Author: Atlantic BT

Enter Content Curation Contest

Win an Ipad 2 or Kindle FIRE
The first Content Curation Contest seeks to discover the Top 10 content curators of 2011. The contest has two phases: APPLICATION (ends 226) and VOTING (starts the next day). If you love to curate content on Facebook, Twitter or Scoop.it you might win an Ipad 2, Kindle Fire or Fame and fortune with a profile page on Atlantic BT and a “TOP CURATOR” handle.

Easy Curation Contest Application
Wanted to keep application easy, friendly and FAST. The toughest question asks to describe your curration philosophy. This is a question I’m not sure I could answer. I curate a little like I used to paint. Generally I curate the intersection of Internet marketing, cancer survivorship, art and startups – the things I love and care about (cycling creeps in there too). We don’t need a polemic about curation philosophy as much as we need your sense of motivation and where you want to help, where you want to make a difference with your content curation. Don’t over think, have fun and know everyone at Atlantic BT appreciates your hard work.

Win Fame, Fortune and Appreciation
We created the Content Curation Contest to say THANKS and heap some rewards on people who help first and worry about awards later. Click on the link above to fill out our contest application – only takes a few minutes and you may be selected as a top curator, win fame, fortune and some of those drinks with little umbrellas in them. Good luck and thanks for everything you do to help others understand the information revolution.

Thanks for your had curating work. Together we understand faster and better than apart. Wisdom of curated crowds is the only way to survive Moore’s Law of content chaos.

Martin Smith
Director Marketing

Here’s a WordPress plugin that will allow you to create a cool sponsor wall with flip effect; instead of complicated post management, embed tiles anywhere with shortcodes!

Download Sponsor Flipwall Shortcode  Download from WordPress

As taken from the readme file:

---

Description

Creates a cool sponsor wall with flip effect; instead of complicated post management, embed tiles anywhere with shortcodes!

Creates a two-sided square with a “logo side” and a “detail side”. Logo side will display a scaled image, while the detail side will show a name, description, and website link.

Based on awesome script Sponsor Flip Wall with jQuery & CSS by Martin Angelov. Not related to plugin WP Sponsor Flip Wall, which creates a content type in order to display tiles.

---

Installation

1. Unzip, upload plugin folder to your plugins directory (/content/plugins/)
2. Activate plugin
3. Add flipwall tile shortcode anywhere you need it.

---

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I make a flipwall tile?

Use the shortcode!

What is the shortcode?

Use the following format:

[flipwall id="image-name" title="Sponsor Name" url="http://whatever.com" linktext="Instead of whatever.com" image="url to image" text="description if singleline" ] Description with <em>HTML</em> [/flipwall] 

where

• id = a unique identifier; if not provided just increments flipwall-#
• title = the name to display at the top of the “detail side”
• url = external link on “detail side”
• linktext = if provided, the text of the external link (instead of just showing the URL)
• image = url of the image for the “logo side”; if not provided will just display text “More about $title”
• text = optional – you can use this for a simpler shortcode if the description is just one line
• class = optional class to apply to the tile

Pretty much all of the attributes are optional:

[flipwall]This tile has no attributes, just a description[/flipwall] [flipwall text="This is just a one-liner"] 

But your resulting tiles wouldn’t be very useful.

Please note: if using the single-line version with text, you must either list all of them as such or list them at the end (due to the way shortcodes are closed in WP)

Also, if you want to use the default container, just wrap everything inside

[flipwallgroup] ... [/flipwallgroup] 

which will automatically clearfix the tiles.

Can I change the defaults?

Only one simple hook available:

• add_filter('abtSponsorFlipwall_localize', YOURFN);change the base javascript variables used by the flipwall init script:
  • stylesheet: replace the default stylesheet with your own to change the default appearance of tiles
  • speed: change the flip speed (from 350 ms)
  • direction: change the flip direction (from ‘lr’)

Here’s a WordPress plugin that will allow you to send Contact Form 7 submissions to a 3rd-party Service like a CRM.  Multiple configurable services, custom field mapping, pre/post processing.

Download from WordPress

As taken from the readme file:

---

Description

Send Contact Form 7 Submissions to a 3rd-party Service, like a CRM. Multiple configurable services, custom field mapping. Provides hooks and filters for pre/post processing of results. Allows you to send separate emails, or attach additional results to existing emails. Comes with a couple examples of hooks for common CRMs (listrak, mailchimp, salesforce).

The plugin essentially makes a remote request (POST) to a service URL, passing along remapped form submission values.

Includes hidden field plugin from Contact Form 7 Modules: Hidden Fields. Based on idea by Alex Hager “How to Integrate Salesforce in Contact Form 7”

---

Installation

1. Unzip, upload plugin folder to your plugins directory (/content/plugins/)
2. Make sure Contact Form 7 is installed
3. Activate plugin
4. Go to new admin subpage “3rdparty Services” under the CF7 “Contact” menu and configure services + field mapping.

Please note that this includes an instance of hidden.php, which is part of the “Contact Form 7 Modules” plugin — this will show up on the Plugin administration page, but is included automatically, so you don’t need to enable it. This file will only be included if you don’t already have the module installed.

---

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I add / configure a service?

See Screenshots for visual examples.

Essentially,

1. Name your service
2. Enter the submission URL — if your “service” provides an HTML form, you would use the form action here
3. Choose which forms will submit to this service (“Attach to Forms”)
4. Set the default “success condition”, or leave blank to ignore (or if using post processing, see Hooks – this just looks for the provided text in the service response, and if present assumes “success”
5. Allow hooks for further processing – unchecking it just saves minimal processing power, as it won’t try to execute filters
6. Map your form submission values (from the CF7 field tags) to expected fields for your service. 1:1 mapping given as the name of the CF7 field and the name of the 3rdparty field; you can also provide static values by checking the “Is Value?” checkbox and providing the value in the “CF7 Field” column.
7. Add, remove, and rearrange mapping – basically just for visual clarity.
8. Use the provided hooks (as given in the bottom of the service block)
9. Add new services as needed

How can I pre/post process the request/results?

See section Hooks. See plugin folder /3rd-parties for example code for some common CRMs, which you can either directly include or copy to your code.

---

Screenshots

1. Admin page – create multiple services, set up debugging/notice emails, example code
2. Sample service – mailchimp integration, with static and mapped values
3. Customized thank-you page

---

Hooks

1. add_action('Cf73rdPartyIntegration_service_a#',...
   • hook for each service, indicated by the # – this is given in the ‘Hooks’ section of each service
   • provide a function which takes $response, &$results as arguments
   • allows you to perform further processing on the service response, and directly alter the processing results, provided as array('success'=>false, 'errors'=>false, 'attach'=>'', 'message' => '');, where
     • success = true or false – change whether the service request is treated as “correct” or not
     • errors = an array of error messages to return to the form
     • attach = text to attach to the end of the email body
     • message = the message notification shown (from CF7 ajax response) below the form
   • note that the basic “success condition” may be augmented here by post processing
2. add_filter('Cf73rdPartyIntegration_service_filter_post_#, ...
   • hook for each service, indicated by the # – this is given in the ‘Hooks’ section of each service
   • allows you to programmatically alter the request parameters sent to the service

Basic examples provided directly on plugin Admin page (collapsed box “Examples of callback hooks”). Code samples for common CRMS included in the /3rd-parties plugin folder.

One of the services offered by our Experience Design team is what we call an Expert Review. The end result of an Expert Review is an easy-to-digest list of must-fix issues, smaller issues, and positive attributes. In the field of usability, an Expert Review is also called a Heuristic Analysis or Heuristic Review. It’s an efficient way to identify usability issues with your website or product, because we do them in a day or two; inteviews or usability tests generally take a few days longer.

How to do an Expert Review

The basic idea to walk through most of the common tasks and identify potential stumbling blocks. But, instead of pointing out only the negative (which is usually easy to do!), Expert Reviews from Atlantic BT  go one step further and call out specific features that work particularly well.

Issues are identified with a list of heuristics (i.e. good design principles) and the reviewer’s own expertise. Nielsen’s Ten Usability Heuristics is a good starting point for developing your own list. Each heuristic is backed up with research. For example, we know from cognitive psychology that people can only store a limited amount of information in working memory. Therefore, web pages should be designed to minimize or eliminate the need for a user to remember information from one page to another.

When conducting a review, it is important to remember “The Evaluator Effect”. Research has shown that when multiple usability specialists look at a website (or any product), they often identify different issues. To minimize this problem, it is important to involve multiple usability specialists in this process. It always necessary to include an experienced usability specialist if a junior-level usability specialist is involved. We usually have one usability specialist do a thorough review, and a different usability specialist do a quick review.

How to Format an Expert Review

An Expert Review should be easy to scan and fun to read. There is no reason to create a long, boring list of usability problems if nobody is going to read them. At Atlantic BT, we create a bulleted list and use a three dot severity system:

The green dot is used for positive findings. The red dot is used for must-fix severe usability problems. And the yellow dot is for less severe problems and nice-to-haves. If it’s a big site or there are a lot of problems, introduce a 4th dot (orange). For a lot of our clients with smaller sites, we have found that our three dot system works very well.

Don’t Forget Recommendations!

An Expert Review is not complete unless each item is actionable. Therefore, each issue should have recommendations on how to resolve it. The recommendations presented in the Expert Review should not be final, because a multi-disciplinary design team (including marketing and design) will also have potential solutions.

When to do an Expert Review

Since a website or product’s users are constantly changing, it’s necessary to constantly check-in to make sure their needs are being met. An Expert Review should always be done before site redesign efforts and any user research (e.g. usability testing or surveys). If major issues are discovered in an Expert Review, further user research on the existing design is often unnecessary and not cost-effective.

Why Expert Reviews Save Money (Maybe)

For a simple website, an expert review is much more cost-effective than a usability test. A standard usability test requires at least 5 participants, which need to be recruited and then paid for their time. Before that happens, a research plan needs to be developed with a list of tasks and other materials for the study. Depending on how hard it is to find participants, it takes at least a few days to complete a usability test.

Advanced user interfaces require more usability specialists looking at the site. In this case, it may actually be more cost-effective to conduct a usability test.

Usability tests are great at finding unanticipated issues that may go undetected in an expert review. But, if there are salient problems, then an expert review should be conducted and those problems should be fixed before any research is conducted. Participants in a usability test have a hard time looking past major issues, and valuable time will be wasted.

We could write about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for days, and days. SEO can be intimidating and seem hard. In 2010 I rode a bicycle across America to raise money for cancer research. Thinking about riding 3,000 miles would have doomed Martin’s Ride To Cure Cancer to failure before we started. Instead I thought about the fifty or sixty miles a day I needed to ride to arrive in LA within our 60 day plan. Bite size, daily goals make the mountain seem less overwhelming.

SEO in Under A Minute A Day from Raleigh Web Developers Atlantic BT is short, frequent tips you can easily do that take about a minute. Our goal is to share sixty SEO In Under A Minute Tips before the end of February. One caveat needs stating. You may spend more time READING about Atlantic BT’s SEO In Under A Minute Tips than actually doing them. Explaining takes more time than doing sometimes especially when distilling more than 20 years of search engine optimization experience (on the Atlantic BT marketing team).

SEO In Under A Minute Tip 1: Don’t Start With SEO
Name five of your company’s core values and ideas. Why does your company, brand or product exist in the world? How, who and why is better because your company is here.

Take these questions as an elevator quiz, a Rorschach test.

If you have trouble firing five company and brand ideas, five core values then we suggest homework. Read these books:

• How: Why how you do everything means everything by Dov Siedman
• Delivering Happiness: Path To Profits, Passion and Purpose by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh
• Grow: How ideas and growth power the world’s largest companies

Your web site is a huge reflecting and amplifying pool. If you have any dissonance, confusion or unresolved, “Who are we,” issues resolve them BEFORE you create a web site or at least before your next email marketing campaign. If your site is a reflecting pool of your company then SEO is a reflecting pool of your site. You can see the trickle down problem. If your brand communication is unclear at the top it gets way to murky by the bottom, by the time you reach SEO land.

Start with brand clarity or as close to clarity as we can get these days or the marketing problem, like a snowball rolling down a steep hill, gets bigger with each roll.

First Operational Business Intelligence Awards
How many years of your life have you spent bent over a spreadsheet trying to tease out Truth, Justice and the American Way? I started working on spreadsheets when they were called VisiCalc and then Lotus 1-2-3, and yes I realize how much that last sentence ages me.

We made better business decisions even in those early days. We had to key data in from printed reports back in the day.  We became human filters passing digital data through our fingers so it could become OUR digital data in Lotus or later Excel.

We’ve come a long way. One of Atlantic’s coolest customers, Entrinsik located right down the street, created a feed and database agnostic tool called Informer that does things I dreamed about. The years I would have gotten back if our data warehouse and SQL reporting tools at M&M/Mars could magically tie data from internal AND external systems.

I love the IDEA of Informer. Selling it to our tech guys at M&M would have been an interesting conversation. In the end, M&M’s ISG tech team wanted sales and marketing to be self-sustaining. Sales and marketing were too much of a pain to do anything else. We didn’t have a tool like Informer, a tool capable of blending, matching and empowering. If you’ve read any of my Marketing Director at Atlantic posts, my ScentTrail Marketing posts, @ScentTrail Tweets or my Internet marketing writing for Technorati you know data democracy and the empowerment it creates is a favorite topic.

We live in special times as marketing pros. We don’t have to GUESS so much, but we need information to do what we need it to do. When we need a standing front somersault we need real time business intelligence, easy to cut, spin and create actionable information mined out of an impossible black hole of data that gets more impossible every minute of every day. We need to find golden needles so well hidden no pivot table or what if analysis will ever even know they are there.

I wrote about No Silver Bullets or Barking Dogs in web development on Friday. There are times when the right information is worth millions, years of your life, advancement in your career or all of the above. There are times when a silver bullet is a very good idea. Don’t know about you, but I’ve found it TOUGH to be so armed in my 30 year career.

My friends at Entrinsik want to pat me and every other BI spreadsheet junkie on the back. Entrinsik’s First Annual Operational Business Intelligence Awards reward the hardest working people in rock and roll – analysts and line managers who battle numbers, feeds and giant Ogres to help marketing, sales, manufacturing, nonprofits, colleges, universities and that garage business you love and want to fund your retirement.

The First Annual Entrinsik BI Awards focus on creative uses of their magical Informer reporting tool. Our marketing team and I are working on a creative use of Informer’s ability to tie Google Analytics, Argyle Social and site conversion data from our ancient Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system together. Probably NOT going to make the BI Awards 2.29 deadline, but we will make next year’s Entrinsik’s BI Awards. If you are doing cool things with Informer be sure to APPLY for an Informer award today (deadline is 2.29).

Just curious? Learn More About Entrinsik’s Operational BI Awards

Follow @Entrinsik

Entrinsik on Facebook

Entrinsik’s Informer  reminds me of Arthur C. Clark’s famous quote “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Feel like you are drowning in BI?
Entrinsik’s talented team can help (they are helping me).
Call 888.703.0016 and tell Yanni or Sharon Martin sent you. Email sales(at)Entrinsik(dot)com.

Entrinsik’s Contact Form

Got a great Battling Spreadsheet Ogres story?
Share it on Entrinsik’s Contact Form and they will pat you on the back. Keep the faith, data is growing like wild Kudzu but so are cool new curation tools such as Informer (read my Curation Is The Next Web Revolution post for more hope).

Martin