People@Ephox

People@Ephox brings together both official and unofficial blogs about Ephox. The aim is to provide a central place to learn about the people, products and culture of Ephox.

Providing User Friendly Style Names

Ephox Developer Resources - June 30, 2009 02:00 PM

EditLive! will automatically detect custom styles from your stylesheet and display them in the styles drop down. In some cases it may be desirable to provide a more user friendly name than the actual stylesheet uses. This is achieved by adding the style to the configuration file.

Under the styles combo box element, simply add an extra <comboBoxItem> element for your style.  The “name” attribute should match the CSS selector exactly (eg: a.moreLinks or .myStyle). The value of the text attribute will be displayed to authors in the styles drop down.  For example:

<toolbarComboBox name="Style">
 <comboBoxItem name="P"/>
 <comboBoxItem name="H1"/>
 <comboBoxItem name="H2"/>
 <comboBoxItem name="H3"/>
 <comboBoxItem name="H4"/>
 <comboBoxItem name="H5"/>
 <comboBoxItem name="H6"/>
 <comboBoxItem name="PRE" />
 <comboBoxItem name="a.moreLinks" text="More Links" />
</toolbarComboBox>

Note that styles in the configuration file will appear in the styles drop down even if they are not present in the stylesheet.

Bayside House For Sale

Robert Dawson - June 30, 2009 01:26 AM

My father-in-law is experimenting with selling his home privately. I’m not sure how it will go, but it will be interesting to see how the internet helps make it all happen. He’s started with an early launch of the website, before sending it out to some of the relevant Real Estate sites soon.

If you are interested in having a look at the site he put together, or if you are interested in buying a house in the coastal suburb of Wynnum, in Brisbane, Australia, take a look at Bayside House For Sale.

Webinar: Effective Content Management for Portal and Quickr Environments

Ephox Weblog - June 29, 2009 11:54 PM

Stupidity

Adrian Sutton - June 29, 2009 03:09 PM

I think this photo more than any other symbolizes stupidity. It was taken quickly on a first generation iPhone so if you can’t see clearly what’s wrong, it’s a photo of our new screw driver set. The packaging includes a clear plastic overlay which, you guessed it, is screwed down.

That would be just normal stupidity except for the fact that the package is advertised as a DIY getting started pack, containing the essentials to get you started. Except of course, now you need the DIY getting started pack, opener pack. It’s beginning to sound like an enterprise software sale…

Why The iPhone Has Succeeded

Adrian Sutton - June 26, 2009 08:00 PM

Stephen O’Grady:

Remember that, at its core, the iPhone offers not a whole lot more than a phone, browser, camera, iPod and GPS. Which, ok, is kind of impressive. But not truly differentiating, Apple’s acknowledged strength in user experiences aside. As good and smart as Apple is at design – and they are very, very good – they’re never going to be as good and smart as everyone else. We see this in the enterprise world frequently, where vendors that foster an ecosystem succeed and those that don’t, well, don’t. But we haven’t seen too many examples of this play out in the consumer world yet, which is one of the reasons the iPhone is such an interesting platform. With the App Store, Apple’s attempting to cement its role with a community play.

I find it interesting that everyone holds up the App Store as the key reason for the iPhone being successful – the key differentiating factor. Has everyone forgotten that the iPhone originally launched with no developer SDK at all and how well did that go? That’s right, it was a massive success.

The iPhone is not succeeding purely because of the App Store, in fact it could just as easily be the opposite – the App Store is succeeding because the iPhone is so popular. There’s nothing simple about developing for the iPhone – you have to learn Objective-C and Cocoa Touch, you have to pay to get involved at all and you don’t know if you’ll be allowed to ship your app until after you finish it and submit it to Apple. So why do people do it? Because there are a huge number of iPhone users out there.

In the short time the iPhone has been out, people have simply forgotten how revolutionary the phone and Apple software that comes with it actually is. The third party apps are just very tasty icing on top.

Phishing Spam Fail

Robert Dawson - June 25, 2009 12:41 AM

 

I always find the latest incarnations of phishing spam entertaining.  I almost clicked on one of the fake facebook links a while ago, but really wasn't at all tempted to click on the links in the one that came in today..

Yes, I am looking at that message in Mail.app, and viewing the source did show that the link didn't go to where it said it would go.

EditLive! for Quickr 1.0.5.93

Ephox Releases - June 24, 2009 11:59 PM

Includes EditLive! version 6.7.2.46.

Bug Fixes

• When using Quickr 8.1.1 and IE6, Installing the EditLive! integration caused the page to continuously reload until the browser ran out of memory

EditLive! for LWCM 6+ 3.3.2.195

Ephox Releases - June 23, 2009 11:22 PM

Includes EditLive! version 6.7.2.46.

Bug Fixes

• Empty P tag was inserted when saving an empty document
• Usernames with single quotes caused javascript exceptions

In the News at Econtent Magazine: Compelling Compliance - Bringing Digital Content Up-to-Code

Ephox Weblog - June 23, 2009 10:39 PM

Econtent Magazine covers Ephox’s accessibility technology in the June 2009 feature story:

Compelling Compliance: Bringing Digital Content Up-to-Code

Econtent Magazine by Jessica Dye
June 2009

“We believe that accessibility will become increasingly important, particularly as the population ages and companies seek to create webpages that give them broader market penetration and commercial advantages,” says Damien Fitzpatrick, director of products for Ephox Corp., a company that makes content compliance tools such as EditLive!. “The Target case serves as an important warning of the legal requirements for accessibility for all websites, not just government sites.”

Getting the User's Name

Ephox Developer Resources - June 23, 2009 02:00 PM

When building plugins, it can be useful to know the user’s name, like the track changes functionality does. There are two key parts to this:

1. Retrieving the current user name
2. Prompting the user for their name if one hasn’t already been set

Retrieving the Current User Name

The current user name can easily be retrieved from the OperationManager - the class that manages all the track changes data:

String username = editliveBean.getOperationManager().getUsername();

In some situations however, the username may be returned as null.  This occurs when the username has not been previously set. In that case we need to prompt for the user name.

Prompting the User for Their Name

While you could just display your own custom dialog to ask the user for their name, if they later used track changes they would be prompted a second time.  By reusing the same dialog the user name will be set once and used whenever it’s needed. To do this, simply fire the TextEvent.SET_USERNAME event with null as the extra string:

editliveBean.raiseEvent(new TextEvent(this, TextEvent.SET_USERNAME, null, -1));

Once the method returns, retrieve the username from the operation manager as normal.

It is possible for the user to cancel the dialog that asks them for their name.  If the username is still returned as null after firing the SET_USERNAME event, you should either proceed without a username or cancel the operation.

I’m hearing double…

Dylan Just - June 22, 2009 10:59 AM

The internet, bringer of wonderful things

Andrew Herron - June 18, 2009 09:27 AM

Searching to load apps has always seemed weird to me

Andrew Herron - June 17, 2009 01:14 PM

Apple airport express’s join a wireless network feature

Suneth Mendis - June 13, 2009 08:50 AM

I can see many of you go “HUH?!” looking at the title of this post… You are not alone, because this is an undocumented feature of Apple Airport Express (AE). Quite a handy one too.  For the longest time I was looking for a way to share my wife’s laser printer over the network. The [...]

XML shorthand

Dylan Just - May 24, 2009 10:56 PM

Andrew Roberts - April 18, 2009 02:36 PM

Unifying Ideas

Suneth Mendis - April 03, 2009 03:14 AM

Introduction to a world of frustrations Social networking is extremely useful in our modern day context. Being thousands of miles away from family and friends, I have integrated social networking into my daily routine. However, the technologies and concepts that drive social networking is changing rapidly. While existing ideas are improved and remodelled to fit into [...]

FIXED: No Sound on Bootcamp in VMWare Fusion

Damien Fitzpatrick - March 31, 2009 03:56 AM

“YES!  FINALLY! FIXED!!!!”  

That’s what I sounded like when I finally managed to fix my sound issue on my Bootcamp partition with VMWare Fusion.

Sometime during one of my updates to VMWare or Windows XP somehow my sound stopped working when I accessed my Bootcamp partition via VMWare.  Ever since I’ve been battling with Bootcamp and VMWare to get the sound working again and finally I’ve done it.  

While I found numerous suggested solutions on forums and web sites none of them worked for me, so I thought I should document the solution that worked for me here…

The Problem

When using my Bootcamp partition via VMWare Fusion 2.0.2 there was no sound.  Despite the (software) sound card being connected and the sound icon in the bottom right of VMWare’s window lighting up (showing that it was receiving XP’s sounds) there was no sound no matter what I tried.

The Solution

The solution that I believe worked for me in the end was two part:

• Rollback a sound driver update; and
• Delete and reinstall the Bootcamp partition from the VMWare 

Rolling Back the Sound Driver Update

Firstly I rolled back a soundcard driver update that occurred via Windows Update.  The instructions on how to do this can be found on the VMWare Community web site in the article called “Audio Driver Bug in VMWare Fusion 2.0”

Delete and Reinstall the Bootcamp Partition in VMWare

After rolling back the driver, I then removed the Bootcamp partition from my list of VMs and then reinstalled it.  This appeared to force VMWare to reinstall all the drivers it needed into the VM.

The default settings of VMWare Fusion do not allow you to remove a Bootcamp partition from the list of available VMs.  In order to make the Bootcamp item delete-able you will need to exit Fusion and then run this command in the Terminal:

sudo mv "/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator" "/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator.bak"

(Thanks to the post from WoodyZ in the VMWare forums for this - http://communities.vmware.com/thread/200649) 

When you start Fusion up again the Bootcamp item can now be deleted via the right-click/context menu.

Once I had deleted the Bootcamp item I restarted VMWare Fusion once more for good measure and then re-installed the Bootcamp VM via the normal VMWare interface for this.  

And now the sound works!!!!

Finally…Thank You

Thanks to all those on the VMWare forums whose responses helped me track down a solution to this most annoying problem, I wouldn’t have gotten it working without you!

A Black Hole for Feedback

Damien Fitzpatrick - March 30, 2009 02:16 AM

Last week I was called a “bit of a black hole for feedback - in the nicest possible way”  by our acerbically humoured CTO Adrian Sutton.  I’ve been working with Adrian for many years now, and I find his perspectives forthright and valuable and often they lead to some manner of introspection - hence this blog post.

Before I embark on a journey of introspection though I think some exposition is warranted.  The “black hole” remark came up as Adrian and I were exchanging emails about how best to improve our ability to track the veritable mountain of feedback that we receive from staff, clients, prospective clients, business partners and many others.  This has become an increasingly important issue as the company has expanded and we seek to move from product design with heuristics to formal systems and processes in order to better cope with our growth.

Ephox is now a global enterprise software company, with several major OEM partnerships, a large number of clients in the Fortune 1000 and offices on three continents.  At the same time as this expansion has been happening we’re having an increasing number of conversations with our clients.  Adrian, Michael Fromin (my US-based counterpart) and myself talk with clients at every opportunity to discover how Ephox can provide them with better solutions to their content creation problems.  Hence the mountain of feedback.

And this feedback is important!  As a product company Ephox lives and dies by its ability to deliver solutions that the market wants - request and feature management is a key part of this.  In the very beginning we determined what functionality to implement by looking at similar applications to EditLive! in the desktop space.  We outgrew this eventually EditLive! matured and the requirements of a specialty web-based editor diverged from that of the desktop one around EditLive! version 4.0.  By that time our second feature management system was in place.  It was called “the product manager with a spreadsheet”.  This system worked surprisingly well, even if I do say so myself, and gave us the basis of what we use today.  Today the system has evolved and both components have received some decent upgrades and is now called “the Director of Products with JIRA”.  [For the record I am simplifying here, there are more people and systems involved in this…but that just doesn’t make for a good story, and it is still a good analogy.]

Overall, I think that Ephox does a great job of tracking user feedback.  We get a great deal of feedback from all of the sources I’ve mentioned previously and all feature requests are tracked in detail, prioritized and reviewed during every release planning phase.  Yes this is time consuming but it is absolutely worth it, and to be honest I for one take great satisfaction in knowing we’re delivering functionality that our customers want and need.

Unfortunately though, in certain cases this system is not coping.  For what it’s worth JIRA does a fantastic job of tracking discrete issues.  While it’s “clicky” user interface may drive me nuts some days (I hope someone from Atlassian’s reading this) for the most part it does its job very well.  To Adrian’s point though I think it’s the other part of the system that’s currently not as effective as it used to be.  

The problem lies with the high level feedback.  Those things that aren’t exactly features or specific requests but things more along the lines of someone saying, “you know, I think EditLive! could do more for authoring for mobile browsers.”  Right now, those ideas are on paper, mind maps and spreadsheets.  They are then centralized and processed in my head…which is unfortunately not a globally available system with 99% uptime.

So, I think it’s time for Director of Products 2.0.  So over the next few weeks I’m going to try and upgrade our feature management to be something more like “Product Management Team with JIRA and some web 2.0 collaborative applications.”  I’ll keep you posted.

JRE Upgrade kills Accessibility Bridge

Brett Henderson - March 26, 2009 05:01 AM

We are currently doing an Accessibility audit of our Java Applet EditLive! prior to a new release. To do this, we are using

• JAWS - the most common Windows screen reader
• Java Accessibility Bridge – required to use a screen reader on Windows

The test platform is Windows XP running JRE6u7 with Java Accessibility Bridge 2.0.1 and JAWS 10.0.1139 installed.

When JAWS was activated after installing the Bridge, the screen reader output the details as I navigated around the Java Applet. So it read the menu names, dialog fields, the keys entered while typing etc.

When I upgraded JRE to JREu11, not only did JAWS no longer read out the menu and field names but cursor movements no longer work at all. That is to say, you can no longer navigate through the entered content in the editor. It appeared as if the cursor events were not being passed to the Applet and JAWS was not being passed the accessibility details back.

I then upgraded to JREu14 beta to see if this resolved the issue. It didn’t.

It was recently suggested that the upgrade to the JRE may have blasted the accessibility.properties file so the Access Bridge no longer gets loaded. To test this theory I reinstalled the Java Accessibility Bridge and JAWS now responds appropriately.

So, if you have JAWS and a JRE pre-update 10, you might want to reinstall the Java Accessibility Bridge after you upgrade your JRE.

Think Different

Doug South - March 26, 2009 04:41 AM

Personally, I'd rank things differently then the ranking given in the previous post.

1. Revenue for the quarter is as expected
2. Revenue for the quarter exceeds expectations by 10%
3. Revenue for the quarter are short of expectations by 10%
   
4. Revenue for the quarter exceeds expectations by 50%
   
5. Revenue for the quarter are short of expectations by 50%

And I'd only classify the first as success. They key isn't how much was achieved as much as how close to expecations was the result. To me, that's the difference between a short term and a long term view.

Rating Outcomes

Doug South - March 25, 2009 01:31 AM

Let's for a moment say that you run a business (if you don't already). You have forecasted your revenue for the quarter. Now consider the following scenarios:

Newspapers reduced to Twitter-sized articles

Andrew Roberts - March 06, 2009 09:07 AM

Is this a trend of the future? The Australian publishes an article online with a whole 85 characters. I think republishing their ENTIRE article might constitute a breach of fair use ... but seriously where is journalism going?

GOOGLE chief executive Eric Schmidt says the US economic situation is "pretty dire".

With the economy so "dire" will all newspaper articles be less than 140 characters soon?

Social Netwoks and B2B Marketing - Lessons from the Obama Campaign

Antony Awaida - December 19, 2008 10:47 PM

Political analysts have showered praise on the Obama campaign for its effective use of the internet to win the race to the white house. In particular, the Obama campaign did an exceptional job in leveraging social networks – and B2B marketers would do well borrowing a page from the Obama campaign’s playbook.

Let’s start with the Obama website: it is a true community powered website – a social network in its own standing. It allows voters and volunteers not only to learn about the candidate but also to contribute and share content.

Allowing people to create content and share it with their peers is a central premise of social media.

Take the Obama blog, not only does it contain articles by Obama, but as importantly, it contains articles by 100s of members and 1000s of commenters. One article is by Jenny Richmond a 54 year old first time voter telling why she has decided to finally vote. Another is by Bradley – a campaign volunteer – describing the most exciting campaign he has ever worked on. Another section of the website where the social media thinking is at play is in the people section: Latinos, Unions, Environmentalists etc… These coalitions show their grass root support by posting their articles and videos.

By contrast, the McCain website looks like an official production by the campaign with limited grass root contributions. The blog section largely consists of press releases by campaign officials (no articles by Joe the plumber!). The People section looks particularly poor – essentially the same content was used for various coalitions with minor modifications interspersed here and there.

Lesson #1 to B2B marketers – In a web 2.0 world, community created content is much more effective than campaign created content to engage the community and therefore result in online or offline action. A company’s website is a place where customers and prospects come to gather and, increasingly, exchange information. Forums have been extensively used to enable technical people to exchange technical information. Similarly, business people are looking for this unfettered information from their peers – rather than the usual marketing innuendo.

I do realize that getting business people to share information on a B2B website is much harder than getting campaign volunteers to share information, but – with some out of the box thinking, it can be done!

One innovative approach is being espoused by one company I am currently working with – www.realization.com. Over the years, the company has recorded 10s of videos of its customer presentations at its annual user conference. In the videos, customers from industries as varied as Aerospace to Software present the challenges they were facing and how, using Realization’s solution, they were able to overcome those challenges - . The company is now using those recordings as the centerpiece of its website http://videos.realization.com/realweb/ For prospects considering the company’s products, watching a case study – ideally one from the same industry with a similar problem – is a very effective conversion tool - much more so than sifting through pages of marketing literature. The page further enables customers or employees to create customized playlists and email those to prospects.

Another company I am working with has come up with an innovative scheme to create customer content: it has offered existing customers a one time discount on technical support fees in exchange for a case study. Further, new customers are offered discounts on their license fees in exchange for a case study within six months – discounts which would have been offered anyway in today’s challenging sales environment. The campaign has been quite successful: It is amazing what customers will do to lower their costs in today’s environment.

Those two cases are examples of what innovative companies are doing to transform their websites into community powered websites. Those are initial steps in what is likely to be a long journey. Marketers may worry that they are relinquishing control of their website’s messaging. They need to understand that their level of control in a web 2.0 world is increasingly limited and that the power lies with the customer. If B2B marketers do not provide the infrastructure that enables customers and prospects to create and exchange the information they are looking for, they will do it somewhere else – often on a competitor’s website.

Part 2 of the article discusses how the Obama campaign masterfully leveraged social networks such as Facebook and Linkedin and how B2B marketers can use those lessons to leverage business social networks.

A Week of Storms, Birthdays, and Parties

Kristin Repsher - December 15, 2008 08:58 AM

Nearly a month ago, both James’ and my birthdays rolled around. It’s pretty funny that our birthdays are only one day apart; it’s also amusing that James uses this as an excuse to say he’s not actually a year younger than me. No no no…he’s 364 days younger!

Anyway, the whole week around our birthdays was pretty eventful. On James’ birthday, which happened to be on a Tuesday, we had our work Christmas party. Yes, I know that a Tuesday in November is a pretty odd time to have a Christmas party, especially when said party starts at 12pm. However, there was method to the madness–our COO was in town from America for a few days so we wanted to include him. We had a great lunch at the Caxton Hotel (mm…filet mignon wrapped in bacon), and the wine was some of the best I’ve ever had.

Needless to say, by the time I made it to James’ car I was a little bit on the tipsy side.  This was okay though, because we were going out to a big group dinner at a Vietnamese place in West End with all of his friends. James got a bit overzealous on the ordering of food and we ended up with 5 quail, a massive steamboat full of vegetables and seafood, and another appetizer + main on top of that! After my massive lunch there was no way I could eat the equivalent of about two dinners!

As we sat in the Melbourne pub after dinner, it began tipping it down outside. That motivated us to stay that little bit longer, which meant that James was bought quite a few drinks, the best of which was the Terminator–shots of Absinthe, Bacardi 151, and Chartreuse topped with Tabasco sauce. I can’t say how happy I was that it wasn’t yet my birthday so I didn’t have to drink that!

The rain that night only further saturated the already soaked ground in Brisbane. On the Sunday prior, we were hit with a massive storm that had the strength of a category 2 hurricane (and Doug from Ephox has the videos to prove it!). On the night of my birthday, another massive storm came through and smacked down the already struggling suburbs yet again. Luckily I don’t live in the harder hit suburbs and my house is at the top of a small hill so we made it through without serious damage to house or cars.  Driving to work on the morning of the 20th was like driving through a disaster zone though. Many of the houses in Rosalie looked like they had filled with nearly a foot of water and people were already out on the streets at 7am piling up soggy, ruined belongings.

Besides a lot of people being very unhappy about gigantic thunderstorms filling their houses and cars with water, my birthday was quite a good day. At work we celebrated with an apple crumble cheesecake (how can you go wrong with a combination of apple pie and cheesecake?). When I got home, a large wrapped box was sitting on the couch. I was ecstatic because it was a photo box–a wood box with four frames on the outside and pull-out albums that hold 540 pictures–to replace the one that Australia Post mangled two years ago. He was proud of finding the perfect gift for me then, only to get the box back a month later looking like it had been used as a rugby ball. One side had completely broken off and all the glass was shattered. Luckily, he got his money back then and this time he didn’t have to put it through the post so it’s still in perfect condition. Now I just have to get prints to put in it!

For my birthday dinner, James and I went out to a teppanyaki restaurant (where the chefs cook food on the grill in front of you). Our chef was hilarious and gave all of us our money’s worth. Not only was the food delicious (we ate steak, Moreton bay bugs, prawns, and fried rice to name but half of the meal), but we spent a good part of the evening in stitches over his various jokes and games. We got to catch pieces of omelette in our mouths and even better, attempted to catch raw eggs in little egg holders. That didn’t go so well for me, and I was just happy that I’d moved my purse beforehand…since I really didn’t want to go home with egg smeared all over it!

To finish off an eventful week, James, Ollie, and I went to the local golf links the following Sunday, since the Brisbane River was full of debris from the rains and wakeboarding was a no-go. I feel a little sorry for the people following us because they were endlessly watching us hit balls into the next green over or straight into the ground 5 feet away (that was my specialty). It was much more entertaining than I thought swinging a pole and then searching for the next 300m for a little white spot on the ground would be; however, I still think Ollie and James had a lot more fun because they got to laugh at me the whole time. We ended up at +22 (James), +34 (Ollie), and +55 (me) for the 9 holes. Needless to say, there’s a little bit of improvement to be had by all!

Coffee for Productivity

Brett Henderson - December 12, 2008 12:28 AM

About 3 years ago Ephox invested in a coffee machine to celebrate a successful deal that the engineering team had worked had to help close. Not just any coffee machine mind you, something that freshly grinds the beans, brews the coffee and allows you to froth the milk.

For various reasons, most of which have now been forgotten, the coffee machine ended up being named Fabio.

Recently we had some problems with Fabio and it went in for some repairs. When picked up today we found out that Fabio has made over 10,600 coffees.

So how has a coffee machine aided in productivity? With Fabio out of action this week, it was obvious how having to go out and get coffee changes the flow of work.

With a coffee machine in the office, individual members of team regularly go get coffee when they want it. With the need to go to a local coffee shop however, people tend to all go at the same time.

So next time anyone asks what can best aid the productivity of an engineering team consider a coffee machine in house.

Guitar Hero: World Tour

Kristin Repsher - December 08, 2008 12:18 PM

I know this post is nerdy, but I originally intended it to be part of a larger post. However, I’m exhausted tonight and don’t have the energy to write a lot…

Anyway, about a month ago now, I bought a copy of Guitar Hero: World Tour. The way I got it wasn’t exactly as I planned it…I was just going to pop by the shops after work, buy the game on its own, and then go home and try it out. Instead, the night before the game came out, I went with James and his friends to see a movie at the shopping centre. Afterwards, one of his friends said he was just going to pop by EBgames because they were open from 10pm-1am for the Guitar Hero launch. I figured that since it was 11.40 already and they could officially sell the games at midnight, I might as well go get my copy too.

The crowd wasn’t too big but it was still enough to fill up the store with interesting characters admiring the few that got to play the game on the big screen TV. One guy was wearing a shirt that said “You read this shirt. That’s enough social interaction for today.” At that point, James got very scared and wanted to leave…yet at the same time, he somehow managed to convince me to stay because “you’ll only have to wait 15 minutes.” Not only that, but he also explained that logically, if I just bought the game, I would only have half of the functionality since I wouldn’t have the drums or microphone, and therefore I wouldn’t be getting my money’s worth. Somehow this convinced me and I ended up with the entire drum kit/guitar/microphone set by the end of the night.

Long story short, I ended up in the very back of the line but still had my game (which came in a large box that James carried on his shoulder) by 12.15. As soon as I got home, I went to sleep, so I didn’t even open it until I got home from work the next day. Even then, I only played the guitar until my flatmate came home and decided to put together the drum kit. It was only then that we found out that they had forgotten to put drumsticks in the box!

Needless to say, I wasn’t very happy, given the price I paid for the entire package. Plus, I did want to try out the drums, as did Ian. Therefore, we started devising other ways we could play them. The plastic handles of our silverware didn’t work too well because they were way too short and the drums never registered the impacts, but we found that wooden spoons did a reasonable job. There were three main downsides:

1) The drums still had to be belted with the drumsticks to register anything on the game (although we later found that this is actually a problem with real drumsticks on the kit as well)
2) We were hitting the drums using the handles and therefore holding the wide ends of the spoons…which caused blisters very quickly on the hands
3) We looked like idiots (but this was very entertaining for everyone watching)

Fortunately the manager at EBgames the next day was reasonable and gave me a set of Ozzy Osbourne drumsticks (although why he has his own drumsticks, I don’t know…) for free. On top of that, Dylan from work gave me a set of his old nylon tipped drumsticks so now we have multiple choices!

To talk about the game itself, I’m actually a bit disappointed with it overall. The drums are fun to play, but I’m not very good at them at all. The guitar parts are significantly easier than on GH3, but I still can’t get the hang of 5 notes and the whole moving my hand thing. That means that hard is too frustrating most of the time and medium is too easy, so I get a bit bored. Plus, I definitely prefer the songs in GH3. I suppose since it was called “Legends of Rock” it makes sense that it has more classic songs. I like some of the songs on GHWT but it just seems like a lot of them are recent songs that are decent but nothing special. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a fun game, but I guess after playing GH3 for so long I was expecting more.

The power of messaging: Letters from Iwo Jima

Antony Awaida - May 18, 2007 06:39 PM

In a recent article, I talked about the shifting roles of sales and marketing in Enterprise 2.0: marketing is increasingly taking on tasks historically performed by sales. As a result, I see many marketers focused on tactical marketing and they seem to have forgotten one of the cornerstones of effective marketing: messaging. A typical comment I hear: “we will do it later, we need to deliver leads for the sales team now”.

The trouble is that when messaging is not delivered by marketing, it will still be delivered - by the sales team. To use a military analogy: Messaging is the air cover provided by the air force before the marines’ invasion of a beachhead. If the air cover is not provided to soften the beachhead, the marines will have to do it – using hand grenades. Not a pretty sight….

Speaking of messaging and military strategy, I recently watched the movie “Flags of our fathers” which was shot back to back with Oscar winner “letters from Iwo Jima”. “Flags” depicts the trials of the Iwo Jima flag bearers who came back to the US to help the FDR administration with its 7th war bonds fund raising. Both movies are excellent and I highly recommend them – but I am transgressing…

I was particularly inspired by the war bond campaign. It was (and still is) the largest and most successful borrowing from the American public in history at $26B. To put that amount in perspective the total US budget in 1946 was $56B. Some pundits argue that this is one of most successful campaigns ever.

A key factor in the success of the campaign was the powerful messaging – embodied in the famous photo of the Iwo Jima flag-raising. While messaging may not have been a marketing concept in 1946, its central importance was crucial in the execution of the campaign. As I dissected the ingredients that made the war bond campaign a great success, I put together my “Guy Kawasaki‘sh” top rules for campaign messaging:

Rule #1: Start with what the people want. In Feb 1946, Roosevelt picked up a copy of The New York Times. "There it is again!" he thought as he eyed the photo of the flag raising. He was amazed how many times the newspapers were reprinting the AP newsphoto. Then the idea hit him. He called his secretary of the treasury: "Hank, I've got it. I've got the symbol, the theme for the Seventh Bond Tour. It's the flag raising picture. People love it. FDR understood deeply why the photo was so popular with Americans. It represented victory and the end of war. His genius is that he was able to tap into this powerful yearning and connect it with the war fund raising effort.

A company I recently worked with told me that their campaign message was:” we offer the best open source….”. This may be a good mission statement but it is not an effective campaign message. As a general rule, avoid the word “we” in campaign messaging.

Rule #2: Get the executives involved – Roosevelt had a lot on his mind in 1946 with a war being waged in the pacific and the remnants of a war in Europe. Yet he obviously had been thinking about the message of the campaign when he said: ”I’ve got it, I’ve got the symbol”.

If Roosevelt can spare time to get involved in messaging, surely the company’s executives can. Get them involved in the process. It is that important!

Rule #3: Make it a mantra. During the first two months of the seventh bond tour, everyone in America would see the flag bearer’s picture anywhere they went. You couldn't avoid it. It hung in: 
1,000,000 Retail Store windows
16,000 Movie Theaters
15,000 Banks
200,000 Factories
30,000 Railroad Stations
5,000 Large Billboards

Furthermore, The message was also aired on thousands of radio commercials. While the medium and location may have changed, the message was the same. Consistency is key to successful messaging! 

Too often companies keep changing their messages – often because they believe the messaging is not working, or because the company – not the customers - got tired of it. Messaging needs both volume and time to work.

Rule # 4. KISS or Keep it simple, stupid. (Incidentally, it was another democratic president – Bill Clinton – who used a famously related expression in his successful 1992 campaign: “It’s the economy stupid”). The text used in the war bonds posters was simple: “Now All Together”. No mention of the bonds interest rates. No mention of the amount needed to wage the war. None of that. It was not needed: The photo was the message and it was worth a thousand words!

Here is an example of a simple yet very effective message used by Dell: “Purely you!”. Very short but powerfully conveys what Dell is all about.

Rule #5: Make it emotional. Rosenthal, the photographer who took the picture was asked to explain why his picture touched a national nerve. “What we do in war, the cruelty is almost incomprehensible” he says. “But somehow we need to make sense of it. The right picture can win or lose a war. I took a lot of other pictures that day, but none of them made a difference. Looking at it (the picture), you could believe the sacrifice was not a waste”.

Rule #6. Don’t let details get in the way of a good story. Rosenthal’s photo actually captured the second flag-raising event of the day. A US flag was first raised earlier in the morning. However this flag was too small to be seen easily from the nearby landing beaches. Therefore a larger flag was raised the second time and Rosenthal captured that moment in the photo. Rosenthal was accused of having staged the picture or covering up the first flag raising. Of course, none of those details made a difference in the fund raising effort. The photo captured a great moment in history and the American people did not want to hear any of the controversy.

Translated: don’t let the fine print or the lawyers get in the way of a great marketing message.

Those rules worked back then and resulted in arguably one of the most successful campaigns of all times. They work equally well today. For those readers who are thinking – come on, software marketers have written the book on marketing and have nothing to learn from politicians. I say – hogwash – politicians have written all the books when it comes to marketing. They have been selling the same – repackaged – goods for years. And that, not even the software industry marketers could pull off!