L&S Unscripted

In the ever evolving realm of social media platforms, Google has just launched the latest utility – Google Buzz. This new platform has ease of use and convenience in mind, not to mention the extensive following and familiarity Google already possesses.

Similar to Facebook and Twitter, Buzz is a platform where friends can connect, share thoughts, photos, videos, chat and link accounts with other social media sites. But there are a few distinct characteristics that set Buzz apart from the rest. One being that Buzz is built directly into Gmail, giving it approximately 150 million immediate users from day one. This gives users a social media component in addition to full service email in one convenient stop.

Another delineating characteristic is Buzz’s slightly more advanced and selective privacy features. Users can switch from a public conversation thread to a private chat via Google Talk in Gmail. Furthermore, lists can be created that allow users to control which friends see certain content, while blocking others from that specific buzz. Users also have the option of making their Buzz public or just for friends.

After investigating my own Buzz, I found the convenience of the instant connections and only one login for Gmail and Buzz to be a nice component. I have not witnessed much activity yet, but I am sure that will soon change as users start to learn of this new utility and its many features.

Google’s omnipotent power and presence in the search engine and email markets will only add to the growth that Buzz may potentially see. As we all know, social media is advancing and gaining momentum daily. Keep your ears open as the “Buzz” is sure to spread.

More notes from the International Advertising Bureau’s MIXX conference. 

Can you imaging spending 3/4 of your ad budget in ditial marketing?  Adobe can, and they do.  They have created proven campaigns, and alleviated concerns by sharing data and results.  The first speaker of the conference, Anne Lewis, Senior VP of Adobe, set the theme with this statement: It’s ALL Advertising.   When you think about it, it’s true.  Every piece of material we put out there for a brand can either credit or discredit that product or brand.  It’s important to make sure that what you are putting out there is relevant to your target audience. 

Sanford Children’s Hospital partnership with the Great Plains Zoo was featured on ABC Nightly News with Brian Williams last week.  What an awesome program for kids staying in the Castle of Care!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/vp/34072231#34072231

Three days learning about new products, sneak peeks of emerging technologies and networking with over 5000 of your peers and industry experts. The annual event, held last week in Los Angeles, brings all of these elements together to give attendees an unparalleled conference experience. From the general sessions to the workshops and labs attendees are exposed to the tools that they need to get the job done.

To start the conference off on the right note Adobe released ColdFusion 9 the night before the first general session. This release contains new features and enhancements that make developing, maintaining and managing CF apps easier than ever. More on the features and benefits of ColdFusion 9, and ColdFusion in general, will be coming in a future post.

General Session #1

“Our goal is to help you and all of your clients reinvent their businesses in this digital age. To be more effective, more profitable and more agile.” Shantanu Narayen, President and CEO – Adobe Systems Inc.

The kickoff session was about using all of the available tools to create a uniform experience across multiple platforms and mediums. Development is no longer just about making sure your application works on a PC and a MAC, but that it looks and functions the same on all web enabled devices (web browsers, desktops, smart phones, web enabled TVs)

Flash 10.1 which will start rolling out on computers, netbooks and mobile devices in early 2010 will eliminate the need to build different versions for multiple devices and allow developers to build and maintain one codebase. The notable exception is the iPhone (and iTouch) which will support pre-compiled flash apps, but not web based flash through the built in Safari browser.

With Adobe’s pending acquisition of Omniture, it will become easier than ever to allow developers to gain access to analytics for rich internet applications.

The first session was closed out with a exclusive sneak peak of the upcoming film Avatar introduced by producer Jon Landau. He explained how they used Adobe products to solve real life production issues and throughout the entire production process. 3D technology has definitely come a long way!

General Session #2

The second general session focused on real life applications built using Adobe technologies. 

FedEx has developed a real-time tracking application with Flex and LiveCycle Data Services that allows them to monitor the location and status of their delivery vehicles. It can also track trending and send alerts when it detects problems with equipment or delivery delays. History is also stored and can be used to replay the route for review.

The crowd was shown a demonstration about a truck with a failing refrigeration unit and a package that needed to remain between a  certain temperature range. When a sensor started showing a rise in temperature over a relatively short period of time staff was alerted and immediately began to look for a service location on the current route. The truck was re-routed and the delivery times were updated to display the new delivery time. Within 20 minutes the vehicle was fixed and the driver back on to the destination. Once the vehicle was within 30 minutes of the destination a delivery alert was sent to the recipient and the package was delivered on time. In this case, the application helped FedEx prevent delivery of a spoiled product and the liability of replacing the item as well as meeting the customers’ expectations. (http://www.youtube.com/?v=Tqn2iXsqQ44)

The U.S. Postal Service Augmented Reality demo was by far the most practical AR application that I have seen to date. The premise is o place the item you would like to ship in front of the camera and a virtual box appears around it. This allows the user to select the correct size box for shipping. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpS3LeCiCtc)

John Mayer Augmented Reality demo – http://max.adobe.com/johnmayer/

Sneak Peeks – These live demonstrations showcase features that Adobe is working on to make their products better.  Among the fan favorites were Hierarchical Undo, Content Aware filling, ROME, server side actionscript and the Flash CS5 physics engine. These features, while still in early beta, are impressive to say the least and promise to help designers and developers to spend less time working and more time on innovation.

The conference provided valuable information about all of Adobe’s products. While I tailored my sessions to focus mainly to Cold Fusion, most of them also detailed how the different products work together seamlessly to provide the best solution for the end user.

Additional information and links to the general and individual sessions can be found at http://max.adobe.com

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:10 — 3.9MB)

Webinars are easy to come by. If you’ve shared your email address with any kind of marketing or advertising website you probably have an invitation to one sitting in your inbox right now.

Presenting a webinar on the other hand… that’s a different story.  Preparing, practice and producing a 60 minute “show” can be hard. But in the words of Coach Jimmy Dugan from A League of Their Own,  “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard… is what makes it great.”

Take a listen as The Extra Minute sits down with John Pohlman, VP of Creative Services at Lawrence & Schiller, to discuss the challenges and rewards of hosting a webinar.

For the Social Media Boot Camp season finale, we brought in the ratings boosters –a.k.a. VP Dan Edmonds (@monkeyboy5280) and VP John Pohlman (@johnpohlman) to discuss the impact of social media on our design world.

For those not familiar with the history of social media design, let me give you a brief overview.  In the mid-1990’s we entered the era of Early Static Websites. These websites allowed users to view the website’s message but only accounted for one-way communication, similar to traditional advertising. The era of Early Web Applications was soon created and those applications allowed online users to interact solely with the propriety content on the website, but two way communications started to take hold; Oh No! What’s an advertiser to do! (j/k J)

Today, we have entered into the golden era of Social Web Applications, which allows for multiple-way communication, promotes interactions and connects people together. This is why design is so important, people are using these websites to interact with other users and the brand, and users don’t need a poorly designed website getting in their way.

To succeed in the current era of Social Web Applications there are two important rules to follow:

1. Don’t Do Anything without a Plan

2. No Need to Invent the Wheel Twice.

These may seem like very basic rules to follow, but it’s good to remember that though the medium of interacting is new and different, the design concept behind the interaction is at the core, the same.

The Best Practices of Social Media Design (summed up in webinar 10): Make Interacting Easy. When a user comes to a website they need to be able to engage quickly and without a long search for the content they want, or thought they would find. Think of how many times you have gone to a website and quickly wanted to make a purchase, upload a file, or find a link, but the icon seems to have disappeared from the site!  I know I get irritated when I spend too long on the website; for some reason my frustration “rope” is much shorter when working with technology than in the off-line world. Technology is here to make life easier, not more complicated; a website should be designed with the users’ intentions in mind.

In the era of Social Web Applications, users want to become a part of the website, so it is important to design and support the development of online communities. Everyone always wants to feel connected and a part of something, so design your website as a place for members to share interests, join groups or post blogs. As we have entered the web applications era, we want users to become part of the site and have it be a place to communicate and connect with others of similar interests.

At the end of the webinar, @johnpohlman and @monkeyboy5280 didn’t leave any cliff hangers but they did leave some words of wisdom: Make sure the experience belongs to the user!

Thank you for participating in our webinars, and see you next season!

If any of you out there manage blogs, you know the battle fought with spam comments. For a long time, they were complete gibberish, often coming in the form of public domain literary works cut-up and strewn together like an over-zealous ransom note. Then they became intelligible but racy. It was this shift in content (often promising much more than it could ever deliver [don't ask]) that spurned the blogging world into action, much like a father of young children racing to the DVD player after remembering just how lenient the ratings were on movies produced in the ’80s. (MPAA film ratings tip: a 1984 PG is slightly less wholesome than a 1960 R.)

Since that time, spam-collection plugins and techniques have become much more advanced. They have become so advanced, in fact, that we are ushering in a new era of spam content: the spamversation. It is my belief that this spam tactic aims to be general and complimentary in hopes that the blog administrator will leave their comment intact. The benefit here is that their URL (which they so desperately want you to click) is now displayed to the public.

To use an entomological metaphor, the spamversation comment is a moth, unassuming and harmless. But we crush moths, don’t we.

Today, I ran across a little gem as I went through my email. The comment has been eradicated, but I wanted to share it with the world.

My brother has a blog similar to yours but it is written in Spanish. I like yours better to be honest.

Like a moth, it caught my eye, dancing ever closer to the bare light bulb that is the comments section. Alas, floating moth dust is all that remains. (I don’t have a “blog administrator” metaphorical equivalent for that visual.)

I never liked that old saying, “Nice guys finish last.” I don’t like it because often it is true. I also don’t like it because it isn’t true.

In the end nice guys finish first. Because they can look at themselves in the mirror and people respect them. Sometimes people even say nice things about them when they aren’t around. So maybe it isn’t that they finish last. It’s more that, because they are nice, they don’t call attention to themselves and don’t get the credit they deserve when they deserve it.

Let’s take Mt. Vernon, SD native, Iowa Hawkeye star and Minnesota Viking Linebacker Chad Greenway for example. He is a nice guy. I say that even though my wife went to high school prom with his uncle. I have to say it. Because it is true. Only a nice guy would have his NFL draft party at Wermers’ Lounge in his hometown while helping dad on the hog farm. And only a good guy would commit to donating $5,200 to Sanford Children’s Hospital if he makes the NFL Pro Bowl team.

That’s where you come in. Players are selected to their position in the Pro Bowl by three votes. The coaches, players and fans each have one vote. Chad is near the league leaders in tackles and forced fumbles. A number of Facebook groups and other social media efforts have sprung up in support of Chad’s Pro Bowl bid. Look them up. Get out there and join the fun. And most importantly, go to www.nfl.com/probowl/ballot and vote for Chad. As they used to say in Chicago, vote early and vote often. On the NFL site that is encouraged. Be sure to vote soon. The deadline is December 9th.

So why has all the viral dust begun to stir in support of Mr. Greenway. Mostly, because he’s earned it on the field. And in part, because he is a nice guy. Here’s your chance to help the nice guy finish first. And then maybe we won’t have to hear that annoying old saying anymore.

Vote for Chad!

Said another way, don’t leave Chad hanging.

Sorry, couldn’t help myself on that one.

Lawrence & Schiller received two Sioux Falls Business Journal Readers Choice Awards this week:

Best advertising agency
Best web site developer

http://www.argusleader.com/article/20081119/BJNEWS07/81118064

Thanks to our Clients for allowing us to work on the many great projects that attributed to these awards!

It has been brought to my attention that I needed a title. First of all, I’m flattered because that means I’m official. And you know what comes after a title, that’s right, business cards. Yippee! Just in time to show-off at holiday gatherings. After many sleepless nights, I ended up rejecting:

Blogger-in-chief – too trendy

Manager of Futuring – too made-upy

Brand Champion – too everyday and too implied, I’m ALWAYS that

Creative Functionality Facilitator – didn’t want to make the any “creatives” around here feel even more insecure

For awhile, I was going with Sasquatch because of the fact that everyone talks about me but doesn’t know for sure if I actually exist. (Hello people, these words of insight don’t just magically appear…)

So after much hullabaloo and an episode of “True Blood” – my title will officially be Shapeshifter. It’s because on any given day I get just as excited for award-worthy creative work as I do a spreadsheet that shows amazing ROI. I could be a using Classic Yahoo one minute and signing up to be a Beta Tester on another site the next. I might play the role of agency den mother or high-fivin frat brother. I jump around from being 22 and loving my first job out of college to being 72 and still being amazed at this industry. Not to mention how much fun all the other ages in between are. Each with their own perspectives and challenges I can’t wait to share. Being able to transform into different personas is going to be A.W.E.S.O.M.E. But did you know I can also transform myself into animals? It’s pretty obvious what my fav is going to be….a fly on the wall.

Today is Friday and typically not alot of “meetings” so . . .I have some time. Interesting that today was the unofficial day of the scarf. In South Dakota, we have fully embraced the scarf as our winter necklace. Its too bad because I really like “the scarf” as a fashion accessory but now since its became standard L&S wear, I obviously will not be wearing my faves as frequently. Don’t believe me? I had a few helpers in the agency take these pics. So – what’s your take on the next item to make it on the L&S hot list?

Today is the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, making it Election Day.  If ever there was a day to make time to get home before seven, today is it.  The South Dakota Secretary of State website has a number of great election resources, including this gem: Unofficial General Election Results.

This web application will automatically update itself when new election results are in.  The site allows you to view election results for Statewide Elections, Ballot Questions, and Legislative Results to name a few.  It’s the perfect web companion.

A bowl of popcorn, a warm blanket, a loved one, and election results.  Who could ask for more?