PR quagmire: Oprah, Zach Anner, and the unpredictability of online polls

Rex Riepe Jul
10

Oprah cheated a handicapped man out of a deserved win.

That’s the potential headline, anyway. After Oprah put up a show as the prize in a contest on her site, Reddit and other sites championed an unlikely candidate: A very funny guy with cerebral palsy named Zach Anner.

Anner, whose contest video included the quote, “No Atlantis is too underwater or fictional,” quickly became the darling of the popular social news website (and surely others too), tallying over 9 million votes before the contest was up.

Of course, the winners page, where Anner placed 7th, shows him at 3.4 million votes even though his submission page still shows the 9 million.

What happened?

Well, the Internet happened.

Online polls are completely unpredictable. Tying real world decisions to them, like Oprah’s team has done, is asking for a public relations nightmare. A telling example is Time Magazine’s 2009 “Most Influential Person” contest, where 4chan founder Christopher Poole won after the poll was bombarded with scripted votes. Poole wasn’t the only influenced vote; 4chan also picked the top 21 spots.

Time isn’t too bothered by the results, though. They didn’t promise anything to any of the winners of their poll.

But Oprah did– sort of. It’s interesting to note that she promised a show not to the 1st place winner of the contest, but to her favorite of the top 5.  It would seem that keeping Anner out of the top 5 was a calculated PR move: Avoid the appearance of not picking the handicapped guy.

It was completely reasonable in a way. Anner’s a funny guy and probably does deserve a TV show. But for Oprah’s audience? Probably not. And it wasn’t Oprah’s audience doing the voting, either. The top-voted comment on the latest Reddit submission concerning the story is a joke about continuing to not watch Oprah’s in protest.

Backing up

If it was a calculated move, however, they’ve now backpedaled, expanding the top 5 to the top 8, which includes Anner. Anner will be heading out to LA to audition, along with the other 7 finalists.

What was the decision-making process here? We’ll probably never know. On the one hand, it seems unethical to throw out votes. On the other, it’s not exactly right to pick a winner even if none of your fans actually voted for him. If you were Oprah’s PR team, what would you do?

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Building your web development team: Meet the warrior, rogue and mage.

Rex Riepe May
24

In roleplaying games (RPGs), player classes can usually be boiled down to three basic roles: The warrior, the rogue, and the mage. In web development, we see the same three basic archetypes.

Concept art for the three basic classes of the first Diablo.

The Warrior

As the heavy hitter (he’s the guy with the big ax in the picture), the warrior ends up doing a lot of the damage.

But he’s more useful for the damage that he takes. A team of adventurers will have a hard time functioning without a crazy guy up front, swinging around his weapon and taking all of the big hits.

In web development, the warrior is the back-end programmer. It’s a dirty, bloody, sweaty job, but somebody’s gotta do it.

The Mage

After slinging around a few magic missiles, the mage is the guy on the team that gets to act like the whole thing was no big deal. He drops a few tidbits of wisdom on awed onlookers in his fancy robes while the warrior gets to pick bits of ogre out of his ragged warrior beard.

That’s right; the mage is the designer. Everyone see the lights of his fireballs from the village, and comes running to congratulate him on a job well done after the village is saved.

But if a Goblin were to slip by with a spiked club, the mage and his fancy robes wouldn’t last long. The Mage has the hardest time on his own.

The Rogue

The Rogue is the most versatile of the three classes. He can attack from afar, like the mage, with his bow and arrow. He can also mix it up in the front lines with his dagger, particularly if he can position himself correctly (ideally, behind his opponent).

It’s this versatility that lends the rogue his real strength. He can be where the team needs him to be.  In web development, the rogue is the guy with an unusual combination of skills. He’s sometimes called a sweeper or just a jack-of-all trades.

Building your team

Putting together a web development team is just like putting together a band of adventurers. You need a balance of classes.

If you have three people, aim for one of each class. Sometimes it’s okay to have two warriors and a mage, or similar combinations. Having three of the same class is almost always a disaster.

With two people, the combinations become a bit more limiting. Obviously Warrior/Mage or Warrior/Rogue is a good combo. Notice that having at least one warrior is always a good idea (the converse, having all warriors, is just as bad as that idea is good, however).

Watching out for the know-it-alls

Adventurers are a boastful bunch. Watch out for the warrior who says he knows everything there is to know about magic, or the mage carrying around a great sword that’s taller than he is. For every day an adventurer spends learning more about the intricacies of shooting fireballs, the less he learns about swinging an ax. There’s lots to know in fantasy adventuring, and there’s even more to know in web development.

We’re long past the days of one person being able to know everything. A balanced team of specialists will always beat out a team of know-it-alls.

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Match Strike launches HootCourse

Rex Riepe May
24

StrikePad has been a bit quiet lately. If you’re wondering why, it’s because we just launched our new project, HootCourse, into a public beta about two weeks ago. We’ve been working at a fevered pace since then to get everything just right and deploy a few fixes.

Now we’re looking for feedback and bugs. If you’re interested in helping out with testing, join HootCourse 101, the course for learning about HootCourse.

If you want more information on HootCourse, read our About Page. Or check out a couple of the blogs that have recently featured us:

Thoughts of a Cyber Hero: HootCourse

Free Technology For Teachers: HootCourse

Jane’s Pick of the Day: HootCourse and CloudCourse

We’ve seen an outpouring of support from our friends, both personal and in the educational field. Thanks to all those who have helped!

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Introducing the iPan

Rex Riepe Apr
14

Apple just sent over their latest product, the iPan, and I’ve gotten to spend a couple of days with it now. Here are my impressions.

ipan

It’s all about taste.

Ramen noodles are the lifeblood of my small startup. Their ease of preparation and low, low price make them ideal for bootstrapping. I had perfected my cooking technique and couldn’t be happier with my ramen noodles.

Or so I thought!

With the iPan, Apple have once again introduced a complete game changer. Preparing and eating ramen noodles will never be the same.

Apple’s saucepan brings something to the table that other saucepans just can’t match: Taste. iPan ramen just tastes better. The taste continuum below perfectly represents why Apple products, especially the iPan, are superior.

tastecontinuumNot just a better development environment: A complete development environment.

Before, my development shop was plagued with the worst kind of problem: Too many choices.

Now Apple have done even more work to lift that burden from my shoulders. I no longer have to go to the store and pick from several different saucepans, with their erratic problems and glitches. I have the iPan.

In fact, I couldn’t go to the store and pick if I wanted to. Apple have extended the terms of their agreement to include the complete development environment– which now includes our kitchen.

Some companies would be content to just provide an alternative. Apple thankfully mandates our development environment, ensuring a great experience for everyone.

They go that extra distance so I don’t have to.

Apple have also quite cleverly ensured that I will always pick ramen noodles. After dropping 1700 on a MacBook, 500 on an iPhone, 700 on an iPad, 99 a year to develop for the iPhone, and 149 on this revolutionary new iPan, all I can afford is ramen.

Thanks, Apple.

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HTML5’s missing piece: The disclosure tag

Rex Riepe Mar
16

disclosureImagine a worst case blogging scenario: The FTC have pegged you as a violator of their disclosure guidelines. You now face $11,000 in fines per sponsored post. Or, worse yet– you don’t live in the states, but your country has recently implemented a policy that makes the FTC fines seem like parking tickets.

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to point to the clearly tagged disclosure that’s included with your article? That’s the disclosure tag. And it’s sorely needed in HTML5.

The strengths of semantic disclosure

Portability

One current convention of disclosure is the site-wide disclosure policy. Like a privacy policy, it’s linked in its own section, usually in the footer or navigation.

The major drawback of such a policy is aggregation. An article that’s torn from its home site and posted in different places won’t have that same footer or navigation, opening the author up to potential disclosure violations.

Like the header or time HTML5 tags, the disclosure tag would travel with the blog post, protecting the author regardless of where it was posted.

Separation

Disclosures exist in a limbo state. Sometimes they’re part of the article, and sometimes they aren’t. Authors will often awkwardly paste them in at the beginning or end of their article, or as mentioned above, depend on a site-wide umbrella disclosure. The disclosure tag would keep the disclosure text separate from the post’s text, while still keeping it within the article tag.

Style

As a separate element, disclosure would place an emphasis on developing a style for displaying the disclosure text, something that’s often overlooked now. More often than not, authors aren’t the ones designing their sites; a default disclosure style saves them from the plight of having to style their own (or worse, finding a disclosure plug-in of some kind).

How it would work

The article element

Like header and time mentioned above, disclosure would be a child of the article element. It would be optional; not all articles need disclosures.

In-line disclosure

The HTML5 working draft already includes an example of in-line disclosure under the small tag description. Functionality like this (disclosure: I’m a co-worker of John McExample) wouldn’t be handled by disclosure.  Rather, general article disclosures or site-wide disclosures would be suitable. Some examples:

<disclosure>The author received a promotional copy of the book Strike Up the Web before writing this review.</disclosure>

<disclosure>The author is a former employee of Match Strike.</disclosure>

<disclosure>The author was paid by SuperConglomerate International to write this post.</disclosure>

Just as articles can sometimes have multiple authors, an article may need more than one disclosure.

Linking a disclosure

Disclosures could be linked within the disclosure tag. This maintains the flexibility of having a site-wide disclosure, without exposing the author to potential liabilities through aggregation. Here’s an example:

<disclosure>See <a href="http://matchstrike.net/d.html">Match Strike's Disclosure Policy</a></disclosure>

Authors could link to external disclosures (from disclosure services, open-source disclosure statements, etc.) in a similar manner.

The growing importance of disclosure

Disclosure isn’t going to be less important by the time HTML5 is finalized. By then, the need will be absolutely clear, especially if the FTC start regularly taking action against offenders. We need disclosure as a tag now, not as a “Wouldn’t that have been nice?” spec in HTML6.

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Rowfeeder might be the smartest tool yet for social media monitoring in public relations

Rex Riepe Mar
04

I got a chance to meet up with the guys at Untitled Startup a few days ago. They were working on adding some cool stuff to their own site. What really caught my eye, though, was their app Rowfeeder.

Rowfeeder is like a lot of apps. It tracks keyword mentions on Twitter. The difference, however, is how it records them: Straight into a Google spreadsheet.

rowfeederFor PR pros, this avoids a lot of the problems that the other services have.

  • There’s no daily e-mail report (if you’re in PR, you’re already getting a lot of these).
  • There’s no new site/interface to log in and deal with.
  • The resulting information is incredibly easy to share, whether it’s with colleagues or clients.

At $2.49 for a two-day period, it’s a great deal, especially for product launches, big articles, or events. Did I mention it updates the Google spreadsheet in real-time? It’s impressive stuff.

The downside

The inherent drawback of the service is that it is, in some ways, too powerful and too demanding on both the Twitter side and the Google Docs side. Rowfeeder can’t yet handle the more frequently occurring keywords, but they do have a nifty feature on their site which will tell you if they can handle yours.

It also doesn’t support phrase tracking (any search term with spaces), which unfortunately leaves out a lot of my own search terms. The app itself apparently can handle it, but you have to contact them to set it up.

Since you’re setting up a two-day period, there is some planning time in advance. It’s not a “fire and forget” service like Google Alerts. I imagine the time it saves makes this worth it, although it might be tough to practice this sort of discipline when planning a big event or product launch. Like with phrases, you can contact the team to set up extended tracking over longer periods of time.

If it helps any, know that they’re very approachable guys.

Some things I would like to see

Links: It’s hard to find a site that doesn’t link Twitter usernames to a profile. Rowfeeder spreadsheets don’t. I know it’s possible, and I find myself wondering why they don’t include this feature.

Hand-holding: Rowfeeder gives a lot of extra data in the Google Docs. Some of it is straightforward, like the graph. Some of it’s a little bit more complicated, like the Tweet Data tab.

More graphs: Right now everything is tabular with one graph. If I handed this job off to a person, I’d tell him/her to make some graphs that I can show off at a meeting. I’d probably be paying a person more than $2.50, but the information’s there, so why not take advantage?

The conclusion

Rowfeeder is a steal for what you get. Public Relations professionals seem to be scrambling to show off ROI for all this fun new stuff they’re doing. I think a Rowfeeder spreadsheet is the step in the right direction.

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Facebook’s fountain of youth

Rex Riepe Feb
08

zuckerberg-fountain

Facebook is rolling out a new layout. If the story doesn’t sound familiar, it should.

You can guess the rest. Some people got it early. It has mixed reviews. There’s a facebook group with thousands of people unhappy with the changes. And the latest step: People groaning that it’s already happening again. (The irony of including this step in this post is not lost on me, but bear with me for a moment.)

It’s starting to feel like they’re just moving the same ol’ furniture around.

Maybe that’s exactly what they’re doing. Has Facebook found the formula for keeping the top spot? Keep it feeling fresh, even if nothing has changed all that much.

Madonna reinvented herself every few years. Facebook rolls out a new layout every few months.

Is it the only reason they have hundreds of millions of users? No. But it’s a big reason that people are staying with the site.

The takeaway: It seems to work.

What have you done lately to keep your site feeling fresh?

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How Apple hides the iPad’s dirty little secret with an optical illusion.

Rex Riepe Jan
28

Here’s the iPad as you (probably) haven’t seen it before:

ipadhappydaysLike many others, at one point I found myself asking, “Wait… it’s a 4:3 screen?” It wasn’t because I was disappointed in the new specs; this was hours after I had seen actual images of the device. “I could have sworn it was widescreen!”

I wasn’t quite ready to dismiss my initial perception of the device. After all, the media-consuming public has been conditioned over the past decade to accept that widescreen is just better. Our TVs are wider. Our monitors are wider. Even our Apple laptops are wider.

But the iPad, as it turns out, isn’t wider. That doesn’t stop Apple from giving the impression of width on their website (or, at the very least cleverly transitioning us towards this “new” aspect ratio). My initial perception was wrong, but it took an image rotation in Photoshop to really convince my brain.

Looking at the promo images of the product, it’s not hard to see why. The iPad is almost always presented vertically. If not, it’s slanted away from the camera and pointing off-page, giving an illusion of width-through-depth that, if you don’t look carefully, makes it look wider than it actually is.

appleipadApple isn’t evil and this isn’t a malicious “gotcha” scheme, of course, but it’s worth noting. The folks at Apple are masters at presentation, and I’m positive that they put as much thought into this as any other part of their launch campaign. As far as gripes go, the 4:3 aspect ratio usually comes in pretty low on lists, and I’m betting it’s due in part to this clever presentation.

It reminds me of the old tables optical illusion: Which tabletop is longer?

tablesThe answer (like most optical illusions) is that they’re both the same. Exactly the same shape for both tabletops. That one on the left sure looks longer though, doesn’t it?

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Intentionally unprofessional: Design techniques that could backfire

Rex Riepe Jan
14

One of the worst things about design is that you can put a lot of work into something that comes out looking like, well… nobody put a lot of work into it at all. Here are a few techniques that could make you look like an amateur, even if you know what you’re doing.

Blur

Blurring is a pretty common image editing and design technique. Unfortunately it looks like a lot of negative after-effects of image manipulation.

sentinelThe two Orlando Sentinel logos seen here have a major difference: One is sharp, and one is blurry.

To most people (including most designers), it’s impossible to tell if something has been blurred, or if it simply looks blurry as the result of something else. If the above logo had been made larger, for example, it would look a bit blurry afterwards in most programs. For a print company on the web, this might not reflect well on the Sentinel if they had the bottom, blurry logo on their website.

Of course, they do have the bottom, blurry logo on their website– that’s the original. The top one has had a simple sharpen filter run on it.

The tips:

  • Avoid unnecessary smudging or blurring, especially on type.
  • Solicit feedback from people just getting started with design.

Lossy

Image manipulation can wear out your images fast if you’re not careful. JPEGs get a grainy look. GIFs can go low-palette or get that weird, spotted look. And all images can get pixelated through repeated resizes, even if you’re resizing down.

Occasionally you’ll want to use a pixelation effect, a grainy effect, or an effect that mimics a low palette. Be careful that your image or artwork doesn’t too closely resemble these common missteps in image manipulation.

Even popular effects, like the “grunge” effect, can start to resemble image degradation. Here’s a “grunged” bit of type, and then a lossy version of the same type, without any grunge effects.

onemanOne has a carefully applied dirt/wear effect. One was just saved with really bad GIF options. To the layperson, these two might start look very similar, very fast, especially if we were more aggressive with a grunge or retro effect.

The tips:

  • Avoid retro or grunge effects entirely. (I’m kidding! But seriously, do be careful with any effect that adds wear to a picture.)
  • Be extra careful with pixelation and grain effects.

Repeating backgrounds

You can do really cool stuff with repeating backgrounds while keeping your file sizes ultra-low. The second you remind your user of the bad backgrounds of the past two decades, however, you’re done.

homepage(This says “Welcome to my homepage!” Tell your eyes I said sorry.)

The tips:

  • Avoid seams. If you’re in Photoshop, you can use Filter > Other > Offset to quickly see where they might be apparent. For certain backgrounds, the healing brush can help you fix seams really fast.
  • Avoid prominent details. If you have a smaller repeating background, make sure there are no large marks or patterns that make the repetition painfully obvious. In Photoshop, use Edit > Define pattern to make your image into a pattern, which you can then use to fill (Select “pattern” instead of “foreground color”) a large canvas. If anything sticks out, remove it. You can also make the background image larger to less the repetition effect.
  • Avoid repeating backgrounds altogether if you can. Lots of sites have full page background images, with surprisingly low file sizes. But that’s another post…

So there you have it: Some mistakes the pros can make and accidentally look like amateurs. Got something to add? I’d love to hear it in the comments.

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Bad Practice of the Month: First-party pop-ups

Rex Riepe Dec
22

It wasn’t too long ago that the Internet collectively suffered through pop-up advertisements. They were everywhere. Pop-ups had pop-ups.

Thankfully the whole mess has been taken under control. Even the oldest browsers in use today have pretty good pop-up protection, saving users from the deluge of “Click the monkey” and “Buy this pack of smileys.”

But pop-ups are coming back.

This time however, they aren’t going to ask you to click a picture of George W Bush, take an IQ test, or play a clicking game. Instead, the pop-ups of 2010 will ask you to join a mailing list. They’ll ask you to follow the author on Twitter.

Imagine if, right now, I took a break from this blog post to ask you to follow me on Twitter. Or if I told you to go check out my other blog on public relations. Would it ruin the flow of the post? Did it?

Worse, imagine it was a pop-up. Not the old kind that browsers easily block, but a Javascript-based pop-up in a lightbox window. Sure, it’s handy if you can’t find a link to the mailing list, or if you didn’t know one existed. But it’s only handy once, and only for a small percentage of users. The absolute worst part of it is that the most annoyed group of users is going to be returning readers.

Many blogs have fallen into this first-party pop-up habit. If you haven’t seen it yet, you will. Soon.

If you’re doing it: Please, please stop. This trend is somehow even more annoying than the pop-ups of yesteryear. It’s a clear example of a trend that might work at first, but then rapidly devolve into something your users find annoying and offensive.

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StrikePad is a blog devoted to the web development profession, written by the jerks at Match Strike.

Match Strike - Quality Web Development