ideapark’s annual “Vernal Equinox Party” is a time to celebrate with our customers, employees, and business partners the transition from winter to spring and exchange insights on emerging trends in marketing for the new year.

We also showcase emerging uses of technology for marketing professionals. This year, ideapark partnered up with Michael Bragg and talented team at Digital Dialogue to demonstrate SMS in a fun and engaging way. One of the best examples is how American Idol uses text messaging to drive audience participation. How can we make this relevant for traditional marketers within a reasonable budget?

For example, let’s say you are a major sporting event (or a vernal equinox party) and you want to capture real time insights from the audience.

Here’s how it works, ideapark develops an engaging and branded SMS experience for your audience via cellphone or interactive kiosk. You offer the audience the latest product information, prizes (like a Wii), discounts, or an update about their order. In return, you can gain valuable insight into what matters most to them.

Here’s an example of one the questions we asked as part of the demonstration. The answers were surprising:

We also asked fun questions and almost 70% of the attendees knew the answer to: “What is the airspeed velocity of a laden swallow?”

We were able to turn this around in less than a week.

Also, congrats to Charlie, Maryanne, and Dennis!

If you’d like to see how we did this and the outcome to some of the more serious questions, just drop me a line at mark@ideapark.com.

Wal-Mart just launched a video download service on their website. Big deal. Yet another bunch of movies you have to watch on your computer instead of on your TV the way God meant you to (or, Heaven forbid, on your iPod). In any event, the reason I mention this is because they apparently don’t care about the growing number of people using Firefox. Here’s what their new site looks like to these useless consumers:

Not pretty.

Getting a reliable number when it comes to browser market share is notoriously difficult, but let’s just say for the sake of argument that Firefox users make up between 15% to 25% of the web surfing public. Now think about your business. Is there anything you do today that makes it hard (not impossible, but hard) for 15% to 25% of your qualified current or future customers to engage with your product or service? Of course not. Not on purpose, anyway.

Another example. As anyone who knows me can tell you, I’m always looking for my next car. It doesn’t matter that I’ve had my current car for only 18 months or that I have to keep it for another 18, I’m always looking. One of the cars I’m interested in is Toyota’s FJ Cruiser. Toyota has made two decisions that makes my interest in their car harder to satisfy than it should be. First, they utilize something called the Viewpoint plug-in to power their car configuration tool. Why? Why not Flash? MINI has probably the very best car configuration tool on the web and it’s 100% Flash. Why go with some other plug-in that most people have to install? I’m sure the Viewpoint sales guys have an answer for that, but the user experience guy in me says Toyota should have figured out a way to work around it. Funny thing is, the use of Viewpoint isn’t even why I mention Toyota.

The page that detects the Viewpoint plug-in doesn’t work with Firefox. I’ve installed the thing several times yet it never properly detects that I have. It warns me I need it before I click the link to bypass their warning and then keeps warning me I don’t have it even though the configuration thing seems to be working just fine. If I bounce over to Safari, it works. I assume Internet Explorer users don’t have any problems, either.

So now let’s do some math. The FJ Cruiser sells for about $25,000 (higher with options, but I’m being conservative). By choosing to use a technology that makes it hard for me, a Firefox user, to consider their product, they’re putting potential sales in jeopardy. I don’t know how many FJ Cruisers Toyota will sell this year, but let’s use a nice round number like 50,000. If each one sells for (conservatively) $25k and about 20% of web-based shoppers are using Firefox (and also assuming that two-thirds of car buyers are using the web in making their decisions – a number I just totally made up), Toyota is needlessly endangering upwards of $165,000,000 in sales.

Will anyone not buy an FJ Cruiser because the website sucks? I don’t know. Buy when you consider the ease in which nearly everyone online can be accommodated (assuming you plan and develop for them appropriately), why risk losing even one sale? This is not rocket science, people.

One of my favorite examples of bad email marketing (for which many of my coworkers will vouch) is Banana Republic’s practice of sending me lots and lots of emails promoting women’s clothing. Let me make one think perfectly clear: I do not buy women’s clothing from Banana Republic. I do buy a lot of my clothes from them (like, nearly everything – it’s Garanimals for grown-ups), but never have I bought a skirt, pumps, or a handbag. Trust me on this. I even use their Luxe card because I’m a points whore and like to get free stuff, so you’d think they’d have a really good idea of not only what I’ve bought, but also my favorite colors, waist size, and whether or not I buy on sale. But no, they’ve never seemed inclined to do anything with that.

Until today. This morning, I see that not only does my latest BR email have the word “pants” in the subject line (without the word “suit” immediately following it), but it also contains men’s clothing and actual personalized content. It recognizes me as a Luxe card holder and tells me how many points I have and how many more I need before they send me $25. Nice. This is a step in the right direction. Now, if only the info wasn’t a month out of date…

Fifteen web principles from the British Broadcasting Corporation:

1. Build web products that meet audience needs: anticipate needs not yet fully articulated by audiences, then meet them with products that set new standards. (nicked from Google)

2. The very best websites do one thing really, really well: do less, but execute perfectly. (again, nicked from Google, with a tip of the hat to Jason Fried)

3. Do not attempt to do everything yourselves: link to other high-quality sites instead. Your users will thank you. Use other people’s content and tools to enhance your site, and vice versa.

4. Fall forward, fast: make many small bets, iterate wildly, back successes, kill failures, fast.

5. Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don’t restrict your creativity to your own site.

6. The web is a conversation. Join in: Adopt a relaxed, conversational tone. Admit your mistakes.

7. Any website is only as good as its worst page: Ensure best practice editorial processes are adopted and adhered to.

8. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.

9. Remember your granny won’t ever use “Second Life”: She may come online soon, with very different needs from early-adopters.

10. Maximise routes to content: Develop as many aggregations of content about people, places, topics, channels, networks & time as possible. Optimise your site to rank high in Google.

11. Consistent design and navigation needn’t mean one-size-fits-all: Users should always know they’re on one of your websites, even if they all look very different. Most importantly of all, they know they won’t ever get lost.

12. Accessibility is not an optional extra: Sites designed that way from the ground up work better for all users

13. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes: Encourage users to take nuggets of content away with them, with links back to your site

14. Link to discussions on the web, don’t host them: Only host web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale

15. Personalisation should be unobtrusive, elegant and transparent: After all, it’s your users’ data. Best respect it.

Brilliant.

From Tomski, via Cuene.

There is an evil scourge enveloping the web. Its name is IntelliTXT. You may not know it by that name, but I’m sure you’ve seen it. Ever been to a site where some of the words are double underlined? That’s InteiliTXT. Here’s an example:

Note the word “gaming”. This image was taken from a website about video games, but even so, the word “gaming” seems so general that no reasonable person would expect to see it linked. As you can see, when hovered over, an ad for a computer pops up (some of these even have embedded video).

IntelliTXT’s website says they “enable every word to be an opportunity to engage with customers.” Why, oh WHY, is making every stinking word an “opportunity to engage” someone a good idea? Every word (or even every 100th word) shouldn’t be an opportunity to do anything other than read them. IntelliTXT creates a rotten experience by popping up stupid little windows even if you just happen to pass your cursor over them and distracts from the act of absorbing content by emphasizing some words over others in a way not controlled or even desired by the visitor or the content creator. It’s an unholy alliance of hyperlinks and Google’s AdSense and somehow happens to build on only the negative aspects of both.

Biggest software company in the world and they can’t find anyone willing to work for them who gets it? Installing the Zune software apparently sucks. Quick show of hands here…who’s surprised?

Lunds and Byerly’s just launched an online shopping service (www.lundsandbyerlys.com). Wow, I can’t believe it’s taken this long. However, I do know that fulfillment in the food biz can be challenging. The site offers two options: in-store pick up (select stores only) and delivery. I love to shop online and I enjoy shopping at Byerly’s, so I thought I’d give it a go. The home page greets me with a sweeps offer to win a Jen Air appliance, free year of groceries and more. Nice acquisition campaign to attract new shoppers. It’s interesting that I’m not told about in-store pick up on the home page. I knew they were offering this because I saw the signs on the grocery carts during my last shopping trip.

Now the fun begins. I click on the “Grocery shopping” tab and can begin selecting items for my list. I click on “Grocery” and I see 3 feature items and 3 text boxes at the top. I select “beverages and water” in box A, then, “coffee” from box B, and finally “ground bean” in box C. My point is that I feel like I’m working in Access and not strolling down the carpeted aisles of my favorite Byerly’s store. Even though I know I’m actually connecting tables in a database, I don’t want to feel like I am.

Overall, the site is functional and easy to use despite the look and feel of the shopping experience. Try it.
Thanks for coming on board, Lunds and Byerly’s. We’ve been waiting for you.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who hates iTunes 7. The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

Both Mac and PC users appear to be affected by the glitches being reported, and numerous different threads on the Apple discussion forum have described a range of technical issues.

One of the most recent threads is titled:” ITUNES 7 RUINED MY LIFE!!!! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE HELP”, while another asks: “Is anyone not having problems with the new update?”

Vie engadget.

I don’t have time to get into specifics at the moment, but I just want to say that Apple has made iTunes my enemy with the release of version 7. All I want is to be able to update podcasts on my iPod the way I used to (which was easy and only required me to check some little boxes). Now I find myself locked into some Apple employee’s idea of the ‘correct’ way to manage my content and I am not at all happy.

Imagine me on one side of a crevasse and my little iPod buddy on the other side with the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail blocking the bridge between us. That’s how I feel right now.

I was thrilled to hear a client of ours would be switching to paying us electronically, via the wire, through the air (you get the idea).

It’s true – they are now doing it. The money automagically appears in our bank account. Then I noticed some other things that appeared in our mailbox…

• a notice in the mail from the client’s AP department noting the transaction
• a notice from the bank in the mail noting the transaction (minimum two pages)

So – what used to be a check to us in the mail is now two separate mailings from two separate offices. What are we saving?

Thank goodness we’re not scanning in our snail mail and then printing it…

This is one more reason I think we need to reexamine a global system of pneumatic tubes.

Don’t laugh.