I’m going to write a series of posts about my experiences in making the switch. Little tricks and apps I’ve found that have made things easier on OSX coming from a Windows background. I’m by no means finding using OSX a pleasurable experience at this stage, but hopefully I will come around to it.

What windows to I have open?

I love the Windows Task bar and often have 20-30 windows open at any given time. It suits how I work, for example at the moment I’m entering expenses, sending three emails and writing this blog post, along with handling several support tickets with my hosting provider and various other task. All of these things I can see in the taskbar and can flick easily from one to another.

OSX tries to address this using “Expose” where you drag the mouse to a hot spot and it reveals all the open windows. Unfortunately I like to be able to see the windows all at one time, so this is a problem for me.

I’ve found something Aero Peek that brings the “peek” functionality from Window to the OSX dock.

The search continues for something to actually show all the windows I have open rather than requiring some action to reveal them.

After some initial doubts I’ve been really looking forward to the the release of the iPad. It’s not exciting from a purely technical standpoint as tablet devices have been around for some time and it’s specs are modest. What Apple have done is package it well and make this a really elegant and desirable device. I can see iPad esque devices permeating our lives over the next couple of years with one sitting on most coffee tables or kitchen benches around the home. I’m sure my incredibly un-techno savvy dad would enjoy reading the English newspaper on one, and mum could cart her internet sourced recipes into the kitchen with new found ease.

What the iPad does is break down barriers. No longer is it one person using a device, we can now have equal control and share the experience. This is a massive game changer in the way we interact with online and digital information.

Given my enthusiasm I braved the early morning cold and prepared to battle the hoards for a chance to be one of the first in Adelaide to have an iPad…

6:30AM – Bleary eyed and surprising first to arrive at next byte in Rundle Mall, I was hoping for some die hard Mac fanboys who had been camping all night to validate my enthusiasm, but alas I am left feeling like a bit of an over eager loser!

7:30am – After a lonely cold hour of waiting I’m joined by a friendly crowd of 10 other keen iPad hopefuls. I’m sizing them up, just in case frenzy ensues!

I reckon I can take the kid, but the mum’s enthusiasm scares me…

7:55am – Next Byte employees inform us that they have no stock.. next stop JB Hifi

8:15am – Myer employees come past telling us that they have lots of iPads and are open for business.

8:25am – Got one in my hot little hand…

First impressions of the device are exactly as I expected and there are plenty of online reviews to give you more info. Suffice to say it’s very cool and we already have some great uses for it here at the LightBulb Digital offices!

With the Adelaide Fringe in full swing we can see examples of pop-up art appearing all over the city.

Format Festival is a great example, moving into Peel Street and revamping an unused space for a short term series of exhibitions and events and even VB are getting in on the act with their Popup Pub but I’m not sure if I’ll be scrapping my local for that!

A lot of people may bemoan this decreased value in permanence, but I think it’s an amazing and very powerful idea which really taps into how we are living our lives. Take away food, throw away furniture so why not throw away venues! With popup venues come popup marketing campaigns and one of the best ways to do this quickly and cheaply is online. We can already see people using Facebook like the organisers of a popup festival just off Grenfell street in Adelaide.

As the concept evolves it will bring with it new thinking and processes to support popup websites to give event and festival organisers more freedom and potential to promote. As with a traditional business a social networking space can only take you so far in building an image and concept for your product, so the next logical progression is to create attractive and inexpensive “throw away” websites to fit the bill.

What are your favourite pop up venues, art installations or websites? Let us know and feel free to contact LightBulb Digital to plan your next popup online project!

The campaign started on Monday with the setup of a facebook group called “Dinner my shout, by helping FNUKY find me”.

Natascha says:

The person who writes the NICEST, most CREATIVE comment about ME on my wall will get a free dinner (my shout) at a really great restaurant. If I get the job I might just make it a party and you can all come!
Even without a comment join my petition and help me in my quest. You won’t be causing me to name my first born ‘Batman’, or prove a pickle is more popular than Twilight, but you may just help launch me into a career in cutting-edge media.
To explain I really would like to get a job at FNUKY.

FNUKY are a brand engagement agency specialising in digital and non-traditional marketing. Their maxim is ‘People don’t like Advertising & Neither do we’. Check them out at www.fnuky.com.au.

As I am the perfect candidate for this position I really would like you to pass this on to all of your friends.

Check out the Facebook Group – join and say nice things and you might just score yourself a decent dinner! Who says there’s no such thing as a free meal!

In a few short days she’s garnered nearly 160 supporters, 16 of whom have written nice things about her on the group wall. Including this pearler.

If FNUKY can find her
We all get to dine her
For she is the girl
You just want to twirl

She’s Queen of the monkey magic
And all Pammy, without the tragic
I promise not to ask for (chicken) breast
For my poem will surely be the best.

Im not sure how this saves the little chimps
But as long as I get shrimps…
I’ll toast to the or…phan wrangers in the east
As long as I am VIP at this feast…

A 10% interaction rate is a great result and the campaign has also piqued the interest of at least one other blogger.

It remains to be seen how the campaign goes, but Natascha isn’t the only one using Social Networking for employment purposes. Via Media recently recruited a Digital Creative using the power of twitter and my own company LightBulb Digital linked with a freelance web developer using the same medium. So next time you are looking for a job perhaps you CAN stay on facebook, it might be your best chance!

What do you think? Has the whole social networking to find a job thing taken it too far, or will we start to see more of this in the future?

Having recently attended a “Tweetup” organised by Adelaide Social Networking group SOCADL we were high on enthusiasm for all things social networking. It was really positive to hear so many people pushing the envelope in their pursuit to capture this space, but it’s worth taking a moment to consider, “how much is enough?”

Some things to consider when choosing which social networking channels to target

• Who is our audience?
  If you are manufacturing pipe bends for agricultural irrigation systems it might be that a social networking presence holds little value for your company. Whatever you’re selling it’s of primary importance to consider who you are selling to and how to reach them. Facebook is the obvious choice, but Twitter is rapidly becoming more accepted by normal every day types (not just the early adopters).

  Lance Armstrong’s recent Twitter ride is a fantastic example of using social networking to capture a large and local audience.

• How much time to do we have to invest?
  Let’s face it, it may well have been a hard slog to convince the decision makers in your organisation to do any social networking at all, so you might have to cut back on those dreams of tweeting, facebooking, foursquaring etc. In this case pick the medium you think will give you the best bang for buck in reaching your audience.

• Will we stay interested?
  If there isn’t a sustained commitment to post and respond on your chosen social networking chanels, then it’s worth thinkings about not doing anything at all.

Some Adelaide Locals Doing It Well

A perfect example of a local, regular content producer/receiver is The Governor Hindmarsh Hotel (The Gov), by its very nature content is refreshed almost daily. What The Gov guys do very well, is re-purpose that content across their digital channels…check out The Govs Facebook profile currently befriending 2000+ loyal followers, many of which  interact regularly.

Another example of a highly effective social networker is WOMADelaide festival (the good folks at Arts Projects Australia). Not only do they utilise their rich media content strategically through Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, they also cross pollinate their digital channels with e-newsletters and PR activity in the leadup to their annual festival. On closer glance, their social networks are a flurry of chatter, url forwarding and sharing throughout the year in between festivals.

In two months the festival has befriended over 3000 followers on their  WOMADelaide Facebook profile.

Farmers Union iced coffee also seems to be doing the rounds on Twitter at the moment under the #fuic (probably some bad puns there) hashtag and enjoying some success with 15 or so people a day mentioning it. Personally I find it a little odd that so many people deem it necessary to discuss a milky coffee in a carton, but it never really was my thing.

If you know of any other local brands touting themselves well in the social media world of Adelaide or SA, drop us a line or comment.
Drop in and have a chat to LightBulb Digital for advice on how to appropriately market your business using social networking.

Some of the important ways we are going to see increasingly local content are as follows.

• Twitter Hashtags
• Facebook becomes location aware
• Google Local Searching
• Real locally generated content

Twitter Hashtags

In a recent post about real-time and searching I talked about twitter hashtags and how these are feeding into our understanding of how to use social networking to track user trends. This becomes particularly interesting if you are trying to target a local or niche market

If you haven’t already, check out #adelaide twitter search. Sure there might be some fluff, but that’s the nature of the beast and you might just come up with some gold like a carton of Coopers Lager for $38.99 from ThirstyCamelHWY (they aren’t paying me to say this I swear!).

Social networking becomes location aware

Facebook will introduce location aware status updates to make things just that little bit more relevant. So now we know the who, the what and the where! Combined with rapidly increasing mobile usage, we see this being a major influencer in how we connect with people, venues and businesses.

Google Local Search

Google has a standalone Google Local as well as integrating local search results into standard queries. This is part of an effort from Google to leverage the great power of Google Maps and may be an attempt to pave the way to monetising this service. Expect to see much more being done to bring your search results closer to home.

Local Content

Like fresh local produce, nothing beats actual on the ground local content generated here in Adelaide. Here are 4 of the best local content producers!

1. Glam Adelaide
2. Web Menu
3. City of Adelaide
4. Fringe Benefits

Of course how could we forget our friends from our blogroll.

• Words By Rob – Rob Frost
• Southern Soap Box – Mal Chia

Got a favourite local Adelaide, SA website or blog? Let us know!

If you would like to talk to LightBulb Digital about how we can help you tap into your local or niche market email info@lightbulbdigital.com.au or ring 8121 4462.

Whilst rich graphics and lush backgrounds enhance the appeal and experience of a site, the words are what visitors (and by extension, searches engines) read to determine if where they have landed is where they want to be.

Below are some tips on how you can improve your website’s copy to help your customers find what they want:

1. Choose your words

Before you put your fingers to the keyboard, think about your company’s identity and the corporate tone you adopt as an organisation.

Is it one of formality and maturity, or of fun and youthfulness? Do you have ‘employees’ or ‘staff’? ‘Customers’, or ‘clients’? An ‘office’, or a ‘pod’? Is the company run by the ‘Big Kahuna’ or the ’Chief Executive Officer’? This exercise will help you select the right words to determine the register of your copy. Keep a list of these words handy for future reference.

The words should reflect the market you’re in, and how your product or service relates to your intended target audience. Are you selling high-end professional consulting services aimed at company decision-makers, or do you produce a techno-widget for 18-35 consumers?

Once you have decided on the tone and type of register, stick with it through the entire site as consistency is essential in delivering a great web experience.

2. Be brief

People don’t ‘read’ websites like they read a novel or magazine – they scan them for relevant keywords/phrases, then click through to pages of interest. They don’t have time to pour over pages of copy, so it is imperative to figure out what it is what you want to say about your product or service, and then pare down that message to its essential core.

Trimming 300 words down to 30 is certainly not easy, but it’s worth the time and effort to remain as succinct as possible.

3. Use headings and bullet lists

By breaking your copy up with headings and bullet lists of salient points, visitors will be able to scan to the information they want faster. Headings are also important in optimising your site for search, so make sure you choose words which are part of your defined keyword list.

4. Engage your readers

By its very nature, the web is a great place to employ conversational styles of writing. Just as you would speak to your friends, your copy should be warm and congenial.

One of the best ways to engage your visitors is to speak to them in an ‘active’ voice – You will find great savings in our online shop! – as opposed to a ‘passive’ voice – In our online shop, you will find great savings!

5. Be a tour guide

Ultimately, the end goal for surfing to your site should be to perform an action – to buy a product, send an enquiry email or download a brochure – and so the copy should serve as a tour guide for your visitors. They came to your landing page looking for something particular, so it is imperative that you make information as easy to locate as possible.

Take the time to weave direction into your copy e.g. be sure to check out our services page for more information and ensure you highlight and hyperlink relevant text markers on each of your pages e.g. Contact Us, Download a Brochure, Buy Now, Find a Store Near You etc

6. Avoid jargon and clichés

‘Managerial-speak’ has firmly embedded itself in the vernacular. We read every day about ‘corporate social responsibility’, ‘mission statements’, ‘key deliverables’, ‘synergising organisational directives’ and, my personal favourite, ‘inverting the paradigm’. My advice to you is to avoid this kind of language like the plague.

Why? Because it is dull, deliberately confusing and unnecessarily complicated. Write smartly, without running off strings of long, important-looking-but-essentially-meaningless words, to keep your readers on your site longer. To paraphrase George Orwell, “Don’t use a big word when a small one will do.”

Also, try to avoid industry jargon which may not be understood by general readership (unless absolutely necessary), never use acronyms without typing them out in full first (you might know what A.R.G.C. stands for, but the rest of us don’t), and steer clear of tired business clichés like ‘think outside the square’ and ‘going forward’.

7. Check, check, check! (and check again just to be sure)

Check and triple-check your work before publishing. Use a spell-checker religiously, and make sure you have a dictionary and thesaurus a click-away to build comprehensive word lists. Ask someone else go over the text for grammar and punctuation issues, and read it out loud to yourself to correct any problems with syntax. Your copy should flow on the screen just as if you were saying it to someone over the course of a conversation.

If you’re going to be doing a lot of writing for your organisation, web or otherwise, I would highly recommend investing in a style guide for those curly ‘affect vs. effect’ and ‘there vs. their’ questions.

You don’t have to be a professional author to write snappy, compelling and interesting web copy. It is my hope that some of the advice outlined above proves useful when writing for, or reviewing, your site. If you are unsure what to say, or how to say it the way you want, use a professional copywriter to help craft your message for you.

This is a guest post by Rob Frost, a freelance copywriter who works with LightBulb on digital projects . Find out more about how LightBulb and Rob can assist your organisation in preparing copy to generate more interest and business on the web. Email info@lightbulbdigital.com.au or phone 8121 4462.

For more information about general copywriting services, Rob can be reached via rob@wordsbyrob.com.au

So wait? Google doesn’t know everything?

Contrary to popular belief it doesn’t, well at least not immediately anyway. Google will struggle to return results on up to the minute information Google generally indexes pages periodically and the types of sites in indexes such as news agencies may not have real time updates that it can pick up.

The good people at Google are giving it a good bash by setting up a Google Trends and doing things like indexing news agency websites and blogs regularly, but it still falls a bit short of the mark.

So where do I look?

Enter the unlikely search candidate.. Twitter Search! Because Twitter has a massively active userbase and the idea of micro blogging is to blog small and blog often it’s a great w

ay to track what’s capturing people’s imaginations (trending) in the now!  So next time you want to see what people are saying about that episode of Masterchef or Tiger Woods’s 78th Mistress you know where to look. Take it one step further and you can even get a mashup of trends by location. What you want more? Oh alright.. check out some of these 15 more great tools to track twitter trends.

Stay Trendy Adelaide!

It’s not just products that are getting the green treatment, as increasing numbers of service based and government organisations are getting in on the act.

Power Usage

Green power, turning machines off, efficient equipment. Sleep times

Enabling power saving features on your computers including

• Auto monitor switch off
• Auto sleep

With the advent of LCD screens the concept of screen-saver is a bit of a fallacy, so it’s fine to just auto turn your monitor off or have a black screensaver which will use less power.

At LightBulb we do our bit by making sure that our all servers that house our websites are carbon offset. On a more personal note we love office recycling!

Impact of IT equipment on office cooling should also be considered. This is particularly relevant in server rooms with a high concentration of machines in a small space, but normal office computers will also have a significant effect.

Packaging

If you’ve bought a new PC recently you’ll know how much foam, plastic and cardboard packaging is used, Dell provide packaging amounts in it’s product specification sheets. When making bulk orders, organisations can often request to have their shipment packaged on pallets rather than individually wrapped, but a scary number of vendors don’t offer any bulk packaging system.

Once you’ve unwrapped your shiny new equipment it’s important again to dispose of the packaging appropriately.

Paper Usage

The dream of the paperless office never quite happened did it? The rise of business computing has only made it easier to print and therefore produce more and more paper. The best way to reduce paper usage is to use some common sense and apply the adage “Think before you print”. Here are some other ideas to think about before you sacrifice half a tree!

• Use track changes in Microsoft Word instead of printing and breaking out the red pen.
• Get your IT department to produce print statistics to raise awareness of the paper output of your organisation.
• Enforce print quotas to ensure people only print what is really needed.
• Print double sided or 2 per page if your printer can handle it.

Again common sense prevails and some simple measures like:

• Use recycled print paper
• Recycling used paper for note paper
• Make sure to use the correct disposal of paper in your area (Adelaide City Council area)

Recycling Equipment

The consumables aren’t all you have to think about when formulating a successful green approach to your IT.

Some other things to think about are:

• Disposing of old Mobile phones
• Reselling computers at auction rather than recycling – many vendors such as Dell offer recycling or buy-back schemes.
• Recycling old IT equipment like printers, scanners and computers (look out for the Adelaide City Council computer recycling day)

In a nutshell,, a lot of making your IT that little bit “greener” is just plain old common sense. But bringing together some of the above strategies can have a great impact especially if applied to a large corporate structure. Contact us if you would like to learn more about how LightBulb Digital can help with energy audits, statistical analysis and advice to make sure  your organisation’s technology is friends with the environment!

One notable study (reference missing. anyone help me with this?) involved two groups of subjects. The first were told they must enter a room and were not for any reason allowed to leave until told. The second were asked to enter the same room, but were told that they must simply stay in the room for as long as possible. Many members of the first group became agitated after a short time in the room and demanded to be let out, wheras the subjects given a choice often stayed in the room for several hours.

For this reason if it’s a blog, a magazine or your company’s Facebook profile then why not let people have their own say. You can always ‘post-moderate” if somebody doesn’t follow the rules!

I think the same reasoning can be applied to lots of interactions users have on the Internet and this is particularly important when people are making purchases online. I know if I’m buying a USB cable online, I don’t really appreciate having to register my details. I do appreciate the option to choose and for some notable exceptions such as ASOS.com registering can be really beneficial, as you get fashion updates, trend news and even discount cards as part of ASOS’s fantastic email communication.

What are the disadvantages?

You are always going to have people who don’t quite want to tow the line, but the benefit of giving the rest of your users instant feedback/gratification easily counters this. You may even find that with a strong online community it becomes socially unacceptable to post abusive or inappropriate material.

Spam, Spam, Spam

Why a big picture of a tin or Spam? Well… it does help to take measures to prevent SPAM as I found out when I got over 3,000 comments advertising viagra on my previous blog post. Here are some common methods of SPAM prevention.

• Human Verification (Turing Tests) – You’ve probably all seen those “Please type H76rt” sort of verifications to ensure you are a real person (CAPTCHA) but there simpler verification methods are becoming popular, like asking “What colour is the sky?”
• Login – Making the users login before commenting
• Blacklists – Online lists with common spam keywords, patterns and IP addresses such as Akismet.

Using a combination of the above can be effective, but again it’s important to make is as pain free for users to interact with your site.