We’ll be discussing how we approach business building with a collection of very different personalities, and why in many ways this diversity in thought processes helps us create exactly the kind of business that works.

For more information, check out the event here.

What is a Sprite?

Sprites have a somewhat long history and do different things depending on the platform. In terms of the web, they are simply used to decrease the number of requests to the browser, which speeds up load time for a website. Instead of loading in ten different image files of the same sized icons, why not put all those icons on one image and then display only certain parts of that image as needed? This is exactly the function a sprite serves, in essence it is one large image tiled with lots of different images. Then by using CSS background-positioning, height and width, we can hide and display only certain areas of that image as desired.

One of the most common uses for a sprite is a button: static (regular display), hover (mouse over state) and active (clicking). However, when creating these sprites in Photoshop or Illustrator, many designers lazily eyeball the spaces in between the buttons. Even though those spaces aren’t being displayed, it makes it a pain for the developer if they are not completely pixel perfect. By that I mean, exactly 10px vertically spaced from each other.

Illustrator and Photoshop have many super handy tools when it comes to making these sprites pixel perfect. Some of the different tools I highlighted in this presentation are the Align Tools, Guides, and Measuring Tools. The other key aspect to this presentation was to go over how to correctly set up the document and save images out for the web.

Everybody’s hot for numbers. I get that.

We need information, data, to support our processes, to guide us into making intelligent decisions for our organizations. But the artist, the Humanities nerd, the right-side-of-the-brainer, as well as the realist in me cringes at the trendiness of and seemingly blind allegiance to Big Data.

This week the New York Times published an article about film studios applying Big Data to screenplays. A statistician created an equation to determine what plot elements will fail at the box office and which ones will succeed. For example, if you summon a demon with a Ouija board, it’s not as likely to do as well as if you are the target of a demon’s wrath. Huh.

Film studios rely on this data to choose which screenplays to buy and which ones to discard. While using data to determine how studios spend their money seems like a safe bet, I can’t help but feel like there is going to be an incredible loss of creativity, absence of risk, and pop-cultural stagnation.

And I think there’s something missing here.

Interestingly enough, television is moving away from the deeply-flawed Nielsen ratings in exchange for aggregating insane amounts of data to understand their successes. However, TV networks are also more willing to take risks right now, relying on social media-based crowd-sourced marketing to do its thing.

Shows with cult followings, such as Arrested Development, were canceled due to poor Nielsen ratings. Netflix, as opposed to a traditional television network, is capitalizing on the cult following and by reviving the show after a several-year hiatus, it will probably make a killing. Television is no longer just on a television. Shows have generated enormous audiences of viewers who do not engage with television in the way that they used to.

I’m a great example of this. I am 33-years-old, and I haven’t had cable or network television ever in my adult life. Yet I spend at least twenty minutes a day watching TV shows through iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, or the networks’ own apps on my iPhone or laptop.

In fact, the only television show I’ve watched when it aired in the past few years was this year’s Oscars, and Seth McFarlane’s performance was worse than most of the comedy open-mic nights I’ve been to, so I doubt I’ll waste my time with that again.

So what’s missing from the way the film studios use Big Data? Everything that comes after the box office. The truth that innovation can result in passionate fans, even if the movie doesn’t best GI Joe Two (cringe) at the box office. Having a cult hit is the gift that keeps on giving.

Creating interesting and unique content is a risk, but as all business people and artists know, creativity and risk are what change the world. Think different, right Steve Jobs?

What does all this have to do with Internet Marketing, my department here at Commerce Kitchen? Well, Big Data is useless if you’re not looking at what comes next. I’m lucky to have more number-driven people on my team here, but I don’t think numbers can or should dictate how ways we engender passionate communities.

Let’s understand what has worked and what hasn’t worked in the past, and let’s allow that to inform our decisions. But let’s not stifle our creativity based on an equation of what normally works. There have been plenty of demons summoned in successful films in the past, and there will be again in the future. And in fact, Paranormal Activity, today’s demon franchise of choice, was a surprise hit.

Likewise, when I do keyword research I don’t just look at the highest volume search terms; instead, I look at which search terms convert well, which ones are the most relevant, which ones make sense within the context and within the ethical SEO strategies we’re committed to, and what the intent of the searcher is.

In other words, I look beyond the numbers and into the habitus, the thought processes, and the emotions of the actual people behind the numbers. This is where my experience in the Humanities comes in handy. Big Data helps us quantify an existing ethos, but it doesn’t necessarily help us predict the next one. In being adventurous and taking risks, creative content, whether it’s film, television, literature, or even marketing, not only responds to the cultural milieu, but it helps create it, too.

After I began writing this post, an article was published last week that explains why Big Data isn’t really big data at all; it’s simply what we’ve begun to call data analysis. The article makes some excellent points about the dangers of falling for Big Data without understanding its limitations:

Biases in how data are collected, a lack of context, gaps in what’s gathered, artifacts of how data are processed and the overall cognitive biases that lead even the best researchers to see patterns where there are none mean that “we may be getting drawn into particular kinds of algorithmic illusions,” said MIT Media Lab visiting scholar Kate Crawford. In other words, even if you have big data, it’s not something that Joe in the IT department can tackle—it may require someone with a PhD, or the equivalent amount of experience. And when they’re done, their answer to your problem might be that you don’t need “big data” at all.

We shouldn’t abandon data and data analysis, but we should be more realistic about its possibilities and pitfalls. I’d like to see our love affair with Big Data evolve into something else: an orgy that includes numbers, calculations, emotions, creativity, spontaneity, and risk.

So what does OpenColorado do?

OpenColorado is an organization founded with the idea that government is on the cusp of a transformation that can lead to significant positive change. That change aims to create a govt that is easy-to-use, simple, and beautiful with compelling resources and tools.

OpenColorado supports that work with two core missions:

1) Enable open access to government information (eg crime, health, GIS, and transit data).

2) Host, organize, and partner with others to educate governments and citizens on how to create more transparent, participatory, and collaborative communities.

Much of the inspiration and mission of OpenColorado is influenced by the Govt. 2.0 movement and the work of Tim O’Reilly specifically.

OpenColorado is a little different from some of the other groups working in this area as we are one of the oldest community data catalogs in the world. Additionally, whereas many are state-driven collections, ours is different in that it is community driven.

What resources are available through OpenColorado?

Right now, OpenColorado is home to a federated catalog that hosts data sets that are primarily from municipal governments. Data.OpenColorado.gov is where all the data is collected and it currently is just shy of 700 sets of data. This collection helps to make this information more findable and allows municipalities to create a repository and catalog of their data.

At the moment, most of the information on the site is related to GIS data, but other types are being added all the time.

We are also often engaged with Hackathons in the community. So far, we’ve run one of our own in 2012 and have been involved in others with Denver Startup Week. We were recently just involved with a hackathon run by the city of Longmont that 14 year old, Jackson Roberts won for his app “Longmont Events.”

One of the hackathons that is coming up that we are a sponsor for is the Hack4Colorado event that will be held the weekend of May 31st and that coincides with the National Day of Civic Hacking.

What are some of the reasons that you are involved in hackathons?

The reason hackathons are of benefit is because data is nice, but it has to be applied to make it relevant for most of the public. The hackathons allow us to take open data and make it into web, mobile, and other applications in order to increase the relevance of our data.

The best way we have found to turn that data into tools is through hackathons. However, that is not to say that just a 48 hour work time will get you to a good, complete tool, but it gets you started and it exposes people to the possibilities of this data.

A hackathon is also a good proof of concept for different models of civic engagement. This illustrates to those involved, developers, designers, etc. that they can impact civic engagement and increase community involvement in different ways with the skills they already have.

For example, many developers may not like door knocking or community meetings. However, they still care and they can make a big difference by working with software to build tools that connect the government to the people and vice versa.

How did you get involved in OpenColorado and the open government movement?

First, I was always interested in technology, but having my daughter a few years ago really opened my eyes to how technology could change her life. Based on that realization and my interest in that, I became aware of the the Govt. 2.0 movement. Then, during a project at my day job at the Secretary of State’s office, I was working on a session for an event and was able to bring in leaders from the Govt 2.0 world for that session.

In 2010, another OpenColorado founder, Sean Hudson, went to CityCamp in Chicago and was advised by Tim O’Reilly to implement Sean’s idea to create a community data and idea sharing platform In June of 2010, Sean, myself, and the other founders Michele Hovet and Scott Primeau launched the first irritation of what would become OpenColorado. And the rest is history.

Are you a developer? What is your background?

I have a background in political science and I am a lawyer. At my Secretary of State job, I mostly I do management consulting. For OpenColorado I handle most of our business development, evangelizing, and partner development.

Being a non-tech person in a tech field, I have always found it interesting and challenging. I can understand the non-tech person’s perspective which means I am skilled at helping to understand the challenges and pitfalls from a user’s perspective. Also, in any space, you need a balance of tech and non tech people to balance things out and create the right tools and solutions. Tech is dependent on the business side of the work as well and I bring that skill set to our work.

In a way, I feel like that is what government has been missing, the business side of managing technology. That is not to say that government should be run as a business, but that more understanding and relations between political science, government, business, etc. will make technology and government more effective.

Also, I love where I am right now. Being in a tech space is exciting and it is where a lot of the cool stuff is happening and where everything is moving, especially for civics since it allows you to provide more services for less costs. In the civic technology space it is really just getting started, we are in on the ground floor at the beginning. This is the start of something important and impactful and will change the way people will live.

In my research of this new functionality and some troubleshooting on how we could apply Universal Analytics across our clients’ sites, I once again stumbled across Google Tag Manager. I’d seen this last platform year, but since I’m a reasonably tech savvy marketer who can write limited HTML and edit template files, I figured I didn’t need to use it.

Plus, I have a team of really smart programmers at my disposal at CK, who can drop in unlimited snippets of javascript in a millisecond, so I don’t have the same constraints as a marketer in a large corporation that is constantly fighting with IT to get their tags added over a 3-month release cycle.

So why this change of heart? Why am I now waxing poetic about Google Tag Manager?

Because it doesn’t matter who you are — Tag Manager makes your life easier as a marketer, as a programmer and as a business!

Who Needs Google Tag Manager?

Marketers

1. Complete control
   No need to corral devs to help you add tags. Want to start tracking something new? As long as you know what you want to track, you can do so in under 2 minutes.
2. Centralized management
   Much like an MCC for Adwords, or the Analytics Account List that displays all of the properties and profiles you manage, Google Tag Manager centralizes all of the tracking codes that you have running on every website into once nice, neat little package.

Programmers

1. Cleaner code
   Even on the simplest e-commerce sites, you have at least 4 to 5 sets of Google tracking code — a snippet for Google Analytics, another for a specific conversion event, and as many Adwords conversion tracking codes as you have conversion opportunities (buy a product, request more information, contact us, etc.). That’s a lot of snippets cluttering up the code base.

   With Google Tag Manager now you just need to enter 1 (one!) snippet under the opening body tag and you are done. All “tags” for analytics, event tracking, adwords, and more are handled by the business through the UI without messing with your code. Plus, if the business folks ever do get in hot water, you have a complete revision history in the interface, allowing you to isolate the problem and fix it quickly, and easily.

2. Fewer stalkers
   No one likes being stalked by me — let’s just put that out there front and center. Screw chat, sending polite emails or leaving someone a voicemail. If I need something done, like RIGHT NOW, I’ll wait at your desk until you have time to talk to me and help solve the problem. Not necessarily the most PC approach, but very effective. So devs rejoice! There’s now one fewer reason for me to stalk you.
   

Businesses

1. Greater efficiency
   No more marketing teams chasing developers, and developers stopping work on other revenue-generating products to add some simple javascript. Tag Manager gives your staff the tools they need to do their jobs, and will free up time spent in cross-functional meetings (now rendered unnecessary).
2. Look like a rockstar
   Not only will you be able to manage your client’s web presences and marketing efforts more closely, but you’ll also look like a rockstar when your clients have questions. No need to search through the code to see what’s running where, or log into Adwords, Analytics and any third-party tracking companies’ interfaces to get an answer. You can see it all in the one interface. Any quicker response times equals happier clients and more time to focus on business development.

Get Started

Here’s some great information from Google on how to migrate your sites to Google Tag Manager.

And for all of you advanced users, has a great reference post on how to use macros to track analytics events with GTM.

We just started porting client sites to Google Tag Manager today, but will check back in and provide you the low down as we do more complicated implementations using macros.

Difference Between Tag Manager and UTM Tags

Now you know why you have to start using Google Tag Manager, note one important thing: Tag Manager does NOT manage your campaign-level UTM tags. You still need to create those, and keep track of them however you have in the past.

Maybe an integrated tagging platform that combines implementation of web tags and management of custom campaign tags will be phase 2, Google?

Turning Professional Humiliation on Its Head

I bombed my first technical interview. It might be the most humiliating professional thing to happen to me. Actually, it might be the most humiliating thing to happen to me, ever.

I had just finished an 11-week intensive course to learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails. I was looking for my first coding job, and the company knew my newbie status. However, I myself did not fully understand my newbie status. After all, I’d already had a career — I’m 36. I’ve managed teams, brokered deals, sat at the table of some really important meetings and I’m good at what I do– in advertising. I’ve earned my stripes– in advertising. I was a total noob as a programmer.

And so there I was, Little Miss Accomplished, completely freaking out — sweaty palms, elevated heart rate, and not a clue as to how to answer the two Sr. Developers’ question about Active Record. And the worst part of it all — I knew the answer. I definitely learned the answer in class. I definitely used the answer on a regular basis. But the answer was stuck somewhere between my emotional state of panic and fear.

And so, I hung up the phone. And cried. And sure enough, a little while later, I got the call: they loved me. I was a great cultural fit. However, my technical skills were not where they needed to be, so they passed on hiring me.

I didn’t blame them. I would have passed me over too.

Technical Interviews are no joke. And they are a very real way that companies hire developers. So what should a newbie do?

Well, here is what I did — I went out and talked to Hiring Managers and Sr. Developers. Found out what they were looking for, and learned their tips and tricks for acing a technical interview and how NOT TO PANIC. And now, I’m sharing that knowledge with other women in technology through LadyCoders Boulder.

On May 4 – 5th at Google Boulder, LadyCoders Boulder is holding a Bootcamp. On the first day, Spotify is coming out to demonstrate their technical interview process with their lead recruiter and a Sr. Developer. I plan to have whiteboards for all attendees, and we are going to do this!

The seminar is over two days because while technical interviews are the holy grail for getting the job — there are so many other aspects to tech careers too. We plan to cover them all — resumes, LinkedIn, negotiating a raise, starting a business, networking effectively and my personal favorite — building confidence and risk.

Also, this is not just for ladies, everyone truly is welcome.

And yes, I did get a job coding. You can find me at Commerce Kitchen slaying Rails applications with my fellow Super Heros.

That just about sums it up.

Stay tuned for a post on Twitter’s new keyword targeted ads.

Commerce Kitchen is a fully integrated web shop. We do Rails development, CMS (Content Management System) manipulation, inbound marketing and SEO, and we can even provide IT support from our friends at Lark. Because of this, we have a lot of lingo and buzzwords zipping around, some of which we don’t all understand.

I found myself speaking ‘developer talk’ last week among some marketing folks and realized we needed a connection. The topic of the conversation was custom CMSs for Rails apps compared to some CMS gems we had researched a few months back. The question from the marketing team was: what is a gem?

Ruby Guides describes it fairly well, labeling it a ‘software package’ that you can bring into your application and manipulate on your system. Gems provide awesome tools to add to your toolbox, and there are many out there. You need to be careful about which gems you choose though; even if a gem may do all the things you are looking for, when was the last time it was updated? What systems is it running on? Is there good documentation from the developer? Once you have done your due diligence, you can choose that particular (or many) gems to install on your system, requiring it in your gemfile and doing a bundle install. Mind you, you will need to have bundler installed first in order for this to work properly (you can do this by typing `gem install bundler` in your command line).

Making this connection was interesting because when we were discussing what a gem was, one of my co-workers made the comparison to a WordPress plugin. With a plugin on WordPress, you can find additional functionality to your blog, e.g. wp-touch which allows you to install the plugin and have a mobile-friendly theme ready to go. You can do this by either downloading the file and uploading into WordPress and activating it, or you can use the WordPress UI with a simple search.

Now, this is definitely not an apples-to-apples comparison, as WordPress plugins give you a really nice UI to work with for easy integration. Rubygems extend what you can do in Ruby and can provide nice abstractions for dealing with complex tasks, but you still have to integrate with them in the code itself.

Another comparison is Excel Macros. If you are an advanced Excel user, you may want to add functionality to use across your projects and spreadsheets, but without repeating steps each time so things stay DRY. You can accomplish this by encapsulating the functionality you need into repeatable macros that manipulate your data. This is similar to a Ruby Gem as you are working with the code to extend the capabilities of Excel, but you still have tell Excel where and when to apply the macro.

See how much fun technology can be? We can find ourselves geeking out in one fashion or another all the time, whether it be a developer, a marketer, and ITer or just a plain nerd. Hope this helps clarify some things for you all. If you’re in Colorado, stay warm with this wet spring snow!

We like to be completely transparent about what we do and share with other businesses our process. This keeps things interesting, teaches everyone a little something, and helps all of us do a bit better online.

Today I launched two ads, targeting C-levels and directors at businesses in Canada and the United States. Kind of broad, huh?

I don’t know about you, but those images look terrible on my retina display. The size of the images used in LinkedIn ads and Twitter avatars tends to appear really grainy and awful on my screen.

I’m using the same headline on both of our ads: Be and Do Better Online. We’re experimenting with this tagline. It unites our desires for other businesses with our superhero theme.

All ads are currently going to our homepage because I am doing broad targeting rather than specific web development or marketing targeting. We like to pride ourselves on integrating SEO knowledge with web dev, so I wanted to go for that idea with these ads.

I’ve set our budget at a mere $20 per day, with a CPC (cost per click) of $2.01. LinkedIn sent me a coupon for $50, so that was why we were finally enticed to try. See? Discounts and coupons really work!

I’ll update you all weekly on how our LinkedIn ads are performing, what kind of traffic we’re getting from them, how they’re converting, and how much they cost.

For all you out there interested in doing well online, the only way to guarantee long term success in search is to create a good product, reach out to the appropriate audience, and engage with a community that will be interested in what you have to offer.

That’s it. It’s simple, it’s time consuming, and it’s not something you can pay someone a couple hundred bucks to do for you. With that said, many small business owners have tried to rank well with cheap and unsustainable tactics.

Several years ago an effective way to rank higher in search was to pay an SEO company very little money to spam the Internet with links to your site. They’d create blogs like this, write crappy articles, and link to you. Boom.

Google thought, hey, you must be popular since so many people link to your site. Poor Google was like a kid in middle-school, assuming that the guy with the coolest clothes was automatically worth the popularity.

But then Google went through puberty, got a little bit of life experience, and realized that popularity has to be earned. You have to create something that real people care about in order for Google to take you seriously.

The authority of those fake links (i.e. links created by an SEO company and not by a person who actually respects you) began to crumble, and sites that were doing well in search began to plummet.

If you’re one of those people, if you’re a small business owner who had effective, if slightly unethical, SEOs generating thousands of low-quality links for you and you find yourself slipping in search, here are some tips for rescuing yourself from bad link building.

Disavow Your Bad Links

Google doesn’t want you to suffer if you’re willing to change your evil link-building ways. So they’ve created the disavow tool, which allows you to tell them which links you don’t want them to look at any more.

They prefer for you to ask the webmaster of the site with the bad link to remove you first, but since most of these sites are cloaked in anonymity, it’s nearly impossible to do.

In fact, you may not even know what your old SEO did. But you can get an idea. Make sure you have access to your Webmaster Tools.

In the traffic section of your dashboard, you can view incoming links to your site. When we go through the disavow process for a new client, we download the entire list of incoming links, then we carefully try to find out why the site is being penalized in search.

Go through these links one by one. How is the link placed? Is it in an article that’s unrelated to your product? Is it part of a long list of links that don’t seem to be related or relevant to the rest of the content of the site?

Often your link will be in a blog post that is so poorly written that it’ll become clear to you that even if your SEO company was based in the U.S. or the U.K., they outsourced link building abroad.

Curious what bad links actually look like? Check out this blog post:

Um, what?

I feel bad for Mark Gray, the Australian photographer who hired this SEO firm to build links for him. Mr. Gray, please add this link to your disavow list.

For more information on how to disavow links, check out Google’s instructions. If you don’t feel comfortable using this “advanced feature” contact us and we can talk about working with you to disavow.

Now Build Good Links

Now that you’ve disavowed those hundreds or thousands of links, you’ll need to get some good, high quality links. There are many ways to do this, and I recommend checking out my post Offsite SEO in Five Hours a Week to get some more ideas.

But for the sake of not making you click around too much, here are a few ideas for building good links. And technically you can’t really “build” links. What it comes down to is creating something interesting, interacting with the appropriate people, and being willing to give a little.

Create Something Interesting

Your product or service is probably pretty interesting to you, but that alone may not get attention. I like to use Commerce Kitchen as an example here. We are a Denver web development and internet marketing shop. Great, right? But it’s not a unique service in Colorado. Denver is a big tech hub, and while our approach is what makes us stand apart, we’ve had to showcase ourselves by creating something different and interesting.

Recently we built a very simple web application that takes quotes from director and writer Joss Whedon, who has a very excitable cult following, and turned them into an ipsum generator.

Because many of us at Commerce Kitchen are huge Joss Whedon fans, it was a fun project for us. And, guess what? It got us almost 300 real links that we didn’t have to ask anyone for. Those links will never be penalized by Google because they come from real people sharing a real product.

If you’re reading this blog post, there’s a good chance you’re not a web developer, so you’re not going to be able to build an app like Whedon Ipsum (though you could hire someone like us to!). But I’m sure there is something creative and interesting that your team could put together if you can’t yet afford to hire an ethical internet marketing firm.

Interact With Influencers

Even if you’ve created something great, no one will know about it unless you share it with the right people. When we created Whedon Ipsum, we tweeted it and tagged Whedonesque in the tweet, because we know they’re influential. How did we know that? We did our research.

However, don’t assume that you should tag every influential person in every tweet that you post. Please don’t do that. Instead, begin by interacting with people who inspire you in your community and industry. Build trust with them by starring their tweets, responding to their blog posts, and being a good online friend to them.

For more details on how to do this, check out my blog post on interacting with bloggers. Your goal should be to build your community and make connections. It’s an extension of networking, something that all business owners should do.

If you’ve built trust with your online community, then they’re more willing to share your blogs, post about your upcoming events, or tell their followers about the fun or interesting things you’ve created.

Be Willing to Give

Finally, to get good links you’ve got to be willing to give. Sponsor charitable events, throw online fundraisers, give away your product for free, or give regularly to your favorite nonprofit. This is good for the world and good for your business.

Currently Commerce Kitchen is running an Office Dogs to Watch contest, and we’re donating $10 per entry to Freedom Service Dogs. Admittedly we haven’t gotten a ton of links for this project (maybe four or five), but giving to an organization that we like is just as important to us as getting links back to our site.

As far as giving away your product or service for free, this can be a great way to get good links to your site. Find out who is writing online reviews for products like yours and send them a free sample. Or, give away your service as an online contest.

Commerce Kitchen gave away free SEO setups to Denver-area organizations in exchange for a link on a blog post explaining what we do. Most of the websites we helped were pretty small, and the value of the links wasn’t huge, but it was a nice gesture for our friends and community, and it got us some authentic links.

To summarize this post, in order to rescue yourself from bad link building, you need to first disavow the bad links, then you need to begin to build good links by creating a business that people want to link to and building a community that will support you.

It’s time consuming and it’s not instantaneous. But Google will never penalize you for it, and they’re links that will last. While some SEO firms remove the links they’ve built for you as soon as you’re not longer working with them, this type of link building is long lasting. And it makes the internet a better place.

We’re always looking for organizations who want to be and do better on the Web. If that’s you, contact us and we’ll examine with you how your business can do better online.