Facebook does not own your data and content

Chris Kelly, Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer says;

in no uncertain terms that Facebook does not own your data and content, never did and never will.

Phew! That’s good to know (well if they say it, it must be true!). Read the Facebook terms of service for yourself. The content enables the technology to survive, so it’s pretty shaky ground.

Click here full the full story anyway.

Feb 16 to 23 is Internet Blackout Week NZ

Feb 16 to 23 is Internet Blackout Week NZ. You can join The New Zealand Internet Blackout to protest against the Guilt Upon Accusation law ‘Section 92A’ that calls for internet disconnection based on accusations of copyright infringement without a trial and without any evidence held up to court scrutiny.

It's a black out - the likes of Stephen Fry have have acknowledged the absurdity of incoming copyright laws by "blacking out" social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

Someone like myself could be a prime candidate to be targeted by this law. I help run a small record label and as A&R manager I am regularly sent tracks to consider for signing via all sorts of download methods, but to an outsider it will look like i am just downloading loads of tracks from file sharing sites. So instead of potentially protecting my label from illegal downloads the new law could be severely impinging on our ability to function properly.

Section 92A is an amendment to the Copyright (New Technologies Act) which states that:

(1) An Internet service provider must adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for termination, in appropriate circumstances, of the account with that Internet service provider of a repeat infringer.
(2) In subsection (1), repeat infringer means a person who repeatedly infringes the copyright in a work by using 1 or more of the Internet services of the Internet service provider to do a restricted act without the consent of the copyright owner.

This week protesters against the law are “blacking out” their twitter and facebook accounts as well as various other social networking facilities.

Click here to read more about the proposed law. It’s a shocker!

Spider-man summed up Twitter

Social media is obviously changing the way we interact with each other. For a lot of people it has happened quickly, and they are unsure as to how to use this new form of communication. What should be the tone of your facebook comments, twitters, or blogs etc.

Exactly how much of yourself should you put out there?

Just remember, your workmates will most likely be reading comments you meant for friends and family, and vice versa. Once it is out there, it is out there. What can seem like a throw-away comment could hold all sorts of connotations that you did not intend to, and it can be around the world in seconds.

Before you press submit, just take a moment to read that twitter post and think “what are the implications of this tweet?”

Social media provides you with  a powerful  and far-reaching voice. And as Spider-man famously said “With great power comes great responsibility.”

twitter message

Hi, steve (crashhelmet).

Barack Obama (BarackObama) is now following your updates on Twitter.

- yup. Leader of world leaders.

RFP or RIP

Do you really have a chance of winning that RFP that you are spending all that time on? Have you been blinded by the idea that it is an opportunity that can’t be passed up?

Responding to an RFP usually takes a lot of time and effort. Do you really think your company is going to be the best placed vendor to win this account, or are you just throwing your hat in the ring and hoping for the best? I am not saying that you should only pitch for projects you are certain you’ll win, but you really should look at your motivations for responding.

Time has never been so precious, and the more time you spend chasing your tail the worse that is going to impact on your business. I have done it – a few times, spending days (and nights) putting together a response and then missing out. Just to show you how blinded I got to the fact we were pitching for a job never going to win, the last shocker i had we missed out to a small company called Microsoft. In hindsight what was i thinking? Well – I wasn’t, I just saw the dollar signs and the high profile logo in the portfolio. I simply didn’t do the research into who else might be responding to the request.

Another thing to be wary of is RFPs that demand unreasonable guarantees and warranties, levels of support and service, and other such things that will haunt you years after the site has gone live. Stand back and look at the big picture.

In a time where work is more scarce, how you spend your time will have a huge effect on the future success of your business. It’s important to be clear on why you are responding to the RFP and make sure you are not wasting valuable time and resource on a wild goose chase.

Internal meetings are costing your agency money

I just had another internal meeting. My notes consisted of the following list: the date, the reason we were there, and then in no particular order; a doodle of a transparent 3D cube, a very bad drawing of a man in a wee dune buggy, and some random swirly scribbles. Another successful meeting.

Before I used to be invited to internal meetings I was envious of those who were in the meetings. I wanted to be in the meetings. Meetings seemed exciting and there were lots of them. What sort of brilliant decisions and ground-breaking insight was being offered in these meetings. The answer was somewhat disappointing. Now I know why there are so many meetings. Meetings are, quite often, a complete time waster.

An internal meeting of say 7-8 people that runs for an hour is costing your company huge money. Especially if you come out of it and nothing much has been accomplished. I am just as guilty as anyone as walking into these meeting with no real agenda. How come internal meetings are not run with the same efficiency as (I assume) client meetings are?

From now on I am proposing to put this simple plan in place. Whoever calls the meeting pulls out the white board (or whatever) and writes this down…

1. Why are we here.
2. How do we address this issue.
3. Where to from here.

Then put a stop watch on and try and resolve it in 15 minutes. Maybe borrow from toastmasters and have a warning system to let you know how long you’ve been talking. However you decide to tighen things up, I bet there will be a lot less notes consisteing of little men in dune buggies.

5 quick tips for avoiding having your email newsletter end up in the bin/spam folder

We have a lot of clients who come to us asking for an email newsletter that they can send their clients. After the usual painful battle of ensuring the list is valid and legal, and arguing why using a specialised delivery facility is better than just firing it out from outlook, we get down to design and content. And this is so often where the newsletter falls over and is bound for the spam filter, or being deleted without even being read. So often the design or the content make the newsletter pointless, or even worse, irritating.

Here are 5 quick tips on how you may avoid having your email newsletter end up in the bin or spam folder

You can use services like MailChimp to create attractive, professional emails that match your brand. And it's fun to say. Mail Chimp. Mail Chimp!!!

What’s the point?

Have a clear reason why you are contacting your customers, and what you want to get out of the exercise. How can you measure the success of a campaign if you never had any goals or objectives. Being a designer I so often am just asked to do something and put some place holding Latin in the design. That really makes alarm bells ring. Contacting your clients just for the sake of it will annoy the hell out of them, so make sure you at least pretend to have a good reason to be sitting in their inbox. Ask yourself – why are we sending this thing out?

What’s it all about?

Content is obviously crucial. People don’t have hours to read these things. In most cases if they are interested they will go to you website for more information if it’s required. Keep it snappy and to the point. Craft each word. And write it in a tone that is relevant to the recipient. Ask yourself – do people really care about this message?

What’s in it?

Here I am talking about the Subject Header. I can’t stress enough how important it is to get this sorted out. It may be the only shot you get and having this thing read, so make it brief, intriguing, topical, and relevant. Read the title and honestly ask yourself… would you open that email… really???

How’s it made?

Firstly we”ll talk graphics. Getting as much graphical bang for your buck without sending mail servers around the world crashing to their knees is an ongoing compromise. As for canvas size I try and keep them about 550px wide and as high as you want, although try and get the main message across in about 400 odd pixels of height so that it is guaranteed above the fold. A good design speaks volumes about the level of professionalism of your comany, so do it right. Ask yourself – does this look like shit?

And onto the code. My workmate always cracks the joke  “Here’s my website  <div>… and here’s yours <table>….” I know nerd humour. And yes I was slow to move into tableless/css design. But if your building an email newsletter you’ll be using tables and no external style sheets if you want it to actually display in most email clients. So who’s laughing now eh? Actually not me because building these things is kind of painful.  But seriously, before you send it out, test it and then test it some more. Provide an online option for this who can;t view it for one reason or another. Ask yourself – can’t someone else do this? I do haha.

And that’s about it really. I would like to mention optimising landing pages but that is a different post again. Stick to those 5 tips and your electronic newseltter will have a lot higher chance of success. For delivery service if you don’t have a provider lined up I strongly suggest you look at a company like Mail Chimp. They have a lot of good resources and information on how to run a campaign, as well as built-in HTML email templates that have already been professionally designed and tested in all the major email  so you know they will work.

IE6 we need to break up… it’s not me… it’s you.

IE6 I am putting a restraining order on you

Don't you know when you're no longer welcome???

I was just lamenting why some of our clients insist on keeping on with IE6. A disproportionate bumber of our clients use it was thei main browser. You’re building a new site, everything looks great in IE7,  Firefox 3, Safari… then you test it in IE 6 and sweet Jesus it’s all over the show. I keep looking at the browser stats waiting for IE6 to disappear but it’s alarmingly popular (December 2008 showed 19.6% users). It’s dreadful at supporting standards, and has no support for PNGs… I mean come on!

When can we ditch the support for this browser. IE7 was released in October 2006 – what are these IT mangers actually doing? I think half the problem I personally have is that some of my clients have browser-based systems that aren’t supported by IE7, I know for example our webscanner software doesn’t work in IE7. Some Java applet issue. But seriously! This is a big fat pain in the butt. I remember years ago I used to put at the bottom of some websites “best viewed in….” maybe I need to go back to doing that?

Finally YouTube supporting 16:9

Finally YouTube has starting supporting 16:9 video. Actually, supporting is not the right word. YouTube has totally ditched 4:3 in favour of the newer aspect ratio.

Of course YouTube did previously support some 16:9 content in full screen mode, but now it’s all 16:9 (and a larger screen area too!). So now instead of having 16:9 aspect movies played in 4:3 with letterboxing, you will get 4:3 pillarboxed into a 16:9 display.

Does this mean we’ll get better content on YouTube? Of course not. But it will look better ha.

Although I am very glad to see this feature available (i shoot in 16:9), I’d personally like to see the option available of choosing your player to suit your movie aspect riatio, especially when you think of the absurd amount of 4:3 footage out there. It would be interesting to see what everyone else thinks.

A/B testing on your landing page – part 2

I just realised I wrote about A/B testing and didn’t suggest any way to actually implement the testing. I would say the easiest way to to A/B testing on your web page is to use Google Website Optimizer. It is extremely easy to use, has great reporting facilities, and best of all… it’s free.

Instead of me going on about how to use it have a look at this article which I found really helpful. There’s also some good info on that page about increasing your conversion rates too. For even more information on Google Website Optimizer, have a look on the Official Google Website Optimizer Blog.

Definitely worth a look.