•  Don’t make the user wait around – playback should feel almost instantaneous.
•  Target the fastest, smoothest performance possible across desktop/laptop, tablets and other mobile devices.
•  Stick to a single code base as much as possible, to streamline maintenance.
•  Support some ancient browsers.
•  Launch it really, really soon.

I know what you’re thinking: such solutions only exist in two places:

1. In the wildest dreams of implementation engineers
2. In pitch meetings that the tech lead was “invited to, I swear – I don’t know what happened. It must be something with Outlook. Anyway, I know this is an aggressive schedule….”

Naturally, we sized up the challenge before us, didn’t complain at all, and dove right in – and I’m here to tell you that we found the solution. And by “found” I mean: we kind of saw it once, walking through a clearing, and then it ran away:

Much like the guy who shot the above film (Roger Patterson, in case you’re wondering), I will happily tell you all about the hunt – and not just because I can see that you want to read several pages worth of sardonically documented engineering decisions. NAY, I will tell you… out of necessity.

You see, I have one final bigfoot metaphor prepared: While we’ve come out the other side of this experience with the memories of what we saw, we are unfortunately left with a complete lack of physical evidence. We’d love to point you to the site so that you could inspect the result, but we’re in one of those John Hughes-ian, “Yes, we’re dating but you can’t tell anyone we’re dating” situations. All we have to show for our adventure are a bunch of metaphorical plaster casts of oversized tracks.

But you believe me, right?

 

Instantaneous, composited animation

Ok, so let’s take this one step at a time. Requirement one: After a user authenticates via Facebook connect, we need to pull images from her account and instantaneously display them composited into an animation of some sort.

Serving up a rendered video file would certainly simplify delivery across all of our targets – mobile-accessible video delivery is something we do on nearly every project – but the “instantaneous” requirement means that we’re not going to be able to take the user’s photos and render them into unique video files on the server.

Fair enough. If we’re not serving up a video file, we’re talking about some sort of animation, and there are actually several options:

• Flash
• HTML5 Canvas element
• Manipulating standard DOM elements with JavaScript
• CSS3 Animation

For this project, Flash was off the table. We wanted to avoid using it in order to preserve iOS compatibility. Based on the schedule and the wide range of target platforms, we had a pretty strong feeling we’d be using some flavor of HTML5 or CSS3.

We created a series of test pages, each using one of the remaining methods listed above to perform the background animation for the final piece. Using these as a basis for comparison, we attempted to gauge performance across a wide range of our targets.

It immediately became clear that CSS3 animations were the best option for iOS (and that standard DOM manipulation was the worst). But the “single code base” requirement drove us toward selecting the HTML5 Canvas element, as it offered the most consistent performance across the widest range of our targets.

 

Browser support

Ok, cool, so we’re going with Canvas. Hm? Oh, right, browser support! Our first hurdle! This project needed to adhere to our existing matrix of supported browsers, which included the latest version of all webkit browsers (as well as FF3.6 for folks who love ignoring update messages), and Internet Explorer all the way back through IE7 (mercifully, IE6 was recently dropped). This list didn’t mesh with the Canvas-based solution we arrived at, as neither Internet Explorer 7 or 8 support the HTML5 Canvas element.

Enter: FlashCanvas.

FlashCanvas is a library that uses a SWF file and a whole mess of JavaScript to impersonate the HTML5 Canvas element within Microsoft Internet Explorer. It renders shapes and images via the Flash drawing API, supports almost all Canvas methods, and in many cases, runs faster than similar libraries which use VML or Silverlight.

What this meant was we were able to write the code to animate something using the HTML5 Canvas element, and then use that same code to control the animation in Internet Explorer 8 and older, where the Canvas element technically doesn’t exist.

Hooray! A single codebase, IE 7 and 8 supported! But not so fast, as there are a couple of caveats to using FlashCanvas as a fallback:

• Since FlashCanvas displays things using Flash, all the fun cross-domain restrictions apply, so if you plan on pulling in images or files from other sources (as we pulled images from Facebook), you’ll need to set up a proxy page. The installation comes with a PHP proxy, but if you’re on a different platform, you’ll need to write your own.
•  Custom font rendering isn’t built into the current release. If you dig around on the message boards, you’ll find works-in-progress that support this, but we found them to have a few issues. We ended up only using standard fonts when displaying using FlashCanvas.
• Our particular animation was extremely image-intensive. Through trial and error over the course of the project, we discovered that a number of hiccups and visual artifacts we were seeing were caused by the first very frame of drawing a new image to the screen. We ended up drawing all images used throughout the entire course of the animation frame in every frame. If a particular image wasn’t used in the current frame, it was drawn just offscreen. All the visual defects went away. Your mileage may vary.

The right tool for the job?

At this point, we had internally arrived at a creative direction involving a background and several foreground layers scrolling horizontally in parallax. Our next step was to begin to prove this concept out using some of the leading “HTML5 Animation” tools. We created proofs of concept using each of the following:

• Adobe Edge
• Tumult Hype
• Sencha Animator

At some level, all of these tools are GUIs that generate JavaScript to manipulate a Canvas element or other DOM elements. As a baseline, we also hand-coded an additional proof of concept. Based on our experiments, none of the high-level tools was producing code that performed acceptably on a cross-browser, cross-device basis (case in point: even the example projects that Adobe offers for Edge don’t work in IE9). Some were close, but, in the end, all of the experiments had at least one outstanding defect that disqualified it.

Meanwhile, our hand-coded native JavaScript POC was churning right along. So our decision was made. We were going to hand-code/animate everything! Quickly!

 

Why does it keep doing that thing?

Alright, let’s talk about animating in hand-coded Javascript!

Still reading? Ok, all the cool kids are definitely gone, we can relax.

The intricacies of timing animation frames in JavaScript are many, but, for the most part, they all boil down to optimizing the execution and the method of calling your frame function (helpful googling terms: “Game Loop” or “Tick Function,” depending on context).

In olden times, the setInterval function was used to repeatedly generate frames for an animation, but performance considerations could sabotage this method, making the resultant framerate vary wildly.

requestAnimationFrame is a newer API that specifically seeks to address JavaScript animation at a constant framerate. Unfortunately, cross-browser support is still a bit shaky. There were requestAnimationFrame polyfills evolving as we were coding, and we tried to keep up with them and test them against our codebase as we went.

Unfortunately, we were seeing collisions and “weirdness” that may or may not have been caused by requestAnimationFrame (Since the problems went away when we reverted away from it, it got the blame). Eventually the timeline won out and we stuck with that old standby setInterval to run the animation loop. Given more time, we’d definitely revisit this decision.

Since finishing this project, we’ve seen lots of discussion around the idea of javascript animation and framerate. Some good links to dig into:

• Joe Lambert’s post on the beginnings of these matters.
• JavaScript Guru Paul Irish’s early take on the matter, updated in January 2012 as the polyfill began to evolve.
• Erik Möller’s post on the polyfill.

Until next time?

Beyond investing more time into the requestAnimationFrame polyfill, what else would we do differently next time? I ‘d say the bulk of any additional time would be spent working on optimizing the bones of what we already have in place, with an eye towards playing nicely with the known behaviors of JavaScript garbage collection.

Some great articles on this sort of thing can be found here:

• Eternal Coding Blog – “Unleash the power of HTML 5 Canvas for gaming”
• Scrirra Blog – “How to write low garbage real-time Javascript”

Until then: keep your eyes on the hills.

 #1: Track Actions Visitors Take

One way to better understand your social campaign as a whole is to understand how your users find out about it.

Event Tracking, as mentioned in a post about integrating social media on your website that I wrote for SocialMedia Examiner, has the ability to report the behavior of website visitors by tracking certain actions they take.

For example, Event Tracking can be used to track the number of times a video on your site is played, a file is downloaded or a certain link is clicked.

For this article, I will focus on how you can use Event Tracking to show when individuals click from your website to your social media outlets.

Event Tracking can help marketers answer questions like:

•  Are the social media buttons on my website visible and easily accessible?
• Are my website visitors interested in my social media pages?
• Am I doing an effective job of displaying the current social media promotion on my website?

This information is beneficial in helping you to:

• Understand how your users are finding your social outlets.
• Recognize the way they interact with your brand online.
• Identify areas of improvement in regard to your social share plug-ins or buttons.

For complete steps on how to add the actual tracking code to your website, visit Google Support here. They do an excellent job of breaking down the steps. If you need more assistance, Google Basic Tracking starts at a lower level.

Once installed, you will be able to determine the number of people clicking on your social media buttons from your website during the length of your social campaign.

If you don’t have access to the actual nuts and bolts of your site, fear not. There are other ways you can easily get information about the details of your social promotion in points #2 through #4.

#2: Identify Social Actions Generating the Most Traffic

Many business owners are familiar with seeing Twitter or Facebook as referral traffic in their Google Analytics accounts. This is often a result of a social media campaign that pushes users to the website for one reason or another; for example, a tweet that describes a sweepstakes on Facebook with a link to the rules found on your website’s blog.

Although you’re able to see that the user came from Facebook or Twitter to your sweepstakes rules, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to identify which tweet or post from your social outlets generated the most quality clicks to that page?

Google URL Builder allows you to do just that and it’s a great way to see which variation of a tweet or post harnessed the most quality clicks. It’s important to keep in mind that for every link back to your site from your social media posts and mentions, you should be using destination URLs that identify that specific post (or campaign) as being the source. In other words, don’t use plain-vanilla URLs. Google URL Builder is a simple interface that allows even first-timers to destination URLs to create them quickly. Over the lifetime of a campaign, you’ll be able to come to conclusions about which tweet or post resonated best with your fans and followers or captured the attention of the social sphere as a whole.

 How to Set Up Google Analytics URL Builder

First and foremost, you must have access to your website’s Google Analytics.

•  Go to Google Analytics URL Builder.
• Copy and paste the destination web page URL you will be linking to from your social media promotion.

• Fill out the campaign information so it’s easy for you to understand the elements of the campaign later. The three most important elements in understanding the data later will be Campaign Source, Campaign Medium and Campaign Name. The rest you can leave blank.
• Keep a record of what you enter so that you can refer to it later.

How to Fill Out Campaign Information

• Copy and paste the generated link into a link shortener and then into your campaign tweet or post.

How It Will Look in Google Analytics

To help you better understand how to organize your campaign, I will show you a campaign that I set up as an example. The social promotion seemed to be a success overall with more than 5,000 entries in a two-week period; however, the Google URL Builder allows me to dig deeper. (A big shout-out to GiftZip.com for allowing me to use these screenshots.)

The information seen below corresponds to the information I entered into the Google URL Builder in the example above.

For this example, I used the Google URL Builder to create two different links to a sweepstakes rules webpage that I included in two different tweets promoting the same Valentine’s Day Facebook sweepstakes.

I pushed them out at alternating times (9 am and 4 pm) and days so that each variation of the tweet was sent the same number of times and had the opportunity to be seen at the same time of day as the other.

In this instance, I was attempting to keep my time constant (although there is some room for error here) and focus strictly on which tweet language generated more quality clicks. To see the results of your own social media promotion, follow these steps:

• Log into your Google Analytics account.
• Under Traffic Sources in the left navigation, click Sources and then Campaigns.
• Under Campaigns, click the name of your campaign. This will be what you entered under “Campaign Name.” Mine was Vday Sweepstakes.

• Under Campaigns, you should be able to see the links you built. Mine are Social Media/Twitter and Social Media/Twitter 2.

The Results

At first glance, it appears as though the two tweets were essentially equal with one generating 18 clicks and the other 19 clicks.

Upon further inspection, it’s clear that one outperformed the other in regards to Average Time on Site and Bounce Rate. This means that one tweet generated far higher quality clicks than the other, in that people actually stuck around to read about how to enter the sweepstakes.

The Better Tweet

The Not So Great Tweet

How to Do it Next Time

It’s clear that the tweet that described the sweepstakes in more detail generated more quality traffic than the one that simply listed the prize and name of the sweepstakes. This is information that I can consider when constructing future promotions on Twitter.

Obviously, this is a very small sample and many times you may find that the information you get is inconclusive. In this example I used language, but you can also use time of day, hashtag variations and other elements to help identify which method works best.

 #3: Find Out if Your Social Promotion Grew Legs

Another product that can be used to tap into the power of Google to measure the success of your social media campaign is Google Alerts. Google Alerts allows you to see other places on the web that picked up your social promotion and delivers the information straight to your inbox.

Google Alerts can help you answer questions like:

• Did my sweepstakes grow legs and become viral?
• Were there other outlets that featured my promotion that I don’t know about?

Most times, if another major outlet picked up your promotion, you’ll most likely get a clue from Google Analytics because you’ll see referral traffic from the source that reposted it. But what if the outlet wasn’t linking to your website, but rather the social media page that the promotion was hosted on? This is where Google Alerts really comes in handy.

Google Alerts helps illustrate outside factors that affected your promotion’s success. If an outlet picked up the promotion, it might be worth grabbing their contact information and shooting them a thank-you email.

Identifying key individuals or outlets serves as a great way to build relationships within the social sphere and to start to compile a list of individuals and outlets to reach out to the next time you run a social media promotion.

To set up an alert, simply fill out the information you want to see and how you want to receive it:

• Search Query can be as broad or narrow as you choose. Entering the full name of your promotion might work best.
• Result Type allows you to select where you want Google to look. You can pick from Everything, News, Blogs, Discussions, Video and Books.
• How Often provides options like As It Happens, Once a Day or Once a Week so you can tailor it to your needs.
• How Many will allow you to select from all results or results Google deems the best. You can set up several alerts and manage them from your Gmail account.

 #4: Get Real-Time Alerts

Like Google Alerts, Google Analytics Alerts are useful while the campaign is still running, in that they can assist you to stay up to date with the success of your promotion. (It’s easy to confuse Google Analytics Alerts and Google Alerts because their names are so similar—the first watches your site’s incoming traffic, while the latter watches social activity and web pages across the Internet.) This is especially significant if you work for an agency that runs several promotions at once. It also proves useful for small businesses that do not have time to check their Google Analytics accounts every day.

Netvantage Marketing managing partner Adam Henige says:

 A lot of people don’t think about keeping tabs on social media with Google Analytics Alerts, but it can be a handy tool to monitor crazy traffic spikes from social sources.

Just head into Alerts and set up an alert for a significant increase in day-to-day traffic from Twitter, Facebook and Google+ and you’ll get email updates when traffic starts falling from the sky.

To set up an alert in Google Analytics:

• Log into your Google Analytics account.
• Select the account/website you wish to set an alert for.
• Click the Settings button in the upper-right corner.
• Under Profiles, click Assets > Custom Alerts > Create an Alert.

• Under Alert Name, enter something that will be easy to recognize when you receive the email.
• The Period will depend on how long your promotion is running. For short promotions, a day works well.
• Under This Applies To, select Traffic Sources > Source, and under Conditions select Contains Twitter. This will send you alerts about the traffic you’re receiving from Twitter. You can play with these options to receive different alerts about different outlets such as YouTube, Pinterest or Facebook.
• Under Alert Me When, select Visits and under Condition select a number that makes sense for you. If you’re looking for spikes in traffic, you will want to put Previous Day as the Compared To value. For this one, I chose 50% more traffic than the previous day.

Overall, these tools can assist businesses to understand which portions of their social campaigns were successes and determine which areas could use improvement next time around.

A version of this article by Mallory Woodrow originally appeared in SocialMedia Examiner.

So why aren’t people clicking?

Online banners—regardless of their size, shape, or format—are held to a high standard by Internet users. Consumers know what they like, and what they loathe. In fact, they’re experts on the subject (a massive daily dose of just about anything will do that to a person).

This attitude compels digital marketers to keep their creative fresh, but it isn’t always fresh enough. It doesn’t always leave site users nodding their heads in appreciation or thinking, “Now that’s a useful ad.” What follows are five ways to enhance your existing and upcoming banner ads to stimulate clicks, shares, and buys.

Track mouse movements. Internet users may feel that they’ve seen it all in rich media advertising, but several jaw-dropping technologies are still relatively underutilized. One such technology is mouse tracking. Some brands allow mouse movements to alter the look of their banners (a concept so hip even Google is using it). Others take the more traditional route by inviting users to hover over in-banner hot spots.

One ad for Royal Caribbean created by MediaMind (formerly Eyeblaster) combined mouse tracking technology with an expandable banner in an IAB Sidekick format. In it, the user could hover over hot spots throughout an image of one of the company’s cruise ships to reveal information about special services and features, and click to get even more detail…all without leaving the site page.

2. Add a map. When your objective is to drive consumers to your offline stores, few strategies are more effective than a mapping tool. Naturally interactive map features are the bread and butter of mobile ads but they have a place on the web, too. To generate offline sales, companies like Spongecell incorporate “Smart Mapping” functionality into their clients’ ads, using Zip codes and Google Maps technology to create a custom map of nearby stores.

In a recent banner for Arby’s Restaurants and the Ultimate Angus Philly sandwich, users were able to drill down to the store address and even get directions. The functionality was useful, yes, but best of all it was in keeping with the campaign theme of giving consumers “the best Philly outside of Philly.”

 3. Add a calendar tool. Today’s consumers lead busy lives, so an advertising strategy that makes sticking to the schedule a little easier is sure to be embraced. Enter the banner that links a branded event to an online calendar. When this functionality is incorporated into an online ad, consumers can add an event to their Google Calendar with one click. This is ideal for entertainment companies promoting a new series or the new season of an existing program, but can work just as well to announce a product launch or the start date of a branded contest.

 4. Use dynamic creative. Customized messaging is a hot trend, with particular attention being placed on data-driven display ads. Included in Forbes Magazine’s “12 Predictions for 2012,” these encompass ads that use the consumer’s IP address to pull relevant data about the user’s location, shopping history, and browsing behavior, all in real time. A creative template is combined with offers and messaging options that companies like AudienceScience mix and match to create highly relevant banners. This technique is proving popular among airlines, which use it to supply city-specific quotes based on a consumer’s location.

 5. Integrate social media. Combining a banner ad with a Twitter feed was a novelty when Volvo did it to generate interest in its new crossover vehicle and draw attention to its presence at the New York Auto Show. That was two years ago, and this method of enhancing a run-of-the-mill ad has yet to take off. But it should, and it will, just as soon as brands acknowledge the importance of cross-media marketing online. If you’re lucky enough to attract an eyeball, why not make the most of the opportunity by showing your potential customer everything you’ve got? Go beyond the standard links to Facebook and Twitter and integrate social media in a way that adds value by adding content.

Every banner holds a well of potential that practical (and memorable) functionality can tap. Make your campaigns, and thus your brand, more valuable to your customers by enhancing your ads.

This article by Tessa Wegert originally appeared in ClickZ.

• 20% of your site’s visits looked at the About Us page at some point, and
• the average visit was about five pages long

That doesn’t really tell us what people are “doing.” It doesn’t tell a story. It doesn’t get you inside the visitor’s head at the moment of the visit. A much better answer with story-like overtones might be:

We looked at all your site’s recent visits and we found basically five kinds of visits.

• One type wants to know where your stores are because these visitors already have settled on your brand.
• Another wants to know about your products.
• Another type of visit isn’t checking products; instead these visits involve curiosity about your product category and are looking for ideas or tips.
• Another visit type is simply checking to see if you have anything new.
• And yet another is focused entirely on deals and discounts.

The rest of your visits wander all over the place and don’t seem to have a focus or mission.

Now, that’s a story! A very useful story.

If you can come into possession of that wonderful list of five kinds of visits, custom-extracted from your own site data, you can use it as a checklist:

• Does your site’s navigation and content work well for each visit type?
• Do you have a marketing message that will resonate with each one?
• Do you place your marketing messages where each one will likely be seen by—and resonate with—each visit type?

Going a little further, you can estimate the number of visits of each type and do some metrics:

• Evaluate marketing actions by whether they bring in a predominance of the most desired visit type more than other marketing actions do.
• Evaluate site changes by whether the proportions change the way you want them to – whether you are successful at encouraging one type of visit to become another.

And, if you really want to take it far, you can ask yourself these kinds of questions:

• What about those wandering visits? Are they potentially one of the focused visit types? Are they happy experiences of footloose visitors, or evidence of frustrated and confused experiences?
• Can you attribute value to each type? Can you arrange them into a maturity model, or a purchase-decision model?

<pause for breath>

I can guess what you’re thinking —

• “We already created visit types for our site (or marketing) strategy, so we can ignore all this”

• Good. Incorporating visit types into your guiding vision is absolutely essential to a strategy. But I have to ask — have you since checked those visit types with actual data? Will the data confirm that you visualized them correctly, and that you identified all of them?
• “We already have personas, which are demographic-lifestyle-lifestage descriptions of likely visitor groups, so this doesn’t apply to us”

• Visit types are a different animal, neither more granular nor less granular than personas. The key point of visit typing is that a given persona-person will use a spectrum of visit types over the course of their relationship with you. Your site and your marketing should be ready for as many of those instances as possible.
• “But one person could then have five visits, each a different type!”

• Yes. Isn’t that great? You get five ways to reach that person!
• “I get pages and pages of site statistics and trendlines every month, including side-by-side testing results and so on. Where are these ‘types’ in those reports?”

• The mainstream site analytics tools don’t provide this kind of discovered information. Adobe SiteCatalyst by Omniture, WebTrends Analytics, and Google Analytics have what they call segmenting, but although the word “segmenting” resembles “visit types” the resemblance is superficial. Segments as used by the analytics tools are filters, where you divvy up visits according to definitions you already have in mind, and then the analytics tools provide statistics for those divisions. Instead of divisions you assume are worth looking at (first time visits versus return visits, or search visits versus email visits) I am talking about discovering groups of similar-looking visits from the data.
• “That sounds like cluster analysis, maybe?”

• Yes, more or less. The gist of cluster analysis is getting the data to show you whether granular data can be clumped into groups of similar-ish items. In this case the granular data is your set of site visits, and similar-ish refers to “looking at the similar content on my site.”

That brings us back to what we’re doing in our Marketing Intelligence group here at Enlighten. We really enjoy this particular analysis. We take raw site visit behavior – namely, thousands and thousands of individual visits with their individual lists of pages-viewed – and we work to get the data to tell us what the visit types are. We sometimes end up presenting crazy diagrams like the one below. If possible, we also host a retreat or some really concentrated group discussion. The assumptions and beliefs (about customers as well as about the web site) that are uncovered in those discussions are almost always eye-opening. All in all, we get more a-ha’s and useful insights than we usually get from plain cross-section statistics. And, we hope, “what happens on my site” starts getting a real answer.

I recently completed a digital, interactive storybook for my senior year integrative project. “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is about a lonely boy named Gus who works on an intergalactic telephone station. Gus needs you and your friends to help him, by sending him text messages to charge his spaceship’s battery.

The original premise was to create an animation that the viewer could influence. A video game is the best example of that idea, but technically that wasn’t feasible as I was working alone and I wished to focus on the design and visuals. Through the experimentation process, I portrayed Gus as a lonesome character who wanted a friend. The purpose of the text message interaction is to give the viewer a way to help Gus directly.

How it works

At a certain point in the story, the viewer can send Gus a text message, and that will add 1 “volt” to his spaceship’s battery. Once Gus reaches 150 volts, he can start his spaceship and finish his quest.

I used a service by Twilio that allowed me to activate a PHP script once a text message was received. That PHP script populates a database, from which a Flash file pulls that information. If the text message count is over X amount, then the viewer can see the ending of Gus’s quest. If the text message count is under X amount, then the viewer must send more text messages to charge the spaceship’s battery.

The technical process: Animations and models are made in Modo, processed through After Effects, and referenced by a Flash swf. Text messages are sent from the viewer’s phone to a Twilio phone number. Twilio runs a PHP script I have specified, and then the Flash swf pulls that information to see whether there are enough text messages.

The full project is available to view at www.helpg.us.

I recently submitted the project to the FWA, so if you enjoyed it, please make sure to vote!

As digital technology allows more and more brands to grow globally, what are the implications for marketers? More specifically, how can marketers use the Internet to successfully engage women around the world with their brand? Women, after all, make more than 85% of all household product and service purchasing decisions. They also represent the majority of the online market.

These are questions Enlighten President Tom Beck will discuss when he speaks at the 8th Annual “Marketing to Women Conference” in Chicago next week. The conference, which is attended annually by Fortune 1000 senior brand marketing executives and their agencies, will feature an impressive roster of presenters, including best-selling business author Tom Peters and Mary Lou Quinlan, Founder and CEO of Just Ask a Woman and author of The God Box.

Tom will speak at the opening “Women Mean Business” luncheon. In a session led by Fara Warner, Editorial Director of International Special Editions at Newsweek and the Daily Beast Company, he will join Rose Cameron, a global brand strategist at Hornall Anderson in Seattle, to discuss brand experience, design and digital technology and the inherent challenges in making a brand both “global” and “locally relevant” to women around the world.

The Marketing to Women Conference examines and celebrates the national and global impact of women’s purchasing power across every brand and every category. Starting Monday, April 23, and running through the week, the conference brings together leaders in marketing, brand management, communications, advertising, research and media to share insights and explore questions about the what, when and how of women’s $7 trillion (US) and $20 trillion (worldwide) annual purchasing.

If you’re in town you can register and join the event at the Chicago Cultural Center or be sure to follow Tom on Twitter (@laughingrobots).

8th Annual M2W® – The Marketing to Women Conference

Chicago Cultural Center, 78 East Washington Street, Chicago, IL

Related Hashtags: #Marketing2Women, #M2W, #WomenMeanBusiness

Ever since I could muster the strength to crawl into a swivel chair and locate the computer’s power button, the Internet served as the gateway to the world; a means by which to access the corners of the earth that were located above the counter-tops and beyond the confines of the school playground.

While my love for all things digital has been a lifelong trend, my career path has been a series of sheer accidents. I did not attend school for social media or search because when I was a student at Albion College there weren’t classes for those sorts of things. I was never much of a technology whiz and had only limited interest and knowledge in HTML and web design. I knew the basics, but it certainly wasn’t my calling. Instead, I went to school for English, Economics and Management, and Political Science.

My online hobbies remained just that—hobbies—and I didn’t have any reason to believe that my blog or extensive knowledge of social platforms could be valuable assets within my professional life. It wasn’t until I ended up taking an internship at an ecommerce start-up in need of social media assistance that the pieces of my career started to fit together.

Today, although I’ve had the pleasure of working with brands such as Meijer, Sephora, Home Depot, and General Motors, I am still always humbled by the ever-changing landscape of the social realm. And although I now leverage my knowledge of social media to help businesses achieve their goals, I try to never lose sight of the fact that social media, at its core, is simply a means by which people can connect, share, and interact with the people and things in their lives; it is a conversation—and one I feel privileged to be a part of.

I am extremely excited to start the next chapter of my story at Enlighten. And through my articles and columns for publications like Forbes and The Daily Muse, I get to share my insights with a national audience! It’s a far more interesting and exciting career than I could have imagined for myself even a few years ago.

Interested in what I have to say? Check out my latest article, “6 Things We Can Learn About Addicting Content from TFLN” (originally published on The Daily Muse and recently featured on the front page of ForbesWoman). I’ll be back on the Enlighten blog with more to share soon!

With the season of graduation nearly upon us, I thought I’d share some things I’ve learned in recent months for the aspiring copywriters out there. Consider it an apprentice’s (short) guide to copywriting for a digital agency:

1. You’ll create better work if you learn how everyone around you contributes to a project. Since I didn’t go to school for advertising, I wasn’t familiar with a lot of the titles, roles and responsibilities of the people working alongside me on a project. I made a point to piece together the contribution each department—and team member— plays in the process of creating an ad that lives online. Once I understood what everyone else was doing, I had a greater understanding of how I could do my job better.
2. Do a little homework. I was lucky to have a boss who sent me a list of links to movies, books, and other useful information a newbie like me needs to quickly understand the industry. Right when I started, I watched the movie Art & Copy (available on Netflix), and started reading two books, Pick Me: Breaking Into Advertising and Staying There and How to Put Your Book Together and Get a Job in Advertising. I also watched this clip—and, yes, finally started watching Mad Men! I still have a lot more to learn, both on the job and from the books (I have a few more to get to), but these have all been extremely useful thus far.
3. See what other people are doing creatively. Prior to working at a digital agency, I have to confess that I didn’t pay much attention to digital advertising. I would delete email newsletters I had somehow found myself signed up for, click out of any pops up that got between me and my web surfing, and mute any commercial advertisements that dare interrupt my free online television. This obviously changed when I started writing these things. Now I love to see how ads are making use of the digital space. One of my favorites is a new Nike ad. When it asks you to rollover, a video expands and starts playing, telling a story of a guy and a girl who run across the country, á la Forrest Gump, to be together.
4. Six words or less. Getting your point across in a few short words has been the cornerstone of what I have been doing– headlines, subject lines, and banner ads all rely heavily on short phrases! A fellow copywriter has given me some useful advice: the first six words are the first words people read in a subject line, so make sure that what they need to know is there. A lot of my pre-copywriting practice came from having to write headlines for articles and titles for essays, so I had practice keeping lines short. But I’ve learned that the line should also say something that will catch someone’s attention. And if you’re like me, hopefully your headline, subject line, whatever it is, will make someone smile – and encourage them to open or click through to what you want them to read!
5. Make sense of the lingo. My biggest learning curve was probably just trying to make sense of the industry jargon and acronyms that I wasn’t familiar with. This took time, and I’m still learning more each day. But writing down words I hear around the office—from SEO (search engine optimization), SLT (subject line testing) and CTA (call to action)—and then de-coding the meaning later has helped tremendously.

One of the newly created Hearst channels, called Hello Style, will align content production similar to what readers in five of their women’s publications would expect. The second channel will be Car and Driver TV Channel. The announcement got some press in Adweek yesterday.

Consider what’s going over at Huffington Post: The website is set to offer nearly 12 hours of daily live content starting this summer across desktop, tablet, and smartphones. (With so many viewers and media players turning to the online space, Christina Aguilera’s biggest rival may no longer be Adam Levine, but Yasha Swag.) Plus, with on-demand viewing growing from a Digital Video Recorder to mobile platform, thanks to video archives, the excitement will bridge mobile and video even more (a move that’s much needed, according to my well-traveled and always-on-the-move friends).

Along with offering new video content, media companies will evolve their advertising opportunities and look to engage consumers with new interactive experiences. For example, clickable headlines will create a pop-up video type of experience, reminiscent to VH1’s one-time fan favorite show, where users will be delivered stories that they read and watch at the same time. Also, an easy sharing functionality will allow for simple word-of-mouth on the viewer’s social networks, rapidly growing the popularity of the web series and the advertisers associated with it.

In addition to new in-video opportunities, advanced targeting will improve the relevancy of a brand’s message for a particular audience of video content. As new technology begins to offer opportunities to scan videos and read the metadata to better understand the content, media vendors will benefit because they will have access to more data. This, of course, will allow them to better identify an ideal audience to target based on behavior, demographic, geographic and contextual information, and, in turn, deliver a brand’s custom message to the right audience.

It’s definitely an exciting time in video – for one and all alike. So, sit back with your consumer feet up and enjoy the additional video access. But dive in with your professional gusto to reap new opportunities for your clients. And let’s see if this new twist on the The Buggles famous song proves to be true, bringing video into the next generation of screens.