Failure is not a topic we usually highlight on our blog.  But the biggest failures can be the most valuable learning experiences.  The other day, Michael Cervino chatted with our CEO, Lynn Labieniec, to find out what she’s learned from projects gone wrong.  Take a look.

Google Buzz is the new kid in social networking, and it hasn’t gotten a lot of love. It was rolled out a couple weeks ago with very little fanfare, showing up on Gmail users’ homepage one day.  The initial criticism was all about privacy controls, as Kesah explained last week.  To Google’s credit, they’ve moved quickly to address the most serious issues, and thus quieted a lot of the complaints.

But putting aside the rough edges and works-in-progress, Buzz has some potential.  What’s more, I think we need it, or something like it, in the social networking space.

Let’s look at two of the key players in this space: Facebook and Twitter.

Twitter is all about openness.  It’s got bare-bones features, with a robust API, so that most of the available functionality isn’t actually created by Twitter.  Many Twitter users don’t even use twitter.com to access their account, because so many 3rd-party tools give you that access.  It’s also almost entirely public.  While you can send private messages through Twitter, the whole point is public dialogue. There’s almost no personal data tied to Twitter; you can auto-tweet your content from other sources, but all your demographic info is separate.

Facebook, one could argue, is all about privacy, relationships, and data.  Their status update feature serves a similar purpose to Twitter, but can be limited to your circle of friends. They have very nuanced (and often hard to manage) privacy controls, and the assumed behavior for most users is that their content on Facebook is only available to their network of friends. Increasingly, Facebook is pushing itself as a marketing tool; their greatest value is the amount of your data that they own and can leverage for their advertisers and developers.  If Twitter is all about your public content, Facebook is all about your data and your network.

With Facebook’s recent updates to their privacy structure, a lot of people see them pushing for more monetizable content at the expense of user preferences.  Facebook makes no real secret about the fact that they are there to market to you. And as Facebook pushes harder on marketing and user data, I have to wonder if there’s a friendlier alternative.

I would love for Buzz to be that alternative.  It isn’t yet, but it has the potential. It’s clearly still under development, and I’m sure it will change as it grows, but there are promising signs that it could change into something good:

• It’s well integrated with other Google services.  Maybe the integration’s a little clunky at this point, but they’re making it easy to move between Buzz and emails, chat, RSS, and other media.
• It’s open, or will be.  Google has already announced their intention to make Buzz a “fully open and distributed platform for conversations”.
• There’s no marketing yet.  And while there inevitably will be, it seems likely that it will be context-based like the rest of Google’s advertising – not based on your personal data like Facebook ads.  There won’t be the same pressure to surrender up your personal information to the marketing gods.
• It’s easy to find your friends.  Odds are that the friends you communicate with over email are the same friends you’ll want to connect with on Buzz.  Now that Buzz no longer auto-follows all your contacts who use it, it could form the basis of a social network comprised of all the people you already interact with most closely.

Of course, Google needs to avoid some of the pitfalls other services have faced.  They need to figure out their privacy settings, to make them simple yet robust.  They also need to avoid becoming FriendFeed – it’s great that they made it easy to flow all your feeds into Buzz, but if no one uses it for the status update feature (which is at the core of Facebook and Twitter) then it’s a pale substitute.

Are you listening, Google?  If you are, I’d also like a lightning-fast internet connection, a flying car, and a pony…  you know, as long as you’re granting wishes.

What do you think? Is it crazy to think that Buzz could be the next, best thing in social networking?

If you haven’t been to the American Lung Association Web site in a while, you might want to take a look.  Beaconfire redesigned the site, which launched in December on the Convio platform.  Content is now much easier to find, in spite of how deep and rich the site is.  The design now reflects the mission and stature of the organization.  Calls to action are prominent and direct. It’s also easier to find programs and your local information.  You might say it’s actually a breath of fresh air!  Check it out at www.lungusa.org.

CSS3, which is not yet an approved standard, allows for the inclusion of OpenType and TrueType fonts via the @font-face rule. This is great because there are no browser plugins or addons making the browser render pretty fonts, as there is with sIFR, which requires Flash. This method also leaves your page code alone and, while it does require JavaScript in some cases (see below), does not re-write your HTML in any way.

Typekit

Typekit offers an easy way to take advantage of the capabilities of @font-face without you needing to code for all browsers, obtain licenses for the fonts that you use, and manage the server-side requirements of uploading fonts and such.

It does still cost money (just as licensing fonts would were you to roll your own @font-face setup) but the cost is not bad and you have access to hundreds of fonts that have been licensed to Typekit.

I’m using the free “Trial” license for this post.  I can choose from about 100 different fonts but am allowed to use only two fonts on a single website.  The trial license also requires me to have the badge you see in the lower right corner of the site present on all pages on which the Typekit JavaScript is present.  Most non-personal sites will get what they need with the “Portfolio” plan for about $50/yr.  If you want to use Typekit on “https”, or secure, pages or accomodate more than 20GB monthly traffic, you’ll have to pay $249.99/year.  A big difference to be sure.

Regular old font replaced by a neat one called “John Doe.”

This is great, but the first person I see using “Coquette” in the content of their site gets the silent treatment from me for a good long time.

The way it works is that you create an account at Typekit.com and put together what they call a “kit” by browsing the fonts online and clicking the “add” button.   Then, in your “kit editor” you tell it what CSS selectors (CSS classes, IDs or HTML tags) you want the font to be applied to; the weights and styles (bold, italic, etc.) you will want to use, and what plain fonts you would like to deliver to browsers that do not support @fontface (yup, browser support rears its ugly head again!).  After clicking the “Publish” button, you grab a small snippet of JavaScript, add it to the pages on which you would like to apply this new font, and you’re good to go.  Just add the class name you defined when you built your kit to the elements you want styled and it just works.

From creating my account to styling the text you see above was less than five minutes.  I added the JavaScript snippet to the template for this entire blog and I don’t have to think about it again.

As mentioned, Typekit does require JavaScript which is used to generate the link to your “kit” that you created at Typekit.com. The script does not in any way alter the HTML your page originally contained as sIFR does to replace text with a Flash version of the same text.

Also, though you may see a flash of un-styled text as your page begins to load, this method is much quicker to load than sIFR. sIFR fonts will generally look smoother because of the way that they are drawn by the Flash, but are also not re-sizable on older browsers that do not increase the size of everything on the page as the latest versions of Firefox and IE do (and as Opera has for some time).

So, while I have yet to use TypeKit on a client Web site, I’ve not seen anything so far that would stop me from doing so.

Mailing lists and segmentations can be an email marketer’s worst nightmare. One wrong click and you can accidentally send donation appeals to your supporters who made major gifts yesterday, or send your latest campaign on polar bears to people who have told you that they only care about 3-toed sloths.

If you’ve made a segmentation error in the past, you can take comfort in knowing that it happens to everyone. Take George Washington University, for example, who sent an erroneous “Welcome to GWU” email to 200 early decision applicants last week. Several hours later, the would-be students received the bad news.

Segmenting your users based on their communications preferences and recent interactions with your organization is worth the effort − supporters stay engaged and look forward to messages from you. The more fine-tuned your audience, though, the easier it is to make a segmentation mistake. There are a few safeguards email marketers can take to ensure your email is always delivered to its intended target:

1. Use an email tool that automatically manages opt-outs and unsubscribes. That way human error won’t allow you to message people who have indicated they don’t want to hear from you.
2. Spot check your segments.  Once you’ve built your segment, make sure your list has the expected number of people on it and click in to a handful of records to verify that they should receive the email.
3. For advanced segmentations, have another person double-check your logic. Depending on the email tool you use, constructing queries for list segments can get complex. Robust tools allow nesting arguments, and/or statements, and behavioral targeting of users. It never hurts to have another pair of eyes on your work.

A little prevention goes a long way in keeping your subscribers happy.

So, you have a website. It looks good, works well, and is kept updated — great! But what else should you be doing on a regular basis to ensure its success?

Google Webmaster Tools is a free service provided by Google that will help you to see the “big picture” of how your site exists on the web and how you can improve both its presence and performance. To get started, log in with any Google Account. You’ll need to add your site and complete a brief verification process. Then you’re ready to go.

Here are a few things you can accomplish through Webmaster Tools:

Learn about Incoming Traffic

Understanding the intentions of incoming visitors will help you to make sure they have a positive experience on your site.

• View Top Search Queries shows when and how your web site is appearing in Google search results. Which keywords display your site the most? Which result in click-throughs? Learning the answers to these questions (and identifying the differences between them) will help you to ensure that your site’s content meets the needs of incoming traffic. If certain keywords are missing from the list or ranked lower than you would expect, you may need to add more content to your site related to that keyword and ensure that others are linking to it.

  More highlights after the jump. (more…)

After logging into my gmail account and getting an announcement to check out the new social networking feature Google rolled out, I was eager to find out what all the Buzz was about.  I clicked through to the link and to my surprise I was already following 31 people and 26 people were following me without ever activating a thing.  After poking around, I realized that whether you  like it or not the wealth of information Google knows about you is quickly becoming less and less private.  Before you get behind the wheel, I suggest you read on to understand the consequences of your buzz. (more…)

To take our minds off the second blizzard in a week currently bearing down on us here in the DC area, let’s think about happier things. Like Austin Texas, & South by Southwest Interactive. And, ya know, the sun.

With hundreds of panels and what seems like miles of convention center to cover at sxsw interactive, it has been challenging for folks working in the non profit sector to find a place where you can easily meet up with peers, unwind your brain, or just share all the cool stuff you’re absorbing with other people who “get it”.

At SXSW 2009, with the help of our partners and colleagues, we planted The Beacon: Lounge with a Conscience at the Austin Convention Center, hoping to give nonprofit professionals and the socially conscious community a place of their own. And our little seedling flourished. More than 500 people hung out at the Beacon last year, enjoying the comfy couches, the free wi-fi, the daily coffee and snacks, and the company of their peers.

This year, we’re excited to watch the Beacon grow bigger and better than ever with the rockin’ events we’ve planned:

• Morning coffee with panelists from “Will Kiva Kill Your Non Profit”.
• A daily social media rockstar interview/broadcast by Mark Horvath of Invisible People.
• A gallery of Mike Rohde’s beloved Sketchnotes.
• SoapBox lunches and talks for a cause.
• Afternoon acoustic concerts, including local & virtual musicians, sponsored by BlackBaud, befitting Sweet Relief, Musicians Fund.
• And of course, a place for you to hang your hat, rest your feet and catch your breath.

So if you want to get your good on at SxSW, there’s no better place for it than The Beacon: Lounge with a Conscience. Check out The Beacon Blog for the latest update and follow us @thebeaconsxsw.

And just for a thrill, check out the blurb sxsw wrote about us today. We’re downright giggly about it. (ok, I am).

This post was originally supposed to be about the ASAE Technology Conference. We here at Beaconfire are big fans of the conference – attending, exhibiting, presenting – and we were once again looking forward to being a part of the expo and programming. But the recent (historic) weather in the DC area has forced the cancellation of this year’s event.

Fortunately for conference registrants and other interested parties, an intrepid band of volunteers led by Socialfish’s Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer, along with Omnipress, ThePort, NFi Studios, and Avectra, sprang into action and created UnTech10, the Technology Unconference. What is an unconference? It’s an informal, participant-led gathering to explore the topics that were going to be addressed in the official ASAE conference. Free to the nonprofit and association community, UnTech10 will feature live and virtual presentations from Technology Conference speakers. Beaconfire will be leading a session on using metrics to optimize your social media presence.

It’s unfortunate that the official event had to be canceled, but we encourage all of you who are a part of the nonprofit and association community to check out UnTech10, and participate as you can. It is open to all; you can register here, view the list of sessions, and follow the conference on Twitter using the #unTech10 tag.

In January, the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO, launched their new website, www.AFT.org. Its more than 1.4 million members represent teachers, paraprofessionals and school-related personnel, higher education faculty and staff, local, state and federal employees, nurses and other healthcare professionals, early childhood educators and retirees.

Among other goals, AFT engaged Beaconfire to redesign their 5-year old site to balance the needs of multiple audiences with a more modern and inviting look and feel. Our redesign process involved stakeholder interviews, a creative visioning exercise, a review of peer organizations, a card sorting exercise to gather user input and developing personas representing AFT’s target audiences, in addition to our typical discovery process of defining goals, audiences and features. All these steps resulted in a new information architecture and visual design for the site. In addition to the design, Beaconfire re-engineered the AFT Voices feature on the web site that asks their members to share their voice on important questions and issues for their professions and their constituencies. The new design was implemented by OmniUpdate, AFT’s CMS software vendor.

The new Voices tool automates what was a very manual and time consuming process for posting questions to and comments by members on the website. The new tool has an administrative console where AFT editors can create and publish questions, receive email notifications, moderate and publish responses, and view statistics on questions and comments. It allows members to post their comments and a photo real time, and to vote and rate others’ responses; Editor’s picks and highly rated comments sort to the top. Previously, AFT manually inputted questions and comments from their print publications onto the website, which only enabled them to post a fraction of the number of actual comments received.

The new look and feel, and the Voices tool in particular, have helped to achieve two other key goals for the site – to engage and interact with members online, and allow more members to see themselves on the site and to understand they are part of a larger movement. It’s been a pleasure working with the nice folks at the AFT to make their goals come true!