First of all let’s look at your newsfeed.

This has been made more efficient by removing both Top Stories (which showed the most popular topics) and Most Recent (which placed news in chronological order). The newsfeed now puts up one stream of all the stories relevant to the time they were posted, and according to Facebook “News Feed will act more like your own personal newspaper. You won’t have to worry about missing important stuff.”

Facebook has increased the character limit for status update s from 420 to an impressive 5,000 meaning that brands now have the chance to say more than ever before. There are also bigger pictures in your newsfeed and you can mark stories as top stories meaning that Facebook will automatically put similar stories at the top of your newsfeed.

What is the ‘Ticker?’

Ticker allows the user to link up with friends in real-time whereby you can see immediate updates and join in conversations at any time as the news feed seems to lag in terms of immediacy. The ticker has now created the ability for you to ‘listen in’ on conversations that were meant to be private with people you may not even know (i.e. friends of friends).

What are Smart Lists?

Smart Lists allow the user to create lists based on certain aspects of an individual’s profile for example your family, school, university and so on. Once an individual in the list updates their profile or posts a comment, the list will indicate the total number of new posts by that group of people.

What about my privacy?

It is important to note that through the addition of the ticker, it is now easier for people  to view pretty much everything you post, like or add. You can limit this by changing your privacy settings to “friends only” or “custom” lists. These settings can be accessed either through the privacy setting in the top right corner of your post or at the top right corner of your page. Remember that with the new Facebook, everything you do will be shared immediately to your newsfeed so be careful when authorising various apps, and make sure you understand and are aware of your privacy settings.

According to an article by Alexandra Reid “If you’re friends with a prospect on Facebook, what you’re watching, reading and listening to, and even what locations you check into, can impact their perception of you professionally and damage business relationships.”

An important aspect you should however take note of is secure browsing. According to Carl “By default, Facebook sends your access credentials in the clear, with no encryption whatsoever. Switching to HTTPS is important because a browser extension called Firesheep has made it especially easy for anyone sharing your open wireless network—at cafe or conference, for example—to sniff your credentials and freely access your account.”

In order to change this, it is important to go to your account settings, select the security setting and enable the secure browsing option.

What should brands be aware of?

With Facebook’s new social plugin it is now possible to drive additional traffic to your site. The social plugin is installed on the businesses website and must then be permitted access by a Facebook member. Each time a user visits the businesses website a notification (stating that the page has been read) can be returned back to Facebook whereby a post will be shared on the users’ wall, and newsfeed. This facility is available to developers via Open Graph

A new button referred to as the ‘Subscribe Button’ could also assist in benefitting brands and their engagement with consumers (followers). The subscribe button allows the individual to subscribe to updates by public figures of the brand, who can share posts for the individuals who have subscribed. Additionally the brand can subscribe to regular influential visitors assisting in mutual relations. The subscribe button shares similar resemblance to the follow button on Twitter and works in a similar way.

The Ticker can be used to a brands adavntage as long as a brand has a cohesive strategy whereby updates are placed thoughtfully and interaction with consumers is relevant. Brands need to create relevant, consistent and interesting stories so as to keep the user interested and willing to engage regularly with the brand.

Conclusion

According to SodaHead a public opinion forum, 86% of users are against the Facebook changes with many saying that Facebook is overloading the user with too much information from both the Newsfeed and Ticker, being compared to a kind of Twitter feed, but it’s important to remember that “We are its product, not its customers,” says Andrew Brown editor of Cif belief, with its customers actually being the advertisers.

Keep it light, keep it bright.
Keeping things simple, makes a site easy to navigate. That is why whitespace works so well. You can basically navigate the reader’s eye to where you want it to go.

Make navigation easy
The easier the navigation, the easier it is to browse a site. When you have menus everywhere on the site with five different dropdown menus, it becomes quite difficult to find the information you need, as quickly as possible and to get the correct content across.

Make sure your website loads fast.
Not only is it great for someone visiting your site, it’s good for Google too. CSS loads faster than Javascript, so make sure your CSS files load before all others. If possible incorporate as many CSS features as you can, from bullet points, to URL’s that aren’t underlined – they all load fast!

Design for all screen resolutions
Different people have different screen sizes. The smallest your resolution size specification to design to should be 1024 x 768, and you should preferably never go smaller than that. Rather fill the screen with your brand in a nice clean way, than have it cut off where it shouldn’t.

Provide relevant content for readers
Putting lots of effort into design is nothing without good, relevant and strategic content. Make sure your site is worth something to your visitor, by providing content to inform, and immediately relevant content.

Always keep researching your content, and monitoring which pages are being visited and used, in order to keep content ever relevant and always up to scratch.

Clients were:
Dept of arts and culture – artist interest.
City of JHB – Callabash interest.
FIFA

Click here to view advert 3

• The grass was taken extremely seriously by FIFA, so the grass had to be taken into extreme regard in strategy execution.
• Rehearsals were only allowed twice
• Legacy of the work: 30 students from Educational institutions, 400 people crew, 130 from SARU, 60% of the spend with BEE level 3 and beyond, and only 10% were spent on international partners.

The story:
• Raise the curtain on the biggest, most watched final in the world.
• Find a way to represent the contemporary and progressive side of SA
• Don’t forget the heart and soul of Africa.

Questions answered:
• Jack Morten produced the Athens games, and assisted in all dimensions of the production, in terms of charting and mapping the project.

• Innovation in terms of picture projection made it all stand out. 18 of the world’s biggest projectors around the stadium. Projectors were positioned on the ring of the Calabash, to create 1 unified image on the floor. Mapping was used to project images around objects that aren’t necessarily flat.
• The message to the diverse audience, to glue it all together, is when “we come together, we can do it”. Also they Africa can compete on global level.
• Most panicked point: Contract was only signed on 5 March, with not a lot of time or budget to get it done, up until 5 March. Strikes threatened the ceremonies twice.
• How was it sold to client: presentations were done to boards. To all three mentioned above. DVD packaging was used, to distribute to the different board. Wrapping an emotional context around the message.
• Back up plan if the projectors didn’t work: There was NO room to fail. There was no back-up plan.

Advert 4:
TV Campaign for Chicken Licken
Rob Mclennan from Network BBDO

Click here to view Advert 4

• Only 4 ads every year
• Objective: Based on, “if you havn’t tried it, where have you been?” – from the principle that it has become a huge cultish poduct in the black markets.
• Humour was the differentiator, with the typically South African proposition of the 1994.

Questions and comments answered:
• Brand is very unique, and the brand colour stand out a lot.
• Ad had to have a very broad appeal, in terms of audience and reach.
• Was told to appeal to everybody.
• Idea was very creative. But how does it communicate Chicken Licken above the other brands? It’s about the craving, the hangover cure, and the it thing to have on a night out. This ad worked mainly on one segment, and mainly the higher LSM markets.
• The shift from Chicken Licken target market from black markets, to more white markets. It feels a lot younger audience driven – is the brand trying to go younger? Yes, a shift is seen to student markets. Trying to play on societal leadership.
• Shift in consumption profiles can be seen where franchise membership has been granted.
• The brand has grown from a small franchise operation, to something a lot bigger, and going through all the growing presence.

Loerie ads are judged according to 5 categories:

• Innovation – creativity in terms of being distinctively different
• Quality – how well is the idea executed
• Relevance to the brand,
• Relevance to target audience,
• And relevance to the  chosen medium

On the menu today to talk and question about winning ads are:

Andy Rice, Chairman, Yellowwood Brand Architects
Oresti Patricios, CEO at Ornico Group (Pty)Ltd
Steve Miller, CEO at BF Strategy
Lou Boxall-Davies, Chief Strategist at Morris Jones
Geoff Whyte, Managing Director at Snackworks

Advert 1:

The Vodacom Music Station, done by Draft FCB, directed by Neo Mashingo.

Goal: To promote that Vodacom provides the listener to have radio at their fingertips, their own choice of music.
Creative angle: The DJ Keeps talking over the music, that the listener really wants to listen to. Where as they have their own choice of music via Vodacom.
Delivery: Pointers were given for the voice artist to talk about, and then were elaborated on in studio.

• The voiceover artist did a fantastic job at depicting the DJ.
• The ad explains that it is music without a DJ, any category any music. Like listening to a radio station, on your cellphone.
• Was flighted on vernacular ALS radio stations.
• The Vodacom brand doesn’t come out strong, but appears as a spot read by the DJ.
• Sales increased in terms of data markets. A lot of teaching still needs to happen. The campaign was driven to teach people on ALS stations to use their phones for other functions, like data, and not just voice.
• In terms of building the brand, they wanted the brand to be viewed as a friend, with a comedic thread.

Advert 2

Yuppiechef vs Woolies
Agency: Hello World
Danni Vos, CEO

The sign, which had the incorrect URL on, which Yuppiechef held ransom.

Yuppiechef.co.za hijacked Woolies’s misspelt URL, registered it, and held it ransom.  Challenging them to donate money

• They had less than 14 days before Valentine’s day.
• Social media driven, but mainly driven by the PR.
• How do Yupppiechef now continue to engage? They are an online company, so they continue with online and social media.
• It’s about finding the right social idea, and backing it up with the right brand.
• If it were to be done again, would it be done differently: Because of time constraints, strategy couldn’t be planned.  A bigger base could’ve been achieved, and the Yuppiechhef current bas could’ve been utilized.
• Great opportunistic campaign, and a great PR exercise – what was the PR strat: was totally focused on radio and online media. Power of online has turned a corner, to use Online PR more – to engage online bloggers more.
• Built their social media database immensely.

…./2

Current local (South Africa) trends show that:

• There are ten million mobile Internet users in SA (Five million PC Internet users in SA)
• One in six Google searches in SA originates off a mobile device.
• In South Africa about 40 percent of mobile phone users have WAP-enabled phones.
• The top Mobile Applications currently in South Africa are: Mxit – with 15 million+ users – and Facebook.
• Mobile search and eCommerce will be a large area of growth in 2010.

In short, this indicates an importance for businesses to target mobile searchers and users of mobile applications.

Some of the best Mobile Site examples I can give include BBC, the Goal mobi site, and College Humour (N/B: “these examples obviously look better on your mobile phone – feel free to suggest your favourite mobile sites below“).

However, when creating a Mobile Site it is also imperative to build and optimise the Mobile Sites so it is user-friendly and accessible on the Mobile Web.

Mobile Design and SEO Best Practices
When designing a Mobile Site one aspect to consider is that one must understand that mobile searchers/users are different from PC searchers/users. In order to cater for Mobile users designers must:

• Provide an elegant experience by considering whether individuals possess a smart phone (for example an iPhone with fully featured web browsing) or a standard mobile phone (with stripped site features).
• Consider that phones are not used like PC’s – users are usually on the go therefore the site should be more goal oriented – Relevancy and Simplicity is key.
• Mobile designs are to conform to the new W3C standards in order to create mobile-friendly style sheets (CSS).
• Mobile Sites must be small, lightweight and fast-loading site – (< 20kb / page).
• Consider User Agent Detection –  this is another form of transcoding which takes into consideration the type of mobile phone an individual uses to search and provides more uniform browsing experience for various device types.

Once the Mobile Site has been built, Mobile SEO steps can now come into play. These include:

1.    Validating the page with the .Mobi Validator or the W3C Validator
2.    Following ‘traditional’ on-site  SEO Best Practices such as:

• Major keywords in the title tagging
• H1′s and body text
• Rich keyword Meta Titles and Descriptions
• Keyword-rich anchor text for internal links

3.    Mobile Search results tend to reflect ‘Local Search results’ – your site must be optimized for local type searches. Also submit your business info to local directories making sure your site is verified and included in sites like Google’s Local Business Center.
4.    Get the Mobile Site spidered and indexed – submit to major search engines:

• Google Sitemaps
• Yahoo! Submit Your Mobile Site

In short, the above Mobile Design and SEO factors are to be strongly considered when building a Mobile Site. These aspects help provide a solid Mobile Site foundation for your Mobile Campaign or Strategy. For further Mobile Campaign or Strategy enquiries, visit our Virtuosa website.

According to the official Google India blog a new Site Clinic launched yesterday and will accept site submissions until 20 January 2010. Indian Webmasters can register their sites for the site clinic by simply filling in all the information requested on a form and by complying to some guidelines such as being registered on Google’s webmaster tools and by meeting Google’s quality guidelines.

There is also a Site Clinic especially for the Spanish-speaking market launched by the Google Webmaster Central blog in Spanish in September 2009.

For the rest of us, it seems we simply have to do the work ourselves via our own Google webmaster tools accounts and by meeting Google’s quality guidelines. Who said everything is fair?

Just the other day I came across a site that had a serious drop in its Organic traffic and this got me thinking of strategies that could be used help the site recover from this slump in Search visits.

Anywoo, I thought I’d write a short blog – (well 3 short tips to think about actually) – that you can employ in order to Increase Organic Search Engine Traffic to your site.

1. Choosing keywords –Choose your keywords wisely and implement them correctly. Get a mixture of longtail keywords as well with your niche keywords. Longtail keywords drive some major traffic to your site if focused on over the long term.

According to SEOWizz, “Carry out a keyword search using each variation to find more low competition longtail keywords … depending on the niche keywords, start writing and incorporate the longtails NATURALLY”.
WHY:
• 75% of all search’s are longtail keywords
• 20% of search’s everyday are completely unique to Google’s algorithm

The right keywords on your site creates powerful content that can be crawled and searched by search engines more efficiently – therefore giving better Search Engine Results Positioning (SERP’s).

2. Optimised Copywriting & Keyword Density – One method to increase traffic to your site through organic traffic is by having your copy re-written and optimised with the keywords you would like to target for that page. Bearing in mind that a web page can only be optimised for no more than 2 – 3 keywords (your primary, secondary and tertiary keywords), make sure you add unique content in your copy for your site as possible.

Other simple strategies to consider in your copy include:
• Header tags for your page titles (include your keyword)
• Linking keywords to other relevant pages on your site
• Bolding of important keywords on the web page

Click the image below to see an example of a Perfectly Optimised Web Page by SEOmoz

3. Analyze your competitors sites – It is vital that you take a look at the keywords that your competitors are ranking high for. The keyword tool you can use for this is the Google External Keyword Tool. This may give you an idea as to other keywords that you may have missed out in your research.

It would also be advisable to find your current position in the major search engines. Analysing your competitors ‘result positioning’ – SERP’s – on search engines compared to your positioning not only allows you to draw up a real-time comparison between you and the competitor, but will help you get a clear idea of where you rank for keywords compared to you competitor.

Note: I always think of it as a chance to be motivated or seat back a gloat at your competitors SERP’s.

Last thoughts: Always remember that a web page can only be optimised for no more than 2 or 3 keywords, and as SEOWizz says, “anymore than that and you’re simply giving your page too much work to do”.

For more resources on Increasing Organic Traffic, read:
• SEOWizz: Increase Organic Search Engine Traffic The Easy Way
• SEOMoz: URL Rewriting – Increase Organic Traffic By Using Dynamic URLs That Look Static

So, you’ve discovered the world of openGoo. It does a pretty good job overall but now you want to add some custom flavour! Where do you start? What are the options?

Firstly, I’d recommend running through the “Hello World” application tutorial (that can be found HERE ) as it gives you a quick overview of the control flow of openGoo. If you’re not familiar with MVC (Model-View-Controller) programming it’d be a good idea to take a few moments to read up on the principles of a MVC system, get the basic idea of what each component should be used for. I’ll be looking at the MVC of openGoo in a future blog post, for now we’re moving on to the Hooks.

If you’ve had previous experience with customization of a CRM / CMS / Web application you might be familiar with the concept of hooking / hooks. A hook is one of the easiest and fastest way to extend and application’s functionality in an upgrade safe way. And believe me, you want to keep your customizations as much upgrade safe as possible. Trying to figure out why a customization you did a year ago broke isn’t as fun the second time, it tens to ends in a complete rewrite of the initial customization. There’s nothing that frustrates me more than having to re-write code.

A hook is basically a place where you can “hook” in your custom code without having to change anything to the existing code. In fact, you don’t need to know how the rest of the package works to use a hook.

Using a hook in openGoo is as easy as 1, 2, 3.

1. Create a new php file in the ‘Application/Hooks’ directory, which will contain your custom code. Example: ‘opengoo_hooks.php’ , ‘myhooks.php’

2. Register your hook
   
   Hook::register(“opengoo”);
   
   The string used when registering the hook can be anything, as far as I can see its used as a key in the array where the hooks are stored. You could use this key to reference a specific hook later in your code, if needed. I’ll refer to this as the [hook_key] later. Also note it may be a good practice to name your php file “[hook_key]_hooks.php”.

3. Define the hook function.

function opengoo_render_upload_control($args, &$ret) {
if (upload_hook() == ‘opengoo’) {
$attributes = $args['attributes'];
echo file_field(‘file_file’, null, $attributes);
}
}

Note that the function name should be of the format ‘[hook_key]_[hook]‘.

In the above example [hook_key] = ‘opengoo’ and [hook] = ‘render_upload_control’.

Working example:

Lets say we want to customize one of the layouts on openGoo. For this example lets change the Login layout for illustration. Instead of overwriting the layout file in “Applications/Layout” we can simply define a hook to set the layout to be used to our new custom layout.

Default Layout of login dialog

First lets create our hook file. I created a file “example_hooks.php” in the ‘Application/Hooks’ folder.

<?php

/* Register your hook else it won’t fire! */
Hook::register(“example”);

/* Define hook functions */
function example_override_action_view($controller, &$ignored) {
/* Check which controller has fired the hook */
if ($controller->getControllerName() == ‘access’) {
/* Check that the action is ‘login’ */
if ($controller->getAction() == ‘login’) {
$controller->setLayout(‘example’);
}
}
}

?>

I’ve used the ‘override_action_view’ hook for this example. This hook gets fired by all the controllers. We want to change the layout of the login form so we need to set the new layout when the ‘login’ action of the ‘access’ controller is called. After we’ve tested that we’re at the right spot we can change the layout by calling the “setLayout” method of the controller.

You can use the getLayout method to see what layout is currently being used. In this example the original layout being used is ‘Application/Layouts/dialog.php’

Next step, we need to create our new layout ‘example’. Note you use the file name without extension to set the layout, openGoo automatically looks for the layout in the ‘Application/Layout’ folder. Create a copy of the dialog.php in ‘Application/Layouts’ and rename it to ‘example.php’. Open up ‘example.php’ and make some changes to the layout. I simply added an image below the dialog div and the word “example” to the H1 tags.

<img src=”<?php echo get_image_url(“jack.jpg”) ?>” height=”250px”>

I put the image of Jack, my trusty testing duck, in ‘public/assets/themes/default/images/jack.jpg’ the ‘get_image_url’ function fetches the image URL according to the selected theme.

Browse to the login dialog page and ‘Hello Jack!’. It’s that simple to add a duck to your openGoo login page.

Custom 'example' Layout

List of available hooks: ( for more detail take a look at ‘Application/Hooks/opengoo_hooks.php’ )

/*
* – render_page_actions: Called when drawing actions for an object’s view. Call add_page_action to add actions.
* – render_page_header: Called when drawing the page header.
* – render_getting_started: Add additional getting started help.
* – render_object_properties: Called when drawing properties for an object’s view. Echo the HTML to be drawn.
* – reminder_email: Called when an email reminder is being sent.
* – render_userbox_crumbs: Called when drawing the userbox (top-right of the page).
* – autoload_javascripts: Tells which javascripts should be load when the application starts.
* – autoload_stylesheets: Tells which CSSs should be loaded when the application starts.
* – render_administration_icons: Called when drawing administration panel.
* – object_definition: Allows to define extra columns for a system object.
* – render_object_description: Called when rendering the description that goes below the title in an object’s view.
* – permissions_sql: Called when generating the SQL permissions string for object listings.
* – can_access: Called before checking access permissions for an object.
* – object_edit_categories: Called when rendering categories for an object creation or edition interface.
* – object_validate: Executed before saving an object to validate object fields.
* – before_action: Called before executing an action to determine if the action will be called.
* – override_action_view: Called before generating an action’s view, so that you can change it.
*/

Fire your own hooks from your custom module:

To create and fire a hook from your own module, you simply call the static fire method of the Hook class.

Hook::fire($function, $argument, &$ret)

$function : String containing the name of the hook. Example ‘ render_page_actions’.

$argument : Arguments passed to the hook. For the built in hooks this is normally the current controller.

$ret : The value

Well that’s it for hooks in openGoo. This is meant as a starting point for customization, I’m sure there’s more to be added, any input is welcome. In the next blog I’ll be showing how to create a simple Bulletine Board type module.

OpenGoo can be downloaded here and is easily installed on a websever, with minimal setup needed. If you don’t have experience with webservers it might be a good idea to get the sys admin to handle the install. Never the less the install is quite straight forward, with installation instruction located in the readme.txt file.

When installed on a local firewall, OpenGoo has the advantages of a web interface without having sensitive data being transferred to and fro a remote server somewhere on the internet. You have 100% control over your data, even allowing for custom encryption to be set for the more paranoid among us, whereas other online services limit your control. No internet connection is needed to use the application and thus can be completely isolated from the outside world. Or it could be installed on a remote server that is accessed by different people all over the internet.

I quite like the interface of OpenGoo. It uses the extJS framework to render the UI and site layouts. It utilizes AJAX to update content dynamically giving an enjoyable user experience.

So, this is a very nice piece of software, but what if we want to add some custom features? The one thing the project is greatly lacking is development documentation. There is limited information in the openGoo WIKI which isn’t at all satisfactory and quite frankly no help to the novice.

After browsing through the wiki, forum and blog, I decided the only way to get anywhere was to dive head on into the code. To my delight, the code itself is well commented and any PHP programmer that has some experiece with the MVC (model view controller) method of programming would catch on quickly to the basic structure of the application.

This is the first blog in a series of blogs on openGoo, that I hope will help other developers with their customizations. In the next blog I’ll cover how to create Hooks in openGoo and in another future post I plan to give an example of creating a custom “Bulletin Board” addon, explaining some of the MVC structure I’ve uncovered.

( Check out http://www.opengoo.org/ for more info. or http://demo.opengoo.org/ to check out the demo )

“IceBlue have worked together side by side with Virtuosa for some time, so it was a natural move for us” MD Rex Green comments on the recent events.

The IceBlue team is a natural fit within the Virtuosa Group who already provides clients a full-service digital offering. The addition of the IceBlue’s team of developers enables Virtuosa to offer more specialized development and technological solutions to their clients.

The new Virtuosa team members will work within Virtuosa Design and Development Division headed by Bryce Hancock, Division GM and Creative Director, who is very excited about the changes ahead. “This has always been the vision of our company to constantly grow in the digital arena, by adding these developers’ specialized skills we compliment an already great creative team.”

Virtuosa and IceBlue clients can be assured that this recent development will not only further enhance our web development skills offering but also make us stronger in the digital environment.