Artists are constantly strung to their work while simultaneously (and rather obsessively) focused on all possible creative endeavors. The driving force behind great arts seems to be this OCD quality and need for creative perfection.  Artists, as well as designers have an extreme case of extroverted intuition. A constant need to observe, interpret, and make. This is with cost, the artist will become a loner, not nearly as social. A tremendous interpersonal frustration forms. The individual artists needs social context, and are driven away from this need by the creative pursuit. What is this individual to do?

Creative thinkers are now imbued with endless social possibilities online. Personal links and networks across continents can form, all while the artists is scudded away in the confines of his dark studio. Essentially, web social media has given artists a modern day form of communication (a movement in a sense). Sites like core77.com have brought thousands of artists/designers together in one spot. Issues in design are brought to the masses and discussed through forums and blogs. Individual and company portfolios are laid out for all to see. These web communities merely reflect creative group-think persona that has been around for ages. Artists are provided with an outlet to observe as well as a path to communicate.

Since the cavemen, artists have reached out to each other (a need driven by their lack of social context). It seems as though every great creative period involved major communities of artist. Grand masters of the renaissance period collaborated with peers and students. Salvador Dali amongst other great painters intermingled during the surrealist movement. Artists worked with each other in studios, some even lived together. This is really no different today save for that creative communication has been optimized through the Internet.

I find it rather odd when individuals detest the advantages of web media. I hear stuff like “Twitter and Facebook are destroying our privacy.” The truth, is that web media is just a more fantastic tool by which people can communicate, especially for those creative types. No longer are people of similar interest confined to groups within a small geographical range. The “isolated artist,” has web media to provide that that potent outlet for social context. Old habits are treated with a new means solution.

Me: “That’s great! Online advertising is the best way to reach a huge customer base.  So, Imaginary Restaurant Manager, who do you want to advertise too?”

Manager: “How can I reach everybody?”

Mr. Imaginary Restaurant Manager might seem crazy but for his business he actually has the right idea.  He should be diversifying his marketing strategy.  One of the biggest challenges I face when meeting new clients is to get them to think about the demographics they want to reach.  I worked for a movie theater promoting a local midnight film festival.  They spent lots of money on newspaper ads and a large display at a local county fair.  While they might catch some eyes, the odds are those aren’t going to catch the audience going to the movies at midnight.  If they had done a little more market research they could have used their ad budget in much smarter ways.

So what does Mr. Restaurant Manager do when he wants to successfully go after a diverse market?  If you can afford it, focus grouping is a great way to see if things are working.  If you don’t want to shell out the cash, social media can be a great tool.  You can use Twitter, and Facebook to get people to take online surveys and even do some in house surveying of customers.  If you can get a broad spectrum of people to take the survey you can compile the data into the standard 4 quads, Woman under 35, Woman over 35, Men over 35, Men under 35.  This is how advertising agencies and focus group managers see you.

C compile your data into these quads and look at a few basic questions. For restaurants and hotels it’s “Would you recommend this establishment,” and “Would this be a first choice to go in the future.  For retail it might be, “Is this place your first choice to go for (insert product).”  Look at 100 people, 25 in each quad, and take a look at that big question.   That’s the bottom line that advertising people look at when they decide how to change their ad strategy.

Your main goal is to reach double digits in the “first choice” question.   If you have successful 4 quad advertising the odds are you are doing pretty well in your business but that’s a difficult thing to accomplish.   (Neither the NFL or NBA have double digits in all 4 quads.  The only sport to do it is major league baseball.)  Double digits in all four quads means your advertising is working.

The most likely scenario is that one or two of your quads can are a little bit lower than the others.  If you are a restaurant and Women over 35 is low you might want to gear your advertising to represent your place as a family restaurant since that demographic is also where you get a good idea of what kids are seeing.  (Kids are notoriously difficult to track considering they are spending through their parents and don’t usually have great internet access)  If you are lacking the Women under 35 range then you could try some ads that show how your place would be great for a “Girls Night Out.”  Advertise some drink specials on Facebook or Twitter.

On the other side if you find yourself lacking in the men under 35 demo you may want to show less ads about families and children and start advertising your place as a little more hip.  You could start a funny video contest on Facebook and YouTube for example.  If you have trouble getting the Over 35 guys you could try showing that your place has a traditional feel.  That’s when you try some newspaper ads, and maybe some radio.  It’s all about picking the right medium and the right audience for your message.

Former New Line Cinema executive and current online publisher Jeff Kats (www.geekweeklive.com) said, “All this tracking data is the biggest tool an advertising exec has and is what they use to figure out what needs to be changed.”  Thanks to social media and the internet you can now have this data in the palm of your hands and adjust your advertising accordingly.  All it takes is 100 survey takers, 25 in each quad, for you to take your advertising to the next level.

www.foodservicewarehouse.com/education/restaurant-marketing/demographics

gossmark.blogspot.com/2008/04/new-take-on-restaurant-demographics

findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3190/is_41_39/ai_n15727597/

Perhaps Starbucks enlisted me at too early an age with Grande Caramel Macchiatos and its many variations. How could I even compare leaf-flavored hot water to a caramel chocolaty caffeinated shake that my mom somehow allowed me to drink before school?

In the last year, though, I’ve voyaged out to discover what the big deal was, why my dad, who remembers nobody’s name remembers Earl Grey’s when he’s sick, why my roommate always makes a cup of chamomile before bed, why the English dedicate a whole time in their day to the brew.

Enter: Sarah Rose. Author of the new release For All The Tea in China.

It’s kind of strange how things work out. One day a weird girl is weirdly wondering about why people don’t find tea that weird, the next, she’s interviewing the author of a book about the history of tea!

Rose’s For All the Tea in China is a nonfiction book that reads like a fictional page-turner. As you travel with Robert Fortune on his journey through China to steal the recipe for the beloved beverage, you realize that putting some dried leafy stuff in hot water is a perfected, ancient art. There was a time when tea made the world go round. It influenced foreign policy, and it catapulted men into adventures into the unknown. You could say that tea is drink that launched a thousand ships…or one man, Robert Fortune, with the tenacity of a thousand ships to bring tea under British power.

I got to interview Sarah Rose, a native of Chicago, about For All the Tea in China. Here’s what she had to say:

1. How many cups of tea did you drink while writing “For All The Tea in China?” Or, oh no. Are you a coffee drinker?

For about 2 years in the middle of the book, I couldn’t touch the stuff. I would look at a cup of tea and shudder. I got over it. Now I love tea again. (and no, I’m not a coffee drinker)

2. I follow you now on Twitter. You Tweet a good amount of clever and fun 140 or less characters. As a writer and published author, why did you join Twitter? Does Twitter and other forms of new media “do” anything for the modern writer?

I joined for mercenary reasons, I thought Twitter might be a good avenue to promote FOR ALL THE TEA IN CHINA. There is a pretty active tea community on Twitter. But once I got on, I was hooked. Twitter is a running diary of randomness, a way of keeping up with the world, with tea, and with friends.

3. You recently Tweeted: “Am excited possible new gig will include mag content for iPad – cool new world for #writers” What is your “new gig,” and what do you see the iPad and similar technology has in store for writers.

Since it’s still in the realm of the possible – not the confirmed – I can’t say more yet. But it’s just so easy to buy things on the iPad, I think there’s real hope for the written word there. Not as much because of the multimedia capacity – though that’s awesome – but because it’s the easiest way in the world to spend very little money quickly. And I’d really like to see magazines and books survive so I’ll hope for magic.

4. As a Chicago-based blog, and being a Chicago native myself, I have to ask: Does being a Chicagoan influence your writing or your inspiration?

Being a Chicagoan influences everything I do. First of all, it is the greatest city on the planet. I feel overwhelmingly lucky to have grown up in a place that boasts a deep pool of talent with very little bullshit. It’s a good place to become good at things, no one is watching you fail. No one cares. Then you move to the East Coast and everyone thinks you’re so talented and normal.

5. For All the Tea in China narrates mostly the adventures of Robert Fortune and his escapades to bring Chinese tea to the English masses. Do you see Fortune as a hero or a thief? You explored China, too. While writing your book did you ever feel a kinship to Fortune? Like you were both searching for something in China?

Fortune and I were in a struggle with each other. I would sit down at my computer thinking, ok, Bob, you and me, we’re in this together, can we please make a page work today? His Victorian arrogance frustrated me, but I also couldn’t help but admire his pluck, his swashbuckling improvisation. He spent three years in China, a stranger in a strange land, in the name of science and commerce. My first experiences in China were much less glamorous – I was a backpacker right out of college and Hong Kong is where I went broke, so I got a job and stayed. Returning for the book, I had a mission: to find what was left of pre-nationalist, pre-communist China, to see if there was anything old left in the most rapidly modernizing place on earth.

Was he a thief? In modern eyes, most certainly yes. At the time there was no sense that botanical products could obtain any kind of intellectual property protection whatsoever. There was no intellectual property. But he knew what he was doing was illegal, that the laws of China expressly forbid his presence there.

6. You say writing For All the Tea in China took five “grueling” years. Why so grueling? And for the sake of our tech buffs out there, what word processing did you use?

Grueling isn’t the half of it. Five abusive years. Five miserable years. Five years of degradation, abject poverty, frustration, humiliation. Publishing is a ridiculous business. No one with self esteem should ever write a book.

For the tech buffs, I used word 2002, I think. Someday I’ll need a fancier version, but see poverty above.

7. I heard through the grapevine, aka Twitter, that you recorded your voice for the For All the Tea in China audio book. What was that experience like? Have you listened to the final product? Have you used any other new methods to market your book?

I did record the audio! We just won some fancy awards for it – from Library Journal and AudioFile (Phile?). It was probably the very last time I’ll ever read For All the Tea in China, so it was kind of touching. And it was isolating, I was alone in a booth every day for a week. Just me and the product of all this labor. But I’m so happy I got the chance to do it – I actually had to audition to read my own book.

I would do anything to sell this book. A writer needs readers. If I thought it would help to bake cookies for every single person who sent me a bookstore receipt proving they bought the thing, I would. It has always been my hope that tea shops would pick it up, what the industry calls “non-traditional retail sales”. Michael Harney, of Harney and Sons, sells it. But it’s too disappointing to walk into tea shops in every city asking for it and only finding “Three Cups of Tea”

8. I understand your research came from mostly Fortune’s journals. What other methods did you use for your incredible research? What role did the Internet play in your research?

I made several trips to the British Library in London, where the remainders of the East India Company documents are kept. It’s a wonderful place and I had a mad crush on the brain of their China expert. The Company documents provided a good check on Fortune’s personal memoirs, I could confirm where he was when and what he was doing. I also spent a lot of time flying home to the Regenstein Library – my mother still lived in Chicago then. It’s the greatest open stack library on the planet, a tremendous resource, the entire world should bow down before the Regenstein and kiss what used to be Stagg field. (beware the radiation)

The internet was more helpful in the last years than it was in the beginning. When I began this project, I stood in the basement of Regenstein xeroxing all of Fortune’s books because they were only for sale for $145 by some rare academic press that made its money gouging libraries. Now everything is available on Google Books – I can download Fortune to my eReader. Oh, brave new world.

9. I left your book with a much deeper respect for botany and tea. The time and science that goes into each. What would you say was the most important thing you took with you after writing this book?

I, too, fell for the botanists in a big way. I’ve come to think of them in the same way I think of the guys at Xerox Parc in the 70s, the geeks who paved the way to a technological revolution. Nothing was ever the same again.

And personally, I have developed a healthy wariness of book writing. When I proposed this book, I was young and green, hopeful and optimistic. Now I am old and wizened and feel every mile, every disappointment . So really the most important thing I’ve learned is how truly special books are as a form. For two or three nights, or over the course of an airplane ride, some stranger engages with a project from my pen. I command their attention. They imagine my thoughts and follow my story. And people actually like it! I get letters. There is no magazine story that powerful – well, none that I’m likely to write, anyway. I’m still not certain writing books is worth all the pain – but the reward is profound.

10. What do you see for yourself in the future?

Someday I’ll write another book. I’m still feeling pretty bruised. Every time I talk about a new project, it ends up sounding like I’m describing weight lifting.

So for the moment I’ve had a great year travel writing for various magazines. It’s even more financially ruinous than writing books, but the immediate perks are better.

I need to earn a living. So I’ve been thinking about getting a real job. You know, one of those plentiful, rewarding, glamorous writing jobs.

For All the Tea in China can be found in a bookstore near you, or online.

(http://www.amazon.com/All-Tea-China-England-Favorite/dp/1400165377)

Or download a copy to your Kindl.

Follow Sarah Rose on Twitter: @TheSarahRose

These days it’s a necessity for car dealers to have a presence online especially on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Automobile advertisers need a medium where they can market event sales, show pictures, show feedback and customer testimonials easily, make announcements and keep track of their customer base, all things that Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter were built for.

I once worked with an auto dealer regarding their internet advertising and they have a thriving YouTube channel that is still going strong today. (youtube.com/user/TomSparksBuick) With YouTube you can post videos of your sales staff so people know exactly who they are dealing with before they even step foot on the lot. You can build a relationship and make yourself look trustworthy. Of course with big ticket retail a trustworthy relationship is like solid gold. YouTube can help you build that relationship quickly. The biggest thing we implemented was the customer review videos. You can do this with just a video camera and a few minutes with a satisfied customer. You can either tell people how trustworthy you are or you can show them. The latter is clearly the more effective way – and YouTube makes it just as easy.

If YouTube is a great way to show off your sterling reputation and spotless feedback record, then Twitter is your ticket to make sure you become their source for news on their favorite brands. Take Gary Lang Auto for example. They’ve used their Twitter to tell their followers all about when the latest cars are coming in and what they have coming up down the road as far as new products and events – and they have 1600 fans who use them as a resource. People are most likely to go back to big ticket retailers if they have demonstrated value in some way and that’s the best way to use Twitter if you’re in that category. It can also be a great way to live-blog your events and sales to drum up interest similar to what some music festivals and conventions do.

There are a lot of auto dealers who understand the value of Facebook. Gartner Hyundai in Aurora Illinois built a pretty good following. They have a good amount of fan interaction, which as I’ve said before is a great sign your social media advertising is working. It’s updated regularly with links and interesting discussion topics. They attract followers by holding Facebook exclusive contests, answering consumer questions on their page, and showing them new product pictures to get them interested. Another great feature in Facebook that more auto dealers and big ticket retailers could take advantage of is the ‘event’ page. You can use them to drum up interest in your holiday sales and tradeshows you’re sponsoring. The more pages you have the more chance you are going to catch someone’s eye. As long as you make sure to tie it all together at least.

As with everything one of the keys to having a social media presence is tying it all together. Tom Sparks’s great YouTube presence doesn’t do them much good if they don’t direct people there from the website, show them were they can ask questions on Facebook, get news on YouTube, or show it off in their advertising materials. Just in the last week, I had a freelance client that I was trying to encourage to do just the things on these pages. They don’t take a lot of time and ultimately will help your business, especially with big ticket items like cars it can really lead to a great windfall.

www.topdealerseo.com/7-benefits-for-car-dealers-using-twitter

www.goso.com/blog/2009/10/social-media-best-practices-for-auto-dealers/

www.pressdistribution.net/14896/tips-car-cars-sales-online-searching

In a nutshell Google Me is a social network that doesn’t have the restrictions that come with G-Mail like Google Buzz did. Other than what it doesn’t have, Google is playing it low-key and letting the speculation run rampant and spread word for them. All they are saying is that it will be a much simpler networking tool without all the games and spam messages. (Roughly the same thing Facebook said when they went up against MySpace.)

This would actually be Google’s third try at running a social network. The first try was way back in 2004 when Facebook was in its infancy. The Orkut caught on in Latin America but was a dud in the United States and Google Buzz was drowned out in complaints of privacy breaches and glitches that revealed private data. Of course you don’t get to be a company as big as Google without learning from your mistakes, right?

Google has had a habit hyping up their new products. Every year Google has a new and revolutionary product and sometimes that works in their favor and sometimes it doesn’t in the case of Google Buzz it just didn’t live up to its hype. As I said, this time Google is keeping quiet about exactly what Google Me is, preferring to let to build a groundswell by using sites like Wired. Com and G4tv to get people talking about what exactly what they have coming.

Google certainly learned the value of picking a good time to launch. Facebook has been getting some bad press recently for breaches in privacy and information exposing glitches. There’s even a movie coming out in the fall that could cause Facebook and the people behind it some headaches in the media (See trailer) If Google can spin Facebook’s bad press into good press for them this could be the break they’ve been waiting for.

So how does Facebook respond to all this? If I were their marketing wizard I would publicize the new privacy setting and talk about cracking down on spammers and bots.  I would promote Facebook like they did back when they took on MySpace.  They were the place to hold conversations, stay in touch with friends, and above all downplay all the bells and whistles that they’ve added over time and focus on the networking aspects.

One of the reason’s Facebook has been so successful is that it has shown a remarkable ability to adapt to what people want. When Twitter became a hit, Facebook quickly retooled their front page to assimilate with their ideas. If Google is going to beat Facebook it better do something that catches on quickly and surprises Facebook by doing something fairly innovative.  They said Google Buzz would be revolutionary but it turned out to be just another version of 4-Square using your G-Mail account.

Google has said they will launch Google Me later this year.   The odds are we’ll know pretty quickly whether or not it’s a success.   A massive launch like this is either a hit right out of the gate or it’s nothing and there are only so many times Google can announce they are taking on social networking before people stop listening so this could be their last shot at it.  As far as your own advertising dollars there could very well be a downturn in Facebook traffic as these privacy complaints pile up.  If internet privacy becomes a big issue Facebook will most likely find themselves doing some major damage control.  If Google Me can set itself apart from the rest it could be an interesting way to get your message out there.

news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20009159-265.html

edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/06/28/facebook.attitude/?fbid=EcJX7RW-7kT

www.inrumor.com/in/all/will-google-me-compete-facebook/

mashable.com/2010/06/30/google-me-rumors/

1. Userzoom (Sunnyvale, CA) provided the technology. They offer UX pros the ability to run online, task-based studies with geographically dispersed participants.
2. KeyLime Interactive (Miami, FL) moderated the sessions. They specialize in online web-based usability testing as well as traditional lab-based testing.

A little background about the study before diving into the results. Each Hotel site tested (Hilton, Marriot, Intercontinental, Starwood, Hyatt) were randomly assigned 50 different users to perform 2 tasks seperatly. Tasks took roughly 10 min in length to complete. Users were selected regardless of their prior affiliation with any hotel rewards program or familiarity with the site.

Tasks:

1. Finding a room on a beach at a particular time of year, particular distance from a landmark, within a set budget of $250.
2. Finding a hotel that provided parking to it’s guests

The web sites were evaluated on several metrics based on the tasks which users attempted to cary out (Overall success, Ease of use, Ease of Navigation, Clear where to start, Satisfaction with Time) and then are given an overall score (KLI score) by the moderating agency (Keylime interactive)

Data gathered from open questioning and Task 1 Results overview:

• Marriot, Hilton had largest groups of rewards program participants – and considered ‘most popular’ by users as well
• Hilton ranks best from a search perspective
• Hyatt ranks worst from a search perspective
• Marriot and Hilton brands scored well on ease of use and accessibility
• Hilton & Marriot score highest on success rate, Ease of Use, and Satisfaction. Hyatt scored lowest
• User satisfaction related directly to the time it takes to complete tasks

Data gathered from open questioning and Task 2 Results overview:

• Marriot scored highest on search, but most users had a hard time figuring out where to start clicking
• Hyatt & Starwood rank consistently low in all categories of evaluation within the task result

The KLI results from the 2 tasks were the aggregated for an overall KLI score

Executive takeaways

• All brands had varying strengths and weaknesses
• All brands have room for improvement
• All brands had a ‘negative’ score of with regards to the brand meeting end-users expectations (Hilton however was the ‘best’)
• No single brand or site should be picked on as being ‘bad’ in strict black and white terms. These results were simply the outcome of 2 tasks performed online. But it starts to paint a picture of the overall User Experience the various brands provide

When I started out in advertising, I did cold-calling for an agency’s sales team. I spent most of my day trying to get decision makers on the phone and listening to excuses and reasons why they didn’t need a digital advertising agency. I learned a lot about the misconceptions surrounding advertising that are not only untrue – but could actually be very bad for business. By far the number one excuse for people who didn’t want to do digital advertising was. “I just paid for a great new website,” Or some variation on that.

1. I just paid for a great new website

Having a nice looking website is great and it’s a necessity for doing business these days, but the truth is that if you rely on just a great website for your online presence, you are likely wasting your money. Having a great website is useless unless you do something to draw people to it. You can do more with a plain website, a great SEO presence, and a Facebook/YouTube campaign then you can by just pouring money into a website with tons of Flash and videos.

2. We’re a small business and we’re never going to have the budget to compete with bigger companies.

That’s another one I heard at least once a day. Of course if you have 2 pizza places that are successful you’re still not going to spend hundreds of millions or get a Super Bowl ad. But your Facebook advertising cost the exact same as Pizza Hut’s. Dominos spends as much on Twitter as I do ($0.00) every month. And you can by a video camera and post YouTube videos just as easily as Papa John’s can shoot and post a viral ad. You have just as much of a chance of catching on with your video as they do. That’s the beauty of the Internet; great ads have a way of catching on like a blaze of fire regardless of who made them.

3. Our audience is older and doesn’t use the internet.

That might have been a good excuse ten years ago but the facts show that more and more older people are using the internet for online shopping, keeping in touch with friends and family, and shockingly enough podcasts. With phones and TV connected to the internet becoming standard, and sites like Netflix making is easy and convenient to get movies major companies have started gearing some of their advertising to the 55 and over crowed. Even Facebook has started promoting itself as a place to keep in touch with your kids and grandkids showing that advertisers are taking older people surfing the net very seriously.

4. I’m trying Facebook and I don’t get a lot of fans.

This one is a big one that I dealt with just this last week. Business to Business pages don’t get a lot of fans. If you look at an owner or manager’s personal Facebook page you don’t see a lot of fan pages. The numbers you should be looking at are the ones that Facebook is kind enough to send you in an e-mail once a week. If you are the admin on a page you get metrics that say the number of visitors and how it’s changed since last week. Facebook knows that those are the numbers that ad agencies and marketing managers really want to see. They don’t tell you just who clicked the fan button. They tell you how many people took time to look at your page and those are the number that really matter. Don’t get hung up on the number of fans.

Ultimately, getting to the meat of what is true and not true about social media (and understanding the value of digital agencies) is really a question of doing the costs/benefits research and finding someone who is trustworthy to service your online marketing objectives. So, the next time a kid calls, trying to set up a pitch for a digital agency, keep an open mind; he could be your company’s next big thing!

www.g4commerce.com/all-the-cool-kids-are-doing-it/
www.socialmediaexaminer.com/4-facebook-marketing-myths-and-how-to-overcome-them/

www.silicon.com/technology/networks/2003/11/14/old-people-like-the-internet-39116903/

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090610074159

www.toprankblog.com/2010/06/content-marketing-curation-context

Most businesses these days have social networks accounts they maintain. Likewise, so does just about every user out there. The goal for each is to stay connected by taking advantage of the social web and its two-way nature; sharing content as well as consuming content shared by others.

Naturally, clients want to exploit social channels by advertising them on their sites as well.  Oftentimes now, when you set out to design a site for someone, you have to take into account the presence of social web controls. At first is was probably okay to just fill in a bit of white space with a Facebook or Twitter logo somewhere on the home page as an afterthought. But with the social web being nearly ubiquitous now, it’s time to reexamine that approach. It is critical to take into account the context of the space your share/follow icons will live. Also, consider which affordances you will incorporate to let the user know weather they are able to take actions for share, follow, or both. Unfortunately, there is little consistency across the web so far in presentation and few standards for where and when to use your social controls.

Context is critical. You should give people a reason to so something social on your site. If you want them to follow your Twitter account, make that suggestion next to some great content and hook them while they’re interested. Context has the power to give deeper meaning to something. If you simply tuck  your social calls to action into 16×16 space down in your footer, you are not leveraging their full potential.

Next, consider affordances. Affordances are the subtle details that let a user know what is going to happen if they perform an action. Classic examples include underlining hypertext, altering the visual treatment of a button when you roll over it, or changing the arrow cursor to a hand cursor when you can click and drag something. These signals give us all a pretty clear idea about how elements on the site work even if we are new to the interface. But what about when a designer just plunks down a Facebook logo onto the page? Do we all assume the same things about it’s meaning. I doubt it. If you click it will you go to that companies Facebook page? Or will you be prompted to be their ‘’friend’, or indicate weather you ‘like’ something? Who knows without a proper affordance? Let your audience know what is going to happen before it happens. This will ease anxiety and hopefully result in more clicks.

Finally, in a perfect world, there would be some consistency in the icons used. A universal ‘share’ icon is suggested at this website: http://shareicons.com/ but has yet to catch on in a meaningful way. Interestingly, there is no mention of ‘follow’ icons. Share and follow are distinctly different actions yet they are closely associated because they are reciprocal to each other. It also does not help many web sites incorporate the same icon sets for both functionality types.

This paradigm of large social media sites being omnipresent (even on other people’s sites!) is still a fairly new one. So it’s not surprising we don’t have it completely figured out yet. The old convention, ‘Design is in the details’, comes to mind. If you’re designing for a site, put some thought into your social controls. They deserve to be scrutinized and refined with just as much thought put into them as any other new twist that has come before them.

Threadless was started in 2000 with the prize money from a t-shirt design contest and has grown into an online retailer with a huge cult following. They’ve managed a social media following on par with major retailers without major advertising dollars. One way they’ve managed a fiercely loyal fan base was by promoting themselves as a major hub for fan interaction. At the onset of their launch they advertised a massive promotion that got people to create their own t-shirts. That initial investment paid off and they instantly became a place to buy and create fan made merchandise.

The general rule I follow with consumer based social media advertising is that the most you can expect to get is roughly a third of your core audience on your fan sites. (i.e. If you sell 150,000 TVs, you can’t really expect more than 50,000 Twitter fans.) Threadless (twitter.com/THREADLESS) has roughly 700,000 loyal customers according to their latest numbers, but they have 1.5 million Twitter followers. They’ve conquered Twitter by making sure it is the place to find out about all their latest promotions, contests, and sales. Looking at their Twitter page, it’s clear they haven’t forgotten what put them on the map. They build their Twitter around their followers and make sure to answer all questions and return comments. Even though they have 1.5 million followers ,it feels like you’re part of something small and intimate.

As I’ve said before, great companies use social media at all levels. If Threadless had seen their Twitter blow up and said, “That’s enough” they wouldn’t be so successful. They went on to develop a comprehensive Facebook page (www.facebook.com/threadless) that complements their Twitter ads nicely. They do Facebook-exclusive contests and promotions and constantly change the look of their page based on what new brands the company is promoting. They also use Facebook to showcase photos of products and events they sponsor to show that they are the hip place to be. Threadless has the kind of advertising campaigns that Ed Hardy and other small press clothing retailers can learn from.

If Threadless proved anything it’s that if your going to start an independent retailer online the launch is a major part of the advertising campaign. Runka Green Products (twitter.com/recycledstuff) took this lesson to heart by launching a massive campaign centered on an Earth Day online store opening. Even though they’ve only been around a few weeks now they have managed to steadily build a loyal group of over 700 Twitter followers. That’s very good for a company less than 3 months old. (Once helped launch a product line via Facebook and we were ecstatic when we got 35 fans our first 2 weeks) Runka took advantage of the huge audience that is online and into green products by creating a Facebook Application. (an inexpensive way to get people talking about your products. )

Runka also realized the value of constant updates to your Facebook and Twitter feed especially at the start up period. Just like writing letters if you don’t write them, people don’t write back. If you don’t tweet or post you won’t get any followers. Sure you might feel silly for a few weeks sending a message to 10 people but in the end those 10 people will build you a following. Any company from Runka the Threadless had 10 or 15 followers at one point but those followers soon turned to hundreds and for some, they have hit millions.

apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/runka_green_products?_fb_fromhash=82444f3773bc8a8e6434ac611b474df8&ref=mf

www.marketwatch.com/story/nt-media-launches-social-media-channels-on-twitter-and-facebook-2010-06-10?reflink=MW_news_stmp

www.allfacebook.com/2010/06/facebook-myths-rumors/

Optimize Javascript Code

1. Minimize DOM Access. Manipulating the DOM is very resource intensive for browsers.
2. Smart Event Handlers. Use Event Delegation. You can put on event handler on a container div and then figure out which button inside that div was actually clicked in the function to be executed.
3. Reduce size of private functions (those called only within the js itself, not those called in other documents). So function foobar() would become function a() .
4. Use local variables whenever possible
5. Use the IF statement when
   1. There are no more than two discrete values for which to test
   2. There are large number of values that can be easily separated into ranges
6. Use the SWITCH statement when
   1. There are more than 2 but fewer than 10 values in which to test
   2. There are no ranges for conditions because the values are nonlinear
7. Use array lookup when:
   1. There are more than 10 values to test
   2. The results of the conditions are single values rather than number of actions to be taken.
8. Avoid the FOR-IN loop
9. Use Duff’s Device for looping through arrays when you notice a bottleneck in loops that process a large number of items
10. Alias  javascript properties like foo.style or document.getElementById

Optimize Images

1. Use smushit.com or punypng.com to remove any unwanted metadata from your images.
2. Since smushit.com doesn’t strip meta from jpeg you can do it manually with jpegtran
3. Be sure to always check between gif, png 8, png 24, and jpg when saving images for the web to ensure that you’re using the format that will yield the smallest file size.
4. Optimize CSS sprites to go horizontally instead of vertically, combine similar colors to keep color count low (in other words have a sprite with all green together and  another with brown, but only do so if it keeps file size lower and http requests down. Only do it if it will not yeild higher http requests and not yeild higher file sizes. the whole point is to reduce those factors.) Also don’t leave big gaps between image in the sprite.
5. Favicon – Get one. Browers will get a 404 error even if you don’t have one. 404s are slow to respond. So keep it under 1k and be careful about your expires header since you can’t rename the file if you want to change it.
6. png 8 is able to save full alpha transparency but only at 256 colors and only from fireworks or some other app than photoshop. I can greatly reduce size from png 24.

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