Click these buttons; or else.

In doing a really quick survey of a couple websites and different blog entries, I've stumbled upon something that I find to be rather interesting. It's the whole adding the Twitter and Facebook buttons at the bottom of an entry feature. While that's wonderful and great (making it easier for the reader to pass along whatever unique and profound words you have to say), there's another feature that I find to be more discrediting at times, which would be the showing the live number of actual tweets and likes.

Here are some examples...

Obviously, the top two are from the same website, and the others are from other sites. The first two are fairly recent; about 2 days ago. The middle one is from about a week ago, and the last two are from  roughly a month ago. 

One issue I delved into is popularity of certain social networking sites. Clearly Twitter is the winner from these examples, which makes sense, seeing as how Twitter is a phenomenally fast growing site. In looking at several sites I frequent, I've yet to find more "likes" than "tweets" on any particular entry. So for someone who isn't up to speed yet on the social networking bandwagon, I'd highly suggest hopping on the Twitter wagon first. Facebook has it's advantages, but Twitter is quick and painless to start up and simple to maintain. I won't even mention Digg.

An interesting bit of information I discovered is the actual numbers. You could deduce from just simply looking at the pictures above, that the top two come from a rather popular website, the middle from a semi-popular site, and the bottom two from a rarely seen blog. But is that really the case? Are some posts just more interesting than others? Are they written in a more cleaver fashion? Or are the readers of one blog more or less lazy than the readers of another? Who's to say really? You can't really judge content based of the outside numbers. Or can you?

I came upon the thought of putting these numbers up on your blog. If you know you have a lot of readers, having this up may encourage more people to read: "Oh look at how many people tweeted and liked this! This must be a great article!". But having low numbers consistently across several posts could deter potential readers:  "Hmm, only 5 tweets and 3 likes? I'll pass...". This is why the blog you are reading right now only has the buttons and not the numbers because I know I don't get a lot of traffic. 

Now these could be just erroneous judgements and hastened observations and I could be wrong. But it's just what I've found, and if you don't like it, don't click those buttons down there.

Be well,

Do you unleash your inner career-nerd too?

Do you think people who make a living as salesmen are as susceptible to other salesmen's Jedi mind tricks?  Do cooks silently judge other cooks when they go out to eat? Would a barista rather pull her own teeth than have a first date at a coffee shop?

My prepress manager planted this idea in my head earlier this morning, and I ran with it. It boiled down to one main idea: given the job you currently have, do you "see" that job out in the real world and analyze it like you are at the office? Do you take it in a negative connotation or positive? The examples above are short and sweet, but I'm sure they could stretch on for a while.

Me personally, ever since getting into the packaging side of printing, I look at every single box I come across. Groceries. Video games. Postal parcels. Soap. I look that box up and down and every which way just to study it. How did they die-cut it? Are there any spot colors used? Who printed it? Why is that image low-res?

I guess it really begs the question of do you take your work home with you? And in a sense, I believe everybody does to a certain extent depending on your field (I doubt trash collectors think about trash collection services when they get home and see their own garbage). And I'm not knocking it by any means, after all don't we spend more than half of our lives working? I think a little overspill is to be expected.

Be well.

"Is that you, Fonts? We meet again..."

Yesterday I had to absolute BEST time trying to figure out what was going on between my system fonts and my Adobe CS5 software (previous statement dripping with sarcasm)!

Like all computer software, there are bound to be some bugs. This one by far has been the most frustrating for me. For some magical reasoning, when I opened an AI file, with the fonts turned OFF (Suitcase Fusion), the file still managed to pull the necessary fonts, and throw the kerning off on only three words of the same font in the document. Sounds complicated? Yes. I know.

Here's the example:

(Illustrator already open, turn on fonts or leave them off, then open file)

(Illustrator quit, turn on fonts, then open file)

Obviously the file was pulling the fonts from somewhere. The curious this is though, with the fonts OFF, I could look in InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator not see the font listed. But as soon as I open that file, the font magically jumped into the fonts list in Illustrator, but not the other programs. My frustrations toiled. 

After many tireless minutes of trial and error, we figured out to quit Illustrator, turn ON the fonts, then open up the file. Being a relatively easy solve, it was still difficult along the way to find out WHY this was happening. 

Conclusion? Read my first blog entry about Fonts to learn where I stand, and I won't rip my hair out.

Be well.

MailChimp: The Revisitation

Well, It's been 4 full days (2 business days) since the inaugural launch of Printed Specialties' Email Newsletter. We did so using the ever-so-easy-to-use free website, MailChimp. I was going to wait until the 1 week anniversary to give out stats, seeing as how some folks were out of the office, don't check their mail every 15 seconds (like me), etc. But I must say the results we're seeing are right on par with what we were expecting.

Nothing too extravagant, here. We don't have an insane amount of website traffic. However, our average views per page, and unique visitors are up from the past several weeks, which is nice to see.

Both of our blogs (this one you're currently reading, and PSI's President's blog) have seen a steady jump in views, with the latter seeing the most "clicks" from the email. These are very welcome numbers.

Our open rate is higher than our industry average, as is our click rate, which is also a good sign.

The bounce rate on the other hand was a little higher (bad) than normal standards, but that was to be expected. The list essentially needed to be cleaned, and luckily MailChimp's software did that for us.

It could be too early to call it, but I think this first launch was a success. I just couldn't wait to post our results, and we are hoping for bigger and better ones next time. We're obviously shooting for overall improvement with each newsletter (it's a monthly email), so we have our goals in mind, and our actions poised and ready.

If you or anyone you know is interested in join this mailing list, click here to sign up.

Be well.