The weather may be gray and dreary outside, but the pizza was hot and the topics were bright inside the offices of YDOP! Actually, we have no idea how a topic can be “bright”, but it sure sounded like a good segue, didn’t it?

Would you like to see our menu?

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

Navigation menus are one of the most vital parts of a website. They need to be functional and easy to use, while not being an eyesore. So today, I shared the 2010 trends for website navigation menu from SmashingMagazine.com with the team. Some of trends are:
• Menus with 3-D elements – Who doesn’t like those menus that look like you can almost grab it? Be careful not to go overboard with it because it might ended up looking tacky.
• Speech bubble menus – I think it’s overused nowadays. Although, used properly, it can make the design look fresh.
• Menu items in rounded boxes – Rounded boxes are usually used as buttons on the website. And we love a button that changes its look when pressed, so it looks like an actual, physical button.
• Menus with icons – I really love simple icons that come with the navigation menu. Visual elements can really help the users to navigate the website quickly. But be careful to keep the menu text readable.
• Menus in unusual shapes – Navigation menus can be really interesting and eye-catching when they are in shape of sticky notes, stickers, labels, cards, pins, etc.

Taking the pulse

Jeff Burkholder, Engineer/Analyst

I showed the assembled a site called RowFeeder, which tracks mentions of a word or phrase on Twitter and/or Facebook. The primary purpose of this is to keep tabs on what the social media sphere is saying about you and/or your product. And while there are a number of sites that perform this function, RowFeeder goes an extra mile by directly integrating its reports with Google Docs (they’re also exportable to Microsoft Excel), so that you don’t have to retype the data from some proprietary Flash-enhanced screen.

Motivation and innovation

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

Following Monday’s discussion about being innovative at YDOP, this Friday’s discussion was about motivation as it relates to innovation. I began by reporting on a great interview I heard with Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive, What Motivates Us: Not What You Think. Pink uses research to argue that monetary incentive programs only show benefit to employees in “mechanical improvement.” In Sales, monetary incentives encouraged workers to “game” the system. Most interesting to me was that monetary incentives actually worsened “insightful/conceptual” value from workers. (Hmmm. Does it stand to reason that if I lower salaries, my team will come up with better ideas? Risky hypothesis.)
Three key motivators are autonomy, mastery and purpose. Self direction leads to engagement, but the most powerful motivators are clearly an employee’s sense of progress and self-improvement. We went on to discuss how to develop an atmosphere that is safe for innovators, how to stimulate our innovative brains, and why creativity and innovative ideas are central to the value and survival of our cool company.

Quick hits on social media

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

I wanted to make sure the rest of the team was aware of several developments within the major social networks from the past few weeks:
• Twitter now has its own “tweet this” button and now suggests users to follow
• Facebook updated the layout of photo albums
• MySpace revised its interface to look cleaner and bluer
• Flowtown released a new map of the geography of social networks.
I also introduced members of our team to the concept of unconferences and barcamps, which are events in which participants are far more empowered than in a traditional professional conference. One example is Podcamp Pittsburgh, where I’ve been honored with an invitation to present a session next month.
Finally, I shared the theatrical trailer of the forthcoming movie “The Social Network,” and its not-to-be-missed parody.

This week saw the triumphant return of Steve from his tour of the Great American West. From the grandeur of the Grand Canyon to the old Hollywood history of Palm Springs to the spectacle of Sight and Sound Theater in Branson, MO — and all the massively boring deserts in-between — he saw it all. And apparently video recorded it, too. Still, it was great to have him back so we could all sit around the lunch table share the information we ran across in the past week.

Mini Messages and Primal Leadership

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

Since I had been out of the office for three weeks, I gave myself permission to cover two topics this week.  I opened with “mini” inspirational story about the Mini-Cooper’s viral success in marketing to their own clients using automated road signs that spontaneously produce messages to Mini owners.  The whole idea is fun, got attention and makes Mini owners feel like a special class of people.  To our team, this served as an inspiration to channel even more creative energy toward helping our clients market to their existing customers.

My second topic was about the emotional and social climate at YDOP, my role in it and what steps we will take to continue to develop a work-place/environment that we love and our customers describe as up-lifting.  Using insights from a book I’m digesting called “Primal Leadership,” I described how emotions are extremely contagious, and that is especially true from the individuals in leadership.  I am seeking to identify my own leadership styles and competencies/weaknesses using feedback from the YDOP team using questionnaires I distributed today.  Could be interesting!

The Growth of Facebook

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

Facebook has significantly gained in popularity over the past few years, and more businesses are attempting to reach out to both current and potential clients / customers through this social media avenue. There are many ways for businesses to approach this new medium but interaction remains key to success. By allowing users to provide feedback and having open communication with users, businesses can greatly benefit through the use of Facebook.

Facebook is being slightly restructured: the status box currently at the top of the News Feed page will be replaced by a navigation bar with links to update status, add photos, add links, and ask a question. The latter is a new feature that will allow users to ask questions globally and receive input from other users as well as businesses. These questions can be comprised of text alone, video, audio, or images. This could lead to some very creative marketing campaigns from businesses looking to increase social interaction.

A recent leak has provided access to torrents containing over 100 million Facebook users’ profile information. While not a direct security threat–the information was the composite of only public information–many large businesses are downloading this information. Time will tell if and how they will leverage this data.

The ROI of Webcomics

Jeff Burkholder, Engineer/Analyst

The webcomic xkcd describes itself as a “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” Not only is this all true, but it’s also very widely read among internet users, as the writer, Randall Munroe, tends to have a pretty good handle on internet-related topics. The comic for July 30 is a prime example of this. It illustrates the disconnect between how some people create and design websites with those the website is meant to service. While some people still may look at it somewhat askance as “just a comic”, it’s real, useful, and actionable information that web developers and internet marketers should really pay attention to.

Social CRM and Google Apps

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

To add on to Mike’s Facebook update, I shared screenshots of what the beta version of the Facebook publisher looks like with Questions built in. There are still a number of bugs for Facebook to work out, and even in a limited beta environment I don’t expect that process to be a quick one–Facebook currently only employs one engineer for every 1.25 million users.

I then provided updates on the social CRM scene, demonstrating one use case where the social CRM BatchBook integrates with Gmail for Google Apps, with additional functionality from Rapportive. Because business professionals already have busy lives with not enough time for social interaction (whether online or off), social CRM tools can make it much easier to stay up to date with your customers’ lives by capturing all your interactions with a single customer in a single place, whether the interaction is over the phone, on Twitter, or through e-mail.

Wanna Be Creative? Go Away (from your desk)!

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

Today, I shared some interesting articles with the team. One of them is an article from www.zurb.com, about how beneficial it is to design while standing up. The article says that standing up will increase the blood flow, therefore stimulate the brain even more. Also, by standing up, you invite people to give you feedback and interact with you. So according to the article, “standing up is social.”

On the other hand, an article from the99percent.com is talking about how leaving your desk can help you to be creative. It’s talking about how vacation, for example, can help you solve the design problem from different angle because of the different culture or situation you’re in. It also states that solitude can increase productivity and focus.

I also share some articles about branding exercise. An article from www.millermosaicllc.com tells about how a company can create their “brand statement” from an example exercise. It tells you to think about what one or two sentences you will say about your company to your audience if you have only a couple seconds. This can help a company a lot to focus on what their core statement is.

Google Wave

At last night’s Central PA New Tech Meetup, I had the pleasure of facilitating a conversation about Google’s latest product with the brain trust of techies in the room, along with the meetup’s organizer, John Caddell. My goal was to get a feel from this group of fellow early adopters about what they like/dislike about Wave so far, and about what they see as the future implications of the technology.

Here are my takeaways on the question, Will Google Wave affect the way business is done?

Google Wave will change project management. It’s clear that Wave is superbly suited for small project teams who need to collaborate on projects, often in real-time.

Google Wave will change how we think about documents. Right now the paradigm within business is that a document is a document is a document. An after-action review, a set of product specs, an informal memo, and a legal contract are created, versioned, and stored in similar ways. The current way of thinking about, creating, and storing documents makes sense for things like contracts and records that are meant to become static. But that way of thinking is inadequate for documents about things like best practices, bios and CVs, and marketing research. Wave will prompt business to differentiate between “static documents” and “living documents.”

Google wave is the wiki for the rest of us. Enterprises currently attempt to create “living documents” (and a management/storage system for them) by setting up internal wikis. The problem is, getting a wiki up and running—and more importantly, getting people to actually use it—is difficult at best. Compared to a wiki, Google Wave is fun. Even if Wave is not completely intuitive and simple, it’s more intuitive and simple than a wiki. The impact of Google Wave on knowledge management should not be underestimated.

Google Wave reinvents the message board. Message boards, forums, and BBs have been falling out of favor throughout the past decade. They’re most alive in the tech community, but adoption within other sectors has fallen off. The similarity of a wave to a message board thread is close enough that Google Wave may make a good modern-day replacement for phpBB and other forum software.

Google Wave makes messages more social. Including someone new in a wave is easy and doesn’t require introductions, unlike adding someone to a conversation taking place between multiple people via e-mail. Wave also allows newcomers to the conversation to catch up by watching how the wave evolved over time, using the (really cool) “playback” feature. What’s more, if you find yourself in a wave with a participant you weren’t connected with before, adding them to your contacts (and thus, to your personal network) is a breeze.

What do you think? Are these predictions pie in the sky? Are there other ways you see Wave impacting business processes in the near future?