HealthComm LLC

There’s been quite a bit of fretting lately over the ease with which in-app purchases can be made while playing games on the iPhone and iPad, particularly when it comes to children’s games. Some irate parents, whose children unwittingly ran up huge credit card bills, have pointed a pious finger at Apple, some threatening to boycott all items in the iTunes platform because of what they see as Apple’s "unscrupulous business practices." And a few members of Congress even took the step of asking the FTC to investigate the deceptive nature of these insidious little impulse items.

But hold on there just one minute.

The free or low-cost "trial size" offer has been a staple of promotional marketing as long as man has had goods and services for sale or barter, and in our culture of abundance, the idea of luring customers with a free sample is not only time-honored but often necessary.

I wonder if the folks complaining about the availability to purchase upgrades or special functions within a free or low-cost app have any idea how much time and effort, and therefore money, goes into its initial creation. To borrow from an old phrase, there’s really no such thing as a free app.

Furthermore, while it’s clear that some practices are more ethical than others, and it’s equally clear than anyone offering a $100 wagon of anything to a four-year-old is only in it for the money, the truth is the same now as it ever was: Parents bear the responsibility of keeping their children away from those things that children shouldn’t have, like car keys or medications or guns or credit card information, because they are either dangerous or expensive or both. If your child drinks your 200-year-old single malt Scotch, or even pours it down the drain for that matter, is it the distiller’s fault because he put a pretty picture on the bottle label? Heavens, no.

Nor is it Apple’s fault when your child uses your credit card information to purchase electronic whatnots. It would be easier to empathize with parents whose children are spending hundreds of dollars on these purchases if it weren’t so easy to do something about it. But the fact is, consumers already have a boatload of rights where Apple is concerned.

Parents, you have the right to disable the in-app purchase function of your iPhone or iPad. You have the right to enter your credit card information each time you make a purchase, rather than asking Apple to store it for you. You have the right to demand that your password be entered each time a purchase is made. You have the right to keep your iTunes password a secret, even from your children. You have the right to change your password if you think someone knows it. You have the right to monitor your child’s playing, viewing, and spending. You even have the right to keep your mobile devices to yourself and hand your child a book, a jump rope, or a pad or paper and a box of crayons.

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An introduction to HTML email . . .

You know when you wake up suddenly and find yourself not where you were just a moment ago? A heavy dissonance ringing between where your mind wanted to go and where you find yourself now. You take a moment to make sense of the jumbled jigsaw in front of you. This may repeat for what sometimes seems like an eternity. These folks know what I’m talking about.

Behind the continuous advancement of online technologies can be heard a constant call for standards. This establishes common ground upon which communities can build — agreements in language and foundations that aim to ensure innovation. But of the Internet technologies used today there is one that remains complacent in its compliance: email.

In a recent study by Radicati Group, Inc., the number of worldwide email accounts is projected to increase from over 2.9 billion in 2010 to over 3.8 billion in the year 2014. Though most users may not be aware of the inconsistencies in standards (as a majority limit usage to plain-text emails) the application of HTML in email is akin to that of the Internet Stone Age.

In danger of deletion

Too often, this is the unfortunate reality of the HTML email. What should be a convenient way to deliver tasteful content to a regular audience can backfire. Left at the mercy of misfit email clients and browsers, email designers are unable to take advantage of techniques used elsewhere on the web. Would you be content with your telephone company only guaranteeing transmissions spoken in monotone 1920s slang? You might think it to be the bee’s knees now, but it’d get old real fast.

Dumb it down

For now there are tricks to getting around these shortfalls in standards. You just have to dumb things down. Forget what you know about the latest advances in HTML and CSS and travel back to a simpler time. Organize your information into nested tables. Avoid linking to external style sheets and rely on inline CSS. Keep imagery small and rather than embed (causing bloated file sizes), link to them using absolute URLs. It’s smart to keep an eye on what happens to your emails after delivery. Take advantage of the many tools like Google Analytics or Campaign Monitor. They can go a long way in measuring your effectiveness.

No matter the shortcuts you employ, the most important tip is to test. Test in each major email client (Outlook, Yahoo!, Hotmail, and Gmail to name a few) and test after each significant change. At first it can seem to be an endless loop but by distilling down to the essentials and progressively harmonizing your designs through testing, you’ll find yourself conducting quick and reliable HTML emails like a regular maestro in no time.

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If it weren’t for the Internal Revenue Service, I’d wager that no three-letter acronym is more disdained these days than SEO. I don’t believe such contempt is justified, but it’s easy to understand where it comes from: lingering associations with black hat techniques, suspicions that it’s just the latest snake oil in the marketplace and the naive belief that the all-knowing web crawlers will recognize good writing as they index it.

As much as any other writer, I wish the latter were the case. I’d like to think that all the qualities that make good writing appealing to the reader—clarity, rhythm, a certain depth of meaning, etc.—find their way into the very sequence of bytes committed to disk. But in the end, a bit is just a bit.

If you’re a writer, then chances are high you’re a reader, too. So you should be familiar with expectations that the general meaning of a book is recursively distilled at ever greater levels. For example, we expect the meaning of the book’s chapter somehow to be expressed in the chapters’ titles, whose meanings may be combined and expressed in section titles, which are once again condensed and the book’s singular and lapidary title.

Even if their algorithms forever remain as impenetrable as the Eleusinian Mysteries, search engines generally appear to share these expectations. While they may not yet be able to intuit good writing as humans do, they can definitely recognize well-formed documents and assign relative weight to words and phrases based on what we’ve marked as the equivalents of chapter content and chapter, section and book titles with <p> and <h1> through <h6> tags.

So if the meaning of this post were to be distilled into a single sentence, it would be this advice for writers responsible for the copy component of in-page optimization: Learn the fundamentals of semantic HTML, and spend more time giving your document an appropriate semantic structure than tarrying over every word.

If you’ve traditionally passed off your completed copy to someone else to mark up and place “on the page,” what you pass along should now include this basic markup, and you should insist that the designer or front-end developer respect the semantic structure and integrity you’ve given your portion of the document. They can achieve any style or functionality for which they are responsible with attributes and any other presentational elements they need to add.

This is just a small but important step towards improving your performance in search engine rankings. It may change your project workflow, but its ultimately a more collaborative process. A productive one, too, but I’ll save that for my next post.

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Not so long ago if your child came home and told you she had “friended” the new kid at school, you, being the thinking and dutiful parent you are, would have corrected her grammar. “No, dear, you be-friended him.” Now, however, you merely nod and say, “That’s nice, honey.” That is, if you’re cool and with it and hip to the glib jive.

Hey, even if you’re not cool* you probably know at least a little something about the techno-tools known collectively as social media as well as its particular patois: to friend, to like, to Tweet, to re-Tweet… it’s all the rage. It seems these days you can’t turn around without bumping into somebody’s Facebook wall.

But while it’s no secret that social media is changing the way we communicate, I find it remains dangerous for any commercial concern to fall victim to its charms without understanding its limitations. The fact is, social media is not really all that social and indeed often serves as a barrier to messaging that is either genuine or credible, even as it purports to captivate the masses.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, columnist Eric Felten addresses this issue in his discussion of Sherry Turkle’s new book Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other (2011). Felten explains that what sets Turkle’s work apart from similar studies of social media behavior is her decade of interviews with the group most comfortable with its tools: high school and college-aged subjects.

What Turkle found should come as no surprise: Just as adults today are exhausted by constant connectedness, so are young people. Just as adults today are exhausted by constant connectedness, so are young people. And here’s what these kids have figured out: You simply must own a phone, but its primary function is not for placing calls, or what we used to call “phoning” someone. Instead, you text. You Facebook. You videotape and post to YouTube. You measure your words, manage your profile, and present your best self to the world. Now, if Jazzmyn and Jaxon and Brit’Nee are able to grasp these insights into personal marketing strategy by the tenth grade, shouldn’t those of us in the business of communicating?

Okay, so we pretty much all recognize that, like any avenue of advertising, social media is a place to highlight your best features. But there’s a great risk for a business that’s too simple-minded in its approach to social media. Today’s audiences are savvy and cynical. If all your social media does is repeat the same messages you publish elsewhere without regard to this medium’s unique aspects, you will miss the boat on social media. Well, maybe you won’t miss the whole boat, but you’ll certainly find yourself in much more of a rowboat than a powerboat. And while it’s true that some charities and events – charitable and otherwise – have found success via social media blitzkrieg (remember last winter’s snowball fight in DC’s DuPont Circle?), it is also true that short-term mobilization is not tantamount to long-term sustainability, profitability, or influence.

A recent AdAge article by Matthew Creamer describes this important and material difference between influence and mere popularity. Here, in Your Followers Are No Measure of Your Influence, Creamer explains how Justin Bieber’s powers of sway could be viewed as vastly superior to those of a senior VP at Apple. Such is the absurdity of equating modern-day “Followers” and “Friends” to, well, true followers and friends, not to mention loyal customers.

There’s No Such Thing As a Free Tweet

And by the way, these blog posts don’t write themselves.

Even if tools like Twitter and Facebook have the appearance of being “free” their marginal cost is actually far from it. All that composing and editing and posting and commenting take time and work. But can you really afford not to? Even if tools like Twitter and Facebook have the appearance of being “free” their marginal cost is actually far from it. To wit: Both the articles referenced here and this post itself include options for social media. Even as we issue warnings about its use, we too are joining in on the craze.

The question then becomes, If I can’t beat’em and have to join’em, how do I make it worth the effort? A recent post by Matthew Ingram at GigaOM (again with the requisite Tweets and Likes) points to a success story at NPR, where they have chosen to use their Facebook page not as a source for breaking news but rather as a forum for discussion. This discussion, in turn, leads directly to traffic on its Web site, currently coming in at a whopping 4.5 million page views per month. Now I say that’s what Friends are really for.

What NPR seems to have figured out that so many others have not is that content is king, community is binding, and conversation is essential. It’s also clear that they carefully consider social media tools as a part of their communications strategy but only after they have both (A) a strategy and (B) something worth communicating.

And speaking of a communications strategy…

Recently while having lunch at a college-town diner, I noticed a group of three male students, each of whom was not only eating and chatting with the other two but also texting. I struck up a conversation with them and asked about their use of social media. Here’s what they told me: They currently rely a great deal on Facebook to help them keep up with their friends but can’t imagine doing so after graduating, particularly when job hunting. When I asked how often they text, they answered, “Too much.” They agreed that they would simply much rather type out a text than have to hold a conversation, saying, “It’s just easier.” The good news, though, is that there is one person who still rates an actual phone call: Mom.

Sounds to me like these kids have it pretty well figured out in terms of which tool is best suited for which audience. And that, my friends, is an essential ingredient in any communications strategy. Such was true long before Facebook — even long before the phone book — and it’ll still be true long after both are history.

*Sorry. Didn’t mean to imply I was questioning your coolness. Obviously you’re cool: You’ve been reading the MerryFools blog, and few things are cooler than that. So be a pal, and Tweet this post.

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Now, more than ever, we need to be aware of the old saying that you just can’t be too careful.

A recent article in the business section of the Washington Post tells the story of two well-qualified job seekers who were finalists for the same position. One eventually lost out because of questionable photos the employer found posted on Facebook. And here’s the kicker: the pictures were found not on the account of the job seeker himself but rather on that of a friend of his who had not enabled his privacy settings.

Was this legal? The information was publicly accessible, so, yes, it’s perfectly legal. In fact, the article recalls a December 2009 survey that showed that 75 percent of recruiters say their bosses now require them to conduct online researches of job applicants, in part because they are quicker and easier, not to mention more revealing, than talking to an applicant’s references.

Even if you enable all the right privacy settings, even if you eventually delete your Facebook account, even if you yourself never had an account to begin with, the pronouncements and photographs posted on Facebook — not to mention your blog posts, Twitter tweets, YouTube videos, even emails — are still stored somewhere, as are the things your “friends” have posted that might include you or make reference to you, such as a tagged photo.

You might forget. Your friends might. But the Web never forgets. These days, you can really never be too careful.

Posted in Recruitment, Social Media| No Comments

Just a few months ago, we told you about a new application that we had integrated into our daily workflow: TimeThis, a desktop time-tracking tool built by our sister-company, MerryFools.

At the time, TimeThis had just seen a limited release to beta testers. And now we’re very happy for the Fools as TimeThis is officially out of beta and available for everyone to download!

The app integrates with activeCollab or Basecamp. So if you happen to use either of these online project management tools, TimeThis is for you.

Kick its tires, and give it a spin — you can download and try TimeThis at no charge for 15 days. Then, if you like it, a single license is a mere $30. Need more? They offer a break on the price if you need multiple licenses.

Why do we love TimeThis so much? How ’bout these reasons:

• Since it’s built on Adobe AIR, we can run it on any of our operating systems (Mac, Windows and Linux)
• We can add tasks and to-do’s to projects from inside the app
• We can save the timers we use most often
• We can add a comment to time before posting it
• We can set rounding and billing preferences per project — not universally for all time posted!

And those are just a few. MerryFools has also set up a blog where they are keeping TimeThis users up to date on the latest changes and improvements. Be sure to check it out, and give TimeThis a try!

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Whether you and your colleagues are separated by just a cubicle, a couple of office floors or even ZIP codes, you may have experienced the benefits of using one of the many Web-based collaboration and project management applications available these days. Here at HealthComm, we’ve used a number of such tools over the years to differing degrees of satisfaction.

Two of the most popular services available are activeCollab and Basecamp. We’ve used both of these services; in fact, we still use both, so we hope you weren’t looking for a recommendation!

One of the limitations we encountered with each service was the lack of a desktop time-tracking tool with all the features we wanted. But now, we’re limited no more.

Our sister company, MerryFools, has just released TimeThis for beta testing. TimeThis is a full-featured desktop time-tracking tool for users of Basecamp and/or activeCollab. So, what sets TimeThis apart from other time-tracking tools for these two project management platforms?

Well, for one thing, TimeThis is built using Adobe’s AIR runtime, which means the same app can run on Windows, Mac and even Linux systems.

For another, if you need to create a task on the fly, you can do it from inside TimeThis without opening your usual browser, logging in to your project site, finding the appropriate project and so on.

There are other nice features, too, like the abilities to add a comment to time before posting it, to keep a bunch of timers saved for regular use, to set rounding and billing preferences and more.

We’ve been privately testing TimeThis for a while now, and we’re excited to see MerryFools finally move the app into a wider beta release. If you’d like to join us in continuing to test TimeThis (and help MerryFools perfect their product), you can sign up to be a beta tester at MerryFools’ TimeThis page.

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With the economy still recovering (or preparing to worsen, depending on whom you ask), a lesser-known but equally important problem is plaguing our society. OK, that’s probably hyperbole, but it brings us right to the point. When done properly, the hyphenation of compound modifiers is unobtrusive and probably goes unnoticed; but sadly we live in what my brother, a copyeditor at a metropolitan daily, calls a culture of overhyphenation.

I might wince at an apostrophe and an ‘S’ that need to be transposed, and I might scoff at a ‘who’ that should be a ‘whom’. But at the sight of a hyphen where none is needed, my heart starts racing and my face gets as flush as though the misplaced character were a typographical gauntlet at my feet.

So, what are these abuses of the hyphen? I’m only going to focus on one, and we’ll get to it in a second. First, it may be more helpful to establish what compound modifiers are and when it is appropriate to hyphenate them. (As a preface, it’s worth pointing out that grammar lessons bring to consciousness what, at some level, you already know; in that sense, they differ from the majority of didactic situations whose model is the transference of knowledge. So trust me, this will be fun!)

Simply put, a compound modifier is the use of a phrase of two or more words to describe a noun. There are two in the first sentence above: “lesser-known” and “equally important”, both of which modify “problem”. The key is that the words form a single phrase that names one attribute of the noun; this differentiates a compound modifier from a series of adjectives that lists multiple attributes of a noun (ex., “long, dreary, cold winter’s night”).

The general and prevalent misunderstanding is that a compound modifier, simply because it is a compound modifier, deserves a hyphen. This is just not true. The purpose of a hyphen uniting the two (or more) words of a compound modifier is never simply to indicate the existence of a compound modifier, but rather to disambiguate the noun phrase as a whole (compound modifier plus noun).

For instance, in real estate ads for townhome developments, one frequently listed amenity is the availability of “two-car garages.” Now, imagine that the compound modifier was not hyphenated and read “two car garages.” It may be small, but the possibility is there that someone may understand this to mean there are only two garages that house cars — perhaps they’re available by lottery or on a “first come, first served” basis? So the hyphen is used as a sign that, on the contrary, there are garages available that can hold two cars.

Now let’s get to the most common misuse of the hyphen in compound modifiers, which is in the middle of a combination of an “-ly” adverb and an adjective. There are two examples in this post so far: “equally important” and “frequently listed”.

What makes this use improper? Remember that the purpose of the hyphen is to disambiguate. Because an adverb by its very nature cannot modify a noun, it is grammatically impossible for ambiguity to arise. Does “equally problem” or “frequently amenity” make any sense to you? Hopefully not.

(Look for a follow-up soon.)

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If you’ve got some computers running Windows XP that you still use regularly, or at least not infrequently, here’s a post for you on how you can possibly save some money (and the environment, too!).

In a post on his personal tech blog, Janos Erdelyi walks you through the steps of changing your minimum sleep mode on an XP machine for a significant reduction in power usage during sleep.

As Janos points out, there are some hardware limitations, meaning this will unfortunately not work for every XP user. But if your motherboard will support the change, you can be saving power and money in a matter of minutes.

And the cost? Only the price of a tool to measure your wattage before and after the change. Or you can just trust us that the savings are worth it.

Janos’ post: Saving more power in XP machines

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