Introduction to Web APIs w/ Christopher Castiglione

General Assembly put together this trailer for my Introduction to Web APIs online video series. Check it out!

Client: The Black Eyed Peas / Bacardi
Project Description: The official tour blog for the Black Eyed Peas’ E.N.D Tour

Client: Toyota
Agency: Superfad
Project Description: HTML5/CSS3/JQUERY Mobile Site for Toyota
URL: http://www.toyota.com/

Client: RISK! Storytelling & Podcast
Project Description: HTML5/CSS3/JQUERY/E-Commerce/Wordpress
URL: http://www.risk-show.com

Here’s a snippet from my interview, the first in the series, with Courtney Taylor of The Dandy Warhols:

“Songwriting? That’s something that I don’t really know how to do.” Courtney Taylor felt that I ought to know this before we even began our interview to discuss that very subject.

As we sat upstairs in Webster Hall on a chilly November day in New York City, the Dandy Warhol’s lead singer and songwriter wanted to make this one point clear: “I don’t write songs, they just happen to me.”

The Sound of Songwriting with:
Courtney Taylor of The Dandy Warhols,  Sam Beam of Iron & Wine, Tim Kasher of Cursive

Client: American Express
Project Description: Developing the monthly email campaigns for American Express.

As far as Content Management Systems go, Expression Engine is an efficient, functional solution for both developer and clients. But unfortunately, snappy functionality isn’t the only factor you need to consider when choosing a CMS. Compare EE with two of its “competitors”, WordPress and Drupal, and you’ll find that EE falls short on a number of other issues including: price, smaller community, less updates, and an unfortunate licensing situation.

Warren emboldened the audience to be daring, “There really isn’t a long history of web typography, we are at the beginning of the web font revolution, and we can all be a part of the revolution.”

She noticed that in most of her favorite designs there was “no Arial”, and “no Georgia”. “The difference between Arial and Habano is rock & roll”, she affirms, pointing to recent album cover art from My Morning Jacket. Compare the two images yourself: on the left is the original My Morning Jacket cover with the Habano font, on the right is an example where Warren substituted the text with Arial.

“A question I often hear from designers and developers is, ‘How do you pick a font’”, she admitted. “It’s a difficult questions to answer, but I like to think of it as ‘How do you choose a pair of shoes?’ I think about the weather and my schedule for the day. Shoes just go with people!”

“This woman is wearing crocks, they are practical and they match, but they just really fit her style.”

“These are my Helvetica shoes.They go with just about anything. I’ve worn them on interviews, to dinner, or just hanging out with friends”

“Archer is a font that everyone is using these days. If you’re trying to communicate ‘friendly and approachable’, and if you want to say it the same way that Converse is saying it, then use Archer.”

Until recent years, web developers were stuck using only web-safe fonts (like Arial and Georgia!). But now sIFR and (more preferably) cufon are challenging developers to use non-standard fonts: to beautify and challenge design conventions on the web. This is Warren’s call for action: stop being so agnostic, 2010 is the year to “get stoked on web typography”.

Samantha’s slides from the presentation are on SlideShare:

The other dramatic change I noticed?

When I checked into The Driskill during SXSW Interactive, foursquare altered me,

Via Foursquare: “You are checked in with 250 other people”

But one day later during SXSW Music I received a paltry,

Via Foursquare: “You are checked in with 6 other people.”

What changed? The hotel was just as crowded, if not more so during music, but it’s pretty obvious that the music folk are less inclined to geek-out. I was surprised how many of my friends, ones who even had foursquare and Twitter accounts, didn’t really understand how to use them, or how they could be valuable to their business. Also, I was surprised how many of my friends had normal cell phones where the only app was SMS.

So, I’d like to share how you can get involved with foursquare, Twitter and Facebook using any mobile phone.

foursquare

1) Sign up for a foursquare account

2) Sign in and click “Settings” -> Under Account Info click “edit” -> Add your phone number

3) Check-in via a text to 50500 (like this:  @ Starbucks ! Spending too much money on coffee.)

Extras: From the web, you can visit the mobile address on the web to check-in, or use the desktop application FoursquareX which has a cool map view and plots your friend’s avatars around your location. (note: the SMS feature is only available in the US at the moment).

Twitter

1) Sign up for a Twitter account (duh)

2) “Settings” -> “Mobile” -> Add your mobile number

3) Send an SMS to Twitter at: 40404 (or for an international numbers)

4) Go back to “Settings” -> “Mobile” to decide who you will receive tweets from, or you can set it up as DMs only

Facebook

1) “Account settings” -> “Mobile” -> Add your number and preferences, click save

2) SMS “f” (with the quotes) to 32665 (FBOOK)

3) After you receive the confirmation text your status to 32665 “@ OMG. I’m Awesome”

As of March 2010, BING has 11.5% share (and growing) of the U.S. search market – which is a fairly big deal. So, how did they convince people that they needed Bing?

“We knew people were really happy with Google. So we asked ourselves, ‘How can we introduce a product that no body thinks they need?’, began Stefan Weitz (Director of Search at Microsoft). For the first time, the team fearlessly dove into these types of questions in a public panel: what followed was a degree of candor and humanness that’d I don’t think anyone would ever associate with Microsoft.

Bing and Farmville

Bing used a Cost-Per-Engagement (CPE) model (as opposed to the traditional CPM model) as a way to engage with their audience:

The fact is, more people use Farmville than Twitter. And they use in a different way, “more like a drug”. This gave the Bing team the idea to use the Farmville platform as a way to tell people about Bing. So, in exchange for learning a little bit about Bing, they offered fans some extra Farmville cash.

Bing’s results from using a CPE model with Farmville:

• Over 72% of users who clicked on the engagement became fans
• 59,000 users published the story to their newsfeed, extending the message across their network.
• Over 70,070 clicks were received on published feeds; on average each published story received more than 1 click.
• We received 400,000 new fans on Facebook within the first 24 hours

“The amount of engagement and feedback we received just from this community was enormous, because these people got exposed to us in a way that mattered to them. We’re not necessary moving past the CPM model, but there is something very important about cost per engagement”, explained the team.

Bing #Win, Big #Fail

The Bing team told stories of their triumphs: like the Bing Jingle Contest which was “something we just did as a lark”, yet resulted in a swarm of great press. #Win

But shortly after, when a group of high schoolers planned to perform the Bing jingle, the Bing team “innocently” shipped them a box of tshirts. Weitz explained the problem, “We saw this as an opportunity to engage with these students, but we went over the line. It felt inauthentic and overproduced. And when the video surfaced on Youtube we received a lot of negative press.” #Fail

5 Social Marketing Lessons From The Launch of Bing

1) You know nothing. Social media is one of the wackiest eco systems in the world, comparable to when the butterfly flaps its wing. The media circles that we gave the most attention to weren’t the same ones that gave us the most coverage and exposure.

2) When you screw up. Admit it quickly. Bing tweeted an ad for Victoria Secret’s mentioning that the girls were giving “VD advice” (Valentine’s day?). “What would have been a PR disaster 10 years ago, was covered up in 10 minutes by apologizing: ‘Oops! Our mistake.’ We laughed along with the Twittersphere and they calmed down.”

3) Have personality. As an example they give Zappos’ amazingly funny Social Media Guru video.

4) People want stories, not feature lists. The Bing team received an email from a 100-year old Cardiologist in Florida which read,”I want to thank you for naming your search engine after me.” To which they thought, “Well, clearly this person is crazy.” They followed up on the story, and met with Dr. Bing in Florida, only to find that not only was he unbelievably sane, but full of fascinating stories. The team went on to commission a documentary about his life which was shown at Sundance last year.

5) Give a Shit. People know when you’re not being authentic. People know when you’re pitching them.

The BING panel at SXSW: Aaron Lilly, Lynn Girotto, Stefan Weitz, Ian Schafer

Slides are available on SlideShare.

More information about the BING panel can be found on the SXSW site.