Was Vice President Humphrey speaking prophetically?  Considering the impact the digital age has on society’s access to communication channels, our right to be heard, seen, mocked, praised, etc., is virtually unlimited.  Another example of the solution becoming the problem, the challenge for any type of digitally-authored message is now one of relevancy in the quest to be taken seriously.  Beyond relevancy lies action.  To move people and organizations to take action, your message needs to be seen at precisely the right time by the right person on the right platform or you lose.  Daunting?  Yes.  Impossible?  Nope.

Enter Strategy.

Strategy, a discipline most enterprises relegate to corporate development activities, is fast becoming a necessity when considering any type of digital communication or development initiative.  Properly defined, strategy is not a plan in and of itself but a series of decisions that lead to development of the plan.  If your plan is the “what,” strategy answers the “why.”

A precisely executed combination of words, images, color and technology can inspire people to take action.  In addition to engaging your services or paying attention to your fundraising initiative, it can inspire them to move mountains and to overthrow dictators.  To get there takes some effort and that effort begins with answering some questions that will inform your plans before the first line of code is written.

Who cares?  Really.  This is my number one and it informs your decisions regarding content, target audience, user experience, platform, and more.

What is the ideal outcome I am trying to achieve?  If you don’t have a clear vision of what you’re trying to achieve, you will either under- or overspend on projects that produce disappointing results.

Who manages this stuff?  As little as two years ago, prevailing wisdom would have dictated IT.  Not anymore.  Marketers have drunk the technology Kool-Aid and are rapidly becoming the dominant stewards of all-things-digital, particularly with branding, social media, and enterprise data initiatives.  Ultimately many CEO’s are recognizing that the digital buck stops with them, particularly the ones who have found blogging a useful way to speak directly to their customers and partners.

How do I allocate budget for something I barely understand?  The beauty of digital is that you can start small and scale almost any project over time to meet your needs as you grow or as requirements change.  Open source development frameworks and the application programming interface (API) have improved the speed of development, stability of applications and have reduced the overall cost to iterate design, content and functionality over the long haul.

Ask a few of the right questions before you commit to a digital project, get your strategic priorities in line and you increase dramatically your chances of being taken seriously.

<Mike Broggie is a digital marketing strategist and COO of HDS>

Hodges Digital has tried out several of the PM tools out there, but we’ve adopted three that we’ve grown to call our own (well, you know what I mean).

Here are our favorite project management tools (all of which are web-based with an accompanying mobile app):

• Trello allows you to organize projects into boards and tasks as cards which are assigned to the appropriate board (PM meets Pinterest, without the pretty pictures). While limited to the board structure, you can arrange your system any way you choose. Just focusing on one project? Create a to-do, doing, done system that allows you to take individual tasks through the ranks. Juggling multiple projects? Observe them all in one space with status updates and to-do’s on each project board.
• Basecamp is a tool that allows a group to get together in a shared space, huddle around the metaphorical campfire and share tools and resources as it relates to a specific project. This tool works best when you don’t need to engage in a lot of dialog, but you need a central warehouse to store all the bits and pieces of a project, includes files, images and other documents.
• Smartsheet, as Sonali likes to refer to it, is Excel on steroids (legal ones, not the ones that make you scary and angry). Using its columns and rows set-up, project managers can create checklists, schedules, tracking documents and more. Our favorite part? Being able to add content to individual rows.

While the off-the-grid girl in me still loves the old school method of manila file folders – having a piece of shared technology streamlines the process and cuts out a lot of clutter in the middle.

What PM tools have you adopted?

The traditional solution for creating a website that worked on mobile devices used to involve creation of a separate mobile website with its own design and layout for a specific type of phone – like the iPhone. With the proliferation of devices that can access the internet this strategy is now fast becoming obsolete.

The Answer

The solution to this challenge is responsive web design.

Mashable has called 2013 the year of responsive web design. Responsive web design works by giving an optimal viewing experience to visitors at all stages of their online experience. They might discover your site during a search on their desktop but then they may want to continue research while at work, on their tablet or cellphone.

On the HDS website the content and images are held in fluid grids that size themselves correctly depending on the size of the image. This creates a seamless experience across thousands of devices.

We use media queries to find out the size of screen and set breakpoints for different sizes. This means that there are three layouts that need to be made for one design. One for the desktop (anything above 1024px width), one for the iPad portrait mode (less than 1024px width) and one for the cellphone (less than 300px). The different layouts have different styles associated with them in CSS.

One of the best tools available online to check the responsiveness of a particular website is responsive.is. Go ahead try out how your website looks on a tablet and a cellphone.

<Sanat is a developer at HDS>

For the uninitiated, a Fitbit a tiny wearable device about the size of a thumb drive that silently tracks my footsteps, floors ascended, calories burned and sleep quality. It then wirelessly, without any action on my part, deposits my personal fitness metrics into a Web or mobile app or both.  There are many players popping up in this space and odds are your next smart phone will do all this and make you a sandwich out of the box.  The beauty of the Fitbit and its complementary apps is that it delivers value without creating more friction in my daily life.

I admit that I’ve tried to keep track of my personal fitness and consumption metrics numerous times in the past with dubious results.  What it always comes down to is that fleeting commodity of time.  I just don’t have the time to add yet another log-in event to my already over-subscribed day.  In marketing speak; the perceived value of tracking my data is insufficient to counterbalance the time/irritation required for inputting said data.  Weight Watchers Online?  You’re a great service but guess what, if successful tracking of my data requires my constant care and nurturing – sorry, ain’t gonna happen.

This is not unusual behavior regarding the innumerable Web and mobile apps out there.  We get excited enough to take the plunge on the premise of the sales pitch, but when the value of the app is dependent on our constancy of action, it can create, not reduce, friction in our lives and at that point becomes worthless – cast aside to the junk drawer of our pixelated desktops.

I hear similar gripes from corporate marketing clients that have deployed, sometimes at great expense, Web and mobile apps of numerous variety and specialty to help their companies operate at greater efficiency.  As it turns out, human behavior intercedes and these solutions rarely live up to expectation – either due to their complexity, or to our old friend constancy of action.  What’s often missing from the process that leads to many app deployments are some fundamental considerations: how is this app going to create value, and if that value depends on human interaction, how do I make that interaction as frictionless  as possible?  There are several other important questions to consider, but these are the big ones that can inform and trigger others.

The lesson here for us “developers of efficiency” comes from one of the immutable laws of marketing: “perception is reality”.  No matter how cool or tightly integrated an app is, if it doesn’t deliver perceived value beyond the effort of maintaining or interacting with it, it might as well have never existed.

First – the BIG news.  I am very excited to welcome Mike Broggie on board, as COO of Hodges Digital.  Mike brings deep knowledge and interest in the digital/social/mobile space and is a terrific fit for our company.  Mike moves to Richmond from Los Angeles – one more transplantee in our increasingly diverse town.

We are also finally eating our own dog food!  Our new website is responsively designed and showcases our work much more effectively than previous iterations.  And yes, we will be more diligent about posting to the blog (Casey has us on a tight schedule with her editorial calendar).

So welcome (back) to our site – we hope you will stay a while and check things out.

Are mobile, social and web three separate entities anymore? Not when you consider the following:

• The number of smart-phone users, world-wide just crossed the 1 billion mark.  In the U.S., approximately 87 percent use their phones to access the web and other apps (25 percent of whom, primarily use their mobile devices to access the web).
• More than half of Facebook’s 1 billion users access the platform through their mobile devices, while 18 percent of whom don’t even visit the website.

So, it’s no longer an option to pick a platform, businesses must be on all of them. At Hodges Digital Strategies, our most interesting challenges are design and development at these three intersections: mobile + web, mobile + social and web + social.

Mobile + Web

Side-by-side example of website on mobile (left) and mobile-optimized website (right)

• Mobile friendly sites (Sites that function on mobile devices. These sites have no flash and small image sizes for relatively fast loading. Users may need to zoom in order to use the site. Newer design and development capabilities are phasing out these kinds of sites in favor of mobile optimized and responsive sites.)
• Mobile optimized sites (Sites designed to cater to mobile devices. Pared down functionality and navigation elements, large, touch friendly buttons and minimal data entry allow for mobile optimization. Most mobile optimized sites give users the option to view the desktop version of their website.)
• Responsive design (Sites that utilize responsive methodologies for web development. A full website that renders seamlessly on devices with various form-factors. Meaning, a separate mobile site is not required – a large three column site on your large screen monitor, with rich visuals and extensive menus, can step down to a single column in a series of steps,responding to various device sizes.)

As more people interact with the web, primarily through their mobile devices, mobile capabilities for your website are no longer optional. While there is no right answer on whether to choose mobile optimized or responsive, we are biased towards responsive design and are incorporating these techniques in pretty much every new site we build.

Mobile + Social

Of the main social platforms, Twitter and YouTube were the most mobile-centric from the beginning, however, the switch to Timeline impacted apps, as they’re not visible via Facebook’s mobile app. To mitigate this (and to aid in app discovery), Facebook announced App Center. Mobile friendly apps that are registered in App Center are now discoverable through Facebook’s search bar. From a development perspective, it does mean that each app needs to also include a mobile version (using any of the above methods). There is slightly more work on the backend, however, with more and more users coming in from mobile, this is the only way for the users to access apps on their devices.

Web + Social

Back in 2010, Facebook introduced Open Graph API (yes, that ubiquitous “Like” button is just a toddler). Social sharing by liking or sharing content on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter andGoogle +, has been deployed on millions of websites. Sharing also happens in the reverse direction by embedding activity streams from social media onto the web.  Single sign-on (signing up for a web-app via your Facebook or Twitter account) saves us from having to remember yet another user ID and password. However, balance that with the risk of allowing the 3rd party site access to your information and sometimes publish on your behalf. You can control third-party app access via privacy settings on your Facebook account.

This digital convergence is only going to accelerate further and include future platforms. Just think: Google Glass, the Nike+ FuelBand, your car’s dashboard…the fun has only just begun.

We’ve just launched an app that I hope will be an incredibly handy resource for many people. Hilldrup Move Pro (iPhone/iPad) is a full-featured moving platform.  The app is a must-have for anyone contemplating a move.  But, we wanted to make the app relevant to a wider audience.  When strategizing on app funcationality, we faced a unique conundrum.  How do you extend the life of an app that is built around a discrete event?

In looking into consumers’ moving patterns, we noticed that most people don’t unpack their boxes right away.  (True confessions: I still have unopened boxes in my attic six years after stashing them up there.)  So we created the ability for users to visually add items to their virtual box and even take pictures of their items, in order to document box contents.  High value items can be immediately identified.  Finally, users are able to create QR code labels to slap on their boxes.  When a user wants to identify the contents of a box, all they have to do is to scan the label on the box and read the contents. Pretty Cool!  Oh, and as an added security feature, to prevent just anyone from being able to read the QR code, only the Move Pro app on the original device that “packed” the box is able to read its contents.

Some other features and their long-range applications include:

- Ability to notify friends when you’ve moved – applies down the road if your phone number or e-mail address change.

- Currency convertor.  For people moving to other countries, this is super useful.  And just as handy for people simply taking a trip abroad.

- Assign a task to a friend – “Honey-do lists” are finally mobile-ized!

Reverse search will be available in the next release. Here’s how it will work – suppose I’m looking for that pair of red shoes I wear over the holidays.  A quick search within the app tells me immediately which box those little babies are in.  That means no more rooting through boxes to find what you’re looking for.  This feature alone transcends moving – it puts a handy organizing tool at your disposal.

We’re pretty excited at what the Hilldrup Move Pro can and will do.  Download it and let us know what you think.  We’re hoping that MovePro will make it to your Home screen.