And we’re off!
Day one of the January 2012 edition of Factory Week is in the books. We got our assignments for the week in our first huddle on the mezzanine of the Speak Easy, our HQ for the week. After one day, I can’t say enough good things about this space. If you’re interested in co-working space in Indy, you’ve got to check it out.
What we’re up to:
With 18 projects queued up, we’ve got our work cut out for us. We’re tackling everything from planning for the team trip to SXSW, to taking new team photos, to developing a video game for our culture page. Good thing there’s plenty of white boarding space for all of these projects - 224 sq. ft. to be exact.
Keep on the up & up!
We will post a recap of the week here, but you might want the whole nitty gritty. If so, follow along on the Factory Week blog and the twitterings @factoryweek. We also started an instagram account, so look for SmallBox there!
After a long journey through my 20′s–geographical, temporal and otherwise–I have now landed in an office that is down the street from my high-school. I am basically okay with this. It is also down the street from where I attended driver’s ed: 86th St. in front of North Central was among the first stretches of road that I drove out upon legally, accompanied by a driving instructor who–it seemed to me–lived in an unwavering state of barely contained fury and constant paranoid vigilance.
I’m not sure if everyone had this experience, but my Driver’s Ed teacher made driving around in Indianapolis sound like it was about on par with going over the top of the trenches in World War I and sprinting out into No-Man’s-Land during the Battle of Somme under heavy fire. His attitude was pretty much like, “Well. You might survive without being taken prisoner. But if you do, it will basically be a lucky accident. And frankly, knowing you, it would surprise me.”
Occasionally, mid-commute, my mind will drift back to those days. I’ll remember the grisly stories that I was told in Driver’s Ed about the mortal danger zone that I would immediately be plunged into if I ever drove out into traffic without first checking my tires to make sure that they were at the correct air-pressure, having my hands at 10 & 2 o’clock on the steering wheel, making sure my mirrors were adjusted to ideal angles for a maximum span of surveillance, and sitting erect in the driver’s seat in a frozen 90 degree angle posture, with my eyes looking straight ahead at all times aside from occasionally darting left or right to look in the rearview or driver’s side mirror.
For a moment my hands will spring back to their 10 & 2 o’clock positions and my spine will stiffen into an erect posture. When I turn, I will turn hand over hand, immediately returning my hands to 10 & 2 after completing the turn. My eyes will scan my mirrors at the recommended “every 10 to 15 seconds” frequency, just to make sure that no semis or busses are accelerating behind me at a speed and proximity that would indicate that if I don’t step down on the accelerator they will roll over my car from behind and crush me (apparently, according to my Driver’s Ed instructor, there’s usually about 50-50 chance that they probably are).
I’ll slow my vehicle down by about 5 miles per hour to drive in perfect conformity with the speed limit. I will take my foot off the accelerator and begin slowing my vehicle at the recommended 800 yard distance before Stop signs. I will brake and accelerate smoothly, pretending that a glass of water was sitting on my dashboard and I didn’t want to spill it.
Unfortunately, if I am completely honest, I have trouble maintaining this level of disciplined operational perfection at all times while I am out on the road. Even more frightening is the fact that, according to my understanding, other people sometimes have problems doing this too. We are all out there on the road in various slumpy postures, with imperfectly adjusted mirrors, and our hands—God forbid—at all sorts of incorrect positions on the steering wheel, driving 5 miles over the legal limit.
In all seriousness, driving back and forth to work is without a doubt the most dangerous activity that most of us partake in during an average 24 hours.
That’s where Pulse comes in. 90% of rear-end collisions are avoidable with extra warning. Just watch this video and see if you don’t agree with me.
A Marketing Challenge: Pulse’s product-offering—namely, pulsing third brake lights—is not available to consumers for direct purchase. Instead, Pulse partners with car dealerships across the country to provide this safety feature. Consumers who want to purchase one need to locate a nearby dealership who can install Pulse in their vehicle.
This presents a marketing challenge – and opportunity. Pulse focuses on a two-pronged outreach. Their main focus is in-person networking between dealership personnel and their nationwide sales team. To bolster that, they use social media to make connections and help co-promote their product. SmallBox helped by offering consulting around social media best practices and helping produce video content (the one embedded above!) to tell the Pulse story.
Pulse is just starting to blow up all over the country—keep an eye out and you’ll probably see their product while driving down the road at some point in the next few weeks. It’s a small but extremely important innovation that will save lives—and no doubt already has. You can find Pulse on Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and LinkedIn.
Once in a while, as I show a coworker or client something on my computer, I get a “How in the heck
did you do that so fast?!” reaction. I am a huge fan of quick keys, or keyboard shortcuts that make quick work of tasks like minimizing browser windows and moving files to the trash. Here are just a few of my
most-often used keyboard shortcut time savers.
Snag a Sneak Peek. Have you ever opened or shared the wrong file? If you have OS 10.5 or later, you can easily eliminate those “oops” moments — take a “peek” of the file by tapping the space bar. This feature works great with most standard media file formats (MP3, MOV, MP4, JPG, PNG, PDF etc) and with iWork and iLife native files (Keynote, Numbers, Pages).
An Easier Way to Dump. If you’re like me, you were originally “trained” to drag things to the trash to delete a file or to eject a disc, but you can save yourself a lot of extra “mouse-work” by learning to tame your trash habits:
To move a file or folder to the trash, select it and use Command + Delete.
To instantly empty the trash itself (without the annoying confirmation) use Option + Shift + Command + Delete
To eject a disc, camera or other server or hard drive, select it and type Command + E
Quick!! Hide!! Never be caught off guard by an impromptu visit from your boss or co-workers again… simply hit Command + M to instantly minimize the window and keep it away from prying eyes. “What if the other windows I have open are MORE incriminating?” you might be asking? Easy… use F11 to instantly minimize ALL open windows. If you’re on a laptop or using a keyboard that utilizes the function keys for other purposes, simply use Control + F11 (and yes, this trick will give you access to your other function keys too.)
Cycle and Recycle. Don’t waste your time navigating from program to program or file to file via the Dock or through Menus, instead start using Command + Tab to cycle forward through your open applications and Command + Shift + Tab to cycle backwards through them. And some applications (Chrome and Photoshop for example) support a similar short-cut — try using Control + Tab and Control + Shift + Tab to cycle forward and background through any files (or tabs) you have open.
Quit Already! Yes Macs are great, but they can still fall prey to renegade applications that suddenly decide they don’t want to “play nice”. When you’re faced with such a dilemma, don’t fret, just click Command + Option + Shift + ESC and hold for 3 seconds to “Force Quit” the renegade app and regain control. Yes, you’ll lose any unsaved data, but you’ll save yourself from tearing your hair out from frustration. You can also access the Force Quit feature by holding the Control + Option keys down while clicking on the app’s icon in the Dock and select “Force Quit” from the pop-up menu that appears.
BONUS TIPS FOR LION USERS: Just Swipe It. With OS Lion, Mac ushers in a new alternative to the standard “keyboard shortcut” — gestures. While it still feels a bit strange to me, I do find myself using a few of the “triple finger swipe” ones. Using three fingers on your trackpad:
Swipe up to see all currently open spaces, apps and open files
Swipe left or right to cycle through Full-Screen apps(this only works with full-screen enabled applications)
Spread (using 3 Fingers + Thumb) to reveal the desktop (if you have Lion try it! It kinda feels like you’re just flicking everything out of the way)
What about you? Do you have any time saving keyboard shortcuts up your sleeve?
This is the first installment of a new series that SmallBox will be running to highlight some of the cool things our clients are doing. We’ve worked with such a diverse array of businesses over the past few years, the variety is almost mind-boggling. We work with such a wide variety of companies and industries. From an HR and Employee Benefits company to a company that specializes in delivering top-quality, low-cost flooring products like vinyl plank flooring, we feel like we have a million stories to tell about our clients, and no one to tell them to but each other. So we thought we’d try sharing a few of these stories with you, dear reader.
We’re kicking off the series with a post about Floors To Your Home because we feel that the way they are building up their internet presence is a model for how really effective national e-commerce brands will work in the future. We think that the way that Floors To Your Home is going ‘above-and-beyond’ right now will be ‘the new normal’ in the future, as more of the total retail pie shifts from brick-and-mortar to e-commerce and the space becomes more competitive.
No. 1: “More than words”
Great content and lots of it has been the new model for a while. And Floors To Your Home has great content. When most companies talk about ‘great content’ on their site, they are referring to the text on a page. Design is important for user experience, text is important for SEO purposes. Text is also important for user-experience, of course: if the text is not helpful or interesting to the user it will alienate your customer. So you have to have the most informative, interesting text on the market or your not going to get anywhere. That’s your baseline. But Floors To Your Home decided that wasn’t enough. So they added video tutorials to their main pages. Visit their site and you’ll see their tutorials ranging from how to lay laminate flooring to their explanation of the difference between engineered hardwood flooring and solid hardwood flooring we think that floors to your home has positioned themselves not only as the most affordable flooring site on the internet, but also as an authority and resource for aspiring DIY-ers to get a feel for flooring.
We’re hoping that–sometime in the foreseeable future–whenever you have a question about flooring, you’ll type it in to the search bar on your laptop or your smartphone and Floors To Your Home will be right there on page one to provide you with all of the answers. Like for example, what was the difference between solid hardwood flooring and engineered hardwood flooring? I mean what is it exactly? Obviously the one is engineered, and the other solid, but what does that even mean? [Snapping fingers] It’s on the tip of my tongue…
Luckily, Mr. Kahn’s answer is at my fingertips as soon as I type the question into the Google Search Bar:
There are a number of tangible, measurable benefits to putting really great video on your site.
First, it hooks visitors, causing them to spend more time on your site and to engage more deeply with your brand. This increases Google’s ‘time-on-site’ metric, which is becoming more important as user-experience becomes more central to the way that sites are ranked. Secondly, if your visitor is still in the early research phase, just toying with the concept of laying new flooring in their home, if your video was the one that convinced them that they could ‘do-it-themselves’ your brand will be top-of-mind when that visitor decides to make a purchase.
No. 2: Brand Digital Ecosystem
Floors To Your Home is one of our first clients to become fully invested in a new integrated marketing strategy that SmallBox is calling our ‘Brand Digital Ecosystem.’ Floors To Your Home is thinking outside of the box and beyond the borders of their website about new ways in which their online brand can be enhanced.
I’m going to give you 15 seconds to mentally prepare yourself for another post about SOPA. Perhaps this video will help relax you:
In today’s news about SOPA: Google, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, Yahoo, and Wikipedia are planning to go offline temporarily in protest of the bill sometime in the very near future. This is being called ‘The Nuclear Option.’ It’s an action intended to represent the type and scale of interruptions that we are likely to experience if the bill passes. If this comes to pass, I suppose I’ll get the day off work along with millions of my fellow countrymen. It might be nice for a day or two, although I daresay it may cause some ripples in the economy. Then again, it’s not really very nice at all when you think about the fact that the bill could, in the long-term, present a major threat to my whole industry(one of the most resilient sectors in the US economy).
For those who don’t have a really solid grasp on what SOPA is, but might just have heard a few things about it through the grapevine, here are some of the basics:
Representative Lamar Smith, R-Texas, introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act on October 26.
The bill is designed to protect copyrighted materials. It is intended to crackdown on pirates bootlegging music to make loot from advertising, or just for the hell of it. On the face of it, it doesn’t sound that radical. The provision of the bill which punishes third party purveyors—entities who provide access to sites that provide pirated materials—is likely to have some extremely negative unintended consequences, however.
The whole discussion about this bill is clouded under a great deal of stress.
Artists and promoters (some, not all) are stressed because it’s hard to make a living these days, with practically everything they produce being available for free on the internet. Internet professionals are EXTREMELY stressed because the level of havoc this law would create on Google by essentially requiring them to dump any site about which there is a complaint—legitimate or not—is likely to cause far more economic chaos than the architects of the bill are probably able to even imagine.
In short, there may be something to the spirit of the bill but realistically its an economic time-bomb. Artist’s should ideally be able to get paid for the work they produce if it is being consumed by large numbers of people who would, in theory, be willing to pay for it if they couldn’t get it for free. But in practice, it really is a little bit late in the day to be contemplating this kind of sweeping and intricate regulation into a sector that already employs such a large percentage of the total US workforce. The direction in which the internet has been heading has already changed the direction and organization of our economic infrastructure more than congress is likely to be aware. Disrupting the operations of the sector by attacking its organizational axes (re: Google, Facebook etc.), is likely to be disastrous.
Soon after the bill was introduced, one of the largest flame wars in Internet broke out.
GoDaddy voiced support, lost millions of customers, and then decided to change their minds. Yahoo quit the Chamber of Commerce due to their irreconcilable differences. Now the well-known hacker group, Anonymous, claims it will punish Sony’s support of SOPA with attacks designed to “dismantle its phantom from the Internet.” Upon hearing this, Nintendo quietly rescinded its support of the bill.
In fact, many of the companies and organizations published on the House of Representatives list of supporters have requested to have their names removed after the repercussions of support were made clear by consumers and activists.
The problem is that SOPA gives the U.S. government power to issue death warrants to effectively annihilate any website that they want to, via your internet service provider. There will be so many claims that Google will basically have to honor all of them, or else risk being shut down itself. Your internet service providers will be bound by the law to shut offending websites down if they are deemed to be non-compliant with the rules set forth by SOPA. To put this into perspective: Google is going to have a GREAT deal of trouble trying to stay compliant which means that, in theory, it could be shut down any time the idea strikes Congress’s fancy. Effectively, this gives the government the power to decide what you can and can’t look at, which apparently doesn’t sit well with folks in the Land of the Free.
Any site that displays, hosts or links to a media that is not owned by the first party and not used with permission of the copyright holder is subject to blackout. If you are a site that is selling music legitimately, and you have a comment section on your blog, and someone leaves a link to their Pirate site in your comment section, in principle, your site is subject to black-out.
If you had to guess what percentage of time you spend on the Internet looking at original content displayed by its owners or their officially sanctioned promoters, what percentage would you guess? Tumblr would pretty much be wiped out. Quite a few blogs devoted to news commentary would likely be wiped out. That relaxing YouTube video up there? Gone.
What about Wikileaks? Would the next WikiLeaks be able to blow up in the environment that SOPA advocates are seeking to create? Forget about it.
SOPA is essentially a Trojan horse law entering under the guise of protection for Hollywood, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America. It will certainly protect them, but it will do so at the expense of…well, free speech and the spirit of the Internet we know and love.
Of course, SOPA supporters don’t believe that, and truth be told, you hear a lot more about people who hate SOPA than love it. The language of the bill does not actively seek to terrorize the world, but it’s so broad that “terror” could easily pass for “enforcement”. CNET addresses this directly in an excellent write-up:
The thing is, Google already does an amazing job of filtering out and assigning low rankings to shady sites. Why would we assume that the government can do a better job than one of the most motivated and innovated companies in the history of commerce? Don’t they already have enough on their plate without taking that on?
Section 103 says that, to be blacklisted, a Web site must be “directed” at the U.S. and also that the owner “has promoted” acts that can infringe copyright.
Here’s how Section 101 of the original version of SOPA defines what a U.S.-directed Web site is:
(A) the Internet site is used to provide goods or services to users located in the United States;
(B) there is evidence that the Internet site or portion thereof is intended to offer or provide such goods and services (or) access to such goods and services (or) delivery of such goods and services to users located in the United States;
(C) the Internet site or portion thereof does not contain reasonable measures to prevent such goods and services from being obtained in or delivered to the United States; and
(D) any prices for goods and services are indicated or billed in the currency of the United States.
Some critics have charged that such language could blacklist the next YouTube, Wikipedia, or WikiLeaks. Especially in the case of WikiLeaks, which has posted internal documents not only from governments but also copyrighted documents from U.S. companies and has threatened to post more, it’s hard to see how it would not qualify for blacklisting.
Congress will return later this month to vote on the bill, and at this point they are expected to pass the bill.
Thomas Doane is a prolific blogger who writes about SEO, social media, email marketing and legislation that starts flame wars.
And we’re off!
