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.

Running Ant tasks in Java part deux

Dylan Just - March 12, 2010 03:36 AM

I think this is the right way to do it:

Task task = new SomeTask();
task.setProject(myProject);
task.init();
// set fields
task.perform();

Finalising the architecture

Dylan Just - March 02, 2010 09:14 PM

Today, I heard someone use the phrase “finalise the architecture”. Software architecture isn’t something that should ever be finalized. Actually, one of its key roles is to change and facilitate change in the system.

Ephox Ranks #14 as one of Silicon Valley's Fastest Growing Private Companies

Ephox Weblog - February 25, 2010 10:15 PM

Ephox has made the "Fast Private" - a list of the top 70 fastest growing companies in Silicon Valley as calculated by the Silicon Valley Business Journal.  They announced our ranking at a ceremony and we were happy to make it so close to the top - we were #14.

See the full ranking here:

http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2009/10/05/daily90.html

Meet Ephox at the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco

Ephox Weblog - February 17, 2010 12:33 AM

Upgrade to EditLive! 7.0.2 changes local settings file location

Ephox Developer Resources - February 16, 2010 01:42 AM

The EditLive! 7.0.2.42 release changed the location the local settings file for EditLive! is stored. This was in response to problems encountered with roaming profiles in Windows.

How can this affect your local dictionary or username?

Consider the following scenario.

Your production system is running a version of EditLive! prior to 7.0.2. You decide to check out the latest version features, either through the demo at Ephox, or on a development server. When you are next working in your production environment you then add some words to your dictionary.

When the production server is upgraded to 7.0.2 (or greater) you notice your words appear mis-spelt, despite adding them in the past to the dictionary.

So what happened?

The first time EditLive! 7.0.2 is run, it will migrate the contents of the old local settings file to the new location. From then on, it will refer to this new file location.

When you added the words, it was to the old local settings file. As the file contents had been previously migrated when you tested the new version of EditLive, when you upgraded to EditLive! 7.0.2, the new words weren't there.

This also occurs if between the initial load of EditLive! 7.0.2 and subsequent upgrade of the production server the username for Track Changes/Commenting is altered.

Once the upgrade has occurred, changing the username or adding words to the dictionary will continue to function as normal.

EditLive! for LWCM 6.1+ 4.0.1.20

Ephox Releases - February 15, 2010 02:32 AM

Includes EditLive! version 7.1.1.1.

EditLive! for LWCM 6.0 3.5.0.1

Ephox Releases - February 15, 2010 02:21 AM

Includes EditLive! version 7.1.0.196.

Ant, Subant and Basedir

Adrian Sutton - January 25, 2010 10:09 AM

Here’s an important lesson for people combining ant scripts – the way basedir is calculated is very unlikely to be what you expect. In particular, if you combine the <ant> task with the <subant> task you’re probably in for a surprise.

I learnt this important life lesson when the improved build scripts I’d been working on failed on the build server even though it worked perfectly on my machine. The difference is that the build server is running cruise control and it has a wrapper ant script which checks out a fresh copy of the project then uses the <ant> task to build it. The ant task was:

<ant antfile="build.xml" target="dist" dir="projectDir" />

As far as that main antfile is concerned, everything is perfect – the basedir is the directory that it’s build.xml is in and all is good with the world. However, if that build.xml happens to use subant, the basedir will not be changed. Basically, basedir is now a user configured property rather than a calculated value so it doesn’t get changed. However, if you instead use:

<ant antfile="projectDir/build.xml" target="dist" />

It all works out. The main build.xml still gets the basedir as projectDir but when it uses subant, the basedir will be automatically changed to whatever directory the build file subant points to is in.

The behavior is explained in this bug report which is closed as WONTFIX for backwards compatibility. Thankfully ant 1.8 adds a useNativeBasedir attribute which provides much more predictable basedir behavior for the ant task.

Three Types of Ant Scripts

Adrian Sutton - January 22, 2010 09:27 AM

Bryan comments on the three types of ant scripts:

In my experience, there are three types of Ant scripts that you encounter "in the wild":

• Small Ant scripts, generally Java-only, which can use most of Ant's default behaviors and are clear and simple. A lot of open source build scripts are this way.
• Serious commercial Ant scripts written before macrodef and import became available. These are generally impossible to understand and evolve, and the reality is that a small cadre of Build Wizards keep them running. Such systems often involve a substantial number of custom Ant tasks.
• Serious commercial Ant scripts written to use macrodef and import. In my experience, the need for custom Ant tasks drops way off with Ant releases post-1.6.

This really does ring true to me. Ant scripts can fairly quickly become unwieldy and difficult to work with if you aren’t using import and macrodef, but with them you can achieve so much more without the complexity getting out of hand. They won’t absolve you of the need to properly understand ant and the declarative paradigm it wants you to work with, but it’s much more approachable.

If I can ever get someone to add the optional dependencies for scripting support on our build servers1 I may well find they help a lot too.

1 – which happen to be Windows boxes, behind a firewall on the other side of the world from me, so not easy to make remote changes on ↩

Micro-Templating in EditLive!

Ephox Developer Resources - December 07, 2009 01:44 PM

The new micro-templating feature in EditLive! 7.0 allows non-technical authors to use pre-defined templates to create better looking and more consistent web pages without having to recreate layouts from scratch all the time. This video shows how content authors can use micro-templating and how administrators can configure the available templates.

First Impressions

Brett Henderson - November 26, 2009 03:46 AM

We recently had two new businesses move into the offices next door. Looking through the doors highlighted to me how important the first impression of an office is to the energy you bring when you walk in the door.

One of the offices is very evidently a call-center. It’s clad in shades of grey and blue with small cubicles. It seems to suck the energy out of you just looking at it.

The other (pictured) seems to draw you in. In fact, upon entering, I had not idea what they did¹, but you felt that it would be an interesting place to work.

It may seem obvious, but it’s important to consider the impact your office environment has on potential employee’s as well as the current ones.

When recruiting, if a candidate walks in the door thinking, “wow, I want to work here”, or compares favorably your office/team with their current office and team part of the hiring process just got simpler.

For your own staff, having a place that they want to work in, along with an outstanding team to work with brings it’s own rewards. Higher productivity, less down-time due to illness and greater retention to name just a few. These rewards have value not easily measured but a lot higher than what it can cost to make a great environment.

1 – My wife’s first guess from the photo was travel, but it turns out they are a tattoo artist.↩

Personal Connections

Brett Henderson - November 24, 2009 04:28 AM

Ephox is 10 years old and to celebrate we flew everyone in from our US and UK offices to where it all began … Brisbane.

The celebrations kicked off with a party on Thursday followed by a weekend away at the Hyatt Coolum for employee’s and their partners.

While the weekend away did provide an opportunity to talk shop, it was the personal conversations that I feel pay the biggest dividend.

At Ephox we make great use of digital communication tools like Skype, e-mail and instant messenger to keep in touch. There is something however about talking to someone face-to-face, that allows you to connect on a different level. It’s the conversations over breakfast, the corporate dinner, pre-dinner drinks and while playing tourist that allow you to connect with our colleagues in a way that electronic means just can’t achieve.

In this relaxed environment, you find yourself talking about previous experiences and roles as well as sharing a joke or two. Add to that the ability to meet and talk with your colleagues partner and you begin to build a more complete picture of the person.

So what does this mean for us now we are all back home? The personal connections made enhance our business relationships and communication. The insight gained allows us to filter digital communications through their respective personalities, enriching the experience. In addition, the “back-story” of each person will allow us to better utilise their previous experiences/skills.

Notes on Installing the Connections 2.5 Pilot

Robert Dawson - November 24, 2009 04:19 AM

The installation of the Lotus Connections 2.5 pilot looks easy. Unfortunately the out of the box experience was not at all pleasurable for me. Here are some of the issues that I encountered while doing the install. I’m not sure how many of these were specific to my environment, but they did all hurt.

1) Don’t install from a directory with spaces.

If you download the pilot to your desktop and try and install from here, things will crash and burn

2) Don’t expect the VM to be easily moved around networks

I started my second installation on my laptop at home, then brought it to work. This crashed and burned.

3) Use fully qualified hostnames

While the installer said that you could specify a short hostname or a fully qualified hostname, the short hostname did not work for me.

4) Connections 2.5 is RAM hungry

1.5 GBytes is not enough 2.5 GBytes is. Not sure of the exact threshold for it to work, but I can confirm that 2.5 GBytes is enough RAM.

Resetting IBM WebSphere Portal 6.1 Security

Robert Dawson - November 16, 2009 05:39 AM

Situation 

You have received a WebSphere Portal VM that is setup to use security settings that don’t match your environment, and you need to go back to a simple config.

Running the recommended ConfigEngine wp-restore-default-repository-configuration does not work, because you have not got a working Portal environment in the first place, so it won’t start.

Overview of solution

Disable the security, then perform wp-restore-default-repository-configuration.

Files and Tools used

• security.xml
• ConfigEngine 
• wkplc.properties

Whenever you see some code with bold and italics that is something for you to change to match your environment 

Details:

1) disable security.

This involves directly editing the security.xml file for your node. Note that your portal instance will NOT work when security is disabled, so performing this step will disable your portal instance. You should not think about doing this in a production environment (you probably shouldn’t be passing around Portal VM’s for production environments anyway). (The security.xml will live in the config for your node. I’ll assume you know where this is, if not use the find command on your operating system).

To disable security, edit the security.xml, and change the enabled attribute on the root security element to be false ie change enabled=”true” to enabled=”true”

2) start up your portal instance using whatever commands are appropriate.

On linux you might find service portal start useful.

3) Setup restore properties in your wkplc.properties file.

Profile/ConfigEngine/properties/wkplc.properties

# The realm name to be used. A realm with this name will be created.
restore.file.realm=New Unique Realm restore.file.delimiter=/

# Portal and WAS admin UID (short name) and password
restore.file.primaryAdminId=New Unique Admin ID 

restore.file.primaryAdminPassword=Password

# CN of portal admin group (short name)
restore.file.primaryPortalAdminGroup=adminGroupCN

4) run ConfigEngine.sh

Profile/ConfigEngine/ConfigEngine.sh wp-restore-default-repository-configuration

5) Turn on security (reversing step 1)

6) shutdown (or kill) portal

7) startup portal.

You should now see your portal server running without using LDAP.

Happy 10th Birthday Ephox

Damien Fitzpatrick - November 06, 2009 05:34 AM

On the 12th of November Ephox will turn 10.  It will also mark eight and a half years of me being at Ephox.  Unfortunately though, while the team at Ephox celebrate our 10th Birthday I’ll be on my honeymoon.  This Saturday (tomorrow) I’ll be marking a personal milestone of my own as I get married.

So, since I can’t be at the Ephox celebration to thank people personally, I thought I’d write this post.

It’s been a tumultuous decade to be a software company.  Since our incorporation in 1999 we’ve made it through the Dot-com Bubble and now we’re achieving our greatest growth ever despite a global financial crisis.   There’s no doubt in my mind that Ephox’s ability to survive and thrive during these challenging times is because of the fantastic people who I work with all around the globe.

When I joined the team as an intern in July 2001 I wasn’t planning 8.5 years in advance, but I’m certainly glad that the last 8.5 years have been spent with Ephox.  Ephox has given me one of the most remarkable opportunities of my life – and this is despite me almost falling asleep while our now CEO (then CTO) Andrew Roberts explained HTML authoring to me on my first day on the job.  I started out here as an intern, developed software, worked in the USA as a consultant, traveled the world, and now am the Director of Products – all thanks to Ephox.

Over those years the company itself has grown and faced it’s challenges.  From our offices here in Paddington, Brisbane, Australia we branched out to the USA.  I can recall when Andrew Roberts started our first USA office – in his apartment in San Jose.  From there we’ve grown to have offices in Palo Alto, just outside Stanford University and European offices in London.

Along the way I’ve met and worked with some tremendous people not only here at Ephox but also amongst our partner organizations.  Our partners have always been incredibly important to us at Ephox and personally, it’s given me the chance to meet some fantastic, like-minded professionals at IBM, Vignette/OpenText, Stellent/Oracle, EMC and more.

So Happy 10th Birthday Ephox.  Congratulations and thank you.  I’m looking forward to what the next 10 years hold for us all, particularly if the first 10 are any indication.

Sunsets & Star Trails

Kristin Repsher - August 29, 2009 09:22 AM

Yes, yes, I know it’s been a little while since I’ve blogged. A lot has happened in the past 8 months or so, and I’d love to catch up on all of it, but I honestly don’t know if I can. In the meantime, this post will just have to be enough proof that I am actually alive, I’ve just been very neglectful of this site!

So last weekend, I went to a “Sunsets & Star Trails” workshop out near Boonah (for those of you not familiar with Brisbane geography, that’s about an hour’s drive into the country from my house). It was the second workshop I did with Bluedog Photography, and I can’t recommend them enough. It was a great night, full of good conversations, lots of stargazing, and plenty of learning about proper photography techniques that I can hopefully apply in the future.

The afternoon started out at the Royal Hotel in Roadvale, a small town of about 600 people that I can’t say I’d heard of before reading the description of the workshop. It’s a beautiful little country town, built on rolling hills with larger mountains looming in the distance, with one main street with a country store and the aforementioned Royal Hotel. After a bit of a meet-and-greet, we headed out to the private property of Suellen, who so graciously let us invade her home all night.

Garry, one of the tutors, gave us a quick tutorial on what we were going to need to look for before sending us off into the wild of the large yard. Essentially, we needed to find a good spot with some nice framing that faced roughly south, and we needed to have it fully set up before dark. I had a good wander throughout the entire yard. Luckily my knee has gotten significantly better than it was in April (when I had arthroscopic surgery for to clean up some cartilage that had torn off the back of my kneecap) so I could actually kneel down and try to find somewhat different angles on the same photograph. I managed to get a few late afternoon/verging on sunset photos this way. I was especially happy with the swingset photo that’s in this shot.

I finally found a corner of the yard near the old dunny that I was happy with. There were quite a few possible angles to go with, but I chose a thistle, which would later come back to bite me when I realized I wasn’t actually facing south and needed to readjust my shot. This was the first of a few things to go slightly awry during the evening, but it was all a learning experience, right? In the dark, I managed to get my tripod out of the gnarled bushes I had gotten it entangled in and moved it to frame the shot with a stark, winter-time frangipani tree. After following all of Garry’s instructions, I decided to go for my first star trails shot (star trails, for those that don’t know, are the streaks in the sky you can capture when you take long-exposure night shots. See further down in this post for an example). This involved using my remote release so I didn’t introduce camera shake to the shot. Unfortunately, the remote didn’t have the other very important feature I needed for this exercise–a lock. That meant that if I wanted to get a 45-minute long exposure shot, I would have to hold down a button for 45 minutes. “Oh well,” I thought. “I’m here, I might as well give it a shot because that’s all I’m going to get with this equipment.”

After 10 minutes, my thumb started falling asleep and suddenly twitched, letting go of the shutter and finishing the exposure. Needless to say, I wasn’t amused! I talked to both Garry and Nick; between the three of us, we managed to devise a contraption to hold the remote button down without me being there. It sounds pretty simple–scotch tape a piece of gravel down on the remote, and then tape the remote to the tripod. However, we had a bit of trouble getting it rigged because the remote had to be aimed at the camera at all times–start taping and accidentally move its line of sight and the shutter would close. It look us about 20 minutes to get it set up the first time, but finally we were able to sneak away from the camera without hearing the shutter click.

From then on, I felt a lot more social! I was able to go over to the main group (since my camera was well away from everyone else’s) and chat with everyone else. We were all amazed at the number of stars we were seeing, especially given the cloud cover around sunset. There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky to obscure the twinkling of the stars or the slight haziness that marked out the band of the Milky Way sprawling across the sky.

By the end of the night, each of us had 2-3 shots of star trails. I know, you’re thinking, “What? She went out for 7 hours and got 2 photos?” Each photo takes 45 minutes to shoot and another 45 minutes to process for noise reduction, so it’s a very time-consuming and patience-testing endeavour! I was happy that I got any star trails at all after the hassle I had to go through with my remote, although now I have to do a bit of investigation to figure out why they came out the way they did. Even though the camera seemed to process the picture to reduce the noise, both of my shots are still nearly obscured by the huge amount of noise in them. And since I took the photos at f5.6 and ISO 200 with noise reduction, there really shouldn’t be noise like this in the shot. Everyone else had the same settings as me and their shots came out much better than this, so I’m hoping that there’s not a problem with my camera! If anyone that’s reading this is a Pentax expert, please comment and let me know

Anyway, all in all, it was a great night and well worth the money and the trip out there. I now feel a lot more confident with my night shooting and am really hoping to get away from the city to try it again soon.

Twitter has invaded

Andrew Herron - July 15, 2009 01:15 PM

And the prize for most used jailbreak feature goes to…

Andrew Herron - July 04, 2009 01:47 PM

Andrew Roberts - April 18, 2009 02:36 PM

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!

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!

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!