engage communications for a new era

A few weeks ago, Patrick Ruffini penned a great post on how a single photo of Hillary Clinton and the subsequent viral meme surrounding that photo may have single-handily reshaped some perceptions of the former presidential candidate.

This weekend, a photo of former President George W. Bush helping wounded soldiers during the Warrior 100K rapidly spread through social media with Americans passionately displaying their appreciation and admiration for the President. This at a time when George W. Bush has been largely silent and out of the public eye.

I don’t have anything truly profound to say about these photos. Each of them speaks for themselves. I guess that’s my point. So much of politics is fought with words and rhetoric, but these two photos speak louder and more clearly about these two leaders than years of written words. As the social web becomes more visual (see Instagram, Pinterest, etc.), I believe these moments will play an even greater role in the public’s perception of our leaders.

On this week’s show we take a look behind the current and talk about how we run Engage. First, we take a look at the notes from a Stanford class being taught by Peter Thiel and how we apply the principles of startup culture here at Engage. Then, we dive into this post about preventing “scope creep.” Let us know what you think about the show in the comments.

Remember to follow us on Facebook and Twitter. You can also subscribe to the show on iTunes.

Engage Show 64: Running the Show Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

On this week’s episode, Mark Strand, President of the Congressional Institute, joins us to talk about the inner workings of Congress and how new media and other technology are changing the way the institution works. You should check out the Congressional Institute’s site, Mark’s Sausage Factory Blog, and follow Mark on Twitter.

Check us out on Twitter and Facebook. You can subscribe to the show on iTunes.

As promised during the show, here’s all you ever wanted to know about mimeograph machines.

Engage Show 63: Inside Congress [ 29:38 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Understanding influence is a huge topic in social media. A number of players, like Klout and PeerIndex, have built hugely successful platforms around rewarding highly influential social media users.

These platforms are great at measuring celebrity. If you’re Lady Gaga, you have a Klout score of 92. If you’re Barack Obama, your score is 91. Beyond that, microcelebrities with large Twitter followings and a healthy degree of interaction on the platform will earn high Klout scores, but what we’re talking about is a relatively small sliver of the social media universe.

This left us wondering: what would a good influence score look like for the rest of us who aren’t Twitter celebrities? And specifically, what does it look like on Facebook, the world’s biggest social stage?

Today, we’re launching Trendsetter, a platform which lets you discover who’s influential and what they care about.

Connect with the app and you’ll get your Trendsetter score — and see where you stack up compared to your friends. Trendsetter measures interactions with pages on Facebook and generates an individualized Trendsetter score for you and your friends. A high Trendsetter score means you’re very likely to tell your friends about things on Facebook, have niche tastes, and tend to be early to the party when it comes to liking brands and content. A lower Trendsetter score means you’re quieter in interacting on Facebook and tend to have more mainstream tastes — but when you do share, it’s because it really matters.

For years, through measures like the Net Promoter Score, marketers have been trying to understand the voters and consumers most likely to share things. We have an inkling that just a cursory glance at someone’s social media profile can tell you more about people’s propensity to share, and Trendsetter aims to show you what moves them.

A Trendsetter report gives you a wealth of data about your network — who the biggest early adopters are among your friends, what Facebook pages these early adopters like, what types of things they’re interested in, and how they’re distributed throughout the country. Here’s what my Trendsetter report looks like:

I knew we were onto something when our algorithm ranked Jesse Thomas of the DC-based digital agency JESS3 as the #1 Trendsetter in my network. Jesse is the consummate early adopter, and this makes him the biggest Trendsetter amongst my friends.

Trendsetter is a joint project of Engage and the Winston Group, a strategic communications and polling firm. With the Winston Group, we’ll be developing quick, one-question surveys for Trendsetter users, and breaking down the answers in interesting ways based on user interests and social influence — a level of detail it would be very hard to get at in a traditional opinion survey.

Who are the biggest Trendsetters in your network? Let’s connect and find out!

I’m a huge fan of Rapid Application Developmnent (RAD). I do a lot of personal projects and proofs of concepts for different web ideas of mine. It’s a great way for me to practice web development, entertain myself, and to become familiar with new technologies. I’ve also been wanting to contribute more to the Engage Blog, so I’ve decided to try and release one of my small apps once a month here at engagedc.com.

With HTML5 standards emerging, websites are becoming more and more like applications. This blog post is specifically about Shortcut Icons. One type of Shortcut Icon are Favicons. They are the little images on your browser tabs that are usually the logo of the website. They were originally only used on old browsers when you would favorite a website (hence the name: Favicon => Favorite Icon).

Today, with the power of HTML5, we use Shortcut Icons beyond just a little favorite icon on your desktop browser. They’re used by phones, tablets, the Windows Taskbar and Internet Explorer 9, Facebook, and more — the list goes infinitely on. At Engage, we strive to meet the highest possible web standards for our clients, and one way we do this is by adding Shortcut Icon support for multiple devices.

So, I built this small app that takes an image and resizse it to the multiple dimensions of supported Shortcut Icons, converts the image into a .PNG format, and provides the code for you to make it easy to implement on any website. This is just an early alpha-build proof of concept that still needs a lot of work, and I wouldn’t use this app for hosting or hotlinking your images as it’s only on a shared hosting account. Please feel free to use this though, provide me with any feedback, and email me if you have any questions!

The app is located here.