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.

Posted in Marketing, Social Media, Technology, email| No Comments

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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