November is flying by and some of our mustaches are starting to grow in. So far we’ve raised $1,300 dollars to support men’s health! If you are interested in learning more or donating you can visit our team page. As promised here is this week’s mug shots:
Have a great weekend!
A few days ago, I was browsing my Feedly dashboard and ran across this AdWeek post describing how big retailers are gearing up to poach their competitors customers this holiday season. The article goes into some specifics, but the idea is basically that brands are planning to monitor Twitter for relevant conversations and then “at” message potential customers with special offers, product details, or even local store inventory information.
So imagine @MikeBruins65 from Boston tweeting “Wtf! @BestBuy offering 25% off all 4K TVs in-store…except nothing in stock.” and then @target replying “Cheer up @MikeBruins65! We have 4K TVs in-stock in Everett, MA! Grab coupons at http://bit.ly/target-4k-ma”. Since these brands are certainly leveraging powerful tools like Radian6 or even the full Twitter Firehose, it seems like it would be straightforward for them to execute strategies like this around high value markets. But what about as an individual, could you employ a similar strategy to make a few bucks?
The most obvious, least risky, and least lucrative approach would be to monitor Twitter for tweets that sounded like they were from frustrated buyers and then message them Amazon associates links for the product they’re looking for. Looking at Amazon’s fee structure, you’d want to target high margin categories with moderately expensive products and then hopefully end up doing a decent amount of volume. So imagine searching for Tweets from users frustrated that they can’t checkout on a small eCommerce site, finding the product they’re searching for on Amazon, and then Tweeting them the link to buy with your Associates link.
More risky and potentially more upside. I’m not entirely sure how feasible this would be, but I think the idea would be to use a SaaS eCommerce platform like Shopify to setup an eCommerce shop and then dynamically list items which you’ll later dropship. The challenge would be two fold, using Twitter to identify which previously obscure items are starting to trend and then figuring out how to introduce enough margin so that you end up profiting on the sale. It might be feasible though, with the explosion of small, boutique eCommerce sites it might be possible to negotiate a “I’ll buy 400 for 50% off!” type deal quickly enough to introduce a profitable sale. The bigger challenge would probably be identifying these items as they start trending, but that could be solved by….
Recent member of the billion dollar boys club and frequent target of “haters”, it’s current traction and latent purchase intent potentially make it the perfect place for affiliate marketing. Beyond that, the wealth of potential gift pins and the follower/repin graph might hold the key to identifying relatively obscure products right before they begin to go viral. Anyway, I don’t have any concrete ideas on how you could leverage Pinterest but it definitely seems like the ingredients for success are there.
Totally coincidentally, this article just came across TechCrunch – A Pin On Pinterest Is Worth 25% More In Sales Than Last Year, Can Drive Visits & Orders For Months
Anyway, are any of these actually feasible? Who knows, but I’d love to hear any other ideas.
Last week, LinkedIn published an indepth technical explanation of how their new LinkedIn Intro mobile product works on iOS. What Intro does is basically display LinkedIn data about your contacts directly in your email client – similar to what Rapportive did for gmail. It’s a cool app but the implementation details LinkedIn shared ignited an Internet firestorm, especially among the startup/hacker crowd.
How Intro works is it basically modifies the users normal iOS email client so that it connects through a LinkedIn proxy server instead of interacting with their webmail provider directly. What this does, is allow LinkedIn to dynamically modify a user’s email before it reaches their mail client, depending on if the user is connected to the sender on LinkedIn. From a IT security standpoint, introducing a third party that would sit between a user and the mail server they’re connecting to undoubtedly introduces a new attack vector but what really caught my interest was how LinkedIn was achieving this. In order to smoothly update the user’s proxy settings, LinkedIn is using a iOS feature known as Configuration Profiles.
I’m not familiar with the iOS SDK or APIs so this was the first time I’d heard about Configuration Profiles. In short, what they allow an app to do is install a set of settings on an iOS device – from email and web proxy settings to additional credentials and SSL keys. Configuration profiles are typically used in enterprise environments to allow a company’s IT department to quickly configure the settings on an employee’s iOS device. When provisioning a new device, IT would basically use the configuration profile to install things like a VPN, internal credentials, etc. So what’s the problem?
Well according to the LinkedIn post and comments from users that have used profiles before, the user experience of installing a profile which radically alters your iOS system settings is surprisingly unassuming. As a user, you click through a couple of prompts and boom, all of a sudden Safari is using a proxy server to fetch websites. So what nefarious things could you do by routing iOS mobile traffic through a proxy server? Unsolicited injected display advertising.
On the desktop web, unscrupulous extension developers have been monetizing their install base by injecting display ads into the browsing experience of their users for years. From companies like Bonzi Buddy to newer companies like PageRage, the model is tried, true, and profitable. However, on mobile there isn’t an obvious opportunity to inject ads and get access to the rapidly growing number of mobile web impressions. It seems like using configuration profiles would be the perfect vector to change this. Crapware iOS developers could quietly prompt their users to install a configuration profile to get access to “hot new features” and then surreptitiously start injecting display ads into websites on the proxy server.
I’m not familiar enough with iOS development to speak to how easy developing an app like this would be or if it would get past the app store approval process, but if it’s feasible someone is certainly going to do it. If anyone is familiar with an app already doing this, I’d love to know about it.
Well, it’s one week into Movember and three of our engineers, including myself, have joined the team. It’s too late to join our team, however if you want you can still donate. We’ll continue to provide an update each week.
Here we are this week. Let us know which week you think will be the best mug shot and who has the best ‘stache:
On a side note, we’d like to congratulate DiscoverE on a successful launch earlier this week. We helped the DiscoverE team build their entire site which aggregated a number of old sites they had.
Thought I’d share a trick that I learned from Metal Toad while working on a Drupal 7 development project. This trick may make you very popular with your clients if they hate the being forced to dig through the content table in the standard admin overlay until they find the specific piece of content in a view they want to edit. Instead, using this method will create a gear button when you hover over the content on the front end, with a link that says “Edit” when you click on it.
I should note that if you style each row in the view using ‘Content’ under the Format > Show menu then views will add the link for you automatically. If you have a very simple view and this is all you need, no need to read further.
Unfortunately for me, many of the views I tend to create are formatted using ‘Fields’ because it provides me more flexibility to customize the output. The drawback is that it doesn’t automatically add these useful contextual edit links for content. But don’t worry, a pretty simple solutions follows..
1.) Open up your view and navigate to the ‘Fields’ section. Click ‘Add’ and search for ‘Content: Edit link’, check the box next to it and apply it to the display.
2.) Navigate back to the ‘Add’ button next to ‘Fields’ section of your view and click on the small arrow to right of of it. Next select ‘Rearrange’ and move your ‘Content: Edit Link’ field to the top of the Fields list. Apply the change.
3.) Now go back and click on the ‘Content: Edit Link’ to bring up the field configuration screen. Expand the ‘Style Settings’ section and make the following changes. Be sure to change the HTML element to DIV and spell the class names exactly as below.
4.) Scroll down further in the same screen until you see the ‘Rewrite Results’ section and expand it. Check the “Rewrite the output of this field” box and put the following HTML into the text box:
<ul><li>[edit_node]</li></ul>
5. ) Scroll up to the ‘No Results Behavior’ section and make sure that “Hide if empty” and “Hide rewriting if empty” check boxes are checked. Apply your changes.
6.) Lastly, you need to add some styling to the edit links wrapper. For my example I used the following which put the edit links in the top left of the content box. If you want it to appear at the top right just leave out the ‘top:0px’ line.
.views-field-edit-node .contextual-links-wrapper {
height: 50px;
width: 50px;
top: 0px;
left: 0px;
}
If you want the wheel to be a different color than standard grey, you can use image editing software to alter the color of the image of the wheel at the following location: “[your projects base url]/modules/contextual/images/gear-select.png “.
Hope this trick helps you as much as it has helped me! Feel free to reach out with any questions.