Dunkin’ Donuts is taking an interesting social approach to get their customers engaged via Facebook Places and Four Square this holiday.  It will be interesting to see what the final outcome reveals and how much participation they can generate.

-Erin Naterman

“Wee Nudge: Teach Your Clients The Mysteries of the Web”

A very helpful resource for debunking common myths in web & design. They have currated popular articles across the internet addressing common misconceptions such as white space (and why you should have it) and the nefarious 600px “fold” rule. There are some great lessons here folks for both sides of the table.
Check it out.

-Alex

-By Jason Santa Maria. Saw this when I was reading an article titled “Good Ideas Grow on Paper”. Moral of the story: while it’s very tempting and sometimes necessary to go straight to the computer, your work will be at the very least enhanced if you start out with a pencil and paper. So try to make time if you can.

-Alex

Check out the great article by Christopher Kelly in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram about the Lone Star International Film Festival. We had the pleasure of working with the Lone Star Film Society on the public relations for the film festival. It was indeed a banner year for the festival and I love the quote about Fort Worth  - “incredibly cool and cosmopolitan” – indeed! Looking forward to next year.

 - Lynaia

Situation Overview

 Mystic Tan is the nation’s leading UV-free spray-on tanning booth, creating an even, natural-looking, tan in less than a minute. Mystic Tan launched in 1999 and was met with great success and acceptance among tanning salon owners. The company’s initial public relations efforts focused on educating media and the public in each market in which a Mystic Tan booth was installed, as the concept of spray-on tanning was very foreign in most markets.

 National consumer exposure was necessary to continue to build demand for the Mystic Tan booth. Blanchard Schaefer Advertising & Public Relations recommended public relations efforts to create a push / pull effect to drive customers into salons, which in turn would increase demand for Mystic Tan booths and bolster sales to salons.

Solution

 Mystic Tan’s top-tier target media outlets include national men’s, women’s and teen’s general interest publications; as well as lifestyle television programs. In order to reach those audiences, BSAPR implemented the following strategies:

simplebits:

For the fourth time in my life, I’ve written a book. It’s titled, CSS3 For Web Designers and it’s available today in paperback and ebook formats from A Book Apart. I couldn’t be more excited, seeing this little green thing launch after months of planning, writing, editing, fretting. I certainly didn’t do it alone.

Photo by Jason Santa Maria

I wouldn’t be writing books if it weren’t for Jeffrey Zeldman, so it’s especially fantastic to have CSS3 For Web Designers be the No. 2 offering from A Book Apart—a publishing house created by Jeffrey, Mandy Brown and Jason Santa Maria. Their focus on “brief books for people who make websites” was a perfect fit for the book I wanted to write: a practical guide to portions of CSS3 that work today, usable by anyone right now. I’ve been speaking about how CSS3 can be safely and easily utilized on the experience layer of well-crafted websites over the last year, and it’s wonderful to have that research packaged up in paper and pixel form.

Following up Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers masterpiece was an impossible task. His book was the right time, the right subject and the right author. It’s an instant classic.

Daunting as it was, I set out on a similar task:

So, I’ll be the first to admit, up until last year, I totally didn’t “get” Twitter. And at the tender, innocent age of 24, I naturally believe I’m hip on everything. Except this. I was one of the many people who thought the platform was a way for ego-centric users to announce the most mundane events occurring in their day. It was because of this feeling, that I was incredibly stupefied to see how big Twitter had become and how it’s secretly crept up in everyone’s lives in one way or another.

So, earlier this year I started poking around in my dormant twitter account seeing what all the hullabaloo was about. And of course, there were the users I had mentioned before, speaking of their trips to the store or how hot it is outside. But, there were other twitter accounts that were using the platform as a supplementary rss feed for their respective blogs. This was of great interest to me. I felt like I had access to a daily stream of links, articles, videos, inspiration that I would normally have to search across the internet to find.

The article in the link above from Ad Age discusses this trending topic: Twitter being used against the original intent of the web service:

It’s Twitter users who decided they wanted to tweet about current events by sharing (for the most part) mainstream-media links — turning Twitter into a headline-news service. Others decided they wanted to use it for #hashtag-based witticisms — turning Twitter into a word-centric gaming platform. Still others wanted to use it as, basically, a fan forum for TV and movies and music — turning it into a pop-cultural barometer. And a critical mass saw Twitter as a political platform and organizing tool (e.g., the Twitter-enabled protests surrounding the Iranian presidential election of 2009). And so on…

Twitter’s management didn’t exactly encourage, via interface design, a smarter Twitter — but they didn’t exactly stand in the way of one, either. (Now, finally, with New Twitter, it’s doing a better job of showing off its smarts, not its lameness.)

Twitter’s creators, to their credit, let users reinvent their product. They allowed Twitter users to de-stupidify Twitter. Smart move, fellas.

-Alex