Internet Marketing Blog

Introduction To Flickr Video

This is a video introduction and demonstration conducted by my friend Ann Treacy of Yahoo!'s photo sharing site, Flickr:

Emoticons - An Essential Online Communication Tool :-)

Emoticons
Originally uploaded by d.rex

The humble smilely face :-) emoticon [and it's opposite: :-( ] turn 25 years old today.

The text symbol for happiness,  approval, and humor was invented by Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman twenty five years ago today as a tool to avoid misunderstanding of text-based online communication within emails and online forums by clarifying that the writer intended the preceding text to be a joke or ironic.

The smiley face and frowning emoticon inspired many more emoticons, which have now become standard practice for clarifying online text-based messages used in emails, online forums, chat rooms and instant messaging, and text messaging.

Though the use of them might seem cute, silly, or juvenile at times, as anyone who has had an email disasterously misunderstood can testify, emoticons are an essential tool for clear communication. Though the emoticon was invented for use in old school email and obsolete Usenet newsgroups, they will not be fading away anytime soon in the multimedia age. They remain a central component of clear communication not just for email, chat rooms, and instant messaging, but also and increasingly within mobile communication mediums such as text messaging.

Do not think of emoticons as something just the kids use. They can certainly be a great device to use in marketing campaigns targeted at younger demographics, but properly and appropriately used, they can be an essential tool in delivering a crystal clear marketing message to any audience.

Emoticon Examples

Internet Branding With Icons

Some time ago I was scrolling through my Twitter friends list on my smart phone and the importance of icons suddenly became obvious.

I was frustrated because I was trying to find a particular friend but his Twitter account had the default logo; he hadn't yet customized it. I couldn't find him at a glance. I had to click on each of the people in my friends list who had default icons until I found the friend for whom I was looking.

Time is the one thing everyone has the least of, so when yours is wasted, you tend to get annoyed. It's worse on mobile devices because they generally have slower Internet connections. Because the screen is so small, there is less information available to you at a glance and you therefore have to wade through more of it until you find what you are looking for.

Customized icons are a usability issue and a branding tool. A customized icon allows your audience to identify your content at a glance and with ease. I may love your content and want to consume it but scanning text for it takes much longer than recognizing your graphical icon.

If you're using a tabbed browser, look up at the open tab and you'll see my icon: a gold letter e on a white background with a thin gold border. Look at your browser's address bar and you'll see that very same icon to the left of the http:// part of this blog's URL.

The following is a screenshot of my personal twitter page with my friends list on the right. See how long it takes you to find the e-strategy.com "e" icon among my friends:

Blog Branding With Favicons

For all intents and purposes, favicons are no different from the icons I've been talking about.  (Wikipedia provides a full explanation of favicons.)

It is particularly important to use favicons with your blog because it helps brand your content offsite through RSS distribution.  In Minnesota, we have a local blog aggregator hosted by the MNSpeaks site. The MNSpeak aggregator recognizes when you update your blog and then includes a summary of and a link to your blog post among it's recently updated blogs list. The following graphic shows a portion of that aggregator with a listing from this blog. The orange icons are the default icon for Google's Blogger platform.

Many people subscribe to their favorite blogs through custom start pages such as MyYahoo. This is an example of how a subscription to e-strategy.com's Internet Marketing Blog looks on MyYahoo.

Popular feed readers like Bloglines use icons to identify source blogs:

Finally, the icon can help identify your content on the primary tool people use every time they go online, the browser. If someone bookmarks your site, the icon will display next to your listing in their bookmarks:

Tabbed browsing is now a standard feature of all browsers. The icon will display on tabs, as well, so it is a great tool for helping your visitor quickly identify your content amongst the pages she has open. The following screenshot shows a browser with many tabs open. The orange icons are blogs that use the default Blogger favicon; the blue and white icons are the default favicon for TypePad blogs; this blog is located on the tab furthest to the left:

So How Do I Do It?

I've convinced you of the importance of using icons, you probably want to know how to do it.  thesitewizard.com provides an excellent tutorial about how to create and implement a favicon.

The favicon works for your blog or web site, but you'll need to create a .jpg or .gif graphic to use with services such as Twitter and other web services like MySpace and Flickr and Technorati. The graphic's dimensions vary with each service and they will usually tell you at the upload step the dimensions they require. If not, check their documentation. A stretched out graphic can look pretty bad, so you'll want to comply with their size requirements.

Finally, if you use the Feedburner RSS service, be sure to optimize your feed with your graphic because that's where services like MyYahoo and Bloglines find your icon.

Barry Bonds & The Flickr Effect - The End Of Iconography

As I was reading the coverage of Barry Bonds surpassing Hank Aaron as Major League Baseball's Home Run King, it became to me that there was not one single defining photograph of him that captured his historic achievement. From our two local papers here in the Twin Cities, the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press, to Major League Baseball, ESPN, Fox Sports, Sports Illustrated, and The Sporting News, they all used a variety of photos of Bonds to illustrate the story. Check out the Newseum's Today's Papers section and you'll find the same.

When I think of Hank Aaron surpassing Babe Ruth as the career home runs leader with his 715th bomb, I think of one image and one image only:

Since the invention of photography, every era in our history has had certain iconic images associated with it that helped define, in a glance, that era. The same holds true for many of our most significant historic events or moments.

The slide show below features iconic photographs from our nation's history

Flickr Slide Show Of Iconic Photography

(See below for links to full-sized photos)

As I was scrolling through Barry Bonds Flickr photos today, it occurred to me that Flickr has pounded the last nail in iconography's coffin. The Flickr Effect obliterates mass appeal through the volume and the dissolution of attention its RSS distribution system enables.

From here on out, I think it will be rare that a single image will become iconic by defining an event or era.

The environment for icons was much more friendly when we had three television networks, a couple of national newspapers, and a handful of weekly news magazines.

The death of iconic images has been coming for some time. It started with the expansion of news media outlets by the introduction of cable television and it continued when the avenues through which people consumed news expanded dramatically with the popularity of the Web. But it exploded with the rise of blogs, low cost digital cameras, citizen journalism, and the distribution platforms of Flickr and other photo sharing sites.

Mass media is dead. Because we get our news through such a vast array of sources, it is virtually impossible for one news organization to capture a large enough percentage of public for an iconic image to emerge.

It is certainly possible for an image to gain enough popular appeal to become an icon; it's just not likely.

Take 9/11. Surely the burning of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center was an iconic image. Everyone can close their eyes and see that image in their mind's eye. But there is not one single photograph that is the icon. There was so much coverage from so many different sources that the photographic library of the attack was too voluminous, photos of the buildings were taken from so many different angles, that no single image ever had a chance to emerge as an icon.

The death of the icon is due to too much. Too much volume and too many sources.

Links to the Full-Size Photos Featured in the Slide Show:

The first photo is, of course, Abraham Lincoln, the iconic figure of the Civil War era. The Jesse James Gang and other outlaw photographs are emblematic of the post Civil War Wild West era. Wilbur and Orville Wright's first flight represent the 1900s.  The Roaring Twenties and Jazz Age are captured by the famous photo of jazz singer Josephine Baker. The photo of a migrant mother captures the Great Depression of the 1930s in all its anguish, desperation, and poverty. The Hindenburg disaster marked one of the most indelible word wide media events of the modern age. A photo of a lynching captures a national sin. The St. Valentines Day Massacre dramatically illustrates the gangsterism of the prohibition era. In the 1940s, we fought and won World War II and we re-elected a president, though some were not quite sure.  The 1950s are captured by Marilyn Monroe holding down her skirt in The Seven Year Itch. The turbulence of the sixties included the assassination of a president, controversy, sorrow, a new president, the struggle for civil rights, cultural change, the conquering of space, and a long and unpopular war. The student pro-democracy protesters in China's Tiananmen Square marked a turning point in world history. The famine in Sudan was dramatically illustrated by a vulture hovering over a dying child.

See also:

• Barry B*nds Supplants Hank Aaron As Home Run King
• Barry Bonds Breaks Hank Aaron's Career Home Run Record
• Barry Bonds Passes Babe Ruth