Archive for the ‘Design and Development’ Category

Angela Brown, Marketing Manager

On Tuesday, agencyQ co-sponsored a Web Content Mavens event on content strategy and CMS implementation. The topic was a great fit for us both as a sponsor and as our first outing with the Mavens, so I headed over to the offices of the National Trust for Historic Preservation with one of our project managers. The purpose of the meeting was to define content strategy and execution within a content management framework, and each topic had its own speaker. Harry Chauss of Content Strategy DC represented the strategists and F’Lynne Didenko offered war stories from her role as WCMS Product Manager at Sallie Mae, Inc.

After giving the audience the scoop on Q during the sponsor intros, I spent the remainder of the evening Evernoting away during the presentation (I hope no one thought I was rudely replying to emails instead). Here’s what I came away with.

Adrian Sud, Web Developer

As a web developer, I feel no small amount of peer pressure towards using and building on Open Source technologies.  It’s usually a good thing: building on preexisting frameworks and projects that might fit most of your needs speeds development along, and avoids duplication of effort.  The mindset behind the Open Source ecology is wonderful too—developers, creating for the love of their trade, an overt admission that coding is what we love, and that sometimes recognition of a work well wrought is payment enough for the work itself.

Unfortunately, despite this pressure, I often wind up starting from scratch.  While I love coding for the sake of coding and am a big fan of many free and open source software (FOSS) projects, I do this for a living as well, and despite the Free Software Foundation’s assertions that “Free software is a matter of liberty”, many licenses do just as much restricting as they do freeing—they just do it the other way. A commercial license is all about ensuring that the rights of the software developer, or more likely producer, are protected. Open Source licenses, on the other hand, are all about limiting the developer or producer, so the control lies in the hands of the consumer.

1. Facebook Places: What It Is, What It Isn’t, And Why It May Change The World
By Augie Ray with Forrester

On August 18 Facebook announced its long-anticipated geolocation offering called “Places,” and the Internet went crazy. In what was the most popular post we tweeted this week, Forrester’s Augie Ray argues that “the most important contribution Facebook is making to the geolocation social space is not in form but scale.”

Takeaway: First of all, Places is neither evolutionary nor new. Foursquare and Gowalla beat them to the punch eons ago in tech time. While foursquare counts around 2.5 million users in its base, Facebook has 500 million. This means that Facebook is positioned to introduce the benefits of location sharing to a new and much wider audience. But the rub is in the very first paragraph of Ray’s post – while the popular Foursquare counts around 2.5 million users in its base, Facebook has 500 million, meaning Facebook is now positioned to introduce the benefits of location-sharing to a new and much wider audience. Facebook has an opportunity to change the way people approach social networking without even creating something new. How this will play out has yet to be seen, but the potential significance of this new feature is undeniable.

Have you given Places a try yet? Let us know what you think in the comments.

1. What Nonprofits Can Teach Brands About Social
on eMarketer

Even though corporate marketers have made a great deal of progress with their adoption of social media tools, they still have a long way to go. This post explores the success of social media adoption in the nonprofit sector and what corporate marketers can stand to gain from nonprofit marketers’ social media efforts.

Takeaway: As of 2009, 97% of large charitable organizations were using some form of social media. In contrast, 80% of companies in the Inc. 500—a list of the fastest-growing private companies in the US—used social media marketing in 2009, and the Fortune 500 were even further behind. How counter intuitive that the companies most likely to have the human and financial resources to run an effective social media program are sitting on the sidelines while nonprofits are running about the field.

The issue at hand here isn’t so much quality as it is quantity – it doesn’t tell us how effective nonprofits’ social media efforts are, it only tell us that they are trying harder than their corporate counterparts. But this is still an important point. In 2010, very few businesses can afford to ignore social media all together. And while the results may be mixed, nonprofits are blazing the trail by embracing social media as a marketing tool worth employing. Have you taken the plunge yet?

1. 5 Big Brands That Are Using Facebook Games To Reach New Audiences
by Neil Vidyarthi on Social Times

This great post from Social Times shows how big brands are using Facebook Games to promote products for better or for worse.

Takeaways: Some of the examples in the post work well while others don’t but the takeaway for marketers is that marrying interactive marketing with gold old fashioned fun in an effort to connect with your customers is a practice we can all benefit from.