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Featured on the HOW Blog, here’s my submission to their HOW Conference sticker contest:
As I mentioned last June, I was fortunate enough to attend my first HOW Conference in Austin, TX, and I can’t say enough good things about my trip. I met some great people, attended several informative (and relevant) seminars, and returned back with a wealth of new information and skills!
If you’re a designer (or marketing professional) on the fence about whether or not you should go, spend the money and go- it’s worth it!
“Thank you!” to the folks at the HOW Blog who were nice enough to publish my submission.
Hopefully you can all see the typographical changes I’ve made here to my site; it was really easy to do, and here’s how you can incorporate custom typefaces to your site.
Before we get into the how-to portion, here’s how the code will look on your stylesheet:
@font-face {
font-family: "Your typeface";
src: url("type/filename.eot");
src: local("Alternate name"), local("Alternatename"),
url("type/filename.woff") format("woff"),
url("type/filename.otf") format("opentype"),
url("type/filename.svg#filename") format("svg");
}
Simple enough- it’s basically assigning a name to your custom typeface, and telling your stylesheet where it’s located. You can duplicate this code and use as many typefaces as you wish, as long as you specify new names ("Your typeface") for each one.
Anyway, pick out the typeface you wish to use, then head on over to Font Squirrel’s @font-face generator. Upload your typefaces, download the kit that Font Squirrel generates, install the CSS code, and you’re all set!
A very helpful tutorial can also be found at Nice Web Type.
Via the Plaid Summer Tour:
“Think that social media is just for your customers? One of the many things that we learned while visiting the Sprint World Headquarters in Kansas City was how they’re using social media to communicate with their employees.
If you’ve got thousands and thousands of employees spread across the world, chances are you’re going to need something better than an employee newsletter. Sprint has found that some of the same tools they use to communicate with their customers have also been super effective at spreading the word with their employees.
Sprint employees have internal blogs, communities and other tools to learn about what’s happening, what’s working, what’s popping and what people are chatting about. Social tools happen to be an effective way to get these messages out quickly.”
I can tell you from personal experience that this works on a much smaller scale as well… my company (JoesWork) has nearly 300 employees in 19 Eastern-US cities. I found out about two years into my tenure at JoesWork that a monthly 6-page newsletter (designed properly) was taking up a full week of my time each month. So, I did what any technologically-savvy person would do- I built a blog. This allows me to publish in minutes what previously took me a week to produce (but hey, we all know the benefits of blogs). This also allows me to operate more efficiently and take on other tasks with the time I just saved myself.
Not only has JoesWork’s blog become an information center for my coworkers, it has been presented to potential financiers of our company, as well as insurance underwriters, customers, and developers who wish to engage in business with us.
- The employees get to see what’s happening in other cities via videos, pictures, and brief blog entries.
- The insurance underwriters get to read our weekly company-wide safety topic/article (and our safety-first culture shines through).
- The developers and financiers get to read about our company, the services we provide, and have a better idea of our culture than they would if the were handed a printed-out newsletter.
- Finally, the blog, our twitter account, and our website create a sense of virtual community for our customers.
The bottom line? The blog (social media) is an absolutely invaluable resource for any company in business today.
Smashing Magazine shares 10 not-so-great-to-hear truths about corporate websites. Company owners, take note, and take five minutes to read this post- your web guy will thank you.
Via Smashing Magazine.
If you’re in any position of influence in a company and you still haven’t made the decision to set up a twitter account [watch: what is twitter?] for your brand (product, or service), consider the following examples of how twitter brought consumers and companies together:
Not necessarily a b2c situation, but NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander (@marsphoenix). NASA gave it’s little Mars explorer a voice and used its twitter account to give live updates on the lander’s progress as it explored the Martian surface (and eventually found water). According to Discovery.com,
“When NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory News Services manager Veronica McGregor was tasked with delivering word of the agency’s first-ever robotic landing on Mars during a holiday weekend, she turned to the social-networking Web site…
Tweets at twitter.com/MarsPhoenix won numerous Internet awards and garnered nearly 40,000 dedicated followers — 2,000 of whom joined after NASA lost contact with the Lander in November.”
Next up, and a personal savior of mine, is Frank Eliason, Comcast’s Director of Digital Care (@comcastcares). Frank and his team use twitter (and other social networking tools) to offer those of us who hold twitter accounts another form of customer service; but instead of having to press a bunch of buttons and wait on hold for twenty minutes, Frank and his team are just a tweet away.
Here’s a perfect example of the truly unbelievable customer service @comcastcares offers: On Monday, December 29, 2008, Comcast in Ft. Lauderdale was running a system-wide test for the upcoming digital TV conversion. Well, something went wrong, and my cable and internet went out for a couple of days. Naturally, I promptly dialed Comcast and spoke to seven customer “service” representatives over the course of two days.
Only one of them was even remotely helpful, offering to send a repair truck out to my neighborhood to investigate what seemed to be a localized problem. Then, on New Years’ eve (of all nights), I remembered Frank- one tweet to @comcastcares (and a follow-up e-mail to his team), and someone from his department called me back within the hour. Let me say that again: within the hour. A half-hour later, a Comcast service technician was in my driveway, and had fixed the problem.
That, my friends is customer service; two hours prior to that, I was ready to cancel my service with Comcast- Frank and his team brought me back with a single phone call.
Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh (@zappos) has nearly 30,000 followers on twitter, and over 400 people in his company have twitter accounts. What does this mean for me as an online shopper? It gives the website I just bought a pair of sneakers from a face and a personality. I know that there are real people behind my order, and if something gets mixed up, a quick fix is just a tweet away. (Check out my previous post on the two companies.)
In fact, in the check-out process, you’re asked to leave a comment- I did, along with my twitter name (@joerib), and I got free next-day shipping on my order. Zappos now has a customer for life; it was that easy.
Finally, Clickz has a pertinent article about this very topic, written by Kate Kaye. Kate talks about how twitter is working for Ford Motor Company, Comcast, Zappos, and Dunkin’ Donuts (another one of my fav’s). Check out this other one by Lee Milkes of AdAge, too.
Convinced on adding twitter to your company? Here’s the takeaway:
- It has to be sincere- a person-to-person communication. Skip the bureaucracy in getting tweets approved before sending.
- It has to be instant. Use tools like search.twitter.com to find mentions of your company and take an active role in responding.
- It has to offer your customers a way into your company. Need something resolved, or have a question? Your customers now “know someone in the business.”
- It has to be constant. If you’re going to invest time in getting your customer base to recognize your company’s presence on twitter- keep it up. Your customers will recognize your disinterest in maintaining you account more negatively than if you never made the commitment at all.
- Dell, Jet Blue, Comcast, Southwest Airlines, Dunkin’ Donuts, NASA, Zappos, and Home Depot all use twitter to connect with their customers (and the list goes on).
20 signs you don’t want that web design project
My favorite:
“Client begins first meeting by making a big show of telling you that you are the expert. You are in charge, he says: he will defer to you in all things, because you understand the web and he does not. (Trust your uncle Jeffrey: this man will micromanage every hair on the project’s head.)”
Via Jeffrey Zeldman.
Google Calendar CalDAV support – Calendar Help Center
In case you haven’t heard, Google recently began to offer syncing services between Google Calendar and Mac’s iCal. Click on the above link to learn how to set this up.
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