IE6 has got to go.  We are now two significant versions beyond IE6 and the lengths to which we must go to support IE6 have gotten to be too much.  Very encouraged by this news today that YouTube is probably considering dumping IE6 support in an upcoming release.  That should be the death knell.

Here at JLOOP we’ve dropped default support for IE6 in new projects and encourage our clients to use an “alert bar” that detects IE6 and shows a message to suggest that the user upgrade to a newer browser.  We truly believe this is a reasonable step.  With the coming of HTML5 and many new technologies, support for IE6 is going to get even more costly.  We want to do our part to kick it while its down.

Please join us!

Here is how State Farm did it:
Identify your target audience: the commercial aired during the ANTM marathon on VH1.
VH1 has the second highest concentration of P18-49 viewers among any network. [focusing on the 18-24 age group]
The median age of the VH1 viewer is 29.2. (Source: Nielsen)
VH1 has the highest concentration of P18-49 with a household income of $60K+.
51% home owners (source: cablevsionadsales )

Check out how the illustrations and tools in each the Music Room, Your Place/Your Stuff, and Your Car/Your Ride relate to that audience. The copy throughout the site is written in casual, conversational tone, using the voice and terms of the target audience. Plus they have aligned with the popular band The Fray, Projekt Revolution, the X games….

Anticipate their needs and answer them with the benefits your product provides:
At the forefront, this site uses a really basic question and answer technique, anticipating the users’ questions about insurance and coverage. Dig a little deeper and you will be surprised by the amount of lists and tools for tracking assets and calculating worth, no strings attached. (Because this target audience wants to receive value before they are willing to give up their contact info.) And at the end of each answer or tool, State Farm finds a simple way to say “Use State Farm, we’ve got your back.”

Call to action:
Besides the constant “Use State Farm, we’ve got your back” style of messaging, the omnipresent call to action is hanging out on the bottom right, in marketing’s favorite color – RED.

Ok – I kinda went off there. My main point was about customizing your message for the audience. Clearly this site was created for, and advertised to, the target audience of 18-25 year old non-homeowners with an above average income – selling them renter’s and car insurance. They don’t bother even mentioning home owners, life insurance, or disability.

Spend a few mornings watching the Today Show, and you will get a totally different kind of State Farm marketing, like this commerical, as well as a different website: http://www.statefarm.com/ that focuses on Home Owners, Life & Annuities, Health & disability, and Business.

I was so interested in this alternative marketing campaign to a non-traditional insurance audience, that I did a little more research and found this great quote:
“We do life solutions, and we do that by following life stages,” says Melinda Mueller, marketing manager at State Farm. “A first car. Graduating from college. Getting your first job. Getting married. You start buying life insurance when you have a baby. Most renters happen to be in this younger group, but only 3 in 10 have renters insurance. Statistics show that people are getting credit cards and managing their finances younger and younger. But as we analyzed our portfolio business, and compared our market share and market penetration in this group, we saw a great opportunity.”

Interesting, eh?

And yes, I am aware that this all only supports the fact that I am much too old to be losing 3 hours to an ANTM marathon.

BUT, it appears they have just rolled out an upgrade that does bring us some relief. The menus are noticeably faster on my unit. They have added some features such as “change the time” which allows you to view the whole schedule at a specific time – (a wonky workaround for their ridiculous interface, but welcome nonetheless). And they added a nice feature that allows you to add more space to the machine with an external hard drive. I still hate it, but at least its a start.

It feels worth it for the Blu-ray drive, I’ll admit, but for a system that doesn’t support 1080i and is bigger then most people’s upper torso, I just don’t see it. Oh, one story of genius, a man in Georgia hires 60 temp’s to wait in line, smart.

The first 9 months or so were very successful. The online control panel for the Vonage service is pretty helpful and with the ability to create call hunt sequences and also kick overflow calls to voicemail were nice additions. We did move downtown and wouldn’t have been able to keep our number with Verizon, so the decision seemed to be really paying off.

And then the troubles began. Various clients would consistently experience us sounding “like chipmunks” or with our voices “cutting out”. The problems were intermittent, so we blamed them on our bandwidth at our new location and sought out Charter Cable Internet to upgrade our speed. This seemed to solve the problem for a few months. And then the problem intensified…. and quickly. Some days nearly every phone call would be a disaster. It started that we couldn’t understand the person on the other end. Our bandwidth (3mbps down/1mbps up) was PLENTY, so we knew it couldn’t be that. We reconfigured our routers and spent many hours online with tech support to no avail.

Then the problems disappeared for a while and we hung on. Hoping that the problem had resolved itself. But alas… it returned with a vengeance, but this time in reverse. Now we could hear our callers perfectly, but they intermittently couldn’t hear us. Calls would drop or just be so garbled that we couldn’t continue them. Many days would end up with us calling people back on cell phones. (needless to say, many of us received fun surprises in our cell phone bills).

We finally were left with no choice but to end our relationship with Vonage. We had to go back to Verizon (which is not a pleasant experience). And we’ve had to change our phone number. We are in the final stages of migrating to our new numbers.

In a nutshell, we’re of the opinion that the Vonage service, while a nice option for home use (if you can stand the intermittent outages) is simply just not an option for business. I really think they shouldn’t even sell it to businesses. It is just too unreliable at this point. Probably the biggest bummer is their tech support. The scripted responses and “escalation” strategy takes hours for you to talk to anyone with real knowledge of how it works. As a technology-savvy company it is infuriating to take the leap to jump on technology like this and have no real access to technical support that is reasonable.

I also remain skeptical about the Vonage/Charter relationship in all of this. If our service was working really well, but suddenly became unruly around the time that Charter started offering their VOIP service in this area… doesn’t that seem a bit fishy?

In any case… they offered stock to us early adopters at the IPO price as a good faith gesture and I fell for it. I can’t afford much so I ponied up for the smallest number of shares they would let me request.

All day today they’ve been sending me emails about how the IPO was imminent and really got me hyped up. Each email gave me the option of bowing out at the last minute if I got cold feet, but I stayed the course, hoping for the best. The potential for a quick cashout was there.

So finally the email came – just a few minutes ago.

Today, the initial public offering (IPO) price for Vonage’s common stock was set. Please go to the Vonage Customer Directed Share Program website for details and login to learn whether your conditional offer has been accepted and the number of shares, if any, you have been allocated.

I logged in right away and was forced to click through 3 different screens with very serious language all making my blood rush. It felt like a drum roll was playing in my headphones…. the IPO is launched… the shares have been distributed… here’s that prospectus one more time… lucky you… you get stock at an IPO PRICE!… on the next screen you get to find out how rich you are going to be… you will see… on the next screen… how many shares you got… are you ready?…. when we tell you to… click the button…. not yet…. ok…. NOW (oh and by the way, you may not get all the shares you wanted, if any) IF ANY??? SURELY I GOT SOME!!!

Screw off Vonage. You are going down by the Skype anyway.

Update Wednesday morning: Vonage shares fell 14% at the debut. Well hah. I guess someone was looking out for me.

Last night was (in my book) by far a pivitol plot twist. Walt Cummings having the audacity to lie to President Logan’s face about the intentions of his working with the Russians on this nerve gas deale-o. But of course, in comes superman Jack to threaten to carve his eyeball out like a delicious Buterball turkey on thanksgiving day would cause anyone to crack under pressure. And the look on the first lady’s face after Logan tried to kiss her on the cheek and walk away.. was I the only one that saw that? Wonder if that’s a foreshadow to something else she’s gonna be upto in the next few hours.

So we’ll see what CTU is going to do now that they lost their only leads and connections to where the gas is. Can’t wait for next monday. If you haven’t been watching shame on yourself, because that’s all I plan on talking about for a while. So either way it’s your loss. heh.

I love music, movies, and books. I also love technology. I want to use technology to deliver the media I love anywhere, anywhen, with anyone.

This is fair use: I bought it, let me use it. I will tell all my friends about my favorite music. I might play it for them or even give them a digital version of a song. This is evangelism, not theft. This is advertising you cannot buy.

Restrictive copyright is like a vegetarian knife. You bought the knife, but if you cut meat with it, we’ll sue you. Excuse me? Let’s think again.

Speaking of fun with DRM, your Senator needs an iPod!