Matrix Group International

Month: June 2010

  • What’s So Fun About FourSquare?

    What’s So Fun About FourSquare?

    In my quest to try out new social networks, I signed up for FourSquare last year.  I didn’t start using the service until a couple of months ago, when I get my new Palm Pre and I felt ready to dive into another social network.

    FourSquare is a location-based social network. The idea is that you share your location with your friends and followers by “checking into” locations.  For example, every time I go to a restaurant, I pull up the FourSquare app on my phone, let the app determine my GPS coordinates and show me possible options.  I can select one of the venues select and “check-in” or add a new venue.  When I check in, I can write a little message and share out my update on Facebook and/or Twitter.

    Last Saturday, I checked into four locations, including three restaurants and I got hilarious comments from friends about how all I did on Saturday was eat!

    Here’s what I’m enjoying about FourSquare:

    • I don’t feel compelled to check in multiple times a day, every day. My check-ins are usually to restaurants, but increasingly, I’m checking into events.  Tonight, I checked into the DCWW Content Strategy Workshop held at the Matrix Group office.  I check in only a few times a week, if at all.
    • I love the gaming aspect of FourSquare.  People who have the most check-ins at a specific get a Mayor badge.  So far, I’ve earned a Newbie badge and an Explorer badge.  I’m hoping to become Mayor of one of my favorite restaurants sometime soon!
    • It’s fun to see where my friends are and what they’re doing.
    • FourSquare is not nearly as chatty as Twitter and Facebook.
    • I have learned about so many great, local businesses through FourSquare!
    • Some enterprising retailers are rewarding frequent customers with discount coupons and other goodies.  The retailers are glad for the patronage AND the free advertising from the check-ins!

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  • Moving the Matrix Group Underground to the Foreground

    Moving the Matrix Group Underground to the Foreground

    With all the hiring we’re doing right now, my team decided that we better revisit all of our orientation guides. Orientations work like this at Matrix Group:  we ask staff members from all teams to help with the orientation; we give them an outline and they do the session.  Spreading the orientation schedule around means we cover more in a short period of time and new staff get introduced to all teams in a more meaningful way.

    When we started reviewing our existing guides, we found that the majority of them were too sparse. If you were lucky enough to do orientation with an earnest old-timer, you got lucky; otherwise, lots of things were missed.

    So a bunch of sat down, revisited topics, and came up with 2-4 page guides for each topic.  Each topic has a sub-topic and talking points + specific things to cover.  The guides are working out very, very well.

    One new thing we decided to create is a “Matrix Underground” guide, or the things you should know but nobody every tells you. We realized that it’s things on this guide that tend to trip people up or leave people bewildered.  For example, there are expressions that we expect people to know, acronyms,  and Joanna-isms that a person could take years to figure out.

    Most things on the guide are funny, but some are dead serious.  Some examples:

    • Sumner is the part-timer on the MatrixMaxx team who works in the afternoons (recent hires said they spent six months trying to figure out who the heck Sumner is).
    • When Joanna says “can you do me a favor?” or “I need something from you,” it means “she needs something done NOW, not tomorrow, not next week, now.”
    • When someone says “the cheese has moved,” it refers to the book “Who Moved My Cheese?” that we read as a company several years ago and it means “dude, the situation has changed, let’s move along and get over it.”

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  • What’s Behind Those Long URLs? Tracking Codes, Of Course!

    What’s Behind Those Long URLs? Tracking Codes, Of Course!

    Every day around 3pm, I get my afternoon update of The Washington Post via e-mail.  Each update contains a summary of about a dozen stories and links to the full story on the Post Web site.  Every time I get an update from Facebook about a message from a friend or a comment on one of my updates, I get a URL to click on.

    Have you ever noticed how long these Web addresses are?  Ever wonder why these URL are so long?

    The answer is simple: tracking codes. Tracking codes are strings of text added to the end of a URL that let you track the source of a click.  For example, if your organization has an e-mail newsletter and you want to know how many people click on the links in your e-mails, you add tracking codes to the URLs.  Your usage tracking software will almost always treat the URLs with the tracking codes as unique from the same URLs without the tracking codes.  So, when looking at your usage reports, you can look at usage overall to specific pages and then figure out how much of the traffic came from the e-mail newsletter.

    If you usage Google Analytics for usage tracking, Google has a terrific URL builder that create properly formatted tracking codes to track the source of clicks, specific campaigns, even the duration of your campaign.  Here’s an example of how it works:

    Let’s take the URL to my recent blog post on magazine subscriptions on the iPad.  The URL looks like this if I navigate directly to it:
    http://www.thematrixfiles.net/blog/am-i-really-going-to-pay-4-99-for-one-issue-of-time-magazine/

    When my marketing team promotes this blog post e-mails, Twitter, Facebook, etc., we use the Google URL builder to add tracking codes.  Here’s a sample URL:
    http://www.thematrixfiles.net/blog/am-i-really-going-to-pay-4-99-for-one-issue-of-time-magazine/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=SM&utm_campaign=ceoblog
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  • Am I Really Going to Pay $4.99 for One Issue of Time Magazine?

    Am I Really Going to Pay $4.99 for One Issue of Time Magazine?

    I blogged last week about how excited I am that some of my favorite magazines are now available on the iPad.  Last week, I discovered that TIME Magazine has a free iPad app.  Turns out, the app is free, but issues are not.  Each issue is $4.99.  $4.99!  When a print subscription is $20 through Amazon!

    A recent article in Ad Age Daily tries to explain why we should expect to pay more for online subscriptions on the iPad.  According to Ad Age, we should expect to pay $4.99 for an issue of TIME, Popular Science, Maxim, Popular Photography, Sound and Vision, Transworld Skateboarding and Islands because publishers are suffering, there are fewer tablet PC owners, and magazines are still burdened by their huge editorial costs.

    But here’s the rub: I purchased an issue of TIME for $4.99 and discovered that the content was the same as my print issue!  C’mon, TIME.  I pay about $0.50 for a print issue, but you want me to pay $4.99 for the same thing!  If you’re going to charge me a whole lot more, I expect a different experience and additional content I can’t get elsewhere.

    This reminds me of publishers that put up PDF versions of their print publications and post them to the Web site.  It’s easy to do and gets the job done.  Problem is, the Web is a different medium from print.  Have you ever tried to read a PDF of a print magazine?  Try going from page 2 to page 36 on a Web browser.  Try reading a two-column page that scrolls up and down past two screens on a monitor.    And now companies are putting out software that will take print files and convert them to iPad apps!  Once again, ignoring the usability and user experience capabilities of the device and merely re-purposing content.  How does this create value?
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