Sabina fShao

[shaofh]

Why digital issues are important?

Although the Canadian government has seen the power of digital technology and been putting efforts in booming the digital economy recently, we failed to see those digital issues to be included and discussed a lot in the campaign of Ontario election 2014. Here are the answers about why we should care more about digital issues not only for the sake of digital business.

When we talk about how to support and fertilize small business, we usually talk of lowering payroll taxes or creating hire credits, but there are other important elements that we have neglected. For people who want to start up a new business, one of the biggest barriers is they may not have access to the knowledge and experience in that industry or business. We need to remove that barrier especially for young people by providing transparent information and creating bridges or connections. Internet is an effective place for collecting ideas and sharing thoughts, but how can we create more powerful platforms on Internet and increase accessibility to accurate information?

Growing organic food is a great example, if we not only provide agricultural education to those who want to grow their food in the backyard, but also providing free service to help them sell their organic food on line, we are actually helping them to grow a small business and educating more people to do good to our health and environment. In this information age, the transparent flow of information by digital tools means being able to utilize resources efficiently and effectively.

The same things happen on employment issues thinking of how to increase job opportunities for graduates who have little access to job experience and skills when they hunt for the first job. The government should do more in connecting education in schools to practical experience in real business place. How about building relationship between graduates and companies online so students could learn and obtain more form industry talents and leaders, and providing more job training online to help students to integrate to the workforce market?

There are so many intriguing thoughts and amazing ideas out there that we need to do is to opening up more channels for communication to make them happen. And digital technologies provide so many kinds of opportunities today that we can’t underestimate its influence.

[shaofh]

Who owns the word “candy”?

Albert Ransom, the developer of CandySwipe, wrote an open letter on his website to King.com accusing them of stealing his ideas and attempting to cancel his trademark. Having read the original letter I was shocked and searched a certain number of articles about this argument, hoping to find out why this ridiculous conflict had happened. Ransom filed his trademark for CandySwipe in 2010, two years before King launched Candy Crush. In the open letter he claimed he created CandySwipe in memory of his mother who passed away and accused King of “taking the food out of his family’s mouth”. I downloaded both the games, I don’t think they look confusingly similar and the gameplay is very different between them. However, I can see they share similar three march template. King polished the graphics from CandySwipe and the “Sweet” is very identical. King purchased a trademark predating CandySwipe's filing date, thus they could register a trademark on the word "candy" and move to cancel the trademark of CandySwipe. Now the trademark application gives King exclusive rights to use the word “candy” in video games and other related merchandising. It seems ridiculous because King doesn’t invent the word “candy” literally and for what reasons can they stop other game developers from using it. Their demand is understandable considering Candy Crush is a huge success making millions of dollars and they don’t want other competitors to confuse the customers by copying essentially the same elements in game, fooling customers it is the same game by putting similar titles and making money off it. Trademarking the word “candy” seems to be King’s first step to protest their profitable property in the chaotic game market. But it is still absurd that King can claim their ownership over a common word, and it is even unfair for independent developers such as Mr Ransom who owns his original idea at the first place and now has to give up his title because a big rich company buys its “parent”. The instance of Apple well explains the commercial use of common word as a registered trademark. Apple usually refers to a fruit but nobody eles is allowed use the word “apple” as a brand in market. However, this is only acceptable because Apple is one of the most well-known brands and the public identifies the trademark exclusively with Apple. That explains why it becomes controversial when King trademarks the word “candy”. Even though Candy Crush is suh a success, its brand is still not distinct enough from other casual games. In other words, King don’t have adequate reasons to claim themselves own the word.

[shaofh]

Journal Assign2

Vision

The original vision of the project is to create a fun and smart social game of detective theme using an interactive multiplayer mode and reaching entirely new audience on Facebook. The vision hasn’t changed much during this semester. The only thing I worried about is this vision will be too ambitious to fulfill.  

It is difficult to turn this vision into reality, currently my plan is to create a Gam Design Document, a few wirefames and some character design before the end of this semester.  My strategy is to keep things easy at this stage and do whatever necessary to convey my original concept.

Problem

What is not working is my original idea to combine Mafia, the famous party game, with Habbo Hotel, the virtual world of social network. In other word, in Habbo Hotel, strangers can actually walk around the hotel and do whatever they want, which is not working in the same way as in a detective game.  If I want to keep more narrative elements of a detective story in the game, I have to limit the freedom of users. Thus the game will have some sort of social network, users can have conversations with each other but they still need to follow the game instructions or rules.  

Solutions

So what I plan to do is to build a flow chart breaking down the game structure. This chart and some graphic wirefames will be used in the user testing to find out whether users comprehend my ideas and what are their feedbacks. Another solution is to have scoring design in the game. It is helpful to separate advanced and junior game players by setting different game levels. For higher levels, players will have more freedom and control over the game; while for lower levels, players will receive more guidance in the game.

[shaofh]

Thoughts about developing a business model

Regarding the game is currently a student project, it is absolutely a smart choice to sale the idea to the game industry and our peers in order to gain an ample budget and recruit more talents to join our team. The most obvious way to sale our game is to attend all kinds of industry meetings where we have the opportunities to get in touch with leaders and talents in digital space. Of course considering it costs a lot of the attendance fee, we had better participate these industry events as a volunteer. Thus we have more chance to talk with the guest speakers and other important people. Otherwise, we are also seeking for sponsorship and funding to support our project.

For business to consumer promotion, our market strategy starts with the question of how to make new audience know the game, in other words, how to have their attention? Because it is a Facebook game, thus our promotion will place the most concern on Facebook to catch the eyes of Facebook users. To achieve the goal, we will set up a Facebook page for the detective game, the purpose of the Facebook page is to get more people sign up and play the game. First of all, we need to improve our SEO performance, so the game can rank at top by search engine on Facebook.

To do this, we need to provide our audiences really fresh and tasty content and something that audience can truly integrate and participate with. For example, detective stories have an enduring popularity, and the detective game is based on a compelling and creative story, so why not asking our audiences to contribute their talents to develop the game story into a whole novel? Since it is an open-ending story, the audiences are free to use their imaginations to tell their unique stories. Another thing we could do is to speak our voice out on more social medias, as a result, we will have more followers who are hopefully to become future potential users and by this way we also enable to connect ourselves closely with our game community and relate ourselves to the changing game industry.

However, those efforts are not enough, we have to do more to sell the game to totally new audiences according to audience appeal. For those who may seldom play games and have never finish reading a detective novel, we have to convince them why the game is special and appealing to them. A conventional way is putting advertisement on Facebook which is effective to attract new audiences but will definitely increase our budget. Instead, we plan to put on some shareable content that will invoke hot topics on popular website platforms such as Buzzfeed, Reddit, Mashable and Youtube.

[shaofh]

Business plan for my senior project of a detective game

Mission Statement

The project mission is to create a fun and smart social game of detective theme using an interactive multiplayer mode and reaching entirely new audience on Facebook.

Vision Statement

The vision of the project is to attract those who aren’t frequent game players and to engage them into a virtual role-playing social game. The project objectives are to have one million monthly active users and to build a long-lasting detective game community on Facebook.

SWOT-SC/PEST

The strengths of the game will be distinct characters and compelling narrative skills, as well as creating an interactive multi-player platform where users can show their negotiating and reasoning skills. The biggest risk: a new multi-player model needs to be created to get players to play together in a manner that fits their schedules, which hasn’t been done before for detective game and we have no experience at all. Another risk is considering the game has an open-ended story, we need to give players enough freedoms while still telling a fantastic story. For some player the more freedom the better, but for some other players too much freedom could be a nightmare, instead they want more guiding and control in the game. Regarding of social and moral issues, there won’t be any violent content in the game, and there will be no bloody scenes showing committing crimes and killing people. Otherwise, the game is based on fictional characters and story which won’t provide a criminal scenario for real-life scenes such as school or hospital. For technological analysis, we are a small team and none of us can do programming or coding. What I plan is we will find a proper prototype to help displaying our ideas and work. And the project will rely heavily on the work of graphic designer and content writer.

Target Market and Positioning

The target market of the game is not for advanced players who expect spectacular effects but casual players who wants a bit of light entertainment in the spare time. There is a big demanding market for casual games and the ambition of this game project is to catch Facebook's nigh-billion eyeballs. The game is for those who are tired of dumb games simply playing with objects and want something more sociable and smart. I chose detective game because it emphasizes more about story-telling and logical thinking. The main joy of playing the game will come from the use of analysis and communication skills. And the motivation of playing the game is obvious, because people always want to be smarter than others and the ability to solve unsolved mysteries will certainly satisfy their vanity.

[shaofh]

Gantt Chart Reflection

Actually the plan I started with were mostly based on the outline of each course. What I got right was I could easily look at the Gantt Chart to find out what assignments were there for that week. However, the assignment schedule turned out to be very different than what I thought, since situations always changed. Teachers adjusted their assignments due time according to needs. In the case of Jason’s class, he extended the due date because the server had broken down for a few days.

Another unexpected thing was as most of our assignments were teamwork projects, I had to adjust my schedule to work in the group. In fact I could do nothing before we had a group discussion, because I needed opinions or agreement from other group members regarding of a team project.

For time management, it was really important to figure out how long a task was going to take. Some tasks were much more challenging than the other. As a result of the unsuccessful time management, I found myself had a few free weeks in beginning, while being totally exhausted with the heavy homework at the end of this semester.

If I could try it again I will make a more thoughtful plan in order to carrying out the tasks in dispersion. Moreover, to plan a workflow, I will prefer a more flexible schedule to avoid being in a frightful hurry with the deadline. And since things are changing, a plan B is always necessary.

[shaofh]

Teamwork Reflection

Reflection on how my team operated

Our team members include Paula, Diego, Ryan, Johnathan and me. For assignment, usually we have a brainstorm discussion firstly. We chose a location and time to gather together, reading through the whole assignment requirement together. In the case of IDM 704, we were asked to analyze and redesign the website City of Toronto. The first step was to find out what was problematic. In the case of city of Toronto, the main problems are content, access and inconsistency. To dig into the problems, we went through the whole website to study website elements, from index, menu, search bar, landing pages to other key pages.

I enjoyed the discussions, whereas each of us contributed different ideas and personal angles. Then we could narrow down the problems to a few main problems. For me, I was a poor writer, so I always hoped that I could used exquisite expression to explain the problems just like what they did. We separated the website into different sections and each of us were responsible for a single section. In the end, the file concluding the discussion will be sent to all group members by emails. We used Google Drive to share most documents. For presentations, we used Google presentations, which allowed us to edit the slides simultaneously. Before giving the presentation, we would have another meeting to combine our works and reorganize the content in consistency. We even had an rehearse for the final presentation, whereas each of us gave a brief speech of what we were going to talk about.

I think this project of IDM 704 was most challenging because we must design our sections individually while we still need to keep everything in consistency. We had to work together closely to decide the style, the format, layout and other design elements for the redesign project. Most of our concerns are placed on how to fix the problematic information architecture. Diego came up of the ideas that we could visualize the design by drawing. I found visualization really helpful to organize our collaborative work. We sketched and adjusted all design elements together, working closely to redesign the menu, index, the overall layout and the navigation bar through the whole website. After the discussion, Diego took the responsibility of drawing a landing page template based on our discussion. So we could apply the template to our own sections.

Things that weren’t working well: for IDM 708, we were required to make a viral video, and we decided to make another vision of the viral video Waffle Falling Over, which hit over 1,900,000 views on YouTube. We finished filming the video quite early but we failed to upload it timely. There were very few viewers and nobody really cared about it at the time we uploaded. We failed to upload it timely largely because we were distracted by our personal video projects, but I think one of the reasons was nobody volunteered to play the role of leader. If anyone kept tracking the progress and reminded us to finish editing in time, this failure wouldn’t happen.

Strengths and Weaknesses of each teammate

Paula and Johnathan were good at writing and speech, Johnathan was in charge of the discussion process while Paula would get us back to key points. Ryan had a sense of humor in expression. Diego was a very collaborative teammate who knew well how to make a balance between different opinions. For improvement, Diego and me had similar troubles in writing. John was very respectful to each of our opinions but he probably could be more critical in discussion. Paula did a fantastic job but she could do better in conformity with team, while Ryan could have a more broaden mind with cutting-edge design.

Personal reflection. 

I was like the one who thought differently and contributed a different angle, I guess it is due to my different cultural view. However, I had trouble explaining my opinions, thus I really appreciated their patience in helping me to clarify my opinions using more explicit words. I was struggling in writing as well. Moreover, there is absolutely need for me to know more about Canadian culture, so I could integrate myself better in group conversations . For improvement, I hope I could speak English more proficiently to fully explain my intention and express my ideas.

[shaofh]

The best shopping app!

Free, easy to use and beautifully designed.

Purpose:

Create the best shopping experience! Help customers find their way around the mall, quickly search site and local stores to find the best prices.

Functions:

1.Search for coupons from your favourite stores

2.Scroll through the list of hot deals 

3.Search for a specific store.

See the presentation here:

http://prezi.com/x5h7gopbdlmd/present/?auth_key=7nv2l82&follow=myfjmfnr3h4n&kw=present-x5h7gopbdlmd&rc=ref-53831023

Market:

http://marketingland.com/survey-customers-more-frustrated-by-how-long-it-takes-to-resolve-a-customer-service-issue-than-the-resolution-38756

http://searchengineland.com/study-72-of-consumers-trust-online-reviews-as-much-as-personal-recommendations-114152

https://new.edu/resources/consumer-behavior-how-people-make-buying-decisions

http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/dl/free/0073529958/876022/per29958_ch16_412_449.pdf

http://www.carmarthenshire.gov.uk/English/business/Advice/Documents/Marketing%20Your%20Business%20PDF%20(3367%20KB).pdf

Technology:

http://www.google.com/glass/start/how-it-feels/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass

Sergey Brin: Why Google Glass? | Video on TED.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcode_scanner

http://barcodecanada.ca/

[shaofh]

Being a programmer

http://joyreactor.com/post/476665

Before I attended the Production Tools course this term, I was freaked out by programming classes. I had no idea whether I could handle programming language since it is all Greek to me. However, things turn out to be better than I thought. After taking the class, I have learned how to tackle problems by myself and I have got to say Google is a wonderful teacher in writing a program. Certainly there is no way for me to simply copy the answer, but I could learn from some similar samples then figure out my own.

Taking a sole course was absolutely not enough for me to become an programming expert. The biggest problem was I had to know all the basic programming languages and tools in a short time. Programming was difficult even for students who spent years taking professional IT courses at university. What I could do is to take more practice by myself. 

I have learned HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript so far. After this semester, I found  although different programming languages follow a variety of syntax rules, they have something in common. Instead of covering all the demands for web development, these programming languages focus on solving problems of some aspects. In other words, they are designed for different purposes, and all of them possess their own advantages and disadvantages. For example, HTML is used to build the basic structure of a web page while CSS is more for the decoration style; JavaScript facilitates the execution by the client side, while PHP is typically implemented on the server side. Thus programmers have to use these tools proficiently and combine their virtues for web development.  

Another thing I found was the best way to remember the rules of programming language is to use them. The more we apply the abstract rules to a real case, the more we know about them. Practices help us better interpret the application of various situations of rules. 

[shaofh]

Creative uses of social media

Social media platforms enable us to build a network community and have a two-way conversation with our audience, and social media campaign is becoming increasingly important for a brand. I find two impressive cases to help us better explore the creative and effective uses of social media.

Being timely and relevant

In traditional marketing, a campaign is essentially complete once the content is delivered to the audience; while with emerging social media platforms and tools, the conversation never ends. We have to keep listening to our audiences and moreover, to respond timely and relevantly to things happening at any time.

Oreo shows us a great example of how to react quickly and effectively in social media campaign. There are millions of viewers watching the game inside the Superdome Stadium or on TV, and no one expected the blackout during Super Bowl. The blackout had lasted for half an hour, Oreo took advantage of this cultural moment, posted a twitter that read “Power out? No problem” along with the advertisement “You can still dunk in the dark." The tweet totally rocked the social media world, it had been retweeted 13,734 times and got more than 20,000 likes on Facebook.

BuzzFeed reveals the recipe of the success: how Oreo got that Twitter Ad up so fast? Things tuns out to be they have a social media team who are responsible for anything happening during the Super Bowl. Agency president Sarah Hofstetter told BuzzFeed: “We had a mission control set up at our office with the brand and 360i, and when the blackout happened, the team looked at it as an opportunity.”

Social media network creates an interactive conversation, helping us to speak directly to the audiences. What we learn form the Oreo case is that timely reacting and responding to things happening hep us to build a smarter brand image, and apparently having a social media team to make decisions at the very moment is the key. Also in this advertisement, Oreo chose using humor to respond to the feelings of viewers who wait for the blackout. It is not only important for us to get attention of the audiences but also try to interact with them in a real situation.

Evoke true emotion

Dove conducts a social experiment to prove women are overly critical of their beauty and shows that women are more beautiful than they think. A FBI-trained sketch artist was invited to first draw a woman as she describes herself, then draw her as stranger describes her. The result turns to be the second sketch based on the description of the strangers appeals to be more charming, confident and similar to what the woman actually looks like. The campaign aimed to help women to see their true beauty and build a more positive self-esteem.

Despite of some criticisms about whether beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the campaign made huge success. The Dove Real Beauty Sketches video went viral on Youtube and has been viewed more than 114 million times.

Why it was so successful? It was largely due to the video evoking a strong emotional response of the audiences. I am a girl, and when I watched this video, I was deeply touched. I thought of how unconfident I felt about my appearance, and how negative I saw about my own features. The Dove Real Beauty Sketches inspires me to be less critical about my flaws and see more of my merits. When I share it with my friends, they have the similar emotional responses. It sends a warm message that women are more beautiful than they think.

Dove didn’t simply carry out a promotional campaign, but show concern for helping women to build a more positive attitude towards their appearance. The Dove case proves that if we have great empathy with the audiences, we could make great content and give the audiences a reason to share the content on social media. http://realbeautysketches.dove.ca/ http://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelysanders/how-oreo-got-that-twitter-ad-up-so-fast http://www.businessinsider.com/how-doves-real-beauty-sketches-became-the-most-viral-ad-video-of-all-time-2013-5

[shaofh]

Exquisite Forest -- An ingenious collaborative art project

http://www.exquisiteforest.com

The Exquisite Forest is a collaborative art project providing shared online platform for users to create great collaborative animations. Users can explore a variety of animation themes and contribute artistic work to develop the animation story with a specific theme. As a result, the animation tree resembling the creation pathways grows while more contributors get involved into the narrative animation. 

This project is created by Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin, they are also well known for two other collaborative design projects: The Wilderness Downtown and The Johnny Cash Project. Like Exquisite Forest, they share the same concern of get individual creators working together as a community to develop unique art projects.

Exquisite Forest is supported by the technologies of Google App Engine, Google Cloud Storage and several HTML5 features in Google Chrome. App Engine is used to build, maintain and dynamically scale the project, while Google Cloud Storage provides video and image hosting for the project. The service provides duplication across Google’s global data centers, so animations can be served quickly to users around the world, regardless of location.

The project combines these digital technologies to build a brilliant creating experience for users. Users receive a great amount of data every day, while each of them contribute data to the digital world at some point. At this animation collaborative creating platform, individuals are able to work with artists all over the world and have exciting creation experience. In conclusion, this project shows us a great example of how to generate and incorporate these data in an innovative and interactive way.

[shaofh]

Keep up with the digital trends!

In the ever-changing digital landscape, it is crucial to keep pace of the innovative digital trends. The ability to adapt to change is critical for digital enterprises to survive in competitive environment. There are some inspired articles giving us an insight into the emerging trends of the digital industry, and I would like to share my thoughts of three digital trends after the reading.

Mobile

Nowadays mobile phone has become an intrinsic part of our life, especially since Smartphone had been brought to a tremendous consumer market by Apple. Smartphone enables consumers to carry their advanced mobile devices like to carry a tiny-computer in hands. The mobile innovation has totally changed the traditional way of getting knowledge and communicating. According to Monte Lut, 65% of users start search on smartphone, and 61% of smartphone user access social media on their mobile devices. The data shows mobile devices play a key role as a media platform. Thus one of the latest digital trends is that all digital contents are requested to be available on mobile platform. I think that also proves today’s digital innovation is basically technology led. Technology innovation can lead to the birth of new media mediums or platforms, and the change of media platforms can profoundly change the way that data and information are transferred.

As an extension of mobile device, mobile apps are taking over of the world. Today we can search and download any mobile apps on the Internet. They really facilitate our life in many aspects. There are apps helping people to manage their time and tasks, search maps and book hotels, check out when the bus is coming; there are also apps for entertainment and social media: people can check their emails, watch videos and play mobile games at any time and any places. Hailo, a cab app helping people to get a cab wherever they are, is a good example showing how apps integrate into people’s life by making spare resources accessible to people in need. These mobile apps not only make people’s life much easier, but also provide enterprise and companies a huge opportunity to monetize this new digital trend. For this reason, it is very necessary to analyze user behavior and user experience on the interface of mobile devices, so we can better understand how users get access to the content.

Freemium

Freemium is the combination of two words “free premium”, and it is a new business model in digital space. Publishers provide users their core product or service for free, whereas most of their profits are made from selling premium products to a small amount of advanced users. The advantage of this business model is that publishers can attract and accumulate a wider range of users by giving free service. The example given is Skype: although most of its Internet phone services are free, it charges from a small percentage of users who buy credits for unlimited calls or group calls. Freemium is only possible for the fact that the cost of copying digital products and distributing them on Internet is very low. Freemium has increasingly become a popular model in digital industry, I think it is due to Freemium reflecting the core Internet value of sharing resource and information in a global view.

Engagement

Another highlight of the digital trend is the emphasis on the engagement of audiences. Apart from data and audiences analysis, digital advertising also try to create two way conversations for communication. To involve their audiences into the conversation, more and more advertisements make efforts to show more of their brand personality and speak more like a human in open dialogues. Thanks to the flourishing social media, there are more and more interactive and one to one conversations that making advertisements customized. Looking for the future, the trend of focusing on engagement not only altered previous advertising or marketing models, but also influences consumer behaviors and habits in a deeper way.

For short, digital industry is a challenging space. We have to equip ourselves with updated technology and knowledge for every day. Anyway it is exciting for me to follow the new digital trends and better explore any potential innovations in digital industry.

Reference：

http://www.techhive.com/article/199243/a_brief_history_of_smartphones.htmlhttp://www.siia.net/blog/index.php/2013/09/10-digital-media-trends-you-cant-ignore/ http://socialmediatoday.com/marketingletter/1518801/10-digital-trends-2013-are-you-ready http://www.slideshare.net/EdelmanDigital/edelman-digital-2013-social-media-trends http://www.freemium.org/what-is-freemium-2/

[shaofh]

Find your right tone

In the article “Tone and Voice: showing your users that you care”, Kate Kiefer Lee distinguished brand’s tone and voice: voice stays consistent day after day while tone changes often. Voice represents a brand personality, its purpose is to sound more like a human and get the audiences integrate in the conversation. Tone requests us to consider the situations and emotional states of users or audiences, responding to their needs and emotional feelings. The author pointed out how important it is to have a guideline of voice and tone for content strategy based on human empathy.

This illuminating article inspires me how to define the tone for different types of topics. Another author Aarron Walter said in Designing for Emotion,“ To engage your audience emotionally, you must let your brands personality show. ” Thus how to show your personality and tell your audience you are not a robot? It largely relies upon the changeable tone. We should be able to define the tone depending on what the audiences need and how they feel in their states. By adapting our tone to different situations, we show our audience how thoughtful we are and how much we respect their feelings.

Kate Lee reminded us to use tones carefully for touchy subjects such as health and medicine, religion and politics, money and private information, and failure messages. In my opinions, I would also talk about how we can adapt tones to different subjects. For trouble-shooting or creating an account, we should keep the content relevant, ambiguous and straightforward to guide our audiences, here actionable insights for next steps are helpful; for unsubscribed or failure massages, avoid using negative tone while provide possible solutions to reduce the frustration or stress of audiences. If you want your audiences to share the content in social media, your tone can be delighted, casual but not flippant; if you talk about legal or economic topics, maintain a serious tone whereas joking is not appropriate here. In addition, since we probably have different targeted audiences, we may modify our tones depending on different audiences. Generally speaking, the tone appealing to senior audiences tends to be formal, neutral, and serious; while younger audiences prefer a chatty, warm and funny tone.

Something interesting influences the tone is the typeface and graphic design. The change of typeface, font color or typesetting can produce a totally different tone. Decorative fonts have a floral and casual tone which is not suited for formal and serious content. In web design, we should be really careful in selecting the right font style and other graphic elements to convey the right tone.

In summary, it is good to have some sense of humor which makes your voice sound friendly and distinct, but it is more important to show your personality in a consistent way, getting audiences feel your authenticity and sincerity. It won’t be that difficult to handle the balance between avoiding being too boring or normal and showing your integrity or trustworthiness, as long as you set down the guideline of voice and tones which accurately reflects the brand values.

Reference:

http://uxmag.com/articles/tone-and-voice-showing-your-users-that-you-care

http://www.abccopywriting.com/blog/2010/08/31/tone-of-voice-brand http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2012/08/21/finding-tone-voice

[shaofh]

What a wonderful tour!

Thanks for Fall Tour Interactive, we got the opportunities to talk face to face with local creative industry talents in Toronto. We went for two days, the first day was about interactive marketing & advertising while the second day is a gaming day. I have more interest in marketing things, so I would share my feelings for the first day. For 22nd October, we have visited four innovative companies including SapientNitro, Taxi, TBWA, OneMthod Digital+Design. We were also given presentations by Michelle from Sugar Media. Before the tour I didn't really have a clear concept of what interactive marketing or advertising is, it turned out to be a very different experience for me.

Interactive marketing or advertising pursues the same goal of traditional advertising industry, as Sapient declares on their official website, their ultimate objective is to make their clients more profitable. On the other hand, after all the presentations and introductions given by the industry representatives, I have a strong feelings that they don’t want to be narrowly defined by what they do. In fact, they are almost omnipotent, by which I mean they do every thing from marketing analysis, social media amplification, experience design to experiential marketing. This industry brings all the people of different specialties together to build a powerful creative network, which also explains why these studios or agencies have all been located in a few blocks in the center of Toronto. For me they seem to be a group of people among whom you may find artist, designers, writers, technology developers, producers, marketing analysts and such like. No wonder they meet each other right around the conner and have a gathering from time to time.

The other highlight is that they all emphasize on “conversation”. They analyze conversations online, listen to what people talk about the brand; moreover, they make efforts to get people speak out and engage in the conversation. Compared to traditional media and marketing approaches, they not only excel in telling a story, but also know how to bring that story to real life by having conversations with their audiences who are not satisfied with being told the story but being part of the story. This emerging interactive digital industry wants to act more human before the audiences by using a sincere and consistent tone. One of the values from TBWA agency is “to make meaning, not marketing”, I think it demonstrates very well their new philosophy. Certainly the ultimate purpose is to make profits for their clients, but building brand loyalty is achieved by opening space and sharing resource with the audiences.    

The last thing I have got to mention is they are all so passionate about and highly concentrated in what they do. In the ever-changing digital landscape, they are ambitious in taking advantages of font-edge technologies to make unconventional innovations with fearlessness. As a student of interactive digital media design, it is so exciting for me to be part of this creative community. Any advices for next year’s students who want the most incredible experience with FTI? I would like to say: don’t be shy, keep talking with folks from the industry, including your tour guiders, they are all friendly, talented and knowledgeable people who won’t hesitate to answer your questions. 

[shaofh]

What do you know about SEO?

What is SEO?

SEO is the abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. The definition of Search Engine Optimization from Wikipedia is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic") search results. Although websites are rank by search engine, by studying how search engine works, SEO can get websites to rank higher in search engineer to generate more visits.

How does it works?

—By the case of SEO Moz

Moz is an American company found in 2004. They first set up as an SEO consulting company, then developed into launching online marketing software. They have an inbound marketing data analysis software named Moz Analysis. They also provide free analysis tools on line such as GetListed ( checking site listings on local search engines ), Followerwonk ( tool that analyzes and compares site followers or users) , MozCast ( tracking changes in Google rankings) as well as other paid tools to help customers to develop better online marketing.

Moz does a good job from the User Experience perspective. Their customers may not be gurus of SEO. Moz facilitates their customers to gather all the data in one place. Beautiful data visualizations with a comparative view are brought into competitive analysis to give customers insights into their marketing performance online. Then advises of how to improve online marketing efforts are given by actionable instructions to help customers achieve their goals.

They believe SEO is not only about making websites search engine friendly, but is also about building brand concepts and values through engaging into conversations on Internet.

What prompts SEO?

Apart from Moz, there are many other SEO analytics platforms or tools online helping customers to gain more site traffic and social media attention. So what is the marketplace need that prompted SEO?

According to the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, almost half of internet users use search engineers on a daily base. Everyone wants to get their sites rank on the first page of Google, Yahoo or Bing. SEO has become one of the effective online marketing strategies for companies or enterprises to promote their websites or brands considering so many people search products, service or other website content by search engine.

What to improve?

The fact that Google has personalized search results challenges SEO. Since search results vary form computer to computer based on search history, it limits the potential options for users and also makes it harder for small companies to show up on the top of search results. Hopefully more and more SEO companies can find a way to overcome this disadvantage.

Reference:

http://www.wikipedia.org

http://moz.com

http://seoserviceprovider.com

http://www.pewinternet.org/

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1099747

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Steve Jobs: a dictator or a great leader?

When I was asked to write something about leadership in digital media, the great example came up to my mind is Steve Jobs and his Apple Empire. Although many other companies try to imitate and copy the Apply magic, the success story of Apple is largely attributed to the leadership of Jobs.

The unique and unrepeatable example set up by Steve Jobs inspires us to rethink the key role that leadership plays in the success of the digital media business.

Undoubtedly there are many remarkable characteristics in Steve Jobs as a great leader. He is highly gifted, innovative and charisma, who is absolute confident about his own intuitions and judgement; who has the decisions to overcome enormous skepticism to execute and materialize his ideals; who owns the ability and personal authority to lead a company with more than 5000 employees. Jobs changed the traditional ways of innovative thinking in digital media, his obsession about the perfect aesthetic look and cool user experience makes Apple product more of a piece of artwork. Compared to usual market strategies of deciding the product features in the need of consumers, he aroused the unprecedented demand for new Apple products.  

However, many people dispute his temper and character, portraying him as an arrogant dictator in parallel with his leader glamour; while a good leader is supposed to be considerate and listening views form employees according to leadership rules.

As Joe Nocera said in New York Time,

 “(Steve Jobs) violated every rule of management. He was not a consensus-builder but a dictator who listened mainly to his own intuition. He was a maniacal micromanager. He had an astonishing aesthetic sense, which businesspeople almost always lack. He could be absolutely brutal in meetings: I watched him eviscerate staff members for their “bozo ideas.”

In fact, the democratic principles are not as applicable in business as in politics. An arbitrary ruler will bring huge disaster to a country, but leading a company is more like leading an army.  A great general is the one who undertake the mission of giving the right orders to his soldiers at stake. Similarly making decisions with certainty is critical in the competitive business environment today. Virtually the flaws of Jobs are part of his personal characters, Jobs had used his powerful authority pushing Apple employees to achieve the highly demanding standards. They are afraid of him but love him at the same time.

In the Playboy interview in 1985, Jobs said:

“We tried never to have one person make all the decisions. There were three people running the company at that time: Mike Scott, Mike Markkula and myself. Now it’s John Sculley [Apple’s president] and myself. In the early days, if there was a disagreement, I would generally defer my judgment to some of the other people who had more experience than I had. In many cases, they were right. In some important cases, if we had gone my way, we would have done better.”

Jobs is a dictator in the sense that he finally made decisions based on his own instinct, but meanwhile people always forget another fact that he is also highly accountable for his decisions. At this point seldom people are willing to take risk of making decisions, which explains why there are so few leaders today.   

Reference:

http://longform.org/stories/playboy-interview-steve-jobs

http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2011/08/27/steve-jobs-broke-every-leadership-rule-dont-try-that-yourself/?partner=yahootix

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/08/25/how-apple-works-inside-the-worlds-biggest-startup/

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/27/opinion/nocera-what-makes-steve-jobs-great.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1382122868-HIxlf4eSibrALKIb8FAN3Q

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HTML and CSS

HTML is the abbreviation of Hyper Text Markup Language, an universal markup language of network. HTML enables users to combine web page elements of texts, images, animation, sound, tables, links into an organized document, so browsers can read these elements and display the complex webpages. When people click on an icon in a document, internet will automatically go to the relevant content which may be stored in another computer of network. So people can see the pages on any Internet browser regardless of what type of computers or browsers.

CSS means Cascading Style Sheets. It is a style sheet language helping users to more easily control the look and format of web pages. CSS allows one style sheet to be applied to different pages, or allows one page to have different style sheets. Because the style of all pages are decided by a CSS file, users can effectively change the style of layout, fonts, colors, backgrounds of each web pages by simply modifying the corresponding elements on CSS file.

Summary : The main purpose of HTML is to define the structure of web pages. Like house structure being determined first when building a house, HTML determines the positions of headings, paragraphs, hyperlinks and other basic elements in a page; while CSS designs the whole styles and formats by giving different font styles, sizes, colors, backgrounds and other attributes to web pages, just like interior decoration after building the house. HTML and CSS define respectively the structure and style of web pages. The separation facilitates users to control the whole page style without changing the page content and structure.