Increasing Usability for E-mail Newsletters E-mail marketing has been very popular in the past ten years and it still is, most likely because of its relatively reduced costs, low amount of work required and quite large potential audience. E-mail marketing is a direct way of sending commercial messages to a group of people by using the e-mail as the main and only channel. E-mail newsletters are not always sent because a company needs to sell a product, sell ads or request donations, but is sometimes meant to build loyalty, trust and brand awareness. There are many usability guidelines for e-mail marketers to follow and in the past couple of years the number of guidelines has actually increased, as users request more and more from providers and tend to ignore poorly designed layouts. Time is also an important matter today; more important than it was ten years ago. Subject line What can you learn from here? E-mail marketing: when? In my opinion the key to e-mail marketing is branding. Scanning, not reading Responsive (again) Typography
How to Use Delicious for Content Ideas Do you have a Delicious account? What on earth is Delicious? Delicious is an apt name for a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. It puts emphasis on the power of the community, and it can help you discover new content, save it for reference later, and share it with your colleagues. It comes in handy for two main purposes: 1.) 2.) You can write notes about why you liked that content when you bookmark it as a short hand for later. Bookmarking and tagging content As you develop your blog's and micromedia content calendar, it may be helpful to use Delicious as a tool to bookmark content you find interesting, instructive, and helpful. You can even start your posts right there by writing a brief comment to the tagged URL. I bookmark big stories that inform my thinking on trends. Other ideas on bookmarking and tagging: become a go-to resource for industry information on a specific topic -- the more defined, the better.
The Last Podcast – Facebook Login is Hard: Welcome to Idiocracy Facebook Login is Hard: Welcome to Idiocracy We saw an interesting phenomenon on ReadWriteWeb today. My colleague Mike Melanson wrote a post about Facebook Connect , which now shows up as the #1 search results on Google News and also as a new result on Google’s main search engine. That – by itself – wouldn’t be something out of the ordinary, but here is what happened: suddenly we got an influx of tens of thousands of confused Facebook users who thought that ReadWriteWeb was Facebook. Just image the thought process somebody would have to go through to think that RWW is Facebook: “Oh – lets use the Google to check Facebook… let’s type in ‘facebook login’ here in this thing that shows me the Internet… oh look… there it says Facebook, let’s click on that… [ opens up Mike's Facebook posts - confusion sets it ] Hmm… that looks red… weird… there is a lot of text… don’t want to read – too hard… just log in to Facebook… where’s my Facebook? Just look at comments like this:
Foundation | A Responsive Email Framework We know building HTML emails is hard, especially responsive emails. That's why we created Foundation for Emails. Get away from complex table markup and inconsistent results. Email marketing is good for your business. Common UI Patterns to Build Faster You can use these UI patterns in your designs to quickly get your email into shape. Emails that work in all of the major clients, even Outlook There’s no need to worry about inconsistent spacing and odd rendering issues with your layouts. View our compatibility chart → The ZURB Email Stack will make you an email pro Upgrade your email workflow to save time be more efficient. Learn more about the ZURB Email Stack → Inlining CSS is was a pain It used to be that every time you had to make a change to your email, you had to copy the contents, open the inliner in your browser, paste it in and inline. Check out our web inliner →
FellowUp Makes Following Up Manageable [INVITES] FellowUp FellowUp connects to Google, Facebook and LinkedIn to serve as a web and mobile personal assistant. Scaling contact management for social media users. Tomer Cohen was a bit overwhelmed when he first arrived from overseas to earn his MBA from Stanford. “I was meeting great people and making great connections,” the class of 2010 business school graduate told me over coffee. Like most of us, Cohen found that the relationships he invested time in were the ones that eventually paid off professionally. And so Cohen created FellowUp, a private beta website and iPhone application that plugs in to Facebook, LinkedIn and Google APIs to help users better manage their relationships. FellowUp users need only connect their third-party accounts and the startup will pull in contacts and calendar items. Eventually, according to Cohen, FellowUp will do a better job at alerting the user to all manner of important events, with importance determined by user preference, happening around his contacts.
Facebook Friends Checker for Greasemonkey Script Summary: Regularly checks your Facebook friends to check whether anyone has removed you from their friends. Did this script help you? Please donate, but don't feel forced to! When the script detects that someone you used to be friends with is no longer one of your friends, a message will appear informing you about who it was and giving a link to their profile page. Brief explanation of how the Script works... Any time a page is loaded on Facebook, the script will run and it will follow the following basic algorithm; Load a list of all of your friends in the background.Compare this list of friends with the list from the last time the script checked your friends.If someone was on the list before who isn't now, show the blue box informing the user.Save the new list of friends over the old one.Save the current time as the last checked time. If you have any comments on this then please create a discussion about it. NB. Known Issues Screenshot Update Log 7-Jan-2009: Initial release.
The Fab Four technique - Responsive Emails without Media Queries The Fab Four technique to create Responsive Emails without Media Queries I think I found a new way to create responsive emails, without media queries. The solution involves the CSS calc() function and the three width, min-width and max-width properties. Or as I like to call them all together: the Fab Four (in CSS). The problem Making responsive emails is hard, especially since email clients on mobile (like Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook.com) don’t support media queries. That last approach has been my favorite so far. Once all the blocks are stacked, they don’t take the full width of the email. I’ve been looking for ways to solve this problem for a long time. A solution Remembering width, min-width and max-width On top of the calc() function, the solution I found involves these three CSS properties. If the width value is greater than the max-width value, max-width wins.If the min-width value is greater than the width or max-width values, min-width wins. (Answer : the box would be 480px wide.) Demo
3 Ways To Meaningfully Visualize Your LinkedIn Network The best thing is that people are connected for a reason there: when sending a friend request, you need to specify how you are connected to a person. This way your network contains a wealth of business-oriented information: you can find out how you are related to any company or person you need to get in touch with. Alternatively, you can be introduced to anyone outside your immediate network using your first-level connections. Tapping into your Linkedin connections can be a great way to discover new career opportunities for personal and professional growth – and here are three tools that can help you to: 1. Visualize Your Network Layers and Influencers: InMaps InMaps (we have already reviewed InMaps) is a new project inside LinkedIn labs that creates the visual representation of your professional network. It may take some time for larger networks but it is well worth waiting… The tool can be a huge help in identifying influencers in your business network: 2. 3.
McDonald’s to Be First Location-based Marketer on Facebook: Report McDonald’s will be the first marketer to use Facebook’s forthcoming location platform, according to Advertising Age. Users will be given the ability to check in at a location using a status update on Facebook as early as this month, AdAge reports, and then see a featured product targeted to that location. McDonald’s will reportedly be the first brand to participate, as part of a larger media buy. However, Facebook won’t necessarily be charging advertisers for the highly targeted, extremely valuable, serendipity-inducing, long-term-relationship-forming privilege of showing their promotion to a nearby customer on an already-open Facebook mobile app, if the Ad Age report is to be believed. Asked specifically about geolocation features, Facebook national sales director Kevin Colleran said at a conference yesterday, “We never launch a functionality with the intent of monetizing it,” noting that Facebook mobile usage currently goes entirely unmonetized.
Email Design Guide Content Focus your message Some of the most effective emails have one clear message. If you have multiple messages to send, try breaking them up into a series of emails. Be concise Reduce the length of your email until you can simplify no more. Create a hierarchy Put the most important information first for people who are short on time. Break it up Use headings and bulleted lists to divide content into sections that are easy to understand. Link out If you have a lot of information to convey, link to a page on your website (or someone else's website) where subscribers can learn more. Templates Start from scratch Sometimes it's easiest to start from scratch. Save your template Instead of starting over every time you send an email, create a template you can use and modify again and again. Identity Label it Make sure the reader knows who the message is coming from by putting your logo or name at the top of the email. Color Pick a palette Choose just one or two colors for your emails. Images
Fan page Facebook: gli errori comuni | NON CONVENZIONALE blog social e dintorni — By Emanuela De Vecchi on 24 marzo 2010 16:16 Sono architetto è già in passato ho dovuto scontrarmi con clienti che non riconoscevano il valore del mio lavoro perché ritenevano di saperlo fare da sè. Ci sono mestieri in cui, più di altri, è difficile far valere la propria professionalità e la propria competenza proprio perché molto vicini al “fare comune”. Facebook ha un grande vantaggio rappresentato dalla facilità di utilizzo. Per le aziende non è molto differente. Vediamo alcuni aspetti: Reclutare i fan Come non fare pubblicità: immagini scadenti, errori, ripetizioni. Popolare la pagina deve essere il primo obiettivo. Anche l’attività di reclutamento fan attraverso lo spam su bacheche di pagine o gruppi simili dà scarsi risultati. Senza dubbio il modo più efficace per raggiungere il proprio target è quello di investire in una campagna pubblicitaria su Facebook, almeno nella prima fase, per dare un booster iniziale nonché notorietà al brand. Aspetto della pagina
10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know We’ve updated this guide with the new privacy settings just launched by Facebook. You can get the new Facebook privacy guide now. Everyday I receive an email from somebody about how their account was hacked, how a friend tagged them in the photo and they want a way to avoid it, as well as a number of other complications related to their privacy on Facebook. Over the weekend one individual contacted me to let me know that he would be removing me as a friend from Facebook because he was “going to make a shift with my Facebook use – going to just mostly family stuff.” Perhaps he was tired of receiving my status updates or perhaps he didn’t want me to view photos from his personal life. 1. I can’t tell you how many people are not aware of their friend lists. There are a few very important things to remember about friend lists: I’ll touch on each of the things listed above in more detail later. Using friend lists is also extremely useful for organizing your friends if you have a lot of them.
Condizioni d'uso Facebook aggiorna l'aggiornamento di stato - Tom's Hardware Con le nuove API Facebook permette alle applicazioni di accedere direttamente allo status, ai link e alle note pubblicate degli utenti, tramite le chiamate FQL. Le applicazioni, quindi, potranno accedere e modificare questi elementi; altre novità riguardano il caricamento dei video. Le novità più interessanti riguardano senza dubbio l'aggiornamento di stato, vero cuore del Social Network, che potrà essere modificato anche tramite le applicazioni esterne. Fino ad ora questo era possibile con strumenti semplici, come la barra degli strumenti di Firefox. Le nuove API, infatti, permettono ad applicazioni di terze parti di accedere a Status, Note e Link in maniera semplice ed immediata. Ancora una volta, si parla di scontro a sangue tra Facebook e Twitter, che però noi vediamo come servizi segnati da differenze importanti. Le reti sociali sono la rete del futuro?