There’s only one thing we love more than marketing here at Carbon8 – and that’s pets! We were recently spoiled with a fun project for client Pets Trust Us, where we were encouraged to turn to our furry friends for inspiration in redesigning their logo and website. We’re thrilled with the results – check it out here!

For fun, here’s the before and after:

Anyhow, in an effort to blog about pets AND marketing, we recently heard about an issue that both saddened us and made us happy. After a 24-year run with Pedigree as the title sponsor, the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show cancelled the sponsorship and signed with Nestle Purina PetCare. Why? It sounds like Pedigree’s ads promoting pet adoption with sad music and equally as sad pooches were just too depressing for viewers. (Read the whole story here).

We’ve all seen those commercials, although not always the whole way through because they are just too hard to watch. We agreed, most of us dog lovers change the channel when they come on, which is precisely the problem that the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show ran into.

(Don’t believe us about how sad they are? Get your tissues and watch one here.)

The reality of this sad situation is that Pedigree has lost a big audience for their noble cause. The not-so-sad part of this situation is perhaps they didn’t lose the audience entirely. Instead, many audience members have shown incredible support on Pedigree’s social media channels – a beautiful testimony to the power and existence of social media marketing!

We love social media and have had the pleasure of arming various clients with the knowledge and guidance needed to kick off social media marketing within their organizations. While their products, services and causes may not bring tears to your eyes, or tug on your heart strings, or affect you for days on end, social media can be equally as powerful in increasing traffic to their websites, upping the SEO benefits for their websites, and establishing them as thought leaders within their industries. If you’ve got social media needs, contact us!

And just for fun, here’s some photos of us with our pets. Enjoy.

Sophy and Lisa

The easiest way to find a solution to virtually any problem these days is to type the problem into Google. Get a weird Outlook error message? Google it. Keurig coffee machine stops working? Google it. It works for almost anything.

The problem I have seen over the last few years is that the ratio of askers to answerers is not very conducive to finding solutions. Many times, you can find plenty of forums where someone has the exact same problem you do. The big issue is finding someone who actually knows how to fix it. Sure, the answer is probably out there, but it might be result number 6, 8, 12, 35, etc. in your search.

I believe this issue is twofold. First, forum software does not do a good job of aggregating like posts. For example, most good issue tracking software (take JIRA as an example) has an excellent system for associating one issue with another - related issues, duplicate issues, dependent issues, etc. Almost without fail, people will end up posting the same issue a couple of times because they either didn't find the existing issue or they didn't look for it. When this happens, administrators can easily mark the item as a duplicate with a link to the existing issue. Anyone who happens to find the duplicate item later will see that it is closed to comments, and they have a quick link to the canonical issue.

In general forums, very few people have a reason or ability to easily link to a duplicate issue. If the answer isn't on the current page, they simply move on to the next search result which is often on a different website. I do this all the time, unfortunately.

Search engines cause the second problem. With the current search engine algorithms, results are determined by how closely the terms match and how well respected the host website is (inbound links, age, amount of content and a thousand other factors). This often means that a large forum site with 10 people posting the exact same error message will rank above a lesser known site with one person asking a question and the other person answering it.

The solution to this problem is twofold as well. First, forum software has to get smarter. (And not the vague kind of IBM-commercial "smarter"… the specific kind you can actually implement.) Many forums already have the ability to vote up an answer. This is a great start. To expand upon this, it would be fairly simple to keep a record of which forum posts each user views. When a user votes up an answer, the system checks the other posts the user recently viewed with similar keywords and presents the user with a dialog "does this post also answer these questions?" Users could then vote on whether the current post also answers other posts. With enough votes, the other, unanswered post could be marked as "answered" with a link to the answered thread. Implementing such a system across multiple sites could present quite a few challenges since ad-revenue-dependent publishers wouldn't want to link to competing websites, but within huge forums it could still provide value.

Secondly, search engines need to know which forum threads have been answered. (Yes, users can search for the word "answered" along with their question, but this is quite problematic.) One possible answer is found in the semantic web movement. Simply including tags to indicate whether a particular post is a question, additional information or a solution would let search engines better present answers to users instead of just lists of the same question over and over. Forum software could even allow users to tag the post as they post. A user could mark whether they were asking the question, clarifying the question, attempting to answer (which would have to be validated with user votes before actually being marked as the answer), or asking a "me too" type question.

When I ask Google "how many nautical miles in a mile?" it just gives me the answer instead of giving me search results. If I ask Google "how do I fix error 553 on my satellite receiver?", it should be able to give me the same experience.

Windows, Mac and Linux (Ubuntu specifically) have broken the desktop interface for power users.  They have each substantially increased the time it takes to navigate from program to program, and in doing so they have encouraged desktop clutter which in turn saps user brain cycles.  In short, recent upgrades have made the desktop OS worse.

I expect this will get a rise out of my colleagues, especially the Mac users (just wait, it gets worse for you), and I intend this to start a debate.  I believe I have objective observations that show every major OS is going in the wrong direction.

The theory: an operating system's primary function is to enable users to interact with programs as quickly and easily as possible.  This happens in two major ways.

1) Behind the scenes, an OS provides an environment for its programs and allows them to interact with the computer's hardware.  This was the original function of an OS back in the day.  Without an OS to perform these basic tasks, every single program would have to do them individually -- a word processing program would need special code to detect what kind of monitor you have, what kind of printer, etc, and figure out how to send data to them in a way they will understand.  It would make programs unimaginably more complex, and every program would perform common tasks differently.  While highly important, this function of the OS is mostly unnoticed by users (as long as it's working).

2) OSes provide a digital world where users can move back and forth between programs.  Users have constant exposure to this OS feature, and after reliability, I would argue this is primarily what determines whether a user likes or dislikes an OS.

The complaint: Somebody somewhere decided that your OS should group all instances of a running application into a single icon.  In other words, if you have Outlook and five emails open, all six distinct icons should be grouped into a single Outlook icon on the taskbar. This is a terrible feature for power users. Why? Because it takes you two actions to get somewhere that should take one.

The proof: The proof is almost too simple -- you cannot make two motions as fast as you can make one. For example, I have three emails open that relate to my task at hand.  I want to refer to the third one briefly as I write the new one.  With Windows 7 in its default state, I have to click the Outlook icon (or hover and wait), scan the list for the email I'm looking for and click on it.

(click to enlarge)

With the way I run Windows 7 (which is similar to the way Windows has run since Windows 95), I see the email I want in the taskbar, and I click on it.

(click to enlarge)

The first example wastes brain cycles as well.  As a user working on a new email, I know I need to switch to a different email about the rough estimate.  My brain has to think: Ok, it's an email, so it'll be grouped with Outlook.  Outlook is the yellowy-orange icon with an O on it... hover over that -- new list... ok, scan the list for "rough estimate"... there it is... click.

With the "old" taskbar, I click on the thing that says "rough estimate".  Who decided the first method is better?

Unfortunately, all of the major OSes have fallen prey to this type of thinking.

Windows
To its credit, Windows held out for a long time. They introduced taskbar grouping in Windows XP, but at least the items on the taskbar still said what they were, and you could turn it off very easily.  Windows 7 finally gave into the pressure to be more like Mac OSX and hid the labels by default, too.

Mac
Mac OS is the original sinner.  The Dock is really a terrible, terrible idea.  I could go into detail on all the problems, but it's already been done... by Apple's own interface designer.  To be brief, not only is everything grouped into a single icon, this icon is hidden among tons of other icons for programs that may or may not be running... and quite often the icons are so small that people use the magnifying feature to make part of the Dock bigger so they can more easily scroll through the madness and find what they're seeking.  All that to SWITCH PROGRAMS.

(image source: Apple.com)

I was answering some questions for a designer (redundant to say a Mac user) the other day, and I noticed something interesting watching her switch between Photoshop, a Word document and an email as we talked.  She instinctively dragged each program to different parts of the screen so a little bit of each was still showing when she was viewing the others.  I realized that this is how she works with everything -- if you don't leave a little piece of the program sticking out behind the others (and therefore can just click on that bit of it to get back to it), then you have to go back to the Dock to get it again, and that takes forever.  I hold this up because this designer loves Macs and has no axe to grind -- and even she has to come up with crazy ways of working to get around in the inadequacies of Mac OS X.

Ubuntu Linux
Poor Ubuntu.  They had a beautiful interface for the longest time (and a widening lead as the most popular consumer Linux distribution).  They even had multiple desktops -- one of the most innovative ideas that's never been picked up by other OSes -- more on that in a future post.  But in the latest release, Ubuntu switched gears and went to a more Mac/Windows-like taskbar.  You can only tell what's running because it has a dot next to it.  And apparently people are running from Ubuntu in droves.

(image source: Ubuntu.com)

Another View: Now to be fair, there is a flip side to this coin.  Remember back when Internet Explorer didn't have tabs?  And when you wanted to have 15 websites open, you had 15 items on your taskbar?  And they were all so small you couldn't tell what any of them were without clicking each?  That was a mess.  And Firefox (sorry Opera) stepped in and saved us with tabs.  (Shockingly, those tabs listed the title of the website so we could click the one we wanted.)

Why is grouping tabs in the browser different from grouping in the taskbar?  It's not, really, and it has the exact same problems.  However, in cases where you are likely to have a whole lot of one thing open, and you are likely to do a lot of navigating within that group, it makes sense to group these items into their own separate taskbar.  That's really what tab navigation in all the major browsers is -- another taskbar.  This is true for browsers, coding programs like Visual Studio, text editors like Notepad++, etc.  Think about the way you browse online.  At least for me, I typically open lots of sites at once seeking information.  I click back and forth between all these tabs, and I pare down the information to what I need.  Once I have what I want, I go back to other programs to use the information.  That's not true 100% of the time (sometimes I'll refer to three different websites while using other programs), but more often than not, my browsing from tab to tab takes place at one time, and then I go back to navigating from program to program.

In Conclusion: I'm hopeful that Windows 8 doesn't take away my ability to fix their interface flaws, which they are no doubt making worse by assuming I'm going to physically touch everything when I want to use it.  I will continue to use my Mac for what it's good for -- casual use from my couch.  And I'll probably try out a new Linux distribution even though I love(d) Ubuntu.  And perhaps all these companies will realize that big, pretty taskbar buttons are fine for people who just check their email and browse the web; those who want absolute simplicity and don't care about wasting a second or two each time they switch programs.  I care.  That second or two multiplied by a few hundred clicks a day adds up for me.  You OS makers can even enable the casual user interface by default... just give me a way to turn it off.

* PS - I haven't addressed keyboard shortcuts here.  Alt+Tab is exceptional for switching between 2-3 items.  Much more than that (where you can't immediately know how many times to hit Tab) and it has the same problem I'm describing in the rest of the article.