Interactive Producer Blog

photo credit: grunge

I’ve worked with some designers recently to create some pretty fun HTML emails. I was thinking about the first email campaign that I developed a few years ago, and I’m amazed at how much I’ve learned in terms of best-practices.

Here are some of my favorite resources / thoughts when working with HTML email:

• Design for the preview pane — without question, the top 200px are the most important aspect of your email.  All to often, we design our emails with images at the top.  This is fine, but make sure you have some renderable text in the top 200px that isn’t automatically blocked.  This text should be concise and tell the reader exactly what your message is about!
• Inline CSS: do it right – in the HTML/CSS coding phase, I keep all of my styles in the head of the document or in an external file.  This allows the obvious benefit of being able to revise and update your styles quickly (that’s what CSS is for!). But when sending an HTML email, you need to bring all of your styles inline with each styled attribute.  This tool will save your life — Preflight for HTML email.
• Using tables — most HTML developers know this, but tables are really the only way to guarantee your layout.  I’ve found that nesting tables within tables is much easier than using colspans and rowspans within one or two tables.  Here’s more about nesting tables — you can see that you’d need to get pretty crazy to run into an issue.

I’ve got three major sources of inspiration and information with email design, strategy and development:

• Email Marketing Reports
• Smith-Harmon Blog & Retail Email Blog
• Smashing Magazine (just for design)

Okay, that was four links. What do you think?

A PDF version of my presentation at the University of Minnesota later today:

• Interactive Advertising — Journ 4272  (PDF, 1.3MB)

Blogs I read most frequently:

• Silicon Alley Insider
• TechCrunch
• ArsTechnica
• iPro
• Bannerblog
• Smashing Magazine (one of my favs)
• AdScam
• Email Marketing Reports
• Fireworks Zone 

What blogs do you like that I should be reading? Let me know in the comments!

Local organizations / clubs / events that interest me:

• Ad Fed MN
• MIMA
• MN.swf
• FlashMN 
• MinneDemo

What other events and organizations I should be attending? Let me know in the comments.

photo credit: iwoiwo

Do you know about version control, specifically Subversion? The concept is pretty simple — version control is a quasi-filesystem that creates a repository for team members to collaborate on files.

This filesystem allows you to look back at old revisions and (with many version control solutions, depending on filetype) you can merge two different documents together.  This book (free online) does a much better job explaining SVN.

Voila! Better project management.  I get excited just thinking about it.

But then I come back to reality; it’s never easy teaching people new methods and new software.

I’ve started using Subversion for some projects solely to track my revisions (everything from PSDs, to AS files or even DOCs) .  The reason for me is simple — I often times forget to do a ‘Save As…’ when starting a new version of the same file.  With SVN, I’m able to track my progress more effectively.

Do you use version control in your day-to-day?

 I’ve been sent a few articles recently proclaiming the prevalence of the 35+ crowd on Twitter.  Here are some links for background information:

• Twitter older than it looks — Reuters
• Twitter traffic explodes … and not by the usual suspects — comScore

And here’s a graph that’s handy for discussion:

There is absolutely no doubt that Twitter is exploding — and its growth among all age groups is dramatic.  The almost-even-among-demographics growth is a testament to Twitter’s power of connecting people and creating dialogues like we’ve never seen before.

But the comScore data should not be interpreted that Twitter’s users are middle-aged.  Here’s why:

Growth versus the agreggrate.   As social media matures, it will always have higher growth among older demos.  Because Facebook is growing fast among 35+, doesn’t mean the sub-35 crowd is outnumbered. The same is true for Twitter.

comScore is only tracking Twitter.com traffic.  Here’s year-old graph from ReadWriteWeb that shows why Twitter.com traffic is not a representative sample of its userbase –

Only 54-percent of Twitter traffic comes through Twitter.com — my guess is that the 44% of Tweeters using AIR apps, iPhone apps, text messaging, etc. skew heavy within the younger demographic.

What do you think?  You can reach me on Twitter, @tbuchok.

I had a great lunch with the guys from BackTalk Media yesterday.

Much of the conversation centered on relevant targeting when it comes to banner ads.  The Stub Hub ad above does just that — is geo-targeted for my city (Minneapolis) and pulls live data in for their best ticket deals.

Slick!

More and more, I believe we’ll begin to see online display ads working harder for advertisers.

photo credit: h de c

Razorfish unleashed its 180-page digital outlok yesterday.  The valuable, compelling information starts on page one.

In the Trends to Watch section, they write, “Social Influence Marketing^TM will go mainstream in 2009.” I don’t fully have my head around Social Influence Marketing — but it is trademarked, so maybe someone from Razorfish can help out…

As I understand it, Social Influence Marketing is providing marketing solutions that are shareable with your friends, and allow for a two-way dialogue between consumer and brand.

The report uses a real-world example of Social Influence Marketing — Facebook Connect. From the Razorfish report, “Facebook Connect … has the power to make an invidual viewing experience social.”

For the past 18 to 24 months, marketers have talked about bringing branded apps and widgets to the social network.  With Facebook Connect, the social network can now be presented in bigger, broader and more in-depth environments outside of the social network.

How?  Check out a couple examples from major brands:

• Comcast Town
• Red Bull Connect
  

If you’re a brand and want to build a relevant service that can be fluidly shared — Facebook Connect allows you to instantly attract an audience.  And they don’t have to worry about registering for another site or forgetting another password.

Have you used Facebook Connect with any brands or online services?  Let me know and I’ll update this post.

photo credit: dvdbramhall

As I prepared for my trip to Italy this week, I did some catch-up reading on the Renaissance.  The wealthy patrons of the Renaissance era focused a lot of their energy on beautifying their surroundings — with painting, architecture, sculpture, literature, etc.  The power of creativity and art enhanced not only their lives, but countless others over the past 500 years.

(You could argue the following comment is disingenuous at best…) In a way, interactive producers are stewards to the online aesthetic.

From assisting in social media content creation, ensuring best practices in website design/development and pushing the limits across all channels — interactive producers are key to working with creative teams to make the web a prettier place.

When I think about “what does an interactive producer” I go back to fellow producer Jennifer Helm’s comment:  “We work … closely with the creatives to be sure their vision is delivered upon.”

Am I getting a little crazy comparing Donatello to  Jason Fried …  what do you think?

photo credit: this is your brain on lithium

I’ve been posting some thoughts and ideas elsewhere for the past few weeks or so.  Check it out!

• Advertising 2.0: Idea is Still King – on the Eyeblaster CreativeZone blog
• Fireworks to Flash tutorial — on the Fireworkszone blog
• Interactive Steward (an interview) — on the iPro Blog

photo credit: nflorence2012 (such time en-route)

The internet community has been abuzz with this absolutely awesome tutorial from Read Write Web.  In the tutorial, you’re able to build a customized feed that, essentially, picks up on the most social-media-worthy content on the web.

Going through the tutorial, I created a customized feed covering the field of Mobile Marketing.  The RWW tutorial also introduced me to a great website: PostRank.  From the PostRank website: “PostRank™ measures audience engagement and provides integrated tools to enable you to customize your RSS subscriptions. Save time, boost productivity, and Read What Matters.”

PostRank is able to deliver upon their promise by trolling the web for tweets, inbound links, blog articles with comments, etc.  In short, PostRank judges an article’s relevancy based on how many people are talking about and interacting with that post.

I got to thinking about how this influences searches of all type — are we at the precipice of a new search revolution?

There are many options out there that democratically allow web users to vote on stories — Digg, Yahoo! Buzz, Newsvine, and even Google has added the ability to Promote search results.  PostRank takes this a step further — gauging relevancy by the amount of conversation it produces.

I think this is an interesting (r)evolution that will continue to move forward.  Think about the power of a re-tweet (RT), from Shel Israel:

Retweeting allows the power of the network to take over. It allows a solitary voice to be amplified by the voice of the crowd and it seems to me that Retweeting is the most powerful single aspect of Twitter.

Add this to list of comments, social bookmarks, etc.  PostRank takes content beyond PageRank, which is heavily anchored to inbound links.  No longer can SEO specialists just consider where their link is placed; is the content worthy of a comment, discussion, tweet or re-tweet?

We may be on to something here…