Archive for December, 2009

Outlook 2010 – Same Old Dog, No New Tricks

by Dan Hight on December 28, 2009 in Email Marketing with No comments

For those of you who spend time creating html emails and waving your fists at Outlook 2007 waiting for an update – stop waving your fists and start tweeting. Since its decision to start using Word to render HTML in Outlook 2007, Outlook has been less than warmly received by email designers and marketers for its lack of css support… among other things. With the upcoming release of Outlook 2010, now in Beta version, William Kennedy, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President, Office Communications and Forms Team, has confirmed that Outlook 2010 does use Word 2010 for composing and displaying e-mail, just as it did in Office 2007.” Microsoft’s believes that this allow for the best e-mail authoring experience available, drawing upon the “rich tools” that Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years now. This may be fine for everyday email creation but for email design and marketing it prooves to be nothing but a headache. Fixoutlook.org is a website that aims to pressure Microsoft into stepping up their HTML support. Even though Outlook 2010 has made it to Beta testing without a new rendering engine and is unlikely to be changed for its official release, make sure to visit the site at http://www.fixoutlook.org/ and tweet your displeasure. They have to hear sooner or later.

Best of CSS Design 2009

by Dan Hight on December 21, 2009 in Website Design with 1 Comment
webdesignerwall

 

WebDesignerWall has just released their 2009 list of Best of CSS Design.

Check it out @ http://www.webdesignerwall.com/trends/best-of-css-design-2009/

CSS3 – What’s in Store…

by Dan Hight on December 18, 2009 in Website Design with No comments

CSS3 promises to offer a bounty of new tools for web design. Better yet, IE9 has annouced full support for CSS3 hopefully bridging a bit of the gap that exists when designing and testing cross-browsers.

Check out all the new features and keep up to date with what’s in store, including text-shadowing, rounded borders, web fonts and more @ http://www.css3.info/

CoTweet: How Business, our business, does Twitter

by Carey Copeling on December 15, 2009 in Social Media, Twitter with No comments

cotweetscreenshotWhen we started looking to increase our presence with Twitter, we initially did what the first 18 million people did – signed up and began posting from Twitter’s native site. As more and more of our consultants took an interest in contributing, a quick Google search revealed a multi-user platform appropriately named CoTweet™. It allowed us to quickly setup users for all of our consultants who wanted to get tweeting, and allowed them login with their own usernames and fire away. Referred to as a Social CRM, CoTweet packs a lot of features that were important for our organization. The ability to create custom searches, either by keyword or hash tag, immediately allowed for segmentation of the over 1.8 million tweets posted per hour, or 27.3 million per day.

That is a whole of noise coming from the four corners of the globe, and really the majority of it ends up being clutter. We quickly leveraged the search function to develop specific returns, for example, “marketing automation” – using a simple keyword matching tool it reveals any recent tweets that mentioned that phrase. Every user has their own search panel that stays in place and allows them to monitor specific search strings and the most recent matches. This is something that can’t easily be achieved by using the native Twitter application without managing multiple windows while constantly refreshing the content.

Another excellent feature is the List function. Recently, Twitter released the functionality to group fellow Twitter users based on any condition. In our case, we created a Private List of all of our clients, and at any given time, we can filter our tweet stream to only display posts from our clients. You can see how this can be effective and efficient, and quickly serves up fresh tweets from your clients. You can also use Public Lists which can be accessed by any Twitter user.

If you are looking to get onboard with Twitter as an organization, or as an individual, CoTweet is the perfect solution. Factor in the cost – free – and everyone can enjoy a supercharged version of the native Twitter user interface.

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