The first links of the New Year!

Just tossing out a few links for thought on this mid-winter's day: 

What Will You Miss When Newspapers Disappear? (Seth Godin via PSFK) 

Would a Greener Apple Make for Sour Grapes? (via Undercurrents blog) 

January 29th, 1895: Modern Electricity is born! (via Wired.com) 

>Free iPod/iPhone Wallpapers featuring rock stars through the decades (these guys always have great downloads like this -- check out the free handwriting fonts post from a few weeks ago). 

Britian Reports: Broadband for all by 2012. (via Brand Republic) 

How Typos and Factual Errors Could Be Killing Your Blog Readership (via The Blog Herald)

Tips to Stay Green Around the Office, at Virtually No Cost. (via Graphic Define)

Check out this barrage of Obama-inspired advertising: 

Tropicana Squeeze Hires Obama Lookalike and Kids. (via The New Advertising)

Pepsi Borrows a Slogan...and a Design...and an Entire Advertising Campaign. (via Debbie Schussel)

Coke Trades 'The Coke Side of Life' for the Chance to 'Open Happiness.' (via Business Week)

A Coat of Paint for the White House

by J. Butler, Applecore Content Development Specialist

It started on January 20^th, at 12:01 PM, as President Barack Obama rose to take the oath of allegiance (never mind that he’d be doing a repeat later). Perhaps only a little blip on the fast-moving radar of cyber-space—but a huge step for social media.

Launched mere minutes after the official beginning of Barack Obama's Presidency, the White House now has a blog.

The first entry was attributed to Macon Phillips, the Director for New Media for the White House. The list of entries—as of this posting—is modest, but just by existing it makes the point loud and clear: this is going to be a Presidency unlike any that’s come before it. 

The blog wastes no time in outlining exactly what its purpose will be: to support Obama’s commitment to “…making his administration the most open and transparent in history.”

To say this is an incredible step is an understatement. The President's executive orders and proclamations will be publicly published in a forum that everyone has access to, at least theoretically. True, within two hours of swearing in, President Obama had issued an official proclamation, posted for everyone to read. One aspect of the blog will be videos, sound clips and pictures from the President’s Administration, a promise quickly followed by having the video and full text of his inaugural speech up by the next day.

One important thing to notice about the blog? It’s filled with one word that stands out: “we.” And if that isn’t the perfect word to sum up social media, I don’t know what is. 

For the Sake of Facebook Friendship

by J. Butler, Applecore Content Development Specialist


A recent Burger King viral marketing ploy lost steam before it ever left the ground—but not for lack of publicity.

The campaign, called “Whopper Sacrifice,” took the form of a Facebook application. In exchange for dropping ten Facebook friends, the ruthless user would get a coupon for a free Whopper. It was a cute, funny way to plump up Burger King’s brand, and more importantly, get their product in the hands of would-be customers.

But of course, that’s not the whole story. The campaign was taking off—a total of 233,906 users found themselves on the Whopper chopping block—when a little hitch appeared.

A key point of the campaign rested on informing the dropped friend that they had been “sacrificed” for the sake of a Whopper. Well, that was a clear breach of Facebook’s “de-friending” policy, which allows users to cull their friends list without fear that their former pals would be notified.

While Facebook only asked that the notification feature of the app be disabled, the agency (the controversial but attention-grabbing Crispin Porter + Bogusky) decided that the spirit of the campaign would be lost, and chose instead to shut down the whole works.

The Whopper Sacrifice website now reads that the "Whopper Sacrifice has been sacrificed." But clever Burger King has the last word: they’ve kept a feature that allows de-friending victims to strike back—with an official Burger King Angry-Gram.

The Inauguration in Real Time

by J. Butler, Applecore Content Development Specialist

The whole world—or at least, Western  media—is abuzz covering the first 100 days of Obama’s Presidency. But what was really neat was the seamless integration of the same kinds of technology that helped put him in the White House into the coverage of his first day on the job.  

CNN.com and Facebook teamed up to bring a live feed of the inauguration coverage into the homes of people around the world. The real hook, though, came in the presentation: while watching the proceedings of the inauguration, the video was spliced with a Facebook feed of status updates from users logged in around the world, updated in real time.

The linking of the two worked so well, providing a real-time reaction to what was going on and most importantly, capturing the zeitgeist of the day. Reading the joyful, almost giddy reaction of people who have never met but share a fantastic, powerful bond showcases the awesome heights that social media can reach---when done correctly. 

Who knows in what kind of direction this rapid-fire interactivity could take in the future? And what a perfect way to punctuate the first truly interactive election. 

*UPDATE!* Stats from psfk (emphasis mine): 

The inauguration prompted more than one million status updates during the event, averaging over 4,000 status updates per hour Tuesday morning and peaking at 8,500 updates every minute while President Obama was giving his speech. As of 11:45 a.m. Eastern time, CNN had served 13.9 million live video streams globally since 6 a.m., according to Mashable.

Using Gmail for Internal Email

by Greg Pike, Applecore Web Developer

A Little Background
At our office we use one email for sending all of our server-generated emails. We have scripts that connect to the server and use that email for sending notifications, contact forms, and other website-related emails. In the past our scripts could send emails and mask who they were coming from by simply changing the value of the "From" field. For instance, if I went to a contact form and entered my email as johnsmith@example.com and click Send, the email received should appear from johnsmith@example.com rather than the generic email used by the server for sending mail.

For years, with our host, this was never a problem. We recently switched our email host to Gmail and, along with a few other technical hiccups from the switch, we had a problem with masking emails as from a specific sender.

Why is there even a problem sending these emails from Gmail?
Gmail blocks server-generated emails from masking who they’re from. Gmail forces the developer to authenticate themselves as whatever email they want to send from. That is, if you wanted your script to send an email as John Smith you would need his username and password to send it from the server. This isn’t usually ideal, but Gmail is trying to prevent servers from sending emails from someone without their consent.

Disclaimer
We managed to come up with an ad-hoc solution to the problem for any small organizations, like ours, that run intranets or scripts that send external emails from employees or members. It isn’t glamorous and it unfortunately doesn’t really work for anyone who isn’t a part of your network, but it’s a solution that met our needs. And since we couldn’t find any references to it online, we’re making our own contribution.

Our solution
Log into the Gmail account you intend to send emails from. This account should be the one your web scripts access. Click Settings and go to Accounts. Here, add the account of each member of your network. You can do this by clicking "Add another email address." As long as John Smith is associated with the server email (the one you logged in to), Gmail can send emails as if they’re from his account. This goes for all members of the network.

It might be wise to explain to your organization ahead of time that you need them to confirm their association with this Gmail account. When you add them as an additional account they’ll receive an email that tells them they need to verify that they wish for their account to be associated with your server account.

Good luck with it! 

Understanding Bounce Rates

by Greg Pike, Applecore Web Developer

Bounce rate. It's one of the top Google Analytics metrics and yet many people are still confused by it. What does it mean next to exit rates? What's the difference?

 A “bounce” is when a user has shown little interest in your website. In other words, when a user hits your website only to leave or ignore it immediately.

 The bounce rate is therefore the percentage of users who bounce. If four out of every ten users bounce, your bounce rate is 40%. This says four out of every ten users came to your site, didn't find what they were looking for, and left.

 Bounce rate: "I came. I puked. I left." - Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Analytics Evangelist and author of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.

Average Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is a performance measure for a website, particularly websites keen on converting users into customers like e-commerce websites. Most bounce rates will be somewhere between 35% and 60%. It's good practice to strive to reach the lowest possible bounce rate you can for a website.

Causes of High Bounce Rates

High bounce rates can be caused by a number of factors.

• Poor content. Users are nosy and want to learn more, but if your content isn't useful or not relevant they will not waste their time.
• Misplaced links, buttons, graphics or ads. Web users are very impatient and if they don't see what they want right away, they'll simply leave. Review how you're communicating to your users or redesign your website to draw them in. Google’s Website Optimizator will allow you to compare visitor metrics for multiple versions of the same page. Try creating several versions of a page to determine what will perform better.
• Abbreviated domain name. Many organizations share abbreviated names. For example, MWI is both the name of a search engine marketing company (mwi.com) and conflict mediation company (mwi.org).
• Start pages. Any user that has your website set as their start page will hit your website every time they open their web browser.
• Information pages. Users can be quick to jump around to find the information they desire. Information pages tend to have high bounce rates because users hit them to learn something specific, and when they acquire that knowledge they return to where they came from or move on.

There are some websites that will have high bounce rates and there's very little that can be done to change it. For the other websites that want to take action and lower their bounce rate, there isn't really one solitary solution. Every website has different content, different audiences and many other distinctive factors that make it unique-- which means improving bounce rate can only be taken on a case by case basis. That magic word or one-step process to give you a better bounce rate? It doesn't exist. 

Bounce Rate and Exit Rate

At first glance, it might be difficult to see a difference between bounce and exit rate. Exit rate is similar to bounce rate, but differs in that it calculates the percentage of users that "exit" the site from any particular page. For example, a user hits the default landing page and navigates to a news article. There is no bounce because the user stayed on the website. Then the user goes to google.com and searches for something. This is an exit. Exit rate is the percentage of users that leave the site from a given page divided by the total number of users that visit that same page.

 Let's break it down.

Ten users visit the Applecore Games page.

Two users hit this page from a search query and the other eight all get there from the site navigation (meaning they were already on the Applecore site before going to the games).

One of those two users (from the search engine) leaves the page and goes back to their search results and the other one clicks a link and plays one of the games.

Of the other eight, three users leave the website and go to eBay to buy books on the definition of Exit Rates.

The other five click on links and also play the games.

Bounce Rate: 1 / 10 - 10%
Exit Rate: 3 / 10 - 30%

 

Exit rate is not necessarily a bad thing. Users cannot stay on your website forever. It does, however, give you insight as to what pages leave your visitors feeling the need to move on.

Watching The Future of TV

by J. Butler, Applecore Content Development Specialist

The days of appointment TV are looking like a thing of the past.

In recent years, viewers have found themselves with more choice than ever when it comes to television, with even basic cable clocking in at nearly 75 channels. More specialty channels crop up every year, with interests so finely tuned that you have to wonder who exactly tunes in (are there really enough viewers to justify WealthTV?). But something else has changed about TV: it's not just what we watch, it's also become a choice of how we watch it. 

The writing on the wall came when Tivo first appeared on the horizon. It eclipsed the sometimes unreliable, unwieldy technology of VCR, replacing tapes with a hard drive and human forgetfulness with automatic recording (which meant that viewers would never miss an episode of their favorite shows). A pioneer in digital video recording, Tivo allowed viewers the freedom to watch their favorite shows whenever they had the time, instead of making the time.

That, it turns out, was the first wave.

Now, the internet has taken it one step further, bypassing the need for a subscription or even a special device. With the advent of YouTube, Hulu and other online resources, the only thing many viewers need to catch up on their favorite shows is a speedy internet connection. In just one year, the percentage of Americans watching some prime time TV on their computer screens instead of their TV sets went from 6% in 2007 to over 20% in 2008.

The effects of this shift aren’t hard to see. Saturday Night Live made history this year with Tina Fey’s infamous impersonation of Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin; by the following Wednesday, NBC.com reported the skit had become their most-watched viral video ever, with 5.7 million views. 

So the times began a'changing. No longer would you need to rely on external sources—such as the daily newscast or commentary programs—to catch all the highlights of the day. Miss Obama’s inaugural speech? No problem; just catch it later on YouTube. With that, history has been broken down into democratic snippets, letting everyone catch up in their own time. With the explosion of these easily uploaded, accessible video clips, the viewer is allowed to create their own highlights. 

Other networks have figured out ways to profit from this shift. New episodes of CW favorite Gossip Girl are available for purchase on iTunes the next day for $1.99, and the show’s popularity has exploded as a result—but only online, as the broadcast version consistently under-performs. The explosive online success of Gossip Girl has been called a preview of TV 3.0, and the larger networks have gradually followed suit, as ABC made popular shows Lost and Desperate Housewives into downloads for iPods, as well as streaming select episodes for free on their website. Rival powerhouses NBC and CBS quickly did the same.

This hasn't proven a huge moneymaker yet (at least not compared to the usual revenue from advertising sponsors, TV stations and cable channels) but the networks seem determined to stay on board this potentially lucrative bandwagon. It's a wise move indeed, especially as the Information Generation (that is, those born from 1980-2000 who grew up using computers) become the overwhelming majority. This kind of instantaneous delivery system is poised to only increase. 

What might be the next step in television's horizon? Telling stories in a way that lets everyone play along. A Finnish network has developed Accidental Lovers, a new romantic drama. The twist? Its concept puts the viewer in a pivotal storytelling position, encouraging text messages to influence the outcome of the story:

On the screen, viewers will see their text messages and will hear the characters respond to their messages. A glowing heart will show whether their messages are warming or cooling the hearts of the romantic couple, and viewers will see the relationship develop according to their wishes. 

If the romance doesn't progress as viewers wish, they can try again later as four runs of the programme will be broadcast showing 12 different evolutions of the love affair. Each one will be different, with each reacting to the viewers' wishes. 

Such a concept could mean the revival of appointment television once and for all—and a whole new meaning to how we see interactive media. 

Google Does it Yet Again

by J. Butler, Applecore Content Development Specialist

Google has become such a mainstay that it would hard to remember a world without it. In fact, the day that we all knew Google wasn’t just the latest technological trend probably came sometime in July 2005---when “Google” entered the English language as a verb:

goo·gle • \gü-gəl\: to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web.

 These days, Google is consistantly the leader of the pack when it comes to innovations. In late 2006, they bought the online video site YouTube for US$1.65 billion in stock. Come September 2008, Google launched Google Chrome, its own web browser.

Late last year, Google announced the introduction of Google Flu Trends, a service that will take the IP addresses of users searching for flu-related queries, compile them, and track the active areas of flu outbreaks weeks before the official data from the Center for Disease Control is released.

As of May 2008, Hitwise reports that Google is the most used search engine on the web accounting for 68.29% of all US searches, way ahead of the closest competition—Yahoo, for example, trails behind at 19.95%. But did you ever stop to think about the path Google took to become the household name that it is today?

Older search engines would only rank the importance of a site by how many times a search term appears on it—if you searched for “apple pie,” you’d be given pages based only on how often “apple pie” appeared on the site…not based on the overall quality level.

But Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two PhD. students out of Stanford University, had a bigger dream: to devise a ranking system that could accurately reflect the relevance and quality of a website.

And so, in January 1996, Google began as the research project of two students. The germ of their idea was a search engine that could create a more accurate ranking system by looking at the relationships between websites rather than just the web content alone. Revolutionary? We think so.

After much testing, the company was incorporated as Google Inc. on September 4, 1998 (making them Applecore’s slightly older brother). Their unofficial corporate motto? “Don’t be evil.”

            Google’s approach paved the way for Search Engine Optimization (or SEO). Search Engine Optimization is just what it sounds like—it’s enriching a website with the right tools (like keywords, links and content) to place it higher in the page rankings of Google and other search engines. Using SEO properly is two parts science, one part art, helping to achieve top rankings organically (at no cost). SEO has transformed into an incredible tool for attracting both the right kind and the greatest volume of traffic for a website.

It’s an exciting wait to see what other innovations Google will cook up next, because with every new invention comes inspiration from seeing people be their most creative, most insightful selves. 

The Motrin Moms Mobilize

by J. Butler, Content Development Specialist

Is there really no such thing as bad publicity?

A few weeks ago, the internet was buzzing with one tale of social media gone horribly awry. The story became notorious almost instantly: Motrin, manufacturer of painkillers, was at the center of the controversy, with a well-armed, plentiful group of consumers opposing them: mothers.

It began with a simple 30-second spot and a handful of print ads over the course of one weekend. Motrin, aiming for tongue-in-cheek clever, was sympathizing with the joys (and aches) of being a new mother: namely, the backache, muscle pain and headaches associated with carrying your child around in a sling instead of in a stroller or pram—often called ‘baby-wearing.’ While their message was sincere (“we feel your pain, let us help”), their approach proved too glib for so sensitive a topic: the message that emerged was “attachment parenting is trendy and tedious.”

As the video started circulating the internet, and almost as soon as blogging moms saw it, a powerful reaction began to brew. The ad, clearly intended as sly, harmless fun, was instead hitting a nerve. Calling baby-wearing a “supposedly” good bonding method, the ad implied that one of its chief benefits was making the wearer look like “an official mom.”

Many viewers thought it disrespectful to parents, and condescending to child-rearing. These outraged parents took to the streets of the information highway and protested loudly, on very public venues such as their blogs, Twitter, and YouTube. They began a thread on Twitter (#motrinmoms), collected the complaints and turned them into a YouTube video that had nearly 21,000 views within a handful of days. In other words, they got organized—and got themselves heard.

Motrin responded quickly by removing the offending video and issuing a formal apology on their website (see a play by play of the weekend’s activity here). The lesson here is clear: the instantaneous nature of social media means a new kind of responsibility for those who create content online. There’s never been a better time to speak up and harness such a powerful medium, because customers are now engaging in an active conversation about the products they use. Instead of using an apology to merely appease customers, mistakes can be used to spark a dialogue that could have endless potential in the future.

 

Source: Web Strategist