or to support a specific marketing campaign. The problem with changing domains, all the link value associated with the previous domain will be lost. Using a brand-new domain means the value of the brand, on the Web, is effectively reset to zero. If you can’t sway your leadership from making the switch, make sure you add permanent 301 redirects to push the SEO juice onward.
• Focusing only on branded keywords. This approach works well if you want to reach customers who are already looking for your product. But what about those who aren’t? Apple for example targets the term “play music” in their campaign for the iPod. This exposes the iPod to many people who would potentially be searching for a different player and may end up deciding to go with the iPod.
• Push all press releases as blog articles. This worked in 2001, but  no one gives a shit about your stupid press releases on the blog now. If you want to have them on the site, create another section for them. While this doesn’t have a direct SEO impact it will discourage participation on other blog articles that were meaningfully written.
• Switch to Flash for Interactive Purposes. As a digital agency, this one is tough for us- but if you’re serious about an SEO you simply cannot use a flash page as the catchall for the campaign. Alternatives would include creating subdomains or alternate business faces with a more interactive presence.

Stay alert and in the know. You can’t always prevent offline decisions that negatively impact your hard-won online success, but you can find ways to reduce—or eliminate—the damage.

Consider that your content comprises the what dimension of writing.  You might be writing about otters, or the moon, or otters on the moon.  It doesn’t matter.  Identifying what is being said is a descriptive claim: a surface observation about one example of writing.

Voice is about how it’s being said, and how the writer’s choices will influence the reader’s perception.  These are analytical claims: insights that address writing as a process and not as one individual example.

Diction

Diction is your word choice.  It encompasses both the denotation (literal meaning) and connotation (implied meaning) of language.  To make the most effective use of your words, (1) target a specific audience; (2) understand your purpose in the context of that audience; and (3) tailor your vocabulary for maximum economy and impact.

Remember that you are writing for other people and not yourself.  Consider the demographic(s) you’re aiming the piece at and how you want them to react to your objective.

• Are you selling a product or advertising a service, making a persuasive argument, or supplying information?
• What general knowledge on the subject do you expect your audience to have already?
• What are some of the needs, desires, aversions, and quirks common to your target audience?  Use this information to your advantage: it will help you develop a strategic discourse.

Discourse can be thought of as the larger body of terminology that applies to a given subject or family of ideas.  “Bourgeoisie” and “proletariat” belong to the class discourse, “Nash equilibriums” to the economic discourse, “hypochondriac” to the medical discourse, and so on.  The important thing about discourse is to be conscious of the fact that you’re always using one, and it should remain consistent for the sake of not confusing your readers.  None of the words mentioned before, for example, should appear in your article about otters on the moon.  Don’t over-explain every detail, but also don’t get bogged down in obscure jargon and expert technical language.  Both scenarios are boring and you will lose an already fleeting attention span.  A college professor told me to write as though there are two people reading: one who knows significantly more than you do about your subject, and one who knows significantly less.  Try to strike a balance that pleases both people.

Sound

The ear is a very keen instrument in its ability to perceive rhythm and balance.  As readers interpret and process a text they also evaluate it according to the metrics of sound, whether they realize it or not.

Sound is the aspect of voice that is probably most often overlooked.  Beyond the denotative and connotative meaning of language, the phonic elements and patterns created by certain words either in sequence or proximity will trigger subconscious associations in the audience.

Short, punchy sentences communicate simple ideas with more immediate impact and less wasted time.  Down to the letter, the hard consonants (and especially plosives: p, t, k) reinforce this staccato rhythm as they fall more abruptly on the ear.  Vowels tend to be more melodic and lend themselves to a more legato, or connected and flowing, sound.

The characteristics of language that you want to emphasize will depend on your audience and your objective.  If you are writing copy for a product advertisement, for instance, staccato sentences can pack a lot of meaning into a small space, and the plosives indicate decisiveness and agency.  This can make for a strong and memorable catchphrase, but keep in mind that it’s not a very subtle strategy and may be jarring to read.  The same goes for alliterative language, which despite its immediate impression sounds tacky and disingenuous when overused.

As the ideas become more complicated and the objective more nuanced, the organic cadence of spoken language becomes an invaluable tool for retaining cognitive attention as opposed to marketing billboard-style.  It’s what we might describe as “graceful” or “elegant” writing, connecting concepts in a way that maximizes clarity, fluidity, and efficiency.  Like a charismatic orator, a sophisticated written voice advances its purpose through a lucid and logical procession of thoughts, and uses this forward momentum to develop a rapport with the audience.

The most original and effective writing utilizes a variety of rhythms, sounds, and words to achieve its purpose.  There are no hard and fast rules in that regard.  Know your audience, remember your objective, and write as if you were speaking to someone.  The structural workings of your particular voice will fall into place with practice, and by no means should you start scrutinizing your work word-by-word or letter-by-letter.  That approach is counterproductive and whatever comes out of it will inevitably sound contrived.  Just allow your mind to be aware of the different dimensions of language and how they interact to produce a complex meaning.  The concepts and close-reading techniques I have discussed here are simply tools that allow us to think of written language as a process, and to undertake that process with confidence, consistency, and self-awareness.

What is Agile Development?

Agile software development refers to a group of development methodologies based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing teams. Here are Momentify we are choosing to use a modified version of the SCRUM development method.

The Reason for Change

One of the big criticisms of SCRUM development is that it’s life cycle is too short and it doesn’t preserve the equity built into brands due to it’s lack of planning up front. We understand this concern, but it couldn’t be more wrong given the current socioeconomic climate in the digital world. Things move faster than you could ever plan for. Just look at the recent “Man You Could Smell Like” campaign from Old Spice, it gained them a 4.6% market share worth millions of dollars using a plan that was reacting to the publics comments live via you tube. There is no way Old Spice could have predicted that the videos put up would have millions of views, or even which video would be the most popular- but what they did predict was that people would be attracted to the personal feel of the campaign as a whole. That was their big idea, a set of socially driven commercials promoting  an old school brand. Your big idea may be to attract more corporate clients with a new website, or expand the reach of your pizza shop with a local TV commercial.  Whatever your big idea is, you need to get it started and react to the results.

A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called requirements churn), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. As such, we adopt an empirical approach—accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team’s ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements.

With our service lineup here at Momentify we’ve been getting asked a lot how do i know if my website is accessible? While the answer is usually complex there are a few general checks you can do to see if you’re site follows web standards and is able to be accessed by the broadest possible audience.First, lets define web accessibility. What is it and why should you care…

Web accessibility is the internet equivalent of a wheel chair ramp or prescription glasses. With an accessible website there are considerations taken into the design that will be apparent to certain users and make it possible for them to use your website. By designing the web accessibility guidelines you will also present your site as intended to the search engines who look for certain behavior in the code of a site to rank you above or below your competitors. If you’d like to chat more about accessibility feel free to give me a call- for now let’s get on with the list!

Does your site use flash?

Flash is an inherently inaccessible  part of a website.  While it is great for large brands like Nike of Pepsi to offer interactivity to their brand, it is a poor and expensive choice for most businesses and will effectively serve as a barrier to search engines, blind users, and the elderly who commonly will scale text larger so they can view it comfortably. Google currently claims to see some of the code in flash and there are ways to optimize it for search engines, but as a general rule if you want an accessible website. Stay away from flash, ask your developer for HTML5 alternatives.

Is your text contained in images?

Many small businesses we consult with are completely content with how their site looks, what they hate is how it performs. One of the biggest offenders to a client with this problem is text contained in images. It doesn’t scale properly, it adds to page load times, and is not  seen by search engines. You can tell if your text is contained in images by clicking and dragging around it. If you can select the text character by character, you’re most likely in the clear. If you select  large squares or rectangles it’s time to talk to a developer about having your site reworked. This is most  commonly found in navigation elements where a designer has attempted  to beautify a site, and inadvertently made it inaccessible.

Is your navigation standardized?

Maintaining a consistent look and feel throughout the design of a site is very important. If your site changes navigation from page to page then you have created a confusing layout for your visitors to navigate. Imagine walking around a house where the walls were constantly moving, it would take you quite a while to get where you wanted. Pick  either vertical or horizontal navigation and stick with it, your visitors will thank you.

How does your site fare?

After taking a look at these three quick checks how does your site look? Leave a comment here and we’ll point you in the right direction if you need help!

One of the things I hear the most when I bring up Twitter to clients is “I just don’t get it”, and I definitely understand where they are coming from. It’s a confusing beast to tame- but when you learn how leverage the users there it can be one of the best ROI marketing tools your business can use. When you start treating your followers like people walking into your store, or customers on the phone you’ll start to see how powerful twitter is.

To get you started here’s a few Twitter tips for beginners:

General Twitter Tips

Getting more followers

1. Give away something to those that follow you (services, iPods, ect)
2. Break news before other people do.
3. Follow people your interested in and send them a REAL direct message.
4. Keep an eye on trends, participate in them.
5. Use hash tags to connect with people you don’t know.

Business Twitter Accounts

1. Make no more than 10% of your tweets marketing related.
2. Personally sign tweets with the Carrot key.
3. @ Reply everyone that isn’t a spammer
4. Integrate twitter with your website.
5. Schedule and track your tweets with CoTweet

Golden Rule: Treat twitter conversations like conversations in real life

Using these techniques I have personally gone from under 200, to over 2000 followers in just ONE month. Probably even more after this article gets popular on Digg and you see my twitter name (@andrewpflynn) here in this article.

Do you have a Twitter tip you’d like to add? Just leave a comment here and I’ll add it to the list with a credit to your twitter name next to it.

Again, don’t forget to follow me on twitter for more tips like these in the future!

Upload a bigger profile picture. (Difficulty 1/5)

You probably didn’t know this, but your profile picture can be as large as 600px vertically on Facebook pages. Take advantage of this to promote an offer your running, or an advantage to using your service or business.

Add a Custom tab (Difficulty 4/5)

Using the FBML tab application you can essentially embed a full blown website into a tab on your Facebook page. This is a little more difficult that normal Facebook moderation but will defiantly set you apart from the rest of the pack when it comes to social media.

Add a tab for Twitter (Difficulty 2/5)

Facebook can be a pain to log into and update, but you can still participate with your fans by embedding twitter into a tab and updating your stream from your cell phone. Seriously it couldn’t get any easier to keep your fans in the loop with what is going on at your business.

Add a tab for Flickr (Difficulty 2/5)

Something interesting happen at your business but don’t have a content management system to update your own website? Embed flickr into your facebook page and use the simple tools at Flickr to get your photos on the web and in front of your customers.

Add a tab for Employee Profiles (Difficulty (4/5)

Would you want to talk to a brick wall or a pretty sign? Probably not, but thats all your facebook page is without some human personality behind it. Upload a custom page with profiles of your employees to give a more human vibe to your fans.

Participate with your fans (1/5)

If a customer walks into your business, or calls you on the phone you would never ignore them. But often times businesses will create a Facebook page and just leave it dormant while fans are constantly attempting to participate in the stream. Reply to every single one of your fans, and moderate them very lightly.

Do you have any tips for Facebook pages that have worked well for your business? Leave a comment and let us know here!

Make your content Lovable.

Making a website lovable is the hardest part of developing the brand of a business on the internet. There are many unpredictable variables that we still have no idea how to take into consideration when writing a social media plan. Will people leave comments on You Tube? Would they prefer if we uploaded to Vimeo instead? Will uploading to both sites hurt the feelings of one community or the other? We have no idea, but you also had no idea if your first love would say yes and you still if you could go on a date.

Here are a few things you can do to make it easy for your users to love you:

• Make your website easy to link to. The embed code from YouTube is a great example.
• Create accounts absolutely everywhere. Clamio is great for this, $129 bucks and you’ve got accounts on 300 networks.
• Include links to “favorite” your website at the bottom of each of your blog posts. Share This for regular websites, or Sexybookmarks if you’re using WordPress are both great tools for this.

Speak to your customers.

First step get a blog. Next step, speak honestly and openly about your business. Be creative, if you were trying to catch the attention of a party you’d do crazy things like buy the entire bar shots or jump into a pool naked off the roof of a hotel. Sure, the pool analogy might be a little crazy for some of our clients but for many that would be a hell of a social media hit.

Here are a few ways to make your web presence speak to your customers:

• Let your customers know what’s up  on the inside. Behind the scenes blog entries are great for this.
• Make a video podcast. Pictures can tell a thousand words, and videos have  millions of pictures.
• Search for potential customers with problems you can solve on twitter.

Build a community.

Accepting comments and input from  your customers is essential to any marketing campaign. You’re website needs  to make it as easy as for customers  to give you feedback. Don’t require long registration forms and verified logins just to leave a comment. Customers are doing you a favor by participating with you- accept their feedback and thank them for it.

Here are some ways to listen to your customers:

• Start a forum, make sure it’s free.
• Add a comment form to your blog. Make it threaded to encourage conversation.
• Use Hootsuite to manage multiple social media accounts.
• Start a social network with Buddypress.
• Give away something for free to members of your community. Expect nothing in return.

Make it something you can feel.

DC shoes is one of the companies with a history of finding social media gold. The trick is that they don’t leave it online. They make it real, with TV shows and Live Events. You need to get out there and go beyond just providing great content. Go to trade shows, chamber meetings, or any events in your industry. Find out who the movers and shakers are and talk with them. If you’re smart and can find ways to set yourself apart you’ll be the cream that rises to the top. If you’re lazy and dumb you’ll fail just like you would have in the business world 20 years ago, it’s just a little more accelerated now.

Here are some ways you can get some real human interaction out of the web:

• Go to an event and hand out stickers for free.
• Make a DVD of all your social media hits and send it to customers for free (require them to sign up for a newsletter).
• Put your product in the wild, tape it being used. (see the Keyboard Theory)
• Make it easy for fans to organize meetups in their area. (see Diggnation Live Shows)
• Make merchandised material, don’t look to make a profit on it.

Above all, trust success will come.

While all of the factors that have an impact in social media promotion are still unknown, we can always fall back on basic human instinct. If you feel tricked or taken advantage of you are going to be pissed off. If you’re treated with respect and feel included in a community you are going to support that community with everything you have.

Seriously, if you’re going to do all of this and not trust your customers to like your brand than you should choose a different business because your life is going to be miserable. Let them talk about you everywhere. Facebook, Yelp, Twitter, Gowalla. Respond to them every chance you get, and only moderate when they are being obscene. It’s a simple policy of openness and honesty, not some bullshit 30 page handbook that you hand to all of your employees.

So that’s what we do. What do you think?