Can Your Face Hurt You?

Step One to every LinkedIn profile is adding a photo of yourself. Since LinkedIn is a business site, the photo should be as serious as possible – a straightforward headshot, with no goat horns, family members, or weird makeup. So says conventional wisdom.

After all, you want potential employers to know that you have serious job cred, right? You know how to get a headshot (and a better one than you’d get done at a passport photo agency or photo machine at the penny arcade). You know how to dress for every occasion, including a headshot. Participants in a recent discussion on LinkedIn mostly agreed that if you didn’t post your photo, you were untrustworthy. “I would never do business with someone who doesn’t have their photo on their LinkedIn profile,” stated one participant.

But what if there is something obvious in your headshot that would prejudice someone against doing business with you?

A National Bureau of Economic Research 2003 study on name discrimination tested employers’ responses to resumes and found that a white-sounding name yields as many return phone calls as eight additional years of experience.

Using your photo on your LinkedIn profile tells the world your race right away. It also makes your sex perfectly clear (no “Androgynous Pat” on LinkedIn) and gives a rough idea of your age.

Discussions about damaging information on social media accounts tend to focus on the casual sites where you might be apt to tweet “My boss looks like a plucked rooster” or post a photo of yourself drinking your fifth fuzzy navel. LinkedIn is where you put your best foot forward, seeking to create and enhance business relationships and often job opportunities. We don’t think of LinkedIn as a place that can damage one’s career — you always put your best foot forward and even get to approve or reject recommendations you’ve requested.

Has human nature changed substantially since 2003? What should you do if you’re black, or middle-aged like me, or if your name is Lakisha or Jamal? Can these basic bits of information damage you?

The LinkedIn discussion I read suggests that you’re darned if you do and darned if you don’t.

One of my favorite refrigerator-magnet sayings is “Drink coffee–do stupid things faster with more energy.” Similarly, social media can magnify injustice. Instead of being a great equalizer, it allows people who form opinions for the wrong reasons to do so faster.

What do you think? Does using the gray blob on your LinkedIn profile automatically make you seem sneaky?

A Recipe for Webinar Registration

Using HubSpot to Register Leads for Citrix Online’s GoToWebinar

Disclaimer: Are you a HubSpot customer? Are you a super geek? Then this post is for you. Everyone else: Check out more entertaining content, like the other posts on this site.

If you are planning a webinar, you face some confusing decisions about how to communicate with your leads and store information about them. Both Citrix and HubSpot offer lead intelligence and automated follow-up communication with your registrants. However, neither system does everything that you might want to do, and there is some overlap. This article is intended to help you combine the best features of both systems to make sure you can take advantage of Citrix’s automatic reminder tools without losing any of the benefits of having your lead data in the HubSpot database. For those who are comfortable tinkering with HTML — okay, let’s face it: you have to be ultra-comfortable tinkering with HTML — there are some notes about how to jerry-rig a form so it feeds data into both Hubspot and Citrix.

If you use GoToWebinar’s email marketing tools and landing page to register people for the website, you are missing an opportunity to store the registration data in your Hubspot database. But you do need to use GoToWebinar’s automated follow-up tools to provide your participants the registration link. To avoid having to manually enter data from one system into another, here’s the recipe I used for registration the last time I produced a webinar.

The Recipe

Ingredients:

• Your own website or web server, capable of hosting PHP scripts
• Your Hubspot website and database
• Your Citrix GoToWebinar account
• A few cups of patience

In Brief

1. Create a HubSpot-hosted landing page for your webinar and populate it with any persuasive content and images you would like to use
2. Set up the webinar on Citrix GoToWebinar
3. Create a form on your non-Hubspot hosted website to capture webinar registration. Set it up so that it spools data to Citrix’s webinar registration database.
4. Add the form to your Hubspot-hosted landing page.
5. Test the form to make sure it properly registers you for the webinar.
6. Use all of Hubspot’s tools (lead nurturing campaigns, email campaigns, calls to action, and links from relevant content sections of your website) to drive traffic to the landing page.

Creating the Form

1. Make sure your webinar is already set up GoToWebinar. When you come to the Registration tab, set up the form with the fields you want to capture.
2. In GoToWebinar, click the “Registration Web Page” link and leave it open in your browser. You’ll have to reference the source code for the next few steps.
3. Read the excellent articleon the HubSpot Wiki about how to use the PHP script that integrates GoToWebinar and Hubspot. Copy and configure the PHP code there and post it to your web server as gtw-process.php. You will need to change the code in three lines:
   • Line 4: You should add the URL that you’re going to re-direct your newly converted leads/registrants to once they submit the form. This should likely be a thank you page of some sort.
   • Line 14: Line 14 references the URL of the GoToMeeting registration process. On the GoToWebinar registration page that you left open in the browser, look at the first part of your GoToWebinar URL (e.g. www3.gotomeeting.com) and change the URL in line 14 to agree with that. This will direct the registration data to the right server in the GoToWebinar system.
   • Line 34: You’re going to need to input your HubSpot Lead Tracking API URL on this line in the place of the “<YOUR HUBSPOT POST URL HERE>”. This can be attained from your HubSpot portal under ‘Settings -> Integrations -> HubSpot Lead API” and then clicking on the ‘Create New Form’ button. If there are questions around this, please contact HubSpot support. They’re great.
4. Create an HTML page on your own, non-HubSpot hosted website. This page will only contain the form. Here is a sample form with comments on how you may need to adjust the HTML. You can simply copy-paste the following text into the body of your new HTML page:
   <form method=”get” action =”http://<path-to-file>/gtw-process.php”&gt;Comment: Make sure you reference the path to your PHP file correctly.

   First Name: <input name=”firstName” size=”40″ type=”text” />

   Last Name: <input name=”lastName” size=”40″ type=”text” />

   Email: <input name=”email” size=”40″ type=”text” />

   Comment: The PHP code maps the Hubspot-friendly field names such as firstName and lastName to the field names that GoToWebinar uses, such as Name_First and Name_Last. If you want to add more registration data, create more fields in the GoToWebinar registration form, and view the source of that page to see how GoToWebinar names the fields. You can then add lines to the PHP script to map more form fields to the GoToWebinar system.

   <input name=”WebinarKey” type=”hidden” value=”‘<ENTER WEBINAR KEY HERE>’ />

   Comment: The way this field is named can be a stumbling block. In the land of Citrix tech support, the webinar key is a proprietary, hidden number that you can only get by calling your corporate account representative and acting like a smarty-pants. In this context, webinar key actually refers to the webinar ID. It is the string of numbers that appears at the end of the webinar registration URL you left open in step 3.

   <input name=”Form” type=”hidden” value=”webinarRegistrationForm”>

   <input name=”template” type=”hidden” value=”
   https://www1.gotomeeting.com/en_US/island/webinar/registration.tmpl
   “>

   Comment: This references the URL of the GoToMeeting registration process. On the GoToWebinar registration page that you left open in the browser, look at the first part of your GoToWebinar URL and change the URL in line 14 to agree with that. This will direct the registration data to the right server in the GoToWebinar system.

   <input type=”submit” value=”Submit”>

   </form>

   Comment: If you like, change your Submit button to read “Register” by changing the value to “Register.”

5. Post the HTML page to your website and test it to make sure it registers you for the webinar.

Add the Form to your HubSpot-Hosted Landing Page

1. View/Edit your HubSpot-hosted landing page.
2. Click “Add Module” and choose HTML/Javascript.
3. In the HTML/Javascript window, enter HTML code for an inline frame and set the source to the webinar form you’ve published on your website. For best results, use the width, height, and scrolling parameters in the following example: 
   http://www.your-domain.com/your-webinar-form.html
   
4. Save your landing page and test it.

Kicking Off the Campaign

We used a lead nurturing campaign to repeatedly invite the leads in our database that we knew would be interested in the webinar. Because you have set up the form to spool data to Hubspot and to GoToWebinar, when they convert on the form, they automatically are removed from the lead nurturing campaign and are entered into GoToWebinar’s email reminder system.

Now you can use all HubSpot’s other great tools to drive traffic to your landing page and convert it into leads — and still get all the benefits of the GoToWebinar automatic reminders.

Microsoft Excel Charts in 300 dpi

Today our VP Sales sent me a chart that had been created in Microsoft Excel. He was using wind data that I’m all too familiar with working with — as screen grabs in 72 dpi — which looks horrible when you try to use them in print.

Imagine my amazement when I opened the file up and it was a 300 dpi TIFF image!

I’ve also known that you can copy-paste charts into Illustrator and they come out as vectors.

So, without getting into the nitty-gritty of how you accomplish all these wonderful things, please know that they can be done . . . 

And for a special bonus, guess which Bette Midler song I quoted to our VP Sales in my return email.

How to Export a QuickTime Movie from Flash CS3, And Yea, Even CS4

Disclaimer: Although this blog post does contain a few witty comments, it’s not worth reading unless you’re a Flash developer. If you’re anyone else, the local classified ads deliver more bang for the reading buck.

I’ve been creating some animated graphics for my company, Second Wind’s trade show booth and wind blog. This year, we (speaking broadly — a more accurate description is ‘a few folks from my company, not including me) are exhibiting at the American Wind Energy Association’s WINDPOWER 2012 tradeshow, an enormous industry extravaganza featuring Karl Rove as this year’s keynote speaker (please don’t get me started). The animations were created in Flash (she blogs! she cooks! she develops Flash applications!) and I exported them as Shockwave files to play over the monitors in the booth.

The problem arises when our fearless leadership also wants to be able to play the videos on their iPads. Imagine how flattered I am that the stuff I put together as “moving wallpaper” is deemed content-worthy enough to gaze at instead of using iPads for their original purpose (watching people dive from third-story windows wrapped in bubble-wrap, looking up drink recipes, and attracting favorable attention from other nerds). Imagine my distress when I found that the dialog in Flash CS3 called: “Publish settings . . . QuickTime movie with Flash track” generates an error message saying:

“QuickTime does not support Adobe Flash track beyond Flash version 5. You can however, export a QuickTime move with Flash rendered as video by selecting File > Export > Export Movie.”

OK, so I can change the Publish settings to Flash version 5 or lower . . . (Version 5? Wasn’t that like twenty pounds, two relationships, and eighty-six haircuts ago?) Oops, a whole bunch of cool things I did using features from Flash 5+whatever aren’t supported. Who knew I was that cool? Back to Google Search, where I find that if I can’t export a QuickTime movie using Publish, I can go under the File menu and “Export movie.” I select “When last frame is reached” and sit back, confidently, to wait for . . . hell to freeze over.

My friends on the Internet (is this like people consulting their fillings for messages from outer space?) pass along two key pieces of information:

1. If you have a “stop” on your timeline before the last frame is reached, of course, the last frame won’t be reached and you’ll freeze.
2. The “when last frame is reached” doesn’t work (but wait . . . more on this below), so you can get around it by choosing “After time elapsed.” (Thanks to R. Jon Macdonald, who explains this most cogently.)

Okay, so I make sure there are no “stop” actions on my timeline, and I take the total number of frames, divide it by the number of frames per second, and then divide it by sixty and do a bunch of other math involving remainders . . . to figure out how many hours, minutes, and seconds a 2160-frame Flash video has at 24 frames per second. Are you still with me? If so, I’m impressed . . . I should send you a Starbucks card or something.

I had two problems with this method. First, it didn’t work. Second, I had no idea why. Once, I did get it to work, but the movie was truncated even though I was pretty sure I’d calculated the time correctly. Another time, it just froze again. I rejected one forum commenter’s advice to let the process run overnight — I figured this was giving the bastards too much of my time.

I took a detour through trying to export the files as .swf and then run a bewildering variety of video converters on them (AVS4You, Movea, etc.) but none of them worked and all of them were documented by someone who was not a native English speaker. (This would not have been a problem, except they were trying to write in English and it didn’t make sense to me). One irritating phenomenon is that if you’re trying to export an .swf file that has an imported video embedded in its timeline, a converter like AVS4You will export . . . the original video that you embedded, while ignoring all the other stuff you put into your .swf. Makes you wonder why you bothered in the first place.

I finally located an article that solved my problem. This is the one I was trying to locate so I could publicly thank the author, but I was unable to find it today. The answer, my friends, is to make sure that all the layers on your timeline contain exactly the same number of frames. That’s right, use your trusty F5 key and Shift-F5 to add and delete extra frames from your layers so that all your layers end at the same time. I suppose this eliminates any confusion about what “the last frame” is and allows your movie to export properly.

Here are two other pointers:

1. As noted above, make sure there are no “stop” actions anywhere on your timeline.
2. The export will certainly take a while. Not overnight, but for me, a 2000-frame animation took an entire lunch break to export.

Finally, there was a good note by Danny Chang about what codec and pixel dimensions to use if you’re exporting video for an iPad — 1280 x 720 pixels, and use the H.264 codec.

One other random problem I encountered when publishing content to .swf format . . . one of my files became corrupted so that when I tried to select .swf as an output option under Publish Settings, the program would crash. I got around this by using Control:Test Movie, which saved an .swf file to my desktop.

Please comment and let me know other weird Flash bugs and workarounds you’ve encountered. I’ve had such mixed results when searching on the Internet for solutions to tech problems — some of them work, some don’t, and some go part of the way. Thanks for making it this far!

You Need Talk? FiveTips for Working with a Voiceover Artist

Although I’ve produced many multimedia projects — both for fun and for profit — until recently I had never worked with a voiceover artist. I had to incorporate voice work into an online tutorial — and I was given the chance to have input into the script, how the recording was done, and so on. Here’s what I learned.

1. Before you pass the script on to a voiceover artist, read it aloud. If you find yourself catching your breath, try to edit the script so that it sounds more natural when read aloud. A good voiceover artist will be able to read even challenging scripts and make them sound good, but you shouldn’t be putting lipstick on a pig.
2. Does your client have any sense of the amount of time the script takes to read? Imagine my surprise when I was given a script for a “three-minute tutorial” and it actually took ten minutes to read. Save yourself heartache (and lost fees, if you’re in the freelance boat) by road-testing the script and making sure all parties understand its length.
3. Give the voiceover artist some sense of the action. It is easier to incorporate pauses into a voice track as it is being recorded than to edit the track afterwards.
4. Make sure the script is final before you send it for recording. Re-dos are expensive if you’re working with a professional, and annoying even if you’re working with an amateur.
5. Consider using music in the background. There are many loops of stock audio available at sites like istockphoto.com, and many voiceover artists can help advise you on their selection. Half the documentaries you see on cable TV use this kind of background music — why shouldn’t you? Just make sure that the music fits the material and that there is a good balance of sound — the narration is presumably the important part of the sound, not the synths or guitars (sorry, synth and guitar players).

 

So You Think You Can Talk?

Nearly thirty years ago, the great avant-garde art rock composer Brian Eno told a small group of college students: “Hundreds of people send me tapes of their compositions. One thing nearly everyone does is apologize for the poor production values of the recordings. Often the poor production values are the only thing that make the recordings at all interesting.”

Nowadays, fairly sophisticated recording equipment is available at the consumer level. If you are producing an online tutorial or demo, you might be tempted to simply record your own voice. After all, we hear podcasts, webinars, and audio from Flipcams online every day. Here are a few reasons why you should think twice before taking a D.I.Y. approach to voiceovers and consider hiring a professional voice-over artist.

1. Talent. They call it “voiceover talent” for a reason. I once recorded a scratch track for a Flash demo I was working on so I could get the timing of the actions right. I thought it sounded pretty good. When I heard the final recordings by voiceover artist Jill Goldman of Goldivox, I was stunned. Her warm, earthy tones made the material — a tutorial about how to use a nonprofit research organization’s website — come alive. Her tracks sounded so much better than my speaking voice that she will always be my first call if I need to record voiceovers again.
2. Convenience. You might think it won’t take you all that long to record a quick voiceover, but you might be surprised at how long it takes you to set up equipment, arrange the time to do the work, and perform the voice tracks many times until you get it right. When you consider the costs of your time to do this kind of work, it usually makes sense to outsource it.
3. Quality. A voiceover artist usually has several choices of places to record, whether it’s a basic decent home sound recording setup or a professional recording studio. Don’t be like the young lady who had to include a credit for “Dad on lawnmower” on her first recording.
4. Experience. Whether you need help with audio formats or finding background music, a professional voiceover artist has dealt with a lot of the issues around adding voice tracks to projects before. This expert advice comes with the territory when you’re working with a pro.
5. The Leaky Pipe Rule. As my plumber once told me while repairing a catastrophic situation that I had caused, “Do what you do best, and pay for the rest.” Why not do things right the first time?

Ten things every Microsoft Word user should know

Reblogged from General Disarray:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Most people use word processors like MS Word as they would a typewriter -- manually making section headers bold and centered, inserting hard breaks between paragraphs, etc. This formatting method is fine for short documents, but for long documents that include multiple sections, figures, tables and other elements that need to be styled consistently throughout the text, it pays to learn Word's advanced features.

Read more… 2,025 more words

This is an awesome post from 2006 about how Microsoft Word works . . . or more appropriately, how you can get an application that usually doesn't want to work, to work, at least a little better. Kudos and thanks to the author!

Five Things I Wish They’d Invent

Here’s what I would invent if I were an engineer, product designer, and entrepreneur, instead of whatever it is I am.

1. Loyalty Everywhere. How many “loyalty cards” do you have cluttering up your wallet or purse and getting in your way when you’re reaching for your ATM card or drivers’ license? Replace all these loyalty cards with ONE card. To sign up for a merchant’s loyalty program, just swipe your one card into their reader. You can opt in or out of sharing your personal information with that merchant, and the merchants can participate in marketing initiatives at different levels. This card would have a huge environmental benefit because it would save tons of plastic and associated manufacturing and shipping costs. And it would give merchants more ways to market to their customers without going overboard. 
2. Instant Bike Lane. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a laser light mounted on the front and rear of your bicycle that projects bike lane lines and symbols down onto the road? This device goes beyond alerting drivers to your presence on the road and reminds them that you’re entitled to your space. It wouldn’t work so well during the day, but at night it would be indispensable.
3. Touch Me And Sign In. Instead of having to remember 563 different passwords, your computer keyboard has a little fingerprint reader on it. Touching your index finger (or really, whichever digit you choose) to the reader signs you in to all of the websites you regularly access.
4. Pen Compress. The doctor tells you to apply a hot cloth to an area of your body for 15 minutes at a time, and let’s face it, some of those areas are pretty small. What about a little pen-sized appliance with a quarter-sized cloth on the end? The appliance circulates warm water through the cloth and you hold it on your zit or whatever the doctor’s told you to treat. No more running back and forth to the sink, having water run down your arms, etc.
5. Kiosk for the Rest Of Us. This is less an invention than a business concept. Don’t you think that urban areas would benefit from having little canopied areas with a couple of public phones, a bike rack, and a coffee stand all in one place? The kiosk would make money by selling coffee (and Instant Bike Lanes) and you could always get change for the phone, and there would be someone keeping an eye on the bike rack to make sure your bike doesn’t get vandalized.

This post was inspired by Rachel Sprung, who wrote about an assignment to invent a product that doesn’t exist. This list was going to be ten things I wish they’d invent, but I stopped at five to let my vast audience weigh in. What do YOU wish they’d invent?

Where’s the Turkey?

Overheard in a coffee shop today: “I took the turkey sandwich back to my desk, opened it up, and there was no turkey.”

You may have a similar story, but we hope it’s not about putting up a wind turbine in your community and not having wind. We have heard people say “This turbine will stand as a symbol of… ” or “Imagine visitors pulling into our community and the first thing they see is…”

We have even heard the phrase “boutique wind turbine” used as a compliment. We humbly submit that the purpose of wind turbines is to reduce our carbon footprint by generating electricity through wind. We have even heard stories that some people do not like the way turbines look. We think they’re beautiful, but we want them to be productive.

A responsible wind study is the only way to ensure that the turbine your community wants to put up will actually produce power, and not stand as an eyesore on the horizon. The phrase “Measure twice, cut once” is just as true when you’re erecting a $1 million wind turbine as it is when you’ve spent $12 on a few boards and nails for a home improvement project. Sophisticated wind measurement technology and meteorological expertise are now available even to smaller wind developers and community organizations.

So, next time you hear a community leader advocating for a wind turbine in your community, remember that you need turkey to make a turkey sandwich and you need wind to power a wind turbine. It ain’t a win if the blades don’t spin.

Tracking Changes – Nuts and Bolts

Someone sent me a Word document yesterday without changes tracked. Word’s “Compare documents” feature would have been useful if the original doc we were working on had been in Word, but in this case, the text had been copy-pasted from a web page, changes had been made, and then the text had been sent back to me.

If the person requesting revisions had turned on “Track Changes,” I would have been able to quickly spot the three or four changes they had requested and then edit the HTML document (which had tons of time-consuming formatting added to the text). Without the changes tracked, I was left with two unpalatable alternatives:

• Read the text of both documents closely and change the HTML document to match the text that had been supplied. (This method risks that I’d miss something and that the person requesting revisions wouldn’t be proofreading the document closely, because he assumed that he had given me everything “digitally.”)
• Take the new Word document and reapply the formatting to the text. (This method risks errors in formatting).

Either choice, of course, caused me to take extra time on what should have been a simple job. This led to me posting a short plea on this blog yesterday … worth reading because of the contrast between the title and the content. This blog is fairly new and doesn’t have many folks commenting on it yet (I’m working on changing this by attracting a bigger audience!) but it was enlightening to see what people said on my Facebook page — it turns out that the nuts and bolts of tracking changes are not well understood. Here are four quick tips for tweaking your collaborative workflow and making your life less frustrating.

1. When you send out a document for revision, send it in Microsoft Word (or one of the free alternatives like Open Office) and remind your team members to turn on “track changes.” If you’re dealing with people who you suspect don’t know how to track changes, tell them how to do so.
2. If you’re using Google Docs, don’t despair – in 2010 the Google team added a “track changes” feature — further reducing the need to ever use Word.
3. If you’ve already taken your document to the next step, and the text has become part of a web site, an InDesign document, a Flash movie, or anything else where your team members might not have access to the software, try to force them to edit the original text and leave track changes on. This way,  at least you can quickly see the changes you must make to the new document.
4. If you are accepting changes as part of Step 3, make sure you share the costs of making these changes with the team! This means that if you are a freelancer, you would have a contract in place that specifies additional charges for making revisions outside of a well-defined content cycle. If you’re part of an in-house workgroup, you should make sure that the team understands that the extra revisions have cost you extra time which must come out of somewhere. Don’t complain; just calmly state the impact on your schedule, including other projects that may get delayed, and let the team, or the supervisor, know how they can avoid this next time through.

If you follow these four suggestions and educate people you work with to collaborate with you in a thoughtful way, you’ll be more productive.