We recently had the pleasure of working with HookUP Media to help produce the Web site for “March for California’s Future,” an online companion to an event going on right now in the Golden State. Organizers say that the 250 mile march, sponsored by the California Federation of Teachers and its diverse allies from labor, the faith community, and other civic supporters, is designed to draw attention to the underlying causes of the state’s woes as well as gather signatures for a majority budget initiative.

Visitors are invited to take action by signing the online petition, donating to the cause, and even joining the marchers as they travel from city to city across the state. A core team of marchers staff the roaming “Blogmobile,” and a Google Latitude map is updated throughout the day on a mobile phone.

Check out the site at http://www.fight4cafuture.com/.

The site connects to a proprietary inventory management platform, but most of the heavy lifting for the catalog and content pages are built on the Symfony PHP framework. It also integrates with the content management system provided by Nashville-based SiteMason.

Check out the site at NashvilleOfficeFurniture.com.

In my defense, I’ve been in interactive marketing for 12+ years and have seen enough one-hit wonders to disregard hype. After all, clients don’t invest tens — if not hundreds — of thousands of dollars with CentreSource to get fads. On the flip side, learning is a critical, never-ending endeavor. In this business you blink, and you’re a decade behind. So, I rolled up my sleeves, and resolved to learn something new. It didn’t take long.

The next day our Ops Manager, Will Acuff, told a few of us that he was participating in Pepsi’s Refresh Project, and would appreciate our help in raising money for a neighborhood clean up effort. He asked us to vote for his idea on Pepsi’s site and pass the word along to friends. Will’s verbal request was about to be digitized. After I voted, Pepsi gave me the option to spread the word via Twitter, so I did — which in turn was ‘retweeted’ by friends and colleagues.

By Day 2, word was spreading through our Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter networks. Hits started pouring into the CentreSource website, so we augmented our efforts with a blog entry. On Day 3, the story jumped from social networks into the Nashville Business Journal. On Day 4, Pepsi’s use of Twitter, Facebook, and other online media had combined to build national interest. The Pepsi Refresh Project — and our own Will Acuff’s photo — was featured in a CBS Sunday Morning story to an audience of 5+ million people.

An idea that began with 1 person in our office, traveled via Twitter through our local office network into our regional social and professional networks into a regional newspaper and onto a major national television network and to 5+ million people — in 4 days.

While atypical, this story illustrated to me the speed, the path, and the power of social network marketing — a real, tangible case study for anyone considering how social media can fit into a corporate or personal marketing campaign.

Host: CentreSource Interactive Agency (Hey! That’s us!)
What: February 2010 Interactive Mixer
When: 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday, February 25th, 2010

Where:
CentreSource’s North Fourth Office
1313 4th Ave N
Nashville,TN 37208

To RSVP, visit mixer.centresource.com.

1. The first step is to consider the nature of your website. Is it merely a “static” HTML/CSS website with no dynamic data? If not, does it use a database of any kind? How/where does that database store its data? Lastly, does your website include the storage of a large number of files (multimedia, documents, etc)? And if so, are these crucial to the operation of your website?
2. Next, how much data can you afford to lose? Of course, no one likes to think or talk about losing data, but any solution is a compromise between resources you’re willing to pay for and the amount of data that’s guaranteed protection. This “amount” is typically/best measured in time. Any backup solution will capture “snapshots” of your website — copies of the data at a certain point in time — that will vary anywhere from “realtime” to hours or days since the last snapshot was made. If you cannot afford to lose any data, then a realtime backup solution is the only option. These solutions will do their best to use a program running non-stop in the background making a backup (somewhere) of your data. If the answer is “some” — then you just make a determination of what your acceptable loss is. Is it a day? A week? 6 hours?
3. The second “time” factor is the time-to-restore. How much time is acceptable to go from a catastrophic failure to a complete restore of your website functionality? This time is determined by many things in addition to the actual type of backup you have, including the type of webhosting you have, and the form of the failure. If you host your website on a VPS (”Virtual Private Server”), for example — and this VPS was backed-up in its entirity on a regular basis — then restoring is as simple as copying over the VPS backup and restarting it to that point. If your website has a more complicated architecture (multiple frontend webservers and multiple databases, for example), then the restore process is likely to be a more lengthy ordeal of reconfiguring the servers ahead of time before any data is put back in place.
4. Where is the data backed up? It should be obvious that the best backup is to a location that is physically separate from where your website is hosted. This is not an absolute (in fact it’s quite relative — is another server rack in the same datacenter “off-site”? What about a different datacenter owned by the same company and on the same network?), but in general you should attempt to distance your data from the potential points of failure: fires, tornadoes, hosting company incompetence, nuclear strikes — you name it.
5. Can you test the restore functionality regularly? This is a factor of cost, to some extent, and also practicality. If you opted for any backup solution other than “realtime”, you’ve decided on an acceptable level of data (time) loss — so testing a full restore right to production is not advisable, since you’d lose data. But working with your hosting/backup vendor to verify the backup, and maybe test a restore to another location are things you should pursue, if possible.

These are all important questions that you need to ask of yourself, and also of your web hosting vendor and your web developer. Together, you can decide on a backup solution that makes sense for your website. That said, what kind of solutions are there? This is not a comprehensive list, but it’s a general summary of the types of ways you can guarantee continuity of your website. Interestingly, computing/server technology has come a long way in the last couple of years. Virtualization and cloud competing have blurred the lines between continuity, load-balancing, and backup. After all, if your website is running on a virtual server in the cloud, data loss is impossible, right? Well, no, not really.

• VPS (Virtual Private Servers) – as mentioned above, a VPS can be a good way of assuring a very quick time from hardware failure to restoration. A VPS is a “server” that is entirely self-contained and run in a “virtual” environment. This means that your server itself is essentially a file or files that can be copied (regularly, or realtime) to any other backup medium for later restoration. Typically, most hosting providers that offer hosting on a VPS will also offer a backup service that makes restoration of your VPS a cinch. The above questions, however, are still quite pertinent and should be asked: How often do they backup the VPS? How quickly can they restore? Some hosting vendors host their VPS on a “cloud” server architecture which makes hardware failure a nearly negligible factor. However, you should still consider how much you trust the competence of your hosting vendor and explore the option of backing up your data somewhere else independent of the VPS itself. Many other things can go wrong — virtualization software failure, data corruption, etc. These things can all leave your virtual server inoperable or unsalvageable.
• Backup “daemons” – “daemon” is computer nerd slang for any software that runs non-stop in the background. There are many common backup solutions that use a daemon running in the background to persistently backup your website and its data. Typically, this sort of solution is what’s required for a “realtime” backup of your data. Most hosting vendors that host larger dedicated managed server environments will have some offering in this regard.
• Scheduled backup jobs – there are a wide variety of ways this can be implemented, but loosely speaking, this is any sort of backup script/program that is merely scheduled on a regular basis (say, nightly) and involves a manual copy of the website data (files and database dump) to an arbitrary off-site location.

It’s very likely that any hosting vendor you choose will have one or more of the above options — and possibly others. But it’s not enough to simply sign-off on an arbitrary product without understanding what it does and what it guarantees. Hopefully, armed with the above questions and information, you can make the right decision about how to backup your website. In an age where a website is increasingly the face of your business, you can’t afford to leave it to chance.

Devastation. Tragedy. Hopeless. Those were the words used to describe the recent earthquakes that struck the island of Haiti on January 12 near Port-au-Prince. To a nation that that was already struggling with poverty and trying to meet the basic needs of its people, the earthquake magnified the crisis for the world to see. Like many companies in Nashville, CentreSource matched its employees’ donations to give $500 to the UNICEF organization to help with relief efforts.

Late last year, we were approached by Trinity/HOPE, a feeding program aimed at providing meals for school children and teachers so that they may be agents of positive change in their communities and help lift up a nation. Their existing Web site did not effectively tell of the mission trips, year-round campaigns and coordinated efforts of partnering organizations to sponsor schools across the island. The new site builds upon Trinity/HOPE’s reputation as a spirit-lead organization that makes a difference in the lives of Haiti’s children, one bowl of rice and beans at a time.

Visit their site at trinityhope.org.

Having just wrapped up the logo design, I thought it would be fun to share with you an overview of the process.

Brief

The client had previously received a logo from one of those cheap logo design sites that churn out subpar concepts for around $50. You get what you pay for, and he was given a ridiculous visual representation of his company that had no flexibility at smaller sizes or one-color applications.

After showing us this wonderful example of mediocrity (this is me being nice), Bounty Bev came to the table with a request for a super quick turnaround: they needed a great logo design in about a week, and they had no initial direction with any of their branding. With such a tall order, where does one start? Over beers at a local pub, of course.

The client’s ultimate request was that the logo and branding be fresh, bold, and flexible. I left the meeting with some general notes and a few napkins worth of quick sketches which, if they didn’t get lost somewhere along the way, I would gladly share with you.

Sketch

Even if I sketch with a client, I like to take a few days to sketch on my own time and let ideas grow slowly. A great logo should be an identifiable mark that people can associate with a company and shouldn’t be taken lightly.

I was drawn (har har) to a circular shape from the beginning, abstractly representing a barrel or bottle cap. We had also thrown around the idea of creating a physical stamp from the logo, and these shapes would work great.

The client had expressed interest in using a line drawing of a ship in their logo, but after working with this concept, I felt using a real object in the logo could restrict the brand and that it would be better to work towards something more iconic and flexible.

Concepts

With an intended direction, it was time to open Illustrator and create some concepts. During this step, I’m usually fleshing out sketched ideas, but I leave myself open to completely new possibilities.

The client had made it clear that their primary focus was American craft beer and that somehow needed to be communicated in their branding. Their current tagline was “we deliver the reward,” which is the kind of cheesy marketing speak you could expect in a television infomercial. This led to our new suggested tagline “American Craft, American Passion.” Short, sweet, strong. While trying to bring out American qualities in the logo, I was inspired by the sort of retro shapes and type treatments when it became clear that there’s no modern visual style considered strictly “American,” sans red, white, and blue stars and stripes.

A selection of these concepts were collected in a PDF and shared with the client, along with some visual explorations of the new tagline. Our recommendation was on the circular emblem because of it’s flexibility with color and presentation.

Final

The client loved the suggested concept and gave us the go-ahead to fully explore it and come up with the final version. Because the Bounty Bev box truck is blue, we created a white version of the logo that can work on dark surfaces.

The client has expressed their excitement about their new branding direction, with kind words such as “I love the simplicity and versatility… I love it!”

When I realized that Pepsi was offering grant money to various non profits and community organizations instead of spending tons on Super Bowl ads I was blown away. What a great idea to both raise your brands public image and help change communities across the U.S. As an active volunteer in East Nashville through such organizations as the KIPP School, YMCA youth sports, United Way, and City Church, I thought it couldn’t hurt to apply for a cause I started about 2 years ago called Clean East.

I dream of an East Nashville with no drug paraphernalia littering the steps of our library. Where trash doesn’t blow like tumble weeds through the lawns of our schools. This is possible only through the powerful combination of community responsibility and labor. Our adults and students need to come together to own the problem and work together for the solution. Clean East will do this by organizing community ‘walks’ where every volunteer is given empty trash bags, and protective gloves. Focusing the walks Neighborhood by Neighborhood will allow us to pull in students, teachers, and parents thereby empowering the change we seek physically (beautify the streets) and mentally (community responsibility). I believe this will refresh East Nashville in a way that could impact a generation.

So that’s the story and the pitch. If you have a few minutes to vote, I would greatly appreciate it. http://www.refresheverything.com/cleaneast

Slide from Whoa! Creating Engaging User Experiences

What is Experience Design?

According to The New Everyday: Views on Ambient Intelligence, experience design (XP) is the practice of “designing products, processes, services, events, and environments with a focus placed on the quality of the user experience and culturally relevant solutions, with less emphasis placed on increasing and improving functionality of the design.”

The New Everyday: View on Ambient Intelligence

What Are the Components of Experience Design?

Experience design is made up of six key components:

• Psychology
• Market Research
• Brand Management
• Information Design
• Interaction Design
• Visual Design

As you can see, these components span a wide array of skills. Don’t make the mistake of assuming experience design is the sole responsibility of your designer, usability expert, strategist, dog trainer, mother-in-law, or significant other to handle. Experience design is an inclusive process that involves every person on your team. It is a collaborative process that needs buy-in from every person that touches your project. With that in mind, let’s break down these components.

Psychology

Seek to understand your audience. Who are they? How do they think? What influencing factors shape their decision-making? What types of things evoke emotions from them? Why do people do the things they do? These are all questions you should ask yourself when determining the direction of your experience design.

Market Research

Know your playing field. What are your competitors’ strengths? What are their weaknesses? What have they tried in the past? Identifying these things can save you time identifying potential pitfalls. More importantly, this market research will also help you shape a unique experience that sets you apart from the rest of the herd.

Brand Management

You must have a good grasp of your brand. In this age social media, it may seem like you are not in control, but don’t make the mistake of leaving your brand to chance. You have the ability to control your brand as well as the ability to shape the perception of that brand. I promise you, this is not going to be easy. There are countless books and blog posts written about this very subject, and I definitely do not have all the answers.

Customer service is one aspect of brand management that is easy to overlook when focusing on function instead of experience. Remember the last time you got off the phone with a company and were so mad you wanted to hit something? How do you feel about that company now? Manage your brand well, or you may end up on consumerist.com’s “Worst Company in America” tournament bracket.

Information Design

What information do you want to disseminate, and how will you organize it? Construct your information in a clear, easy to understand hierarchy. Don’t dilute your information with unnecessary fluff. Find the core of your message, and stick to it.

Interaction Design

How will users interact with your experience? This is your opportunity to be creative! I am extremely impressed with the influx of augmented reality on mobile devices. For example, if you have a compatible device, check out the Amazon Mobile application.

Amazon Remembers

I also consider usability design a part of interaction design. Without good usability design, your users cannot interact with your product or service and will ultimately leave with a bad impression of your brand.

Visual Design

What is the visible face of your product or service? What will it look like? Don’t assume that a good logo is all you need. Keeping a consistent, well designed visual look to your logo, print collateral, website, packaging, etc. will help consolidate and unite your brand’s image. Visual design can help shape the perception of your product or service. Take a look at the visual design of any investment firm or financial management institution. Generally speaking, the design will convey stability and order, because they want you to feel at ease when entrusting them with your money.

What’s The Point?

You may be asking yourself, “why do I have to be concerned with all of this? My product stands on it’s own.” This may be true — your product or service may be so revolutionary that it rises to the top of our collective consciousness purely on the power of it’s own awesomeness. For the rest if us, we are going to have to invest a lot of hard work, time, and energy in making it to the top. Case in point: there are 187 million websites in the world. That means, if your site is an “one in a million” experience, there’s 187 other sites that are just as unforgettable. If you hope to rise to the top and elicit tangible customer interaction, you must constantly focus on the design of your product or service’s experience.

With all of that information, managing the taxonomy terms and categories could easily get out of hand. Working with his staff, we created a Symfony module dubbed “HyperWords” (the name is a work in progress) that scans the page content and recommends the appropriate taxonomy. Now, when a new page is created, it suggests to the author relevant categories and tags.

The new site is easy for prospective clients to navigate thanks to a clear strategy and professional design. The site is also easy for Dr. Biesman’s staff to manage thanks to innovations like HyperWords. We call that more than just a facelift.

Visit the site at http://www.drbiesman.com.