Today while working I’ve been listening to TED Talks and I caught this one by Philip K. Howard talking about our modern view of law, how it is inhibiting our ability to live a free life, and four ways we can fix our broken system. This is powerful stuff! Find some time this week to listen to this. It will move you.
TOUCHDOWN FOR PURPLE, ROCK, SCISSORS ON TIM TEBOW FOUNDATION SITE LAUNCH
ORLANDO, FLORIDA (February 18, 2010) — Real time, real data, real results, and really cool cutting-edge technology got the extra point for digital agency, Purple, Rock, Scissors, who teamed up with the Tim Tebow Foundation for a Super Bowl blitz of its own.
Turning the hype surrounding the controversial Focus on the Family-sponsored Super Bowl commercial into site traffic and hard data for the newly launched Tim Tebow Foundation Web site, www.timtebowfoundation.org, Purple, Rock, Scissors scored a touchdown in generating exponential traffic for the site that they strategically engineered to withstand the number of hits it had coming on Super Bowl Sunday and beyond.
“Using intuitive foresight in anticipation of heavy spikes in traffic to www.timtebowfoundation.org, which would naturally stem from any publicity relating to Tim Tebow, such as the future NFL draft, we selected Amazon EC2 to host the site and rigorously tested the hosting environment’s capabilities to ensure that it would remain live despite sudden influxes in the number of hits,” said Bobby Jones, CEO and founding partner of Purple, Rock, Scissors.
Pulled straight from its innovative playbook and as a part of a holistic digital strategy, Purple, Rock, Scissors perfectly executed a technique known as affiliate marketing, where one Web site is used to drive traffic to another and in this case, cleverly utilized the Focus on the Family Web site to pass traffic to www.timtebowfoundation.org. The results were astounding, with this tactic alone accounting for over 95 percent of hits to the Tim Tebow Foundation Web site and increased awareness, interest and support for the Foundation in the days preceding and following the Super Bowl.
“The Tim Tebow Foundation exists to bring faith, hope and love to those needing a brighter day,” said Tim Tebow, the University of Florida football star and Heisman winner, who is currently preparing for the NFL draft. “The newly launched Web site (TimTebowFoundation.org) and official social media pages, allow us to spread our message to a global audience who are equally passionate about our vision and values; to serve those who are going through difficult times. Thanks to our partnership with Purple, Rock, Scissors, we have an informative Web site and official Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages to give the Tebow Foundation donors and partners, not only a place to connect resources with needs, but a wonderful platform for communicating our vision for A Brighter Day.”
Utilizing an innovative mix of cross-channel marketing tactics, Purple, Rock, Scissors also executed highly targeted grassroots initiatives to build trust in the social media space. By creating official Tim Tebow Foundation Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages, along with blog outreach efforts, that launched in the weeks preceding the Super Bowl, the foundation was laid to establish the Foundations’ authenticity, build awareness and accumulate a substantial fan-base.
“Purple, Rock, Scissors was charged with creating a compelling digital marketing strategy that would bring the Tim Tebow Foundations’ vision to life,” said Alex Lirtsman, Chief Marketing Officer of Purple, Rock, Scissors. “Priding ourselves in the utilization of ahead-of-the-curve technologies, we monitored the results of our initiatives in real time, using www.chartbeat.com. The effectiveness of our strategy was exemplified, as we witnessed huge traffic spikes following the airing of Tim Tebow’s commercials.”
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About Purple, Rock, Scissors
Purple, Rock, Scissors is one of the country’s top digital agencies and an industry innovator in forward-thinking Web solutions. With offices in New York and Florida, Purple, Rock, Scissors specializes in holistic digital strategies, employing a vast array of services ranging from Web design and development, search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), e-commerce, application development, social media management and more.
With a diverse and impressive client roster that includes global non-profits, retail giants and major entertainment brands, Purple, Rock, Scissors has a proven track record of success, guiding clients through the perpetual trends of the digital space and growing brands online and beyond. For more information visit www.PurpleRockScissors.com.
Media Contact
Heather Keroes, Connect Advertising
407-415-2808, heather@connectadv.com
This Press Release can be viewed on the web at:
Purple, Rock, Scissors is proud to announce the site launch of Florida Hospital’s Spine Center. About seven in ten people suffer from back pain at some point in the life, which is why the Spine Center sought to create a place where people could find relevant information on maintaining a healthy back, neck, and spine. With new Spine Center initiatives, Florida Hospital approached us to help bring their vision to life, and educate Central Florida residents about Spine conditions and treatment.
Partnering with Florida Hospital’s marketing team, we helped build the brand new site from the ground up, focusing on creating an easy and informative user interface. Taking special care, we’ve executed a trackable and goal-oriented funnel strategy to maximize site potential and lead visitors to professional physicians and care coordinators.
In performing in-depth competitive analysis, we help better position Florida Hospital with rank and traffic. Through extensive SEO research and optimization techniques we also ensure that this site connects existing and future patients to the specialist who can meet their needs.
You can check out the new site at http://www.fhorlandospinecenter.com/
In the physical world, privacy is evaluated as a series of probabilities and assumptions which are often anchored to a network of trust. If you write something on a piece of paper and hide it in your mattress, the likelihood that someone will find it is relatively small because paper is a very primitive data distribution technology. It has real, physical limitations which directly impact the probability that the information will be discovered. If you share information with your best friend or doctor or pastor, internally there are different evaluations of trust which are built on an unbounded series of factors. If they violate that trust and share the information with someone else, there is still a trust evaluation on the other end for the recipient who must determine if the source is reliable (are they making something up about you).
On the web, information moves differently. The data received can be a literal copy of the data sent regardless of how many times it hops around the nodes. The vast majority of our data is shared by proxy through faceless web services which we entrust to be good stewards of our data and our intentions. Out here, there is no such thing as private; only less public. Compounding the problem is what I refer to as the unidirectional path of online privacy which dictates that once something moves along the gradient of privacy (or the degree to which something is public information) towards being more public it can not be moved back to be more private. This is different from the physical world where information can potentially be taken back and disposed of. On the web, all data you see is technically a copy of some original source which most likely does not exist anymore because it was held in temporary memory. The rules and "social norms" of the web are different out here.
We recently have seen a shift in Facebook’s attitude towards privacy. Now, it seems, we are seeing Google test the waters of the new privacy standard (warning: link contains vulgarity):
I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother.
There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts.
You know who my third most frequent contact is?
My abusive ex-husband.
Which is why it’s SO EXCITING, Google, that you AUTOMATICALLY allowed all my most frequent contacts access to my Reader, including all the comments I’ve made on Reader items, usually shared with my boyfriend, who I had NO REASON to hide my current location or workplace from, and never did.
My other most frequent contacts? Other friends of Flint’s.
Oh, also, people who email my ANONYMOUS blog account, which gets forwarded to my personal account. They are frequent contacts as well. Most of them, they are nice people. Some of them are probably nice but a little unbalanced and scary. A minority of them — but the minority that emails me the most, thus becoming FREQUENT — are psychotic men who think I deserve to be raped because I keep a blog about how I do not deserve to be raped, and this apparently causes the Hulk rage.
Privacy is important. Let me say that again: Privacy is important! We have a lot of work to do. We’re still figuring out how data ownership and privacy works on the web. One thing, to me, is clear: people want to be treated closer to their local norms on the global stage.
Food for thought.
Yesterday, I got the rare opportunity to work from home — which is an entire blog post in itself. Through the tribulations that I had to work through yesterday, the largest was Magento. Who would have thought; Magento being a source of frustration. Haaa, I kid, I kid… sort of. My development environment at home is substantially different than what we use here at work. Namely, I run Zend Server CE 5.3 as opposed to a custom PHP 5.2.x build like on our iMacs at work.
News to me, Magento doesn’t work on 5.3… or the version we’re using doesn’t. Fortunately, it was really easy to fix the problems. When it comes down to it, all problems I had were sourced inside of the Varien library as well as the Core Mage library. We’ll walk through it real quick-like. I hope this helps you out.
Undoubtably, the first error you’ll run into is the following:
Fatal error: Method Varien_Object::__tostring() cannot take arguments in /lib/Varien/Object.php
This is a real easy fix, foruntately for you. All you need to do is change the __toString() method to __invoke() and you’re off to the races. That should be your final Fatal Error.
Now onto the numerous E_DEPRECATED errors, which is equally painless to fix. The Magento developers tend to use the function "split" a lot on strings. Just do a search through your project for this function and replace with "explode". It uses the same arguments and the end result is the same, so swapping the function name is all there is to it. There’s a bajillion files with it, but I only had to change it in two to in order to get going:
If you continue to have problems, I recommend checking out the 5.3 Migration section of the PHP manual. Alternatively, Stas Malyshev posted on DevZone not long ago with his 5.3 Migration script, which sounds very promising!
Happy coding!