Q1. When preparing for a tradeshow, what is the planning process like at your company?
[A] It’s a true team effort with defined roles. We have weekly status meetings to keep everyone on task and ensure we’re telling a comprehensive story and taking advantage of every opportunity.
[B] What planning? Even when we schedule meetings, no one ever shows up and I’m left to do all the work.
[C] We roll up our sleeves and get to work. There’s a core group of us with great ideas that like to get in a room, brainstorm, and hash it out. We meet as often as we need to – sometimes every day as the show draws near.

Q2. When people leave your booth they say:
[A] Wow! What an experience! From the demonstration to the sampling and personal attention, it was really well done. This company has its act together. We want to work with them.
[B] Alrighty then, snooze fest. What’s next?
[C] That’s interesting and new. They have a lot of energy and potential – definitely a company to watch.

Q3. How many business cards did you collect at your most recent tradeshow?
[A] I beat my personal record and collected 45. I already have meetings set up with 12 new business leads and four of those are next week!
[B] Six. And three were from other people in my own company.
[C] Business cards are so last year, we use a poken and now I’ve got 100 new Twitter followers and 250 new Facebook fans.

Q4. Other than your booth, what types of tradeshow opportunities do you take part in:
[A] Whatever presents the best opportunities to position our company as a leader and allows us to connect with our key audiences. We’ve got speakers at the podium, are hosting a customer/influencer reception and have two days full of media interviews with top company executives (one for a product we just announced and one under NDA for an upcoming release).
[B] We tried to sponsor a breakfast, but hardly anyone showed up. We also did a room drop, but didn’t build in any way to measure it so we have no idea if it worked.
[C] Can you say happy hour? Can you say cool prizes and giveaways? Can you say major sponsor of the conference’s keynote on social media? We can!

Q5. When you think the most recent tradeshow you attended, do you plan to go back next year?
[A] There’s a good chance. We are broadening our mix of shows, but that one has been a staple for a long time, so if it ain’t broke…
[B] Maybe. If it’s still around. With the economy still tanking I don’t count on much.
[C] I hope so, but honestly I don’t know what I’m doing in six months let alone next year. If it’s an “It” show, you know we’ll be there.

If You Chose Mostly  ”A”s You Are A “Marcia.”
Let’s face it, you’re groovy. On the tradeshow circuit, Marcias are very popular. People are drawn to you and your booth. You look great and have your act together. Chances are you’ve been planning for months and have a great team in place to support you. You understand that trade shows provide an excellent chance to enhance your brand, promote products, establish/strengthen relationships, and drive sales and leads. You take advantage of the “hidden gems” trade shows have to offer, such as show dailies and editorial opportunities in trade pubs tied to shows and conferences, and you even pre-plan for things like onsite speaking opportunities and events. Your experience and confidence are real assets, but Marcias be warned. You can be vain and a bit uncaring. Do not rest on your laurels. Part of popularity and success is reinventing yourself. Never take advantage of relationships or hang your hat on the latest industry numbers or polls, even if your number is one. Don’t react to trends, set them yourself, and keep pushing yourself to find new ways to engage with customers and industry influencers. The stronger your relationships, the more viable your business.

If You Chose Mostly “B”s, You Are A “Jan.”
And if you’re a Jan, chances are that’s no surprise to you. You’ve got middle child syndrome – you feel mediocre, envy what others do, and try to replicate in your search to find yourself. You can often be found saying, “Why didn’t we think of that” or complaining about lack of budgets, vision, or team support. But, before you give up on tradeshows think about this, just because your middle doesn’t mean you have to be average. Identify your uniqueness and relish in what makes you different. Stop comparing yourself to everyone else. And, if you’re still not convinced, use your customers and their greatness to help tell your story. For you, pushing outside your comfort zone is a must. Don’t try to be something you’re not. Discover what’s great about you and don’t try to be all things to all people. Pick one thing and do it great. Be focused. Be creative. Be positive. And, find ways to stretch your budget and make news at the same time. Consider conducting a survey on the show floor, issue a release at the show, include video testimonials taken on site of people surveyed and post them on your website, Tweet live from the show floor, host a Tweet Up at your booth for special offers, etc. It does take a little effort, but it’s well worth it in the end as you start to move the needle in connecting with your key audiences and building your brand beyond a “me too.”

If You chose Mostly “C”s, You Are A “Cindy.”
Ah, so fresh-faced and innocent. You may be a newbie to the tradeshow scene, but you have loads of potential. People are drawn to you because you’re sweet, open, and have heaps of energy. It’s electric now, but you won’t be the new kid on the block forever. In fact, many companies, products, and great ideas come and go. Start planning now for what you want to be when you grow up. Use tradeshows to do more than toot your own horn, but better yet to make connections. Meet with the press; leverage industry events to make announcements and provide technology demos; position leadership as experts, etc. Believe me, we all think your technology is cool, we’re entranced by your adorable lisp, and we all wish we could text as fast as you, but don’t dismiss the fundamentals of communications – even things like radio, direct mail, and commercials can be fun, too. Use this opportunity to really get to know your target, stay on top of industry trends, and gain competitor insights. All of this will help to build your communications accordingly, and these things will take you far beyond child star.

–Corrie Carter

1. Neglecting Page Titles
   Every web page has a title, but it’s often overlooked, as it doesn’t appear on a page’s content area. Rather, it appears at the very top of the browser window. It also appears in Google search results, and it carries significant weight in search ranking. Sometimes the title is left out of a web page’s source code altogether. In these cases, usually the name of the browser (“Mozilla Firefox” for example) is displayed at the top of the browser window. Worse, some web design or development applications will put in a default page title such as “Untitled Document.”  Many websites do include page titles, but use the same title for every page. Of course, this saves a lot of time in building pages, but it’s a big missed opportunity. Every page on a site should have a unique title.
2. Flash-Only Sites, Homepages, or Navigation
   I’m surprised to be writing this, because Flash was the first widespread “easy target” for search engine optimization. But we still see these sites. Flash sites or homepages without HTML versions are nearly invisible to search engines. Navigation built in Flash makes a site harder to crawl than HTML-based navigation. Sure, pay-per-click ads and other promotional tactics can drive traffic to all-Flash sites. But, in general they will do poorly in organic search rankings. Flash is an excellent platform on which to build rich content and applications, but if you’re at all interested in SEO, basic web site architecture should be implemented in HTML.
3. Embedding Type in Images
   Unless coded properly, type in images cannot be read by search engines. Many folks are aware of the importance of coding in ‘alt text’ for images, and that’s great. But for certain images it’s not enough. For example, if your site has important headlines rendered in images (for the sake of visual appearance), and coded as simple images (<img />), you’re missing a big opportunity for search rankings. It’s okay to try to break out of the limitations of lowest-common-demoninator typefaces, as long as you use one of several techniques that allow you to code your headlines properly as headlines (<h1>Headline</h1>, for example). This can be done with CSS and background images, or by rendering headlines as images on-the-fly (Cufon), or by using Flash to replace regular text with Flash type (sIFR). Your friends at Google.com can tell you all about these.
4. Ugly URLs
   Even the web address of your pages, the URL (Unique Resource Locator; sadly, I did not have to look this up) can help with search ranking—if you take care to make it clean and easy to read. If it’s easy for you to read, it’s easy for the search engines, too. Which one of the addresses below is easier to read?
   
5. Using “Click Here” Alone in Hyperlinks
   Links in text to other pages or files should be made up of words and phrases that describe the destination. This is an oft-made mistake, because simply making the words “click here” clickable makes sense from a simple user-experience perspective. It’s fine to use the words “click here,” but make sure you include any descriptive words in the link, too. So, instead of  ”click here to learn about integrated marketing communications,” use “click here to learn about integrated marketing communications.” A bonus: More words make for a larger click-target, incrementally improving ease-of-use for your site.

By taking the extra time and care to plan site design and construction, and by using techniques like these and others, you’ll be able to produce the best balance of rich user experience and natural search visibility.

- Frank Piacitelli

Ribbit is an API that allows you to send and receive phone calls directly from a Flash application. In addition, it has functionality to allow you to send and receive text messages from Flash. I recently created a Ribbit developer account and am experimenting with ways this powerful tool can be used to benefit Martino Flynn clients.

One interesting thing I stumbled across is news that Ribbit is hosting a killer app challenge. There are five contest categories:

1. Media, Advertising & Entertainment – To win this category you need to captivate an audience and add unprecedented interactive value.
2. Social Networking & Communication – Present a Web 3.0 preview with the best example of connecting people via open telephony.
3. Business & Productivity – Pushing business applications even further by bringing voice and rich communication features into the application workflow.
4. Carrier, Network, or ISP Integration – What’s an example of the most innovative integration to an existing cable, carrier or mobile network.
5. Wildcard – Improving the usability of any device or interface (from vending machines to ticket kiosks).

Submitted applications will be reviewed by judges who are respected in the industry. The contest ends on March 12th. I’m really looking forward to seeing some of the winning applications and picking them apart.

Feel free to comment on this post if you have an idea regarding how Ribbit might be used, or have seen examples of it out there. For more information on Ribbit, visit ribbit.com, or to become a Ribbit developer visit developer.ribbit.com.

— Mike Ruschak

However since this technique stops all the sound streams it may not be desirable in every situation. For instance it may be undesirable for all the sound streams to stop in your project. See this bug report on Adobe’s site.
SWFLoader still plays audio in background, even if the SWF is unloaded/replaced

Supposedly this is fixed in Flash Player 10 with a new function called “unloadAndStop”. My hope is this post will save someone time.

— Mike Ruschak

After creating a new logo, you can download jpegs in a variety of sizes for use as icons on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, and others. Pictured is mine. Some other interesting submissions include the supportive, the negative, the humorous, the downright strange, and one from our very own Brad Garratt.

Some quick background: think about how our federal, state, and local agencies work together. Agencies like the DEA, FEMA, National Guard, Coast Guard—plus your neighborhood police and fire departments. They all obviously carry some form of radio for communication, but what you may not know is that they have to carry multiple radios with different frequency bands so they can communicate with each other.

What Harris RF Communications offers is one radio that covers multiple frequencies (as well as many other benefits). The idea of different organizations being able to universally communicate is referred to as interoperability. The need for interoperability has gained more and more attention because of events like Hurricane Katrina and 9/11, when agencies trying to assist those already in the trenches couldn’t communicate. Obviously, that’s a problem that someone needed to solve.

This campaign was a ton of work, but a lot of fun. And a great partnership. I think both teams would agree this was one awesome project to help create. The award was a great win for our egos, but, more importantly, a great win for our client. And, hopefully, for the people using the product.

Even though the timelines were incredibly challenging, this campaign should really be a model for any marketing manager looking to get the most from his or her agency partner.

This was a true collaboration. “Collabo,” as one MFer calls it.

RF Communications did their homework—and then some. They gave a full-on presentation of the new market they were breaking into: the public safety market. AND they covered all the benefits of what they were offering from the customer perspective— including helping us to identify the USP (unique selling point).

They also included management from the get-go. We were able to develop a campaign that included the input and strategic thinking from all of the key stakeholders. With this early management buy-in, approvals were easier and faster. It’s amazing how much this step helped us stay on track with our timeline, and the budget.

The other amazing thing RF Communications did was explain the problem—not just the solution. So we were able to put on our strategic thinking caps to come back with some great solutions they hadn’t thought of before. All of this led to a great outcome.

A strong, compelling, in-your-face (no pun intended) ad campaign that got noticed. And met its communication objectives. It delivered. We delivered. That’s the way it should be.

• Renault Megane ‘Everything is Sport’ Commercial
  French vehicle manufacturer, Renault, shows us just how desirable their cars are. Even the moving parts will do whatever it takes to get in one.
• TweenLite: AS3 Lightweight Tweening Engine
  A really lightweight alternative to Adobe’s built-in actionscript 3 tween class in Flash. Although there are other tweening engines available and with more features, a few of our Flash people here seem to get great use out of TweenLite.
• Hot Pockets Dojo
  Small Flash sitelet for Hot Pockets by one of our fellow Magnet partners. You can send eCards, download wallpapers and watch TV commercials all featuring Master ReDai, sensei of the Hot Pockets Dojo. If you’re feeling brave, you can even ask him questions and get ridiculous answers.
• Design and the Elastic Mind
  Design and the Elastic Mind, an exhibition at MoMA, “explores the reciprocal relationship between science and design in the contemporary world by bringing together design objects and concepts that marry the most advanced scientific research with attentive consideration of human limitations, habits, and aspirations.”
• Google Moon
  That’s right, Google has mapped the moon and made a web application out of it. But other than the landing sites of the Apollo missions, there aren’t many places to get directions to.
• Crayon Physics Deluxe
  A 2-D physics puzzle game which brings to life anything and everything you can draw on the screen with your mouse. To complete each level of the puzzle, you must creatively use the shapes you draw and the laws of physics (gravity, motion, momentum etc…) to push a circle over a star. Seems simple, but can be a tricky game. And REALLY fun. Sadly, though the game is only available for PC. Here’s a video of Crayon Physics Deluxe in action.

• Interactive Ikea Commercial
  Ikea lets you change angles on a series of slow-motion videos of what they refer to as "The Complete Bedroom." As the clip plays, you’re also shown pricing for several items in the scene, which you can click to view additional information straight from the company’s online store.
• Swedish Beatboxing Basset Hound
  Press any of your home keys to make this dog drop some fresh beats.
• Firefox 3 Beta 3 Released
  The latest update to Firefox was released as a beta for previewing and testing.
• Jackie Moon (Will Ferrell) for Old Spice
  This sitelet accompanied a few of their Super Bowl ads and features Will Ferrell as Jackie Moon, his character in Semi Pro, explaining why Old Spice is great. Anything that can ‘cauterize your sweat glands shut’ has to be good.
• Michael Bay Demands Awesome
  An awesome spot for Verizon FiOS featuring awesome director Michael Bay and his insatiable appetite for awesomeness and awesome pyrotechnics. Awesome.
• Left-or-Right.com
  Choose one or the other and then see how other visitors answered. There are some pretty interesting head-to-head match-ups here with surprising results (for example, 75% chose Obama and 25% like Hillary).
• Urban Forest Project Baltimore
  The Urban Forest Project creates environmental awareness through an outdoor exhibition featuring a series of banners created by prominent members of the design community. This year’s project in Baltimore asks the general public to design a leaf through an online drawing tool and submit it for inclusion on one special, user-generated banner.

Hands-on with the iPhone, one element of the user interface really caught my attention. Rather than trolling around a page looking for links with the mouse and cursor, you scan and identify links visually — there’s no mouse-over or rollover state that I noticed, and even if there were, I doubt it would be useful in any practical sense due to the small size of the elements on-screen compared to your relatively large fingertip. This doesn’t affect your run-of-the-mill hyperlinks so much as it does more complex elements like drop-down menus, which are effectively inaccessible on the iPhone. Any sites that rely heavily on mouseover-activated elements will likely be far less useful on the iPhone. On the other hand, those annoying rich media ads that expand when you mouse over them (the peddlers of these claim that a mouseover constitutes user initiation, which IMHO requires a more definite click) won’t work either.

“As many of you already know, Flash is inherently a visual medium, and Googlebot doesn’t have eyes. Googlebot can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing. Moreover, textual contents are sometimes stored in Flash as graphics, and since Googlebot doesn’t currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely. All of this means that even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links. Worse, while Googlebot can understand some Flash files, not all Internet spiders can.”

I’m always amused when I go to an agency site and it is entirely constructed in Flash, especially if said agency is pitching their Internet marketing expertise. As this official Google blog post notes, these sites are invisible to search engines and will not rank in organic results. The search engine indexing bots only see text and html/xml links between pages. They can’t understand pictures, text embedded in pictures or video.

Also, a Jupiter study done in 2001 found that Flash splash pages, those annoyingly clever animations that you have to go through on many sites, cut traffic by 50%. Now, six years later, we’re still seeing people building these things.

The only exception to building heavily Flash-oriented sites may be for major brands (think Nike or Coke) that don’t need to rank because they’re so recognizable and established. Even here I’d question the reasoning behind going totally Flash. As the Google post notes, best practices for using Flash on a site include:

• Embedding the Flash elements in an html/xml/CSS site architecture rather than building the whole site as a Flash animation
• Correctly adding text descriptions to the Flash filenames that are literal descriptions of what the file contains
• Never auto-playing audio or video when a page opens (this drives me crazy- don’t people realize that many visitors to their site may be in a work environment where a blast of audio is inappropriate?)
• Always offer a bypass option to skip the animation

Flash is an amazing tool but it has to be used with care- if someone pitches you an all-Flash site ask them about optimization. The answer should be revealing.