Companies who don't get Social Media

A few months ago I needed to order a lot of spices to restock my burgeoning spice rack, searching online for a supplier (I rarely have time to bricks and mortar shops) I found Spices Of India. I made a large order, it all arrived in one piece, in fact they gave me two pots of Saffron by mistake. Bonus. The email confirmation I received at the time encouraged me to become a fan of their Facebook page, enamoured as I am with this sort of thing I joined up. There were regular announcements of new products, recipes etc. All good and inoffensive. That is until they advertised a new skin cream that contained rose oil. For those who don't know, rose oil is an irritant and should't go in any skin cream at all, ever. All it will do is make your face red as a reaction to the badness in the oil.

I mentioned this.

Instead of a back and forth, a conversation, engaging with their dedicated fans, proven customers in fact, they panicked and deleted the post, blocked me from posting on to their wall and made no mention of it ever again.

This - in case you hadn't guessed is *not* how to deal with your customers using social media. Not only have they lost a customer (me) they have had bad press written about them (here), lost the opportunity to explain themselves and develop their online personality. In fact they have in all ways behaved like a much larger company faced with bad press, delete it and clam up.

Well done "Spices Of India" I hope someone a little more media savvy takes over your marketing soon.

Co-Working spaces in Brighton

I recently moved house. Most things about the move were brilliant, my daughter got her own room, we gained a larger bathroom and Kitchen. However we also lost a bedroom which meant that my spacious and pretty well kitted out home office has had to be moved into our bedroom. This, any number of people will tell you is a bad thing. I love my wife and daughter very much but neither of them make ideal work mates when I'm trying to solve a tricky coding problem or I'm trying to find the best way of presenting 20 different information points on a complicated design draft. Because of this I've decided to start looking for a co-working space in Brighton that I can use in a flexible way around my family commitments.

So far I've looked in detail at three that are close enough to my house:

I'm favouring The Skiff but I think that might just be because I know of them more than I know of the others.

Anyway - I'm going to give them all a once over and see if I can actually work there for a day. All I need for a successful day is a solid internet connection and a comfy desk and they probably all have that. I'm most excited however about the opportunities for networking as I'm embarrassingly bad at getting out there and meeting local people in the industry, mainly because I worked in London for so long!

Wish me luck.

 

Styling the ABBR tag in IE6

IE6 is a pain in the bum isn't it? Like some half assed zombie it keeps coming back from the dead to bite me. Anyway - on my current project ABBR tags are used quite a lot to explain some technical jargon, the tag working in IE6 (we have sufficient IE6 audience) is essential.

After everyone else had considered the problem and given up whilst I was away I was determined to prove  a point and fix things, I had a few ideas, helped by some serious googling, most failed or were complex, the one I thought up all on my own is small, targeted and simple.

Fails:

  1. Get Jquery to spot the ABBRs, and replace them with spans, then style to fit (can;t target something the DOM doesn't believe exists).
  2. Use Marek Prokop's (2002 I admit) script to stick SPANs inside the ABBR and style that as well (works but way too big and inelegant in comparison, + adds extra mark up)

Success:

<!--[if IE 6]> <script>document.createElement('abbr');</script> <!--[endif]-->

Hijack the HTML5 Shiv, first (iThink) created by John Ressig and whack an old school ABBR in there rather than a fancy new shiny FIGURE tag :)

Enjoy!

The Tall Designer has joined The South Coast Design Forum

Just the other day. You can find my details listed on the membership pages. I've attended quite a few SCDF events over the last 18 months and I've been tempted to join a number of times but haven't ever felt enough justification, however with my new surge of networking and exposure I decided that the £40 yearly fee was small enough and the discount on even tickets was large enough.

I'm hoping to attend the February meet up, which I believe is on the first Wednesday of the month. I can't find the even on their website however so maybe I should volunteer to help!

Oh no my mistake - it's hidden in some low contrast text on the right of the events page, my usability opinions kick in to say if it's going to be listed there, it should also be mixed into the date ordered list of special events on the left of that page...

Brighton First Wednesday of the month at the Sussex Yeoman 7 Guildford Road BN1 3LU near Brighton Station 6.00pm

Anyway I shall be attending, complete with business cards and a lack of networking skills. I hope to meet some nice people!