Week 17 : Curated Shorts

Barclaycard’s Ring Calls On Crowd To Build A Better Credit Card. Turns out you don’t have to be a banker or a mathlete to get into the credit card business. Barclaycard is calling its new Ring card “the first social credit card to be designed and built through the power of community crowdsourcing.” That means you. The secret of the card, physically similar to any other, is the financial system behind it: The crowdsourced design has low interest rates, low fees, simple terms and “the opportunity for cardholders to shape and share in the product’s financial success.” That sounds unlike any other credit card we’ve ever heard of.

I suppose you could argue that if Barclaycard listening to it’s customers properly in the past they wouldn’t need to do this … so is it a cynical marketing ploy to get the words social and credit card in the same tag line? Reminds me a little of GiffGaff at all? [read more]

The Story Behind ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ is lovely. Put the famous poster in the hands of a CEO and you would get 10 gradients, smaller typography, larger logo (what they like to call branding) and an ellipsis to signify that there is more to the message that you need to read on their website. Oh, and a QR code although the CEO doesn’t know what their purpose is, he just knows that other companies use them.

Fortunately, it was designed many decades ago and the message was clear making it one of the most effective poster designs in history…for the 21st Century so far. Here is the story behind it and how it was found. [read more]

Startup Marketing: When Less is More. It might sound counter-intuitive, but for a fast-growing Internet technology company, sometimes less marketing is better. Before you disagree and point me to the examples of runaway startup marketing success such as Dropbox, Pinterest or Fab.com, please let me explain what “less” really means and the pros and cons of doing “less” marketing.

There are 3 way “less” marketing means for me: [read more]

Why Were You Not Ready For Facebook Timeline. Timeline for brands has come in and all Facebook page owners have seen their pages switch over on 30 March. We all know there will be no default landing tabs and instead everyone will land on your Timeline (wall); what you probably won’t know is that come 30 March your old tabs will not only be ineffective but they will break. Even if you direct people to a tab where it prompts people to Like you through a hyperlink or through advertising – as it’s no longer the default tab – it won’t work for 3 reasons.

1. The Like button is in the top right now and not in the top left / middle.
2. Your tab won’t use the full dimensions as they’ve increased from 520 to 810 pixels in width
3. Tabs don’t refresh upon being Liked so you would have to ask people to Like and then refresh the page otherwise they will be left staring at a fan gated tab.

It’s a cautionary tale of relying too much on a platform that doesn’t communicate it’s future plans and drastic changes until the very last moment. A whole sub-industry has sprung up over the last year or so (such as Pagemodo) solely to construct gateway pages and liking mechanisms. Be careful out there [read more]

12 Things That Will Kill Your Blog Post Every Time. Blogging is a lot like fishing. Some people do it all the time and never catch anything…while others catch everything. Why is that? You know better than to say it is luck.

So let’s call it what it is…when you look around at successful blogs…whatever industry or topic…there are several undeniable basics to success. And it starts with blog posts that kill it…rather than get killed. But what kills a blog post? Here’s a list of 12 things…ignore them and you will have a tough time being successful. [read more]

FOUND! Another Google calendar booking system. It looks pretty neat and not too disimilar from our myBookingWizard.com offering. It feels like it’s targeted to smaller companies so maybe with a bit of testing we’ll add it to our recommended list of alternates. Like myBookingWizard.com, ScheduleOnce is a calendar booking system that is deeply integrated with Google Calendar. ScheduleOnce connects to Google Calendar in real time and uses it is the booking system in which it creates all appointments.

This approach is new and it likely to share much of the same architecture approach that we use. Most appointment booking systems have their own proprietary calendar and only sync with Google Calendar. They can sync their entire proprietary calendar with Google Calendar. So? This is so limited. With ScheduleOnce you can have each MeetMe page connect to a different Google Calendar and you can decide on the spot in which Google Calendar you want to schedule. The flexibility with ScheduleOnce is on a per booking basis while the traditional appointment systems with proprietary calendars have no flexibility at all. I think I’ll be dropping them an email! [visit the site]

Survey Shows that Half of Government Agencies Have Moved Workflows to the Cloud, Making Online Appointment Software a Viable Option for Automating, Simplifying Scheduling Processes. A recent survey by research company TNS shows that 48 percent of U.S. government agencies have moved at least one workflow to the cloud following an announcement of the new federal “cloud-first” policy. Federal, state, county and municipal government agencies nationwide looking to improve their appointment- and reservation-scheduling procedures are turning to Appointment-Plus online appointment software to automate and simplify this tedious and time-consuming task.

Almost 50 percent of government IT workers have reported moving at least one of their workflow processes to the cloud as now required by the federal-mandated “cloud-first” policy [read more]

Scheduler: Groupon Rolls Out Free Online Booking Service For SMBs Across U.S. & Canada. After purchasing OpenCal, the makers of an automated online appointment scheduling app, back in September of last year for an undisclosed amount, Groupon quickly went about incorporating the technology. Before long, the company had announced Groupon Scheduler, a service designed to make it easy for both customers and merchants to quickly close the loop between offer, booking, and scheduling. As Groupon looks to build its perceived and actual value for merchants, the OpenCal acquisition, and subsequent launch of Scheduler, made a lot of sense. [read more]

Week Shorts is a curated compendium of interesting news articles compiled at Connected and published for those interested in the new media world. All the articles are taken from third party sources and links are provided back to see the full article after minor editing and formatting changes. Connected acknowledges the owners of the work and respective copyrights. The article is provided, as-is with no warranty as to its accuracy. Connected cannot control and therefore will not be held liable for the content of third-party web-sites.