With only a few months until the Iowa Caucus, the annual marathon of political ads is almost upon us. This year, more than ever before, the air war is coming online as both sides trade web versions of TV ads, and some ads will inevitably pick up enough earned media buzz to reach more people than they would have in a paid context.

While this is not new (look back at President Johnson’s "Daisy" ad for ancient viral video), this may be the first cycle that a search engine ad created a furor.

Google recently created a stir when they rejected ads by Sen. Collins’s campaign that slammed MoveOn. Google rejected the ads, according to Policy Council Pablo Chavez, not because of their political content, but because of a trademark violation:

Under our trademark policy, a registered trademark owner may request that its mark not be used in the text of other parties’ ads. Some time ago, MoveOn.org submitted a request to Google that its trademark not be used in any ads…

This all seems perfectly reasonable, but what does it mean for your ads? Follow me below the fold for thoughts on what you can do to make sure your ad gets through…

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Beaconfire welcomes INFORMS and the American Federation of Teachers as two of our newest clients both of whom were looking for Beaconfire to gather user input to guide improvements to their respective sites.

We began work with INFORMS in the past week to prepare for interviews with their members as they begin the process of improving their Website. User research is an important step in any project and for INFORMS offers an opportunity to explore user needs, validate findings from market research and begin to prioritize areas for improvement. As the association for Operations Research professionals, INFORMS knows the value of research and is wisely leveraging it to guide their Website improvements.

Just last week, we learned we had been selected by AFT to conduct a usability audit of their intranet/extranet tool for local union leaders, not surprisingly called LeaderNet. This project will include user interviews which provide a change for key stakeholders to share perspective, feedback and desired changes. We will combine this input with our Expert Review of the site to identify specific areas for improvement and recommendations. The idea is to identify fixes that AFT can implement quickly as well as make a case for longer term changes. Once those changes have been further flushed out, we’ve recommended user testing to validate and refine.

We’re excited to get started with both clients.

I wrote back in March about how to decide what width your website design should be. The decision usually comes down to what we know about the audience in question, and what size monitor and resolution they are likely to use. In the best cases, we have actual data for the specific audience in question to go on, but that data can be sometimes be hard to come by.

Adding a wrinkle to the question is that, as more and more people start using larger monitors, they are not all necessarily going to maximize their browser to fill the entire screen. Some people will be resizing their browsers to either make more room for other windows, or to exercise more control over the width of pages that they read.

While I continue to hunt for a more reliable reporting of these numbers, I found this article from Roger Johansson following up an informal survey of visitors to his blog 456Breast.com in which he found some interesting data about how his readers browse the web.

Thomas Baekdal conducted a similar experiment, but used javascript to collect the information from three different sites rather than a survey. His numbers are a bit different, but the trend seems to hold pretty solid that Mac users are more likely than Windows users to reduce the size of their browsers from the maximum, and that as monitor sizes (and resolutions) get higher, people become more likely to do so.

• Poll results: 50.4% of respondents maximise windows
• Actual Browser Sizes

Like everything, branding evolves. It’s generally an improvement, but it does mean some pretty big changes for the organization’s marketing. In ancient times (10 years ago), the website’s rebranding could largely be an afterthought to print materials.

But today, consider how many of your constituents view your website versus how many will see your business card. How many will get an email from or you, and how often, versus how many times they see your letterhead?

A lot of Beaconfire’s work is done concurrently with branding firms. Sometimes, we’re given a completed branding document, other times, we’re doing our work at the same time as the organization is being rebranded. In any case, there are some common issues we run often run into on branding guidelines that branding firms should be aware of:

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It was my pleasure to address the Council of Michigan Foundations this morning. As promised, here is the presentation available for download as a PDF File.

Web 2.0: Joining the Online Marketplace of Ideas

One of the attendees asked an astute question about identifying and reaching specific subsets of the users of MySpace.com, YouTube, etc… Here is a collection of resources for you to explore.

Thanks for your time and attention!

The past two weeks have seen some exciting developments as both Kintera and Convio launched Open API programs, Kintera Connect and Convio Open respectively. Here at Beaconfire we�??d like to applaud both vendors for listening to the nonprofit community, vendors and organizations like NTEN etc as the concepts of openness, APIs and the transparency of Web 2.0 communities have changed the software landscape for good. See we can all have an impact!

In the interest of full disclosure, Beaconfire is partners with both Kintera and Convio and we share some of our largest clients in common. We have been involved in discussions and briefings with both vendors and are discussing projects with clients that will give us the opportunity to really dig into these APIs. We hope to share our findings from working with the APIs based on these real world examples.

Rather than comment on the differences and pros/cons of their offerings, I do have some thoughts on how to evaluate or compare these APIs, programs or approaches. I�??m actually working with the good folks at Idealware and NTEN on evaluating APIs so this is top of mind for me already. So, let�??s talk about the things that could be important in comparing APIs and not worry so much about how these two compare just yet. For initial reviews, check out fellow Nonprofit techies Michelle Murain, Allan Benamer, and Judi Sohn. (more…)

Until recently building a Facebook application meant either having to use your own real account, which could cause friction with friends who get with invites for your application in development or having to create a test account that would likely get banned and force you to start over. As the Facebook Wiki notes:

Facebook’s Terms of Service require that all accounts be linked to your real identity, so its not allowed to make fake accounts to test things with. The status quo is the following cycle: developers make test accounts, developers test with those accounts for a little while, our Customer Support team comes across those test accounts and identifies them as fake and disables them, developers are annoyed and frustrated, developers make more test accounts. This is pretty bad.

No longer – in a little-ballyhooed announcement, Facebook recently opened up the ability to create test accounts that would live in a quarantined zone, free from fear of banning. More below the fold…

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This month we kicked off with our newest client, Share Our Strength. Their mission of “No Kid Hungry” is one we stand behind and their 10 point strategy for ending childhood hunger in America is smart and effective.

We are excited to be at the table with them to redesign their Web site and assist in their holiday online marketing. Share Our Strength has just finished redefining their brand. The new Web sites for Share Our Strength, Great American Bake Sale, Operation Frontline, Taste of the Nation and Great American Dine Out are all part of the fun work we’ll be doing in the next few months. In parallel, we’re helping out on their holiday fundraising, which for the first time will include alternative gifts to fight childhood hunger in the United States.

Keep an eye out for most posts on what we’re learning and the “great reveal” of the new sites in January.

If you�??re considering launching a corporate or amateur podcast and want to jazz it up with some background music, �??pod safe music�?� will keep you on the safe side of copyright law internationally. �??Pod safe music�?� is safe for using as long as you give credit to the artist at some point during the podcast and offer the audio for free.

The creators of PodShow.com launched Podsafe Music Network at music.podshow.com over a year ago; it�??s still in Beta and continues to be a safe meeting place for artist and podcasters alike. Professional and amateur artists who still have full rights to their music can give their creations a test run by posting and tracking it�??s pod use (or better yet, sell it!), and podcasters can feast upon some great free sounds.

Podsafe Music Network features some popular artists such as Ziggy Marley, but there are plenty of lesser known artists and producers too from Europe and all over. Just as podcasting is a great medium for emerging voices to engage a unique audience, so too is Podsafe Music Network for artists trying to move beyond zero airplay. Registration for artists and podcasters is required.

One of the first indications that Facebook would be the  Meetup of the 2008 election was when the membership of the Facebook group "One Million Strong for Barack" started skyrocketing. Suddenly, everyone in the political world could see how viral Facebook could really be, and how fast you could grow a community.

This group’s visibility also shed light on the true impotency of groups in Facebook – once they hit more than a 1,000 people, the organizer can no longer message to the group. That’s about as useful as a fundraiser with no donation box or a rally with no speaker – just a mob of people who can’t do anything. That didn’t stop people from creating groups, just to get a momentary press hit (note the "1,000,000 Strong against Hillary [Clinton]" group – this was founded by the New Hampshire Republican party and is populated by people who don’t know this), but that was about all they got from it.

That could be changing soon, though.

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Last month, the New York  Times shut down their TimesSelect section, opening the firewall to most of their archives and making their columnists free range again. The times called it a noble experiment, but one that ultimately proved detrimental to their health – the money they raised selling premium subscriptions was vastly outweighed by the traffic they lost to their higher ad revenue sections.

With the Times throwing in the towel on paid content online, what does this mean for the rest of the web? Are there other ways to monotize the web that your non-profit should be thinking about? And should you consider a paid firewall section, despite even the Times’s decision to fold?

All this, and more, below the fold…

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