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The way we design websites has changed profoundly in recent years. We have more information on how web users interact with user interfaces, we have developed many testing methods for evaluating usability, and we now build sites with great emphasis on user-centered design. In addition, research in the fields of psychology, sociology and usability has enriched our understanding of our site visitors.

Yet, while methods of designing for devices, the choice of browsers, and user demands all have increased, designers still tend to shy away from providing users with an experience that suits the ideology of truly responsive design — smart designs that fits the unique personal traits and preferences of a user.

Intuitiveness: The Double-Edged Sword

If you’ve ever conducted a usability research study, you’ll be well aware of the issues people face when presented by an out-of-the-box UI that don’t abide by conventions or trends. The truth is that knowledge — and more specifically, the ability to recognize common objects and their function (such as a button or hyperlink) — is the root of the issue. Knowledge is easy to come by, but it takes time to instill. Every experience comes with a learning curve.

Designing for navigation, links and content is a non-stop juggling act, as shown at eBay.

On the other hand, an intuitive design also empowers users. The user feels that they have the ability to understand the environment and deduce things for themselves. Empowering users is a critical part of the web designer’s role. We can only hope that users know which links are clickable and what button to press to submit a web form.

So, here we are in this position: Many users struggle with the usability of our websites, and we do all we can, generally, to accommodate everyone’s needs.

Nevertheless — and all too often — little is done to level with individual users because of the up-front costs of building flexible, customizable interfaces.

At least, that’s what used to happen.

These days, we invest time and money in building smartphone apps, we build dedicated websites for portable devices, and some of us still provide support for Internet Explorer 6.

Yet, when it comes to interaction, we let our standards slide; we don’t seem to put enough effort into crafting them for the site audience’s needs.

Design Smart, Not Static

If we’re trying to learn what our users want, we should leave customization in their hands.

There are all sorts of general usability tests, but we need to consider which users to include, what to improve, how to implement it, and much more.

To put it simply, users know when something isn’t right about their experience, and even if they have the time to bother telling you about it, they don’t always know what they want or how to express it in a way that would make sense to others.

They know there’s a problem, but they may not know how to solve it.

Visitors idealize. They aren’t trained designers and are liable to request solutions for what may not be problems in the first place, yet we are the ones who make the final decisions.

Design is less about fighting fires and more about empowerment; and smarter web designs are becoming increasingly aware of that.

Usability testing isn’t bullet-proof, but it helps users help us to help them! Shown above is the Silverback usability testing software.

In the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, there is a wonderful quote that sums up our frequent attempts to use our psychic powers to build the perfect website for the default user: "You’re 18. You don’t know what you want. And you won’t know what you want ’til you’re 45. And even if you get it, you’ll be too old to use it."

If we base design decisions on assumed knowledge of what users want, we can’t empathetically suit our websites to each user’s needs.

However, add responsiveness and customization to the mix, and our designs will become easier to use. They’ll become smarter.

Responsive and Suggestive Methods

Users don’t necessarily understand what they need, and designers typically aim to please the masses. We need to remedy that.

Design patterns and techniques exist to help us interact with our users and make our work truly responsive to an individual’s needs.

We know that behavioral engineering is powerful and that user-centric design aids usability.

We also know that every user has different requirements or preferences for an interface. We already create responsive web designs that change depending on whether they’re being viewed in smaller screens (like mobile devices) or bigger screens. The next logical evolution of Web Design is being able to predict what users want and to allow users the ability to customize their experience.

Smart designs are customizable and useful to visitors and they’re built with efficiency in mind, as shown by iGoogle.

Building smart web designs — in concept, but not necessarily in implementation — is simple. Look beyond aesthetics, and think about how users want to interact with your site.

Personalize the content. Enhance the user experience based on user activity. Observe what users do on the website, and try to provide useful signposts and suggestions in the interface.

Presenting Related Content

Knowing what interests the user is half the battle in design. If visitors read and enjoy an article, they might be open to visiting something else that’s equally good.

Links to related material serve as incentives for users to continue their journey on your website. LinkWithin is a tool for showing related posts.

Provide calls to action that direct visitors to the latest content, and provide links to useful material on the same subject. Show keyword tags (or categories and keywords) to identify similar places of interest. Every little bit helps.

Relative Navigation

This is important for users entering your website from another website (such as a search engine or social news aggregator); it helps them find their way around with as few clicks as possible.

Offer human-friendly site maps, with helpful directions. Provide useful error messages, and offer breadcrumb navigation for content categories.

Content Customization

Many users don’t want to view our websites in the way we present them. Users expect to be able to format your work to their taste and, in that way, they can have a personalized site experience. Allowing your content to be viewed through RSS, for example, is a simplistic example of allowing your users to access content through their preferred means.

Smarter Search Features

The search box is the most recognizable way to help refine what users want to see. Allowing advanced searches could help users find what they’re looking for quickly. Don’t be afraid to include auto-completion or to suggest corrections of search terms to respond to errors.

Customization Methods

The second type of enhancement we can provide helps to create dynamic websites. With it, we can offer user-specific customizations. When someone signs up for a service, they expect it to be personable and meet their needs. Each of us consumes web content in our own way.

Basic ways to create smarter designs include offering custom themes or multilingual translations and allowing panels to be moved around the page (or added or removed entirely).

Profile Personalization

If you have a system in place that allows for user accounts, allow them to go wild with customization. Greet users by name, show them what has been updated since their last visit, offer subscription-based email or RSS notifications, and allow them to modify the site layout (as above) in their account as a "saved" state.

Provide Opportunities for Contributing

This technique is widely used in content management systems and social networks. Get users to contribute by recommending articles to them, inviting them to post follow-ups or comments, and offering customizable widgets or visual shortcuts (based on their preferences).

AddThis lets users recommend your work on the social network of their choosing.

Some Responsiveness and Customizability Ideas

Finally, there are "in the future" solutions that could increase the chances of our websites becoming more responsive (even to the point of being self-correcting). By taking advantage of scripting and by monitoring our users’ actions autonomously, we could make websites smarter and more malleable.

Variable Designs

We could build a responsive framework to analyze what devices visitors use and then provide suitable environments for them. We are seeing it begin with CSS media queries and platform-unique layouts. But have you considered blending the techniques by scripting "detect and redraw" (rather than "redirect")?

Layout Profiles

Another technique for personalizing the experience is to allow users to build a visual profile. That is, let them choose what appears on the screen, and where. Then let them save it, and save it publicly, so that all can see — which will enable users to share and apply one another’s themes and gain unique tailor-made layouts.

Customize Content Presentation Based on User Activity

Here’s the most radical idea for smartening up your designs: you could write a script that monitors user interactions — such as what links they click on and how they flow through the site — but use that data to identify what content to show the user, and redraw the layout so that useful content becomes more visible.

In effect, the website will train itself to become more useful for its users.

The BBC offers a powerful "launch pad" platform for visitors who want to read its content.

The Smart Website

Behavior is a powerful indicator of the user’s process and progress of negotiating through a website. We place increasing emphasis on studying patterns and adjusting our pages for a variety of devices. Strangely enough, for all the energy we put into testing and site improvements, we don’t create scripts and frameworks that empower users, whether empowering by recognizing their habits and adapting accordingly to make the experience easier or to increase returning visits, or by letting them change things themselves.

Mobile browser detection isn’t the limit of our ability to improve designs for users. Shown above is Mobify, a mobile web platform.

We live in a paradoxical environment: every user is different (and wants something specific from an interface), yet often, the changes we implement resort to cycles of iterations (human-powered tweaks). No silver bullet exists to get our websites to do all of the hard work.

But isn’t this odd: social networks are among the most highly customizable and flexible infrastructures, yet few websites follow their lead and let users decide what works best for them.

As we move into the future, user expectations will only increase. We’ve had it easy as an industry so far — users have just accepted the way things are.

But as users gain knowledge of the Web and what it’s capable of, they’ll question the validity of the one-size-fits-all model. They’ll want compatibility and the ability to customize.

Personalizing designs is a challenge, but one worth taking on.

Related Content

• Guide to Website Navigation Design Patterns
• Making User Interface Elements Difficult to Use By Intent
• Karma as a Social Interaction Design Pattern in Websites
• Related categories: Web Design and User Interface

About the Author

Alexander Dawson is a freelance web designer, author and recreational software developer specializing in web standards, accessibility and UX design. As well as running a business called HiTechy and writing, he spends time on Twitter, SitePoint’s forums and other places, helping those in need.

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Facebook has introduced two relationship status indicators that folks in the LGBT community might find more useful.

Effective immediately, U.S. residents can choose between “In a domestic partnership” and “In a civil union,” along with the usual roster of relationship options, which currently include Single, In a relationship, Engaged, Married, It’s complicated, In an open relationship, Widowed, Separated and Divorced.

These two new options should be rolled out to residents of other countries soon. In countries where same-sex marriages are already legal, these options will not appear.

A Facebook rep told us in an e-mail, “This has been a highly requested feature from users. We want to provide options for people to genuinely and authentically reflect their relationships on Facebook.”

Facebook and the site’s Network of Support have been instrumental in a few LGBT initiatives in recent months.

After last fall’s string of high-profile gay teen suicides, Facebook teamed up with GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) to put a stop to anti-gay bullying on the social network. A few days later, the site’s Network of Support (NOS) was officially formed. At the time, we were told that more good news for LGBT Facebook users would be coming soon.

The new statuses are a double-edged sword, however; the civil union/domestic partnership distinction is one that many LGBT groups are currently trying to erase. In fact, marriage equality is one of the key campaigning points for many groups in the NOS, including the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD and PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays).

And many couples in same-sex relationships who have already defined themselves on Facebook as “married” aren’t necessarily eager to adopt the new nomenclature. As one user wrote in a Facebook comment on the Trevor Project’s wall, “I’ll just leave myself listed as ‘married’ — after 14 years, that sums it up, even if it isn’t legal!”

Other commenters were more harsh in their statements, saying that Facebook was adopting the “separate and unequal” policies of the many states that do not allow gay marriage.

Still, it’s good that Facebook is finally recognizing the legal relationships that do currently exist between LGBT couples in the U.S. and in other countries. Whether those status distinctions will be needed in the future remains to be seen — and that is a battleground in which Facebook remains decidedly neutral, although highlighting the lack of marriage equality could be seen as a subtle nod to marriage equality groups during a particularly critical time.

In an e-mail, GLAAD President Jarrett Barrios said, “When millions of Facebook users see these relationship status options, they gain a greater understanding of the legal inequalities faced by loving and committed same-sex couples in so many states today.

“Being able to see same-sex couples in civil unions and domestic partnerships who celebrate their relationships no differently than married couples will serve as another reminder that these couples still lack the same legal recognition and protections associated with marriage. Facebook’s noteworthy move also highlights the vast majority of same-sex couples living in states where there are no legal protections whatsoever.”

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Deborah Oropallo, an artist from San Francisco, is one of those artists who has gotten a lot of criticism. She’s been around for a while, so she has some old-school fans who have given her a lot of slack for using the computer in her artwork in the past several years. Some of the stuff I’ve read online is really harsh. However, I disagree. I love these “paintings” that are called “digital collages.” I’ve never seen anything like these before, and the originality and uniqueness in each one definitely makes them interesting to look at.

Deborah says, “I do not want to just repaint an illustration of what the computer can do, but to push the pixels themselves as paint, and to layer imagery and veils to create depth and volume.” These images are part of a collection called the “Wild Wild West Show,” which combines old-fashioned cowgirl pictures enhanced with new digital technology. Aside from the fact that clowns in general freak me out, I really like these! Nice!

[via Triangulation Blog, Wirtz Gallery]

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The new socially savvy web browser, RockMelt, entered private beta on Sunday and is already becoming a viral web hit, thanks in large part to the Facebook-authenticated invitation scheme it uses.

RockMelt isn’t the first product to try to take on social browsing — Flock, which will also be using Chromium as a base for its 3.0 version, has been trying to crack this nut for more than five years.

Thus, our main question is: is RockMelt the answer to finally solving social browsing or is it just another flavor of the month? Let’s take a look.

Journey to a Social Web Browser

There are hundreds of plugins and extensions for the various web browsers, but out of the box, almost every major browser lacks a lot of social integration. Interestingly, Microsoft has actually taken a bit more of a social initiative with Internet Explorer 9. The new ability to pin websites to the Windows 7 taskbar offers one-click access to a site — almost like a single-site browser. These new pinned sites also have social and contextual features. For instance, a Twitter pin can offer a way to check @ mentions, send tweets and more.

Instead of building in social features on the offset, most browser makers are taking the approach of letting companies and individuals create add-ons or extensions to the browser to add these features. Some of these extensions work really well, while others don’t.

There is a very delicate balance between providing social functionality and making the core browsing experience sub-optimal. For end users, the struggle comes in finding add-ons that add functionality without overloading the deck.

It doesn’t help that each add-on can hinder overall web browsing performance. For Firefox, its add-on strategy has actually been a bit of a double-edged sword. On one hand, it was the extensibility that made Firefox different and valuable. On the other, those same extensions and add-ons are what has made Firefox slower over the years, making browsers like Chrome seem like such a breath of fresh air.

I believe this is incidentally where the Gecko-based version of Flock failed. At the end of the day, there was just too much going on and disabling toolbars ended up just creating a slightly uglier version of Firefox. Flock’s 3.0 beta release looks more aligned with what RockMelt is doing, but there are some differences as well.

A Browser Extension as a Facebook App

I was curious to look at how RockMelt would handle its social tools. Initially, I assumed that like the beta version of Flock Chromium, RockMelt would use some typical Google Extensions to add on its social layer.

That’s not quite true. Instead, RocketMelt loads a Facebook app every time the browser is loaded, which is what powers the social elements of RockMelt. This is what gives you one-click access to your friends that are online, this is what makes it easy to check your news feed or update your status, and this is the app that can be the cloud connector for the other elements of RockMelt, namely the RSS feeds and the integration of the Twitter API.

This is interesting in that it does actually bring a fully integrated Facebook experience into your web browser. The downside is that, depending on server load, those features might not load in your browser. Or as we’ve been seeing today, if they do load, the browser itself may become unstable because of the Facebook-app/add-on.

Still, when it works, RockMelt’s use of Facebook as its app protocol and connector is a wholly different sort of approach. It’s actually pretty savvy.

Likewise, the way that the Twitter API is used is nice because you can add multiple Twitter accounts to your sidebar and access or send messages from all of those accounts. The sidebar experience is separate from whether you are logged in at Twitter.com, and it all takes place from an API level.

Thus, the featureset is similar to what you would find in a full-featured desktop or web-based Twitter app. That means you can access lists, send and receive direct messages and easily reply or retweet all from the sidebar.

But Can it Blend?

The way that RockMelt uses Twitter and Facebook — and the way that it monitors websites for RSS updates — is pretty interesting and is relatively unobtrusive. You can make sidebars bigger or smaller, or hide them all together.

The Share button makes sending a website to Facebook or Twitter super simple — though an option of posting to both accounts at once wouldn’t hurt.

Still, we couldn’t help but wonder if this is enough. The extensibility strategy for RockMelt hasn’t been disclosed, and this is going to end up being what makes the service either a cool novelty or something really cool.

As of right now, though you can install Chrome Extensions in RockMelt, you can’t easily access said extensions. In fact, it looks like RockMelt has gone out of its way to hide the Extensions feature.

This doesn’t surprise us — other extensions or add-ons could hamper the load and the various JavaScript and server-side storage that RockMelt is using already. However, it does point out an obvious flaw. If you want to do something other than easily connect to Facebook or Twitter, RockMelt is a lot more limiting.

Like Flock, RockMelt runs the risk of being both too heavy and yet not ultimately fulfilling its end goal. What other services can be added — and whether they should be added — is going to be an issue that RockMelt’s developer base is going to have to figure out.

More immediately, the cloud-based nature of its platform means that RockMelt will have to really focus on keeping its servers reliable and capable of handling the load of user activity. A cloud-based strategy is intriguing in that it offers up some really interesting ways to get real-time data and to connect to different services, but it’s still a risk because if the servers or application backend go down, users are left with just a browser.

At the end of the day, we’re not quite sure if RockMelt is the answer to the problem of social browsing, and much of its success will depend on how it addresses the variety of potential shortcomings in the months ahead.

More About: chrome, facebook, flock, RockMelt, twitter, web browsers

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The introduction of Facebook, Twitter and the like has opened up a whole new world of social interaction and distraction. Suddenly, we can be connected to friends, family and colleagues with the click of a button. Instantly, we can discover what our friend had for dinner or whether their day was a good one or a bad one. Social networking has transformed the way we communicate; there is no denying we live in a permanently connected world.

But can social networking be a bit of a double-edged sword?

As much as it can open our world and succeed in connecting us with ease, it can also be a huge distraction. Its addictive qualities can swallow up hours of our valuable time, and waste companies billions of dollars^[1].

The surge in popularity of smart phones that allow us to access the web has meant we carry our entire social networking world in our very pocket, giving us more reason to stay connected. As well as a balanced argument about the prickly subject of social networking in the workplace, we’ve come up with some pointers to help you decipher when to cut back on your social networking usage.

The Pros of Staying Connected

Why does it seem everybody’s got a problem with social networking sites? What’s the harm in staying connected to the people we care about? Social networking sites can not only be fun, it can also be lucrative if it opens up your business to additional revenue streams and clientele. Often, the virtual world is our oyster.

Here are a few advantages of being constantly connected to social networks.

We Need a Break Every Now and Then

Humans weren’t designed to focus on one task consistently, and in order for creativity to flourish, we need breaks in order to see a new project with a fresh approach. A study by The University of Melbourne showed that those who visited websites of interest actually had improved concentration, boosting productivity by 9%.

Improve Income and Loyalty of Customers

A study by Rice University Jones Graduate School of Business regarding Facebook Pages conducted on a retail business in Houston, Texas found that customers spent an additional 45% in the store, increased customer loyalty 41%, and trafficked the store up to 36% more after they decided to use the social networking site. This study shows that using social networking services can have potential benefits for a company.

Save Time Keeping Up with News

Instead of ringing around our friends to double check when an event is still on or whether your friend has indeed split up with their partner, all you need to do is log into Facebook and you’ve saved yourself time and energy, and bagged a bit of gossip, too.

Open Up New Opportunities

Social networking sites can act as your own personal marketing spokesperson. We are told constantly to sell ourselves in job interviews, and our profiles can often do all the hard work for us.

Companies can set up social networking profiles or update their customers via Twitter, all the while building contacts and leads.

Distraction is Commonplace in the Workplace Already

Email, water cooler chats and mobile phones pose particular productivity threats to employees the world over. Relative to other distractions, is the use of social networking services really that bad? Workplace distraction is nothing new and there is a long list of things we, as employees, have to contend with, with some being more harmful to productivity than others.

The Cons of Staying Connected

Social networking sites are known to have addictive traits that can drain valuable time and money and become a persistent distraction, endangering the productivity of workers. So what’s the damage they can wreak?

Security Threats to IT

A study by Sophos published this year reported a 70% rise in the number of organizations experiencing spam and malware attacks via social networks in 2009. The same study expressed that 72% of businesses are of the mindset that employee behavior in social networks could endanger their business security.

Social Networks Can Lead to Financial Losses

A study by Nucleus Research revealed the use of Facebook alone shaves 1.5% of office productivity. IT consultancy company, Morse, evaluated this productivity loss could cost businesses $2.2 billion a year.

Lost Opportunities

Much has been said about the rise of companies checking out prospective employees by viewing their social networking profiles. They say a picture tells a thousand words: One dodgy photo and an opportunity to be hired by that company you have been dying to work for can be lost. We need to be careful about what we post on the web: An employee posted a comment on Facebook saying her job was boring and was shown the door shortly after.

Tips to Boost Productivity

Although social networking sites can indeed open doors, it can be difficult to know when to draw the line, especially if your job involves marketing and networking through Facebook or Twitter.

Here are our top tips to keep you focused and help you take charge of your work-life.

Establish a Daily Routine and Work Schedule

A daily routine is essential to staying pro-active. It helps us organize a healthy lifestyle and can ease distractions in the workplace. Coordinating a work schedule which clearly shows guidelines involving when to start work, when to take breaks and when we should be finishing work helps put boundaries down, putting emphasis and value on our time.

A structure also keeps us focused and less likely to stray off track. Try to stick to a good amount of working hours; 7-9 hours, 5 days a week is usually a good amount of time and creates a healthy structure to our week.

Make To-Do Lists

To-do lists can ensure you stay on top of all of your work commitments. They also help you get to grips with everything you want to achieve in that day. The best way is to put the most important tasks at the top of the list and make sure they are all crossed off at the end of the day. You can make them and stick them to your fridge or plaster a Post-it note on your computer. You can even use a web-based service so that you have ready-access to your to-do list anytime, anywhere; Gmail, for example, has a simple built-in task list feature that integrates with other Google services.

Limit Your Technology Distractions

Workers who constantly check their emails, social networks, and phones are setting themselves up for continual distractions. An email newsletter, a text message from a friend, a link sent by a colleague through a Facebook update — these activities cause distractions, and if you don’t keep them in check, they can take up a significant portion of your workday.

If you allocate timeslots throughout the day for checking emails, social networking feeds, and phone calls, you are less likely to stumble upon distractions.

Take Regular Breaks

Breaks are essential to keeping a positive mood and in turn, can boost our concentration. Taking a break means getting away from your computer, so trade that sneaky look at Facebook with a lap around the office building. Getting outside your home or office for at least half an hour each day will improve your productivity in the long run.

Make the Most of Your Free Time

On the days that you are less busy, take the initiative and stay productive. Rather than slipping into the constant distractions of tweeting and Facebook updating, involve yourself in admin tasks, catch up on reorganization that you let go because of being short on time, and see if work you have finished can be served from being looked over and refined.

And when you do have leisure time off, use your time wisely.

Conclusion

By all means, indulge in social networking endeavors, but put limits on the length of time you use them. Make sure you devote your time to things that make you happy and relaxed including (non-virtual) social interaction, resting and hobbies. This will all prevent you from falling prey to social networking addiction.

References

1. Facebook and other social media cost UK billions. reuters.com.

Related Content

• Spying On Competition Using Social Media
• 10 Google Chrome Extensions for Boosting Your Productivity
• Make the Most Out of Social Media
• Related categories: Productivity and Project Management

About the Author

Kip Keilty writes for BroadbandCompare.com.au, a comparison site to find plans from a range of broadband providers in Australia.

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This series is supported by Gist, an online service that helps you build stronger relationships. By connecting your inbox to the web, you get business-critical information about key people and companies. See how it works here.

For freelancers, social media has been a real game changer, and brings networking to a whole new level. Depending on how you look at it, the competition either just got a lot tougher or the playing field burst wide open. Social media is a double-edged sword; although getting a job is often still about who you know, connecting online means there is the opportunity to know so many more people.

Considering that social media is really in its infancy, it’s hard to say how freelancers will be using social media in years to come, so it helps to take a look at what is working now and what we think lies ahead.

We spoke to freelancers who use social media to help build relationships and land the gigs that pay the bills, and asked them what is working for them now and what they think may be in store.

Being Everywhere

Establishing yourself online is the first step for freelancers looking to use social media, but where to do it? There are a handful of uber-popular social media sites and dozens more popping up every day. Creating an online identity and cultivating it well on different platforms is key.

Jacob Cass is an Australian freelance graphic designer based in New York who runs Just Creative Design, a design blog, and several other sites dedicated to all things design, advertising and branding. A self-described “social media nut,” Cass is vocal about the ways social media has aided him in his career.

“I’ve never paid a cent for advertising,” he said. His visibility is thanks to his efforts in getting both his work and himself known online via social media. Cass says he updates his blog once or twice a week and is using about as many social platforms as possible.

Though Cass only graduated from university last year, he has been able to showcase his talent for graphics and design quite well via social media. In fact, he was offered his previous day job at a Brooklyn-based new media marketing agency through Twitter. While he has since moved on to another company, it’s clear that Cass has been able to promote himself by blogging informative articles on topics like “what makes a good logo,” tweeting useful links to his 30,000 plus followers on Twitter, and contributing to conversations with his 4,000 plus Facebook friends.

The future of social media is elusive, as what’s hot today may not be tomorrow. “It’s important not to put all your eggs in one basket, ” he said. “Look at MySpace five years ago and today. If you put all your eggs in one basket and you have a million friends on MySpace, where does that get you today?”

Cass says he looks for constant innovations and is eager to use and discover new platforms that will be helpful. He just started using Dribbble, a social networking site for designers and developers that lets you share “sneak peeks” of work as small screenshots with the community. “It’s great for design people because it’s another place to showcase your work.”

Adapting to New Platforms

Mica Knibbs is a freelance graphic designer and photographer in Kelowna, Canada, who says Twitter has been huge in building his business, especially with regard to sourcing clients after interacting with them. His strategy in social media has really been to make personal connections and engage on a conversational level 70 to 80% of the time, and only occasionally use it as a way to plug his work or see if people are looking for designers.

In fact, he’s in the middle of designing a website for a well-known local radio host, who told him the reason that she chose to go with him as a designer was because she felt she knew who he was because of their interactions. Knibbs had introduced himself on Twitter and then made the jump to real life, offering up a business card at an event and kept the relationship going via tweets and e-mails. “That’s a great job for me because it’s such a high profile client and it gives a lot of credibility to the work that I do,” he said.

As for the future, Knibbs also said freelancers should expect to be more adaptable to whatever platform can help. He just started using Foursquare, and as a result is now connected to people he couldn’t necessarily reach on Twitter. “The platform is young and it’s in development as far as the return you get on your investment, but I think it’s coming,” he says. Knibbs says he sees geo-location services growing and expects that geo-specific ads will one day be common, in which businesses could send out deals to consumers in the vicinity. For a freelancer like himself, that could translate into him putting out an ad while he’s in a coffee shop and seeing if anyone within his networks is looking for design work in the nearby areas.

“It’s hard to say, but that’s a direction I could see it going. Plus, I think mobility is the way everything is going. For me, my office is with me all the time — it’s on my phone — and that’s why accessibility [from mobile devices] has to be in every website, with more and more integration.”

Integration and Better Use

Glen Stansberry, a freelance web developer, blogger, and writer from Kansas, agrees that it’s important to be engaging with people on different platforms, but says that in the future, people may learn how to use each platform more appropriately.

Stansberry says he has a different conversation depending on the platforms, and thinks that in the future, more people will realize that strategies should vary depending on the site. Facebook and Twitter aren’t going anywhere for the next little while, but they have already proven their different values, he said. Because Twitter is a micro-blogging site and is limited to 140-characters, it is often just that — limited. Stansberry says that Twitter seems to be more about sending out quick links, and is often filled with a lot of regurgitation; the mindless re-tweet. Facebook on the other hand offers more in-depth conversations to emerge. “Facebook has the edge, and it’s the most attractive to the masses.”

For freelancers, he says, social media is a chance to get your work out there, and there are a number of websites like Behance that are growing very quickly in popularity. Similar to Dribble, Behance allows designers to upload their portfolios where visitors, including recruiters, come to search (and potentially hire) talents. This past July, the site launched a collaboration with LinkedIn that enables users to upload their portfolios directly to their LinkedIn accounts, meaning that recruiters and employers have twice the chance of spotting their work.

Freelancers hoping to stay on top of the latest social media trends have to be open and adaptable, as the social space is ever evolving. Which platforms and trends do you think will be a large part of the future of social media usage among freelancers?

This series is supported by Gist, an online service that helps you build stronger professional relationships by bringing together information from across the web for all your contacts and their companies, giving you the right information at the right moment to get a first meeting, deliver an amazing pitch, or just find a better way to make a connection. Gist does all the work for you, assembling a dynamic collection of all your contacts and their companies from your e-mail inbox, your social networks, or even your CRM system automatically building and updating their profiles as new content is published – by them or about them.

More Business Resources from Mashable:

– How Small Businesses Will Use Social Media in the Future
– How Small Businesses Are Using Social Media for Real Results
– How Startups are Using Social Media for Real Results
– How CEOs are Using Social Media for Real Results
– How Salespeople Are Using Social Media for Real Results
– How PR Pros Are Using Social Media for Real Results

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, VallarieE

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I’ve written about the magical yet complicated nature of emotions before in this article which celebrates being a woman. Today though, I have a new twist to share with you. Consider this… what if in a world of limited emotional energy, emotions needed to advertise in order to retain their market share?

It’s a cute question, isn’t it? Here are some fun ways these particular emotions might advertise for themselves. Some of them are quite convincing. I love the creativity in this concept!

[via youwillnotbelieve]

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The design community is a wonderful thing. I really mean it. Despite the fact that some aspects of it can occasionally seem a little repetitive with the reams and reams of pointless lists that I have seen over and over again, the community endures. Despite the fact that there are literally hundreds, and probably even thousands of sites and blogs screaming out for our attention, most of us still manage to forge relationships.

Am I Really Any Good at this Design Thing (image from ShutterStock)

Personally, I know that I am very grateful for all of the relationships that I have established and seen grow since I really became a part of the community. Some have taught me. Others have inspired me. A few have even displayed a certain keenness for challenging me and calling me out (you know who you are). A small handful have even become my personal friends.

Yet, like so many great things in life, the community can be something of a double edged sword – though not necessarily in a conscious or deliberate way. As much as it can help, there are days where, at least for me, it can also be a painful and uncomfortable place.

That’s what this article is about.

I’m sure that I really don’t need to say this, but the internet’s a big place – I mean it’s really big. Billions of people can come together and share information in a nearly instantaneous fashion. It takes the idea of community far beyond anything it could ever have been conceived to mean even twenty years ago. Granted, the design community is but a microcosm within the larger population of the information superhighway, but even that relatively small fraction of that population still ends up being a pretty significant number of people.

Today, I took a venture out to Smashing Magazine to look at their numbers: 207,622 subscribed readers and an even higher number of followers on Twitter! Obviously, we can’t assume that these numbers in any way reflect the fullness of the community, but I think they do help demonstrate that we’re not just talking about a few hundred people here.

The community is big, and in many ways that very size is part of the source of my discomfort.

A Big Measuring Stick

So the community is big. Why does that matter? For me, it matters because, the bigger the community, the more people we have to compare ourselves to. And make no mistake about it: we do compare. Even the most detached, non-judgmental designers out there are secretly (perhaps even unwittingly) comparing their own abilities against the abilities of those with whom they interact.

It’s just human nature.

And thus do we reveal the secondary edge of the design community – the one on which we can occasionally cut our own precious egos. For, not only is it a large community; it’s also an accessible one. In some form or another, I see the work of my peers almost every single day. Some days (when I find myself being somewhat less productive), I actually find myself seeing more of their work than I do of my own.

The result of this is, of course, entirely predictable: I start to compare and weigh myself against them. Sometimes, it’s not such a big deal. Sometimes I see work that I feel is on par with my own. At the risk of sounding a bit arrogant, I confess that sometimes, I even see work that makes me think that I could do better.

But, then there are those other times, when I come face to face with work that is painfully better than my own. I may marvel at the layout, be struck by the colour choice, be transfixed by the typography or sometimes just stare in ultimate amazement at some simple yet perfectly executed element that pulls an entire design together (but which I know I would never have conceived of myself). I feel a knot in my stomach, and find myself thinking:

“Man, I suck at this design thing!”

A Certain Lack

To make things worse, I don’t really have anything formal to fall back on. As some readers might already be aware, my post-secondary education was not in the field of design. It was in English Literature. While others were studying grids, reading about typography, and learning the finer points of kerning, I was dissecting Shakespeare and Milton and writing term papers trying to explain what it was all about. Instead of theories of design, I was reading theories about culture – modernist, postmodernist, postcolonial and even feminist.

I don’t regret the five years I spent working on my BA and MA. In fact, I wouldn’t trade it for anything, and I do think that some of the critical thinking that I learned during that time has been beneficial for my work as a designer.

However, literary theory is not design theory, and when those difficult moments strike and I find myself coming face to face with my own apparent inadequacies, I simply don’t have the degree or diploma in design to fall back on. I can’t walk into my office and look at the papers on my wall and be reminded that I have the foundation of a formal education in design.

Of course, I know I’m not all that unique in this respect. I’m not the only kid in the community whose education wasn’t actually in design, and some of the people I respect the most are actually in this very same boat with me (figuratively speaking, of course).

Now, I want to be clear: though it may sound like it, I’m not whining here. I’m not building this big melodramatic, woe-is-me kind of plea for attention, based on my own insecurities. Instead, I’m merely acknowledging that those insecurities exist and that sometimes they get the better of me.

I also don’t think I’m alone in this. The more I consider it, the more I’ve come to believe that a lot of other designers probably go through this exact same thing – though of course, in the context of their own unique experiences.

The Salvation of Retrospect

I want to be clear: I’m not saying all of this to be overly negative or depressing, which is exactly what this article would be if we stopped here. Instead, I would like to move towards a more positive conclusion. While recognizing that there are times when I (and others like me) may feel somewhat inadequate in the face of the work of other designers, I’ve found that the important thing is to not linger on those feelings. Dwelling on them for too long will invariably lead to discouragement, and a weakening of your own self-confidence (trust me).

That’s never a good thing. Designers needs to be confident in the choices they make, and assured of their own abilities. Without that particular confidence, I can only imagine that the process of design would become far more difficult and tedious.

So, in order to avoid this unseemly fate, the next time you’re looking at somebody else’s work and feel that you just don’t measure up, take a moment to pause and embrace the salvation of retrospect:

• First, understand that being a designer is like being on a journey. You’re always growing, transforming and moving forward.
• Next, admit that you haven’t reached the end of that journey, and that there are areas of your craft that you may still need to work on, or in which you want to improve.
• Last, and most importantly, look back at your work from 3 months, 6 months or a year ago (maybe even further) and look at how far you’ve already come.

To paraphrase the words of a friend of mine: you may not be where you want to be, but as long as you’re not where you used to be, you know you’re moving forward. That, dear reader, is progress, and if you’ve come that far already, just imagine where you’ll be a few years down the road. For me, it’s that kind of thinking that really helps keep me going.

Unfortunately, there isn’t really any magic pill you can take, switch you can turn or book you can read that will transform you into the next Jason Santa Maria or Elliot Jay Stocks overnight.

Nor should there be. Despite their relative fame and influence within the community, I’m sure neither of them just woke up one morning, decided to become designers and immediately started rocking of the kind of quality material that we’re so used to seeing from them these days. It almost certainly took a lot of time, hard work and dedication to refine their skills to the point that they’re at now.

I wonder if either Jason or Elliot still have their very first designs in their portfolios?

Getting Better

The point (if you haven’t caught it), is to find strength and validation in your own work, whatever level your at. If you know you’re getting better, and if you can actually and visually trace the course of your own development, then stand firmly on that. It will help establish a strong foundation of confidence, so that when the storms and torrents of insecurity come back again, hopefully they won’t have the strength or force to topple you.

Beyond that, just keep working at improving. Last year, I wrote an article about the one thing that everyone needs to do to become a better designer (and the answer is: practice), in which I offered some practical steps for those who wanted to make a very conscious and deliberate effort to improve. If that’s you, please feel free to have a read.

Otherwise, I simply hope that you’ve enjoyed this article, and that some of you may actually be able to relate to what I’m saying here (if not, do I ever feel like a fool). If I’m really lucky, maybe a few of your will even benefit from it!

As always, I’d love to hear from you, so feel free to share your thoughts, reactions and experiences by leaving a comment below. Looking forward to reading your responses!

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Current Freebie Code – 7ev165dd

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Ever wondered what design patterns are? In this article, I’ll explain why design patterns are important, and will provide some examples, in PHP, of when and why they should be used.

What are Design Patterns?

Design patterns are optimized, reusable solutions to the programming problems that we encounter every day. A design pattern is not a class or a library that we can simply plug into our system; it’s much more than that. It is a template that has to be implemented in the correct situation. It’s not language-specific either. A good design pattern should be implementable in most—if not all—languages, depending on the capabilities of the language. Most importantly, any design pattern can be a double-edged sword— if implemented in the wrong place, it can be disastrous and create many problems for you. However, implemented in the right place, at the right time, it can be your savior.

There are three basic kinds of design patterns:

• structural
• creational
• behavioral

Structural patterns generally deal with relationships between entities, making it easier for these entities to work together.

Creational patterns provide instantiation mechanisms, making it easier to create objects in a way that suits the situation.

Behavioral patterns are used in communications between entities and make it easier and more flexible for these entities to communicate.

Why should we use them?

Design patterns are, by principle, well-thought out solutions to programming problems. Many programmers have encountered these problems before, and have used these ‘solutions’ to remedy them. If you encounter these problems, why recreate a solution when you can use an already proven answer?

Example

Let’s imagine that you’ve been given the responsibility of creating a way to merge two classes which do two different things based on the situation. These two classes are heavily used by the existing system in different places, making it difficult to remove these two classes and change the existing code. To add to this, changing the existing code requires that you’ll also need to test any changed code, since these sorts of edits, in a system which relies on different components, almost always introduce new bugs. Instead of doing this, you can implement a variation of the strategy pattern and adapter pattern, which can easily handle these types of scenarios.

<?php
class StrategyAndAdapterExampleClass {
	private $_class_one;
	private $_class_two;
	private $_context;

	public function __construct( $context ) {
			$this->_context = $context;
	}

	public function operation1() {
		if( $this->_context == "context_for_class_one" ) {
			$this->_class_one->operation1_in_class_one_context();
		} else ( $this->_context == "context_for_class_two" ) {
			$this->_class_two->operation1_in_class_two_context();
		}
	}
}

Pretty simple, right? Now, let’s take a closer look at the strategy pattern.

Strategy Pattern

Image courtesy of http://cioinnervoice.wordpress.com

The strategy pattern is a behavioral design pattern that allows you to decide which course of action a program should take, based on a specific context during runtime. You encapsulate two different algorithms inside two classes, and decide at runtime which strategy you want to go with.

In our example above, the strategy is based on whatever the $context variable was at the time the class was instantiated. If you give it the context for class_one, it will use class_one, and vice versa.

Cute, but where can I use this?

Imagine that you’re currently developing a class which can either update or create a new user record. It still needs the same inputs (name, address, mobile number, etc.), but, depending on a given situation, it has to use different functions when updating and creating. Now, you could probably just use an if-else to accomplish this, however, what if you need to use this class in a different place? In that case, you’ll have to rewrite the same if-else statement all over again. Wouldn’t it be easier to just specify your context?

<?php
class User {

	public function CreateOrUpdate($name, $address, $mobile, $userid = null)
	{
		if( is_null($userid) ) {
			// it means the user doesn't exist yet, create a new record
		} else {
			// it means the user already exists, just update based on the given userid
		}
	}
}

Now, the “usual” strategy pattern involves encapsulating your algorithms inside another class, but in this case, another class would be wasteful. Remember that you don’t have to follow the template exactly. Variations work as long as the concept remains the same, and it solves the problem.

Adapter Pattern

Image courtesy of http://www.uxcell.com

The adapter pattern is a structural design pattern that allows you to repurpose a class with a different interface, allowing it to be used by a system which uses different calling methods.

This also lets you alter some of the inputs being received from the client class, making it into something compatible with the adaptee’s functions.

How can I use this?

Another term to reference an adapter class is a wrapper, which basically lets you “wrap” actions into a class and reuse these actions in the correct situations. A classic example might be when you’re creating a domain class for table classes. Instead of calling the different table classes and calling up their functions one by one, you could encapsulate all of these methods into one method using an adapter class. This would not only allow you to reuse whatever action you want, it also keeps you from having to rewrite the code if you need to use the same action in a different place.

Compare these two implementations.

Non-Adapter Approach

<?php
$user = new User();
$user->CreateOrUpdate( //inputs );

$profile = new Profile();
$profile->CreateOrUpdate( //inputs );

If we needed to do this again in a different place, or even reuse this code in a different project, we would have to type everything all over again.

Better

That’s opposed to doing something like this:

<?php
$account_domain = new Account();
$account_domain->NewAccount( //inputs );

In this situation, we have a wrapper class, which would be our Account domain class:

<?php
class Account()
{
	public function NewAccount( //inputs )
	{
		$user = new User();
		$user->CreateOrUpdate( //subset of inputs );

		$profile = new Profile();
		$profile->CreateOrUpdate( //subset of inputs );
	}
}

This way, you can use your Account domain again whenever you need it—plus, you’d be able to wrap other classes under your domain class as well.

Factory Method Pattern

Image courtesy of http://www.lankanewspappers.com

The factory method pattern is a creational design pattern which does exactly as it sounds: it’s a class that acts as a factory of object instances.

The main goal of this pattern is to encapsulate the creational procedure that may span different classes into one single function. By providing the correct context to the factory method, it will be able to return the correct object.

When can I use this?

The best time to use the factory method pattern is when you have multiple different variations of a single entity. Let’s say you have a button class; this class has different variations, such as ImageButton, InputButton and FlashButton. Depending on the place, you may need to create different buttons—this is where you can use a factory to create the buttons for you!

Let’s begin by creating our three classes:

<?php
abstract class Button {
	protected $_html;

	public function getHtml()
	{
		return $this->_html;
	}
}

class ImageButton extends Button {
	protected $_html = "..."; //This should be whatever HTML you want for your image-based button
}

class InputButton extends Button {
	protected $_html = "..."; //This should be whatever HTML you want for your normal button (<input type="button"... />);
}

class FlashButton extends Button {
	protected $_html = "..."; //This should be whatever HTML you want for your flash-based button
}

Now, we can create our factory class:

<?php
class ButtonFactory
{
    public static function createButton($type)
    {
        $baseClass = 'Button';
        $targetClass = ucfirst($type).$baseClass;

        if (class_exists($targetClass) && is_subclass_of($targetClass, $baseClass)) {
            return new $targetClass;
		} else {
            throw new Exception("The button type '$type' is not recognized.");
		}
    }
}

We can use this code like so:

$buttons = array('image','input','flash');
foreach($buttons as $b) {
    echo ButtonFactory::createButton($b)->getHtml()
}

The output should be the HTML of all your button types. This way, you would be able to specify which button to create depending on the situation and reuse the condition as well.

Decorator Pattern

Image courtesy of http://www.decoratorsdarlington.co.uk

The decorator pattern is a structural design pattern which enables us to add new or additional behavior to an object during runtime, depending on the situation.

The goal is to make it so that the extended functions can be applied to one specific instance, and, at the same time, still be able to create an original instance that doesn’t have the new functions. It also allows for combining multiple decorators for one instance, so that you’re not stuck with one decorator for each instance. This pattern is an alternative to subclassing, which refers to creating a class that inherits functionality from a parent class. As opposed to subclassing, which adds the behavior at compile time, “decorating” allows you to add new behavior during runtime, if the situation calls for it.

To implement the decorator pattern, we can follow these steps:

1. Subclass the original “Component” class into a “Decorator” class
2. In the Decorator class, add a Component pointer as a field
3. Pass a Component to the Decorator constructor to initialize the Component pointer
4. In the Decorator class, redirect all “Component” methods to the “Component” pointer, and
5. In the Decorator class, override any Component method(s) whose behavior needs to be modified

Steps courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decorator_pattern

When can I use this?

The best place to use the decorator pattern is when you have an entity which needs to have new behavior only if the situation requires it. Let’s say you have an HTML link element, a logout link, that you want to do slightly different things to based on the current page. For that, we can use the decorator pattern.

First, let’s establish the different “decorations” we’ll need.

• If we’re on the home page and logged in, have this link be wrapped in h2 tags
• If we’re on a different page and logged in, have this link be wrapped in underline tags
• If we’re logged in, have this link wrapped in strong tags

Once we’ve established our decorations, we can start programming them.

<?php
class HtmlLinks {
	//some methods which is available to all html links
}

class LogoutLink extends HtmlLinks {
	protected $_html;

	public function __construct() {
		$this->_html = "<a href=\"logout.php\">Logout</a>";
	}

	public function setHtml($html)
	{
		$this->_html = $html;
	}

	public function render()
	{
		echo $this->_html;
	}
}

class LogoutLinkH2Decorator extends HtmlLinks {
	protected $_logout_link;

	public function __construct( $logout_link )
	{
		$this->_logout_link = $logout_link;
		$this->setHtml("<h2>" . $this->_html . "</h2>");
	}

	public function __call( $name, $args )
	{
		$this->_logout_link->$name($args[0]);
	}
}

class LogoutLinkUnderlineDecorator extends HtmlLinks {
	protected $_logout_link;

	public function __construct( $logout_link )
	{
		$this->_logout_link = $logout_link;
		$this->setHtml("<u>" . $this->_html . "</u>");
	}

	public function __call( $name, $args )
	{
		$this->_logout_link->$name($args[0]);
	}
}

class LogoutLinkStrongDecorator extends HtmlLinks {
	protected $_logout_link;

	public function __construct( $logout_link )
	{
		$this->_logout_link = $logout_link;
		$this->setHtml("<strong>" . $this->_html . "</strong>");
	}

	public function __call( $name, $args )
	{
		$this->_logout_link->$name($args[0]);
	}
}

We should then be able to use it like so:

$logout_link = new LogoutLink();

if( $is_logged_in ) {
	$logout_link = new LogoutLinkStrongDecorator($logout_link);
}

if( $in_home_page ) {
	$logout_link = new LogoutLinkH2Decorator($logout_link);
} else {
	$logout_link = new LogoutLinkUnderlineDecorator($logout_link);
}
$logout_link->render();

We can see here how we are able to combine multiple decorators if we need them. Since all the decorators use the __call magic function, we can still call the original function’s methods. If we assume that we are currently inside the home page and logged in, the HTML output should be:

<strong><h2><a href="logout.php">Logout</a></h2></strong>

Singleton Pattern

Image courtesy of http://intoxicologist.wordpress.com

The singleton design pattern is a creational design pattern which makes sure that you have one single instance of a particular class in the duration of your runtime, and provides a global point of access to the single instance.

This makes it easier to set up a point of “coordination” for other objects that use the singleton instance as well, since the singleton’s variables will always be the same for anything that calls it.

When can I use this?

If you need to pass a specific instance from one class to another, you can use the singleton pattern to avoid having to pass the instance via constructor or argument. Imagine that you have created a Session class, which simulates the $_SESSION global array. Since this class will only need to be instantiated once, we can implement a singleton pattern like so:

<?php
class Session
{
	private static $instance;

	public static function getInstance()
	{
		if( is_null(self::$instance) ) {
			self::$instance = new self();
		}
		return self::$instance;
	}

	private function __construct() { }

	private function __clone() { }

	//  any other session methods we might use
	...
	...
	...
}

// get a session instance
$session = Session::getInstance();

By doing this, we can access our session instance from different parts of our code, even in different classes. This data will persist throughout all getInstance calls.

Conclusion

There are many more design patterns to study; in this article, I’ve only highlighted some of the more prominent ones that I use when programming. If you’re interested in reading about the other design patterns, Wikipedia’s Design Patterns page has a plethora of information. If that’s not enough, you can always check out Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, which is considered to be one of the best design pattern books available.

One last thing: when you use these design patterns, always make sure that you’re trying to solve the correct problem. As I mentioned previously, these design patterns are a double-edge sword: if used in the wrong context, they can potentially makes things worse; but if used correctly, they become indispensable.

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AT&T has a lucrative exclusive for the iPhone in the United States.
But that has proven to be a double-edged sword. While the iPhone has
helped AT&T acquire lots and lots of customers, it has also
strained the company’s network. Regardless of whether or not that’s
entirely AT&T’s fault, network issues have led to a significant
number of unhappy customers.

Improving its image is a top priority for the company. But how should it go about that?

As detailed by AdAge, AT&T is hoping that it can turn more frowns upside down using social media:

…AT&T is turning to social media for customer care after first using the medium for public relations and marketing. “We started using social media as a PR tool,” said Susan Bean, who leads an eight-person social-media strategy and execution team within AT&T corporate communications. “With marketing, we discovered that for social media to be successful we really needed there to be customer care. Otherwise all anyone would want to talk about is: ‘solve my problem.’”

Not surprisingly, AT&T’s efforts focus on Facebook and Twitter. But there are a few problems:

• Twitter and Facebook aren’t always ideal channels for customer service delivery. Looking at just a handful of tweets like this, it’s not too difficult to see that Twitter is a fairly clunky tool for the delivery of customer service, especially in instances where a customer needs immediate help of a technical nature.
• Customer service isn’t a silo. Can social media be a worthwhile part of a customer service strategy? Sure. But good customer service requires excellence across all channels — not just one. While AT&T does deserve credit for monitoring tweets and following up when appropriate, these two recent tweets demonstrate that AT&T’s overall customer service has a long way to go. Bottom line: if you’re messing up in some channels and using another (like Twitter) as a stop-gap measure, something is wrong because there are obviously consumers who aren’t on social media sites who are falling through the cracks.
• AT&T really isn’t using social media for customer care. Problems relating to customers’ biggest beef — that the AT&T network is lacking — are not addressable by the company’s social media team. All the social media team can do is console customers and try to convince them that AT&T feels their pain. That’s far closer to PR than it is to customer care.

The latter point is perhaps the most important. It’s easy for AT&T (and other companies) to label their activities on social media sites “customer care“, but a lot of the time it’s a not-so-subtle effort at PR. The reactions to AT&T’s social media push highlight the fact that a good number of people perceive it as such.

Obviously, when it comes to AT&T’s greatest Achilles heel (network problems), there’s nothing its social media team can do to make things better. But even when it comes to cases where the company is finding individuals who are complaining about their customer care experience in other channels, AT&T’s efforts to publicly address them have more of a PR effect than anything else. After all, you can use Twitter to ensure that a customer who didn’t receive a call back gets helped, but unless you’re addressing the real problem (the fact that a customer wasn’t called back), you’re really only pretending to be providing customer care. What you’re really doing is providing damage control with a smile.

If AT&T is to improve the way customers feel about its brand, it needs to improve its product. And when it comes to the company’s efforts on Facebook and Twitter, it needs to recognize that emphasizing your use of social media instead of delivering customer service effectively across all channels is little more than a fruitless PR campaign.

Photo credit: cameronparkins via Flickr.

I didn’t experience it first hand until today. I noticed a KFC on Holcomb Bridge Road in Atlanta, and I went through the drive thru to order one of these just to see what it looked like since I had read so much about it. The package was literally dripping in grease and I couldn’t bring myself to take a bite.

I’m not claiming that this is the worst fast food sandwich out there, no; there are many other more disturbingly disgusting choices. However, I think this one is gaining popularity because the sandwich buns are replaced with fried chicken breasts. According to the LA Times, “Sadly, within 10 minutes the sandwich caused some physical distress. What more would you expect after eating two fried chicken breasts, a sauce that we still can’t identify, a mix of cheeses that we’re not comfortable confirming as pepper jack or Monterey Jack, and bacon that got a quick zap in the microwave?”

The KFC website says that this sandwich (is it really a sandwich? c’mon) has 540 calories (290 of them from FAT), 32 fat grams and 1,390 milligrams of sodium. There are other sources that claim this sandwich really has closer to 1,228 calories, so I guess we will never know the truly accurate number.

If there is a bright side to this, KFC is donating the buns they would have used for this sandwich to food banks all over the States. It’s such a double-edged sword. This sandwich will only be available at KFC for a few more weeks since it’s a limited edition to the menu. If you are brave enough, try it and let us know what you think.

On a yummy and more healthy note, did you know that Twitter’s own @Jason_Pollock and his girlfriend Katrina Norvell are so inspired by Jamie Oliver’s #FoodRevolution that they have started their own cooking show? There have been two episodes so far, and I’ve included the videos below. It is so much fun to watch them in the kitchen. Katrina teaches Jason how to prepare dishes using healthier food choices. It’s a HOOT!

Just for giggles, since we are talking about outrageous fast food, here is another sandwich that would give a cardiologist nightmares! This is the BK Quad Stacker. It has four beef patties and weighs in with 1,010 calories, 70 grams of fat, 34 carbs, 1,800 milligrams of sodium – and that doesn’t even include the fries.

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Fire is a double edged sword that has enabled the survival of mankind, yet caused massive destruction, destroying everything on its path. This element has the potential to delight or devastate from the first flickering spark. People are hypnotized and fascinated with the fire dancing on the end of a matchstick. In our hands we hold a fleeting power, to be transferred quickly within a few seconds. In this post we feature beauty of the birth of fire.

The Birth of Fire

Combustion

Strike the match

Realized

Ignition

flame

The birth of fire

Maachis

…matchstick…

Birth of the Flame

Match-stick 02

Fackel – torch

birth

Burning together

Burning matchstick

burn…

Fire

Burning

burn…

Playing with fire…

Wings Of Fire

Matchstick

Matchstick

Birth of the Flame

Burning Matchstick

Burning Matchstick

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When you have 70+ speakers and volunteers working for gratis, you start out $2,500 in the hole. And when attendees started registering like crazy, it really was a double-edged sword. While registration was beginning to reflect the fruits of our labor, and the hype was building, my little budget spreadsheet was blinking red with every registration. I was laying out money for shirts, bags and food, and the sponsors weren’t showing up

For those that are willing to go through all of the trouble of putting a WordCamp together, I salute you!

These are cases of successful, memorable branding. Michael Jordan is retired from professional sports, the frogs haven’t been on television in years, and wassup has almost faded from day to day use in the American pop culture vocabulary. However, every one of these elements remains identifiable, and mentioning them to most people will get the typical, ‘oh yeah!’ response to memories of clever marketing, cementing the image of the brand in the viewers’ minds.

Branding is the creation of these memories. However, recollections of a product being indisputably linked with a particular name, image, or slogan can be a double-edged sword.

MCI Communications was one of the most successful challengers to the AT&T ‘Bell Monopoly’ consortium between the late 1960s and early 1980s. MCI managed to push through the breakup of the Bell coalition and allow new players to enter into the field of telecommunications. MCI pioneered many telecommunications innovations, such as Single Mode Fiber Optic Cable, when other companies were content to rely on existing standards. They were one of the first companies to offer the now standard idea of ‘in-network’ calling, where MCI customers received discounts when calling other MCI customers. MCI was one of the big, significant players in the telecom world, so why isn’t their name still synonymous with innovation?

Because it is now synonymous with the words Worldcom, Enron, and scandal.

In 1998, MCI merged with another company to become MCI Worldcom, launching a widespread televised and online advertising campaign featuring notable actors such as Sam Neil of Jurassic Park fame. The MCI brand became inextricably linked with the Worldcom brand. Then, on June 26 2002, the Securities Exchange Commission launched a full inquiry into reported auditing and financial irregularities, resulting in allegations of fraud. By July 21st, less than one month later, it was revealed that Worldcom stock was inflated by $11 billion dollars, and the company entered into chapter 11 bankruptcy. MCI was ultimately bought out by Verizon, and the legacy of a once innovative telecom company was left in the same repository as Arthur Anderson, Enron, and the other big financial fraud stories of the early 21st century.

While this is an extreme example, it is a caution worth considering for anyone interested in making a brand name for his or her product in today’s market. The world is more connected, more informed, and more critical than ever, and while a legacy of good choices can create a strong brand, a reputation for poor or improper decisions can and will conspire to bury a once successful company forever.

Many times, no one can predict what will make a brand into a particular success or failure overnight. However, every company can take three common sense steps to protect their brand and the products it represents.

1. Promote a Quality Product

Quality talks – if a product works, then it has a certain degree of merit that puts it ahead of competition. If a company puts the time and effort to get a quality product onto the market and markets the brand in such a way that the actual qualities are stressed, people will remember.

As an example, Tylenol is an effective painkiller for post-surgical use. It is not a homeopathic remedy relying on word of mouth and supposed benefits, but has demonstrable, measurable effects on human pain and healing.

2. Be Informed About the Brand’s Use

Knowing not just what one is putting out, but what is being done with it in the market, is crucial to proper branding. To continue with the example of Tylenol, many advertisements stress that doctors frequently prescribe it, more than any other over the counter analgesic. Knowing what doctors were using their product allowed Tylenol to make a powerful claim and keep the information in people’s minds.

3. Be Prepared to Take Responsibility for the Brand

As seen in the MCI case, scandal led to the irrevocable decline of a once-powerful brand. Conversely, Tylenol managed to take what could have been a public relations nightmare and came out stronger than ever as a result. When Tylenol executives found out that tampering had led to poison getting into the product supply, poisons that killed Tylenol consumers, they pulled every current Tylenol product from the shelves of stores. They investigated each of their production facilities, solved the problem, and then launched an informative campaign letting people know when and why it was safe to come back to their product. This disaster could have led to the death of the company, but the executives’ willingness to take responsibility and act, rather than covering up and denying fault, saved-a brand that is still powerful to this day.

Again, these are examples of extreme events. Only a tiny fraction of companies ever take their investments down the path of fraud, and almost no one will have to deal with their product becoming a poisonous vector. However, they illustrate the case that a brand is a powerful association for people to make, and that like any part of a business, it requires information and action in the proper degrees.

What Does This Mean to Me and My Website

Normal advertising just informs the consumer about a product and a company’s brand identity. With digital advertising, the consumer can be more involved in the brand image. In this interactive domain, a company can listen to consumers who make comments on their website or blog and act on negative feedback before it becomes uncontrollable. They can try out different advertising strategies to learn which products they should continue to develop and which new features a product should have.

Effective digital branding allows you to identify a singular position and establish your own distinctive voice in the marketplace and incorporates all three of the above-mentioned branding points. You’ll be promoting a quality product. You’ll use social media strategies to keep informed about your brand’s image and you’ll take responsibility for your brand, to guide and shape it to its best advantage.

Branding takes time and thought. Digital branding takes time, thought and an interchange with your consumers. Engaging your customers in your brand in a relevant way is the key to successful online branding.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Branding – For Better or Worse

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Social media is a double-edged sword. Due to its unfiltered nature, it can be a powerful promotional tool. However, it can also publicly expose our problems. Former reality TV star Tila Tequila is an unfortunate but prime example.

Some backstory: Tila Tequila is one of the most popular artists on MySpace, was the subject of an MTV reality show, and most recently filed assault charges against San Diego Chargers linebacker Shawne Merriman, which were subsequently dropped.

Fastforward to Wednesday, November 18th. That night, Tila had a very public meltdown on her Ustream page. She waved around a gun, played around with a knife, ranted about Shawne Merriman, and stripped naked, all live for thousands of people to say (the video was immediately taken down).

Despite claiming that she would never use her Ustream ever again, Tila is back on live video, and this time it’s even more bizzare. She is streaming as “Jane Cordovez,” which seem to be her alter ego for the evening. She is not only waving around a gun once again, but is dancing around with a sword. Yes, a sword. And that’s only half an hour into the live stream.

It’s unfortunate that she’s allowing her breakdown to be publicly streamed. While her brand has always been racy, the last few days have been simply bizzare. If she indeed has issues, we hope she gets some help.

The live, unfiltered video stream is below:

Tags: live video, Tila Tequila, ustream, video

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