This provocative article about Facebook’s imminent steps in their strategy to take over the world is really no surprise given the magnitude that Facebook has grown over the last few years. It’s the nature of the beast. Anything that gets too big tends to develop an insatiable appetite for growth and eventually begins devouring the values upon which it became successful. Think Microsoft and Google.

So there are big changes coming to Facebook. Changes, according to Ben Parr on Mashable, that are going to “Change the world of social media” (Ben sounds like a Facebook shill in parts of this article). Here are some of the quotes from Ben Parr’s article, regarding the “mind-boggling things” Facebook will be launching in within a month or so:

• “Facebook’s goal is to become the social layer that supports, powers and connects every single piece of the web, no matter who or what it is or where it lives.” (Shouldn’t Dr. Evil get a credit for this line?)
• “These changes will make Facebook a place where nearly everything in your life is enhanced by your social graph. These changes will make it so you know your friends better than you ever thought you could.” (It’s about time . . . seeing and talking to people is such a hassle anyway.)

Has Facebook turned ”evil”?  It seems they are intent on creating their own de facto mandatory internet upon which users have very little direct control. That path will be the beginning of the end for them or any other company that thinks they can reign in the freedom garnered from the social media revolution.

One thing that especially alarms me is how Facebook has managed to have users create the value while Facebook collects huge sums of advertising revenue generated from that content. Now it’s expanded into the business realm. As of this year we can build a complete custom interactive web page on our company’s Facebook page but Facebook has complete control and gets advertising revenue. It seems bizarre to me that we’ve allowed ourselves to be suckered into this sort of proprietary network to build our online presences within. It’s like a successful version of AOL (without 10 billion DVD’s being mailed).

While Facebook and other social media platforms will be with us indefinitely, I’m looking forward to the day when the realm is stabilized and attempts by small groups of people to control and profit off the masses are thwarted.

Till then, we offer custom Facebook page design and optimization.

I’m fascinated how a corporation can use a logo, or rather the story behind it, as a totem of corporate mythology (or to be more crass, groupthink). Logos often have more impact within an organization than without. I don’t really get much as a consumer from BitDefender’s new logo at first glance, but as you can see from this link they have created a great myth around it which can be a powerful uniting force within the organization and amongst their customer evangelists.  You can check out their new brand mythology here.  My compliments to the branding team who led this project.

A great example of the the principles of consistency and conformity is the email template we designed for Baker Tilly. Compare the email design with the graphic identity of their existing Website.

Seth Godin’s blog posts are always profound, but his most recent post Bypassing the Leap is especially relevant to the services we provide. The gist of his post is that most of the time creativity is the act of reinterpreting and reassembling elements that are already well accepted and proven to work.

Effective branding and design services are based from this same perspective. While it may sound contradictory, quality creative products are almost always intentionally designed to conform within well established boundaries.

No matter how unique of graphic identity a corporation has, you’ll find the logo almost always in the upper left and the main site navigation in one of two locations. This is staying within the proven boundaries of usability. When Fortune 500 corporations spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop their branding and identity all marketing publications will almost always have identical colors, layout and typeface. This is adhering to the core principle of graphic design—consistency. Corporations conform to the principles of usability and consistency because they know they’re the most effective way to communicate a credible message and the most effective way to persuade their customers to action.

Embracing conformity to communicate uniqueness is really the secret of success when it comes to marketing communication and application design. 

Many small and mid-sized companies don’t get this. Have you ever found a Website through Google that you thought might be a good solution for a need only to have second thoughts when their Website design looked dated, amateur or unclear?  No matter how unique and appealing their solution may be, if their graphic design and usability do not establish unwavering credibility you’re likely to just head back to Google to search for an alternative.

Small and mid-sized companies have a great opportunity to level the playing field against even massive competitors by communicating their unique value message by conforming to already accepted and proven principles.

Does your marketing communication produce credibility or doubt? Ask ten people outside your organization that you can trust to give you honest opinions about their impressions of your Website, emails or other marketing material. If you need an objective professional opinion let us know. The one thing you’ll get is honesty and there’s no obligation. If you do decide for yourself that your identity needs a makeover we provide consulting as well as in-house development and design services. You can call us at 866.770.7967 or through our online form.

Check our our new tricked out Facebook page . . . we can code about anything you can image for your company’s Facebook page. A Single complete custom branded and designed page with interactive features or a complete "mini site" within your Company’s Facebook page. We can code almost anything in your Facebook page including Flash (with fail safe alternative for iPads/iPhones), ajax, JavaScript, Forms, video . . . anything you can image.

• Visit our custom Facebook design here.

Constant Contact announced today that they are offering a 30% discount for the first three months for new clients. To take advantage of this offer just sign up on the Constant Contact website and enter the offer code of 30PERCENTOFFJULY at checkout.  You can also call them at 866.876.8464. The promotion starts today and ends July, 31st.

If you send single emails to groups of people outside your company, even small groups, third party email marketing company such as Constant Contact, VerticalResponse or iContact can provide you an inexpensive and vital resource to insure that your company’s domain name is protected from inadvertently being rated too high in the spam indexes.

Risingline also provides world class custom HTML email design services to perfectly match marketing emails with your company’s branding identity. While our many of our clients are large corporations our pricing is affordable for any size business.

• Information and pricing on Risingline’s custom HTML email design services
• Samples of our email design work

See also: Setting up a HTML email signature in Microsoft Entourage (Mac OS X)

For some strange reason Entourage 2008 adds your email signature at the very bottom of all replies and forwards in an email string. Not only will recipients not see your signature next to your more recent reply, if you reply to the same email string multiple times you end up getting a "stack" of your same email signature at the bottom of the message strings which looks quite unprofessional.

Although Microsoft has made it as un-intuitive as possible, there is a fix for this issue that allows your email signature to appear only after your replies. 

1. Bring Entourage into focus, then just go to the top menu Entourage -> Preferences ->

2. Then highlight "Reply & Forward" and check the box with the verbose description "Place reply at top of message and include From, Date, To, and Subject lines from original message" 

I was digging through the 250+ new features Apple is touting for the July release of OS X Lion when I almost fell out of my chair. Apple is finally fixing a basic usability shortfall of OS X that have has been a pet peeve of mine.

Lion will allow users to resize a window from any corner instead of being forced to use only the lower right hand corner. Yes it’s really true. Buried at the very end and classified in the lonely “Other Features” category we find:

Resize from any edge. You can now resize a window from any side or corner.

Is there really any questions as to why this would be an incredible benefit? Why it took Apple decades to do this I’ll never know but dragging my mouse across my 27″ iMac screen gets old real quick and I hate thinking anything that Microsoft makes is better than Apple. Thanks Apple, it’s about time!

Now if Apple can only fix the other major downfall in Finder by allowing one to sort alphabetically by folders first then files. While I love Macs I hate Finder primarily because it sorts files and folders as if they were the same animal. Apple makes it sound like this might change with Lion, but this is probably just wishfull thinking on my part.  Here’s what Apple says about the new Finder in Lion:

Sort files – A new button in the Finder toolbar lets you sort files by category, making it easier to find what you’re looking for. Sort files by kind, application, date modified, date added, or size.

I don’t have my hopes up that this will make Finder much better, however anything they do to change Finder will be an improvement.

The other bit of good news is the Lion upgrade is priced at $30. Click here for a full list of the new Lion OS X features.

In February, Google made a significant change to its search algorithm in order to penalize and weed out shady SEO tactics such as keyword stuffing, content copying, etc. The Google change has actually forced some companies who practiced such tactics to layoff significant portions of their workforce because their Google search engine result listings dropped so severely. Take a look at this brief article from Website Magazine to read more: Crop Devastation – Google’s Farmer Update Retools Rankings.

As we’ve preached for years, your overall strategy should be to write Website content for your users, not  just to bait Google with keywords. Even if this tactic works for a brief time, in the long run this strategy will be detrimental to your online presence as has been demonstrated by Google over the last few months.

Search engine optimization is still a legitimate and very important component of your online strategy. It just has to be implemented correctly and with correct expectations need to be set for the client by a legitimate SEO firm (which can be hard to find). There is no shortcut or get rich quick scheme with SEO regardless of all the many claims of so-called SEO professionals who fill our in-boxes with their spam. As I’ve observed before, if these people are really so good at SEO why don’t they impart their skills on their own Website and reap the benefit instead of sending out spam?

To get started down the right path simply write your Website content and messaging solely for the benefit or your prospects and customers; in other words with true unique value. With that done then hire a legitimate SEO firm and copywriter to insure that your content is in line with your target keyword market which may require some slight adjustments to your copy.

There is a lot more to a long term SEO strategy but the above will give any Website a great foundation and insure that they are positioned for a successful future.

Microsoft pushed a large Windows 7 automatic update package last night.

You may of found that after the mandatory reboot your Internet Explorer and Firefox will open and freeze up, display a blank window with no menus or control menu or buttons, or display the normal interface but not allow you to access the Web.

This problem is likely being caused by the incompatibility of one of your existing Windows 7 third party services or start-up items. Following is the process to resolve this issue:

• Read but do not yet follow the instructions from this Microsoft knowledge base article: Computer freezes when i launch Firefox or Internet Explorer

• Rather than start the troubleshooting by enabling half of the services and rebooting as the article describes, do the following first:

1. 1. On the services tab check the box “Hide all Microsoft Services” then Disable all, then Apply. Note: always click “Hide all Microsoft Services” before enabling or disabling any service through this troubleshooting process.
   2. On the Startup Tab, disable all, apply then ok and reboot.
   3. Check your Internet Explorer and Firefox; they are probably working again.
   4. Now go into msconfig (using the Microsoft support article instructions) and go to the services tab, hide all Microsoft services, enable all the services, OK, and reboot (notice that all the startup items are still disabled).
      • If IE and Firefox are working normally still, then you know the problem is with an incompatibility in one of the Startup items. Proceed to that tab and use the instructions provided in the Microsoft article for “enabling half the services” (but you will be enabling half of the startup items).  Eventually you’ll figure out which third party startup item is causing the problem. After you find the offending Startup item then enable all of your Services and reboot a final time.
      • If IE and Firefox are not working then start the process of “enabling half of the services” until you either find the service causing the problem. After you find the offending service then enable all your Startup items and reboot a final time.

• I don’t recommend proceeding to the last step in the Microsoft article “To restore your Normal startup” which if taken will nullify all the troubleshooting you just performed.  Leave the settings on “Selective startup” However, you may need to manually enable future services or startup items in the future for them to work properly.