Inside The Candidates' Code: What The Campaign Websites Say About Obama And Romney

Both presidential candidates say they can slice the budget and make better use of national resources. So who is smarter and more efficient on the Web?

A political campaign website has a singular purpose: vacuum up personal information and donations. How they do it is a matter of priorities. Content-heavy sites are slow to load and expensive to operate; running one in a cost-conscious manner means eliminating unnecessary server requests, tracking user behavior, optimizing every interaction and shaving kilobytes off pages. So who does it better, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney? The answer could provide yet another clue into how effect each man would be leading the country's economic recovery. A side-by-side comparison reveals that neither site is perfect--and that they are not very similar.

To measure up the candidates’ online properties, FastCompany tapped Daniel Lacy, lead front-end engineer at the dating site HowAboutWe in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood, and an expert on website minification and accessibility. To examine the candidates’ websites, he’ll be using the Safari Web Inspector in Mac OS X, a Javascript performance tool called DOM Monster, Yahoo's Yslow speed diagnostic tool, and the Web development utility Firebug.

Under the Hood: MittRomney.com

At first blush, Lacy isn’t impressed. “Romney’s using Typekit for custom fonts to get a typeface that looks exactly like Arial,” a font you don’t need Typekit to get. “There’s also a lot of boilerplate geo-location stuff which the site doesn't seem to use much of. And for some reason, he’s using a version of J-query which came out in 2009.”

Deeper under the hood, things get better. The code is pretty clean, if a little disorganized, and most of it is appropriately commented, or annotated by the developer, to make it easy for other engineers to understand. Load times are a little long, and both the landing pages and the homepage are fairly heavy at 706k and 1.4MB respectively. They could also stand to make fewer server requests.

“It looks like it was built by a standard IT firm that hasn't been creative in a while.”

Romney’s site relies largely on a personal site-library stocked with a whopping 8,000 lines of custom code. Some of it is minified, making it leaner and faster-loading, but that’s still a ton of code. Smartly, the landing page caches all the stuff for the Index page, making it load faster, and it performs its loading asynchronously, in a nice non-blocking way.

“This site is competently made, but there's a little engineering bloat,” says Lacy. “It looks like it was built by a standard IT firm that hasn't been creative in a while.”

Romney’s site does have some cutting-edge components. For one, he’s using CommonJS, a modularization system built for using Javascript libraries outside the browser. The way Romney's site uses it, CommonJS helps streamline packages, requiring less work for the server to load the page. It also uses scripting to discover data dependencies in the code, which can help the page load faster. Storage is on an NginX server, a flexible and high-performance open source server solution developed first in Russia. It’s badass compared to Obama’s more old-fashioned server.

The Republican candidate’s site is not thoroughly optimized, but not half-bad for a site this size with this much content. “Romney’s site is well planned out and fairly well packaged--much better than Obama's site in that way,” says Lacy.

Romney’s site also improves the user experience by setting a far future Expires header: this means the page will cache on your machine, so it can re-load faster the next time you visit. However, that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily seeing the same version of MittRomney.com as your neighbor; the site contains analytics code for Optimizely, an A/B testing platform that lets you compare different versions of your site, and rollout the one people like the best.

Under the Hood: BarackObama.com

For the most-part, Lacy says, Obama’s site uses more modern components than Romney’s, but it also seems to forget some of the basics.

"The bloat in Obama’s code owes itself to Facebook and Twitter integration; code for connecting to those networks accounts for about half of all the code on Obama’s site."

Moustache.js is a library popular with front-end developers right now because it provides sites like Obama’s with visual templates that require less coding to implement. It also uses Modernizr, a component which detects support for modern browsers and lets the site load conditional Javascript and CSS based on the capability and vintage of your particular computer. Another friendly addition is wide use of Polyfills, which allow older browsers to run newer site features. Obama's site also features a more recent version of J-query.

There’s more code bloat here than in Romney’s site, but some parts are well-compressed. The bloat in Obama’s code owes itself to Facebook and Twitter integration; code for connecting to those networks accounts for about half of all the code on Obama’s site. Still, the results speak for themselves: his page has earned over 31 million Facebook Likes, to Romney’s 11 million. (At right, Obama's sharing menu.)

The caching setup isn't as good as Romney's; no future expires on most components means your browser has to load it fresh, even if you just loaded the page a little while before.

“This looks like it was built by more modern people, but not using traditional optimization,” says Lacy. “They've forgotten basic optimization stuff: caching, minimizing requests.” His Javascript isn't packaged up well and his Index page needs three times as many server requests as Romney’s to a page that’s 40% smaller. The CSS page is a little sloppily written, too: the typical layout is styles at top, then a Javascript footer, then dynamic content written below. Obama’s code appears out of order.

Still, the Democratic candidate has a superior mobile site, if a little too clever. An initial login screen makes you think you need to be signed up for an account on BarackObama.com just to see the site, but a little clicking around and you can eschew it.

Like Romney, Obama uses a content delivery network to make the user experience on the site better; CDNs disperse your site’s resources to servers in various geographical locations, so the data takes less time to reach people’s computers. The components of Obama’s CDN setup are better organized, with one host server for each of the components, whereas Romney is loading it all from the same server.

Another category Obama wins: analytics. His site is kitted out with ChartBeat and New Relic for analytics. New Relic lets you pinpoint and solve performance issues with web apps, so each user has an ideal experience. Chartbeat lets you see peek at detailed metrics about how people are using your site, like how far they scroll down a page.

Lastly, where Romney's site looks like commercial code, Obama's site has a handcrafted touch: the ASCII art in the source code.

MittRomney.com: The Specs

• Drupal content management system with a toolkit library to fill in gaps
• Storage on NginX server
• Typekit for custom fonts
• Jquery 1.3.2 (circa 2009)
• Common.js
• Using CDNs, which do xyz
• Using Gzip to reduce the number of downstream data
• Has basic login plus Sharethis for social stuff
• Mobile-capable
• Clickable for display advertising
• Shortlink: Mi.tt

Analytics

• ShareThis
• Google Analytics
• Optimizely

Stats

• Splash Screen: 44 requests, 706k, 2.9 seconds 
• Index Page: 79 requests, 1.4MB, 4.3 seconds
• 11 million Facebook likes

BarackObama.com: The Specs

• Moustache.js templates
• Sweet ASCII Art
• Modernizer
• Up-to-date Jquery library
• Poly-fills to bring old browsers up to snuff
• Optimizely
• Custom fonts from Typography.com
• Gzip
• Mobile-friendly
• Shortlink domain: OFA.BO
• Storage on Apache server
• LucidMedia, Double-click and Adnxs for display advertising

Analytics

• Google Analytics
• Chartbeat
• New Relic

Stats

• Splash Screen: 74 requests, 633k, 3.7 seconds
• Index Page: 1MB page, 245 req, 9 seconds 
• 31 million Facebook likes

Source : fastcompany[dot]com

Yesmail Keeps Tabs on the Digital Marketing Competition

Knowing how well your digital marketing campaign is working compared to internal metrics is helpful, but getting a sense of how well it is working compared to external metrics (such as competitors’ campaign results) can give a crucial competitive edge. With its Market Intelligence tool, Yesmail aims to allow digital marketers to study competitors’ results, as well as their own, across email and social channels to create success at a level that beats not only internal expectations but the expectations of competitors.

We live in a competitive world, and marketing is probably one of the most cutthroat pursuits within this world. “Marketing-speak” focuses on neutral-sounding terms like “growing market share” and “customer acquisition,” but in reality, these terms could just as easily be termed “stealing market share” and “stealing customers.” Successful digital marketing in large part hinges on taking customers away from your competitors without letting them take your customers away from you.

While developing new customers who might not have previously been involved in your particular vertical is an important part of marketing, the fact remains there are far more experienced consumers waiting to be wooed than “first timers” waiting to be introduced, and Yesmail proudly announces “spying on your competition has never been easier” in promoting its new Market Intelligence 2.0 platform.

Let’s look a little more closely at exactly what kind of covert operations Yesmail is enabling marketers to conduct.

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em

One interesting aspect of Yesmail’s market intelligence functionality is dynamic filtering of competitive data. Users can apply advanced filters based on keywords, channels, date ranges, etc. to competitors’ campaigns as well as their own.

Obviously originality is a big part of any successful marketing campaign, but at the same time if a chief competitor is winning customers by using a certain phrase in their email subject line, it is certainly prudent to at least take that into consideration when tweaking your email strategy.

Comparing Yourself to Others

Your mother may have advised you to simply be the “best you” possible and not worry about what anyone else does, but mom’s advice to build strong character and personal identity does not extend to the rough and tumble world of marketing.

If your campaign is not performing as well as those of your competitors, the “best you” you will likely soon be asking those competitors for a job. Yesmail enables users to create side-by-side comparisons of their campaigns with up to four competitors at a time.

Comparisons come as interactive, exportable charts and competitively measure campaign count, campaign engagement, and campaign deployment times. You know in high school you were always comparing yourself to the “cool kids” no matter what your mom told you, so why not make sure you measure up to the “cool companies” now?

Other features of Market Intelligence 2.0 include the ability to create, track and analyze customer personas based on demographic and behavioral characteristics and real-time analytic and insight capabilities. 

The Proof is in the Pudding: Social Media Campaigns Don't Match Consumer Engagement Patterns

Yesmail put its money where its mouth is a few months ago, using Market Intelligence to track and analyze more than 20 popular clothing retailers’ Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and email campaigns over a three-month period to assess how effective they were in driving consumer engagement. As reported by CMSWire, what they found indicated that many social media and email campaigns do not match up with consumers’ patterns for when and how they engage with brands.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

How Indiegogo Turns Tragic Stories Like Lydia Tillman's Into Interactive Social Justice

A standout crowdfunding campaign offers donors a chance to participate in justice for the victim of violent, near-fatal attack. Karen the bullied bus monitor has nothing on Lydia Tillman's survival story (warning: graphic image below). And all she needs is $65k.

Jacob Tillman remembers exactly where he was when he learned that his younger sister, Lydia, had been brought to the hospital in Denver, Colorado, after being raped, beaten, and doused with bleach in her apartment, which her attacker set on fire on July 4, 2011. Lydia narrowly escaped death by leaping from the second story window. Jacob, 36, an artist and skateboard salesman, was on a road trip from Los Angeles to New York. As luck would have it, he had just made it to the western side of the Rocky Mountains and was able to get to the hospital an hour or two after Lydia, then 31, arrived with her ankle, ribs, and eye sockets broken, her chin shattered, and untold damage to her brain and internal organs.

How To Participate

• Still Kickin' on Indiegogo
• Friends Of Lydia on Facebook
• Jacob Tillman on Twitter

"You don't ever really think that anything like that could happen," Jacob told Fast Company recently at a café in Manhattan. "It was so weird, so surreal and like a hyper-awareness, a major adrenaline rush. I was constantly trying to put together what happened. My mind was going a thousand miles an hour."

Jacob found Lydia in a medically induced coma, still strapped to temporary EMS equipment because her vitals were so delicate any change might spike her blood pressure and endanger her more.

As Lydia lay in her coma, at least one family member was present at all times, even as she struggled and sent nurses and doctors running into the room. "The visual side of all of this was gnarly," Jacob said. "She was so badly beaten. She was covered in blood the whole time. There was blood matted in her hair, blood in her ears. She was so sensitive. She was in the exact condition that they found her in in the backyard of her house… It was so bad that after the third day, when her eyelashes started to peek out, we celebrated."

Flowers weren't even allowed in the room since her condition was so unstable, so Jacob passed the days drawing bouquets for her and writing her notes for when she finally woke up. He and his two other siblings, Esther and Steven, and their parents, refused to wallow. "Feeling sorry for ourselves or getting angry or anything like that stuff would be a counterproductive use of energy. It just wouldn't happen. Nothing in that situation would happen that's counterproductive. It was just so obvious what sort of things were appropriate."

Cut to a year later. Lydia fought her way back from the assault, recovered most of her speech and physical functions through intensive therapy, and helped convict Travis Forbes, the guy who did it—and who, just months before attacking Lydia, murdered Colorado teenager Kenia Mogne. His use of bleach to try and (unsuccessfully in Lydia's case) destroy physical evidence was the detail that lead police to link Lydia's attack to Mogne's murder.

Forbes was sentenced to life in prison for the first degree murder of Mogne. Later he got 48 more years for the attack on Lydia. The judge in the case read aloud a note written by Lydia during her recovery wishing peace on her attacker (" My spirit and my soul, in my mind, remains untouched ... I wish you peace in this life," she wrote). The case was so sensational it was chronicled by Dateline NBC and other national TV outlets.

Then, for the most part, the mainstream media packed up their satellite trucks and moved on to the next story. But Lydia’s story is far from over. A victim’s insurance fund covered much of her recovery, but she was just about to start a new job when she was attacked, and her insurance hadn't kicked in. She still needs a $65,000 procedure to reconstruct her jaw. And her brother is betting that, in an age of endless sharing and constant status updates, a lot of people who followed Lydia’s plight on TV aren’t satisfied with a Law & Order ending.

So Jacob has taken her story to the social web to raise the money for her surgery--and in doing so, he's offering a chance for donors to share in a modern kind of social justice. Inspired by part by the campaign that raised over $700,000 for Karen Klein, a Greece, NY, middle school bus monitor bullied by kids this past summer, Jacob created a campaign on crowdfunding site Indiegogo called Still Kickin', in which he promises to skate every day in a pair of beyond-shot Nikes until he can raise enough donations. At press time, with 90 days left in the campaign, he'd raised just under $4,000.

"I’m continually brought to tears by my fellows all over the globe for their support," Lydia wrote via email about the campaign and several others that have helped her in the last year. A sommelier, Lydia has benefited from wine-themed fundraisers in New York, where she used to live, and in Fort Collins, where she had just relocated before the attack, as well as an ongoing Friends of Lydia Facebook campaign. She calls the Internet "a fantastic tool to spread peace and love," and her brother aims to prove it one ollie at a time.

The surgery will allow me to chew all solid food, again

So far, Jacob has been promoting Still Kickin' through the skate and sneaker freak subcultures posting photos of himself and his duct taped kicks on and Twitter using Nike, Still Kickin', and Skate Every Damn Day hashtags to draw attention to his efforts, which have been noted in sites like NYC Skateboarding. "Skateboarders are whole different subculture. It's such a tough guy, testosterone thing, Skateboarders really understand the idea of a sister being hurt and needing to help her. That resonates more than anything else; What would I do if something happened to my sister?"

Lydia, has made great strides since the assault. She now lives on her own, has her driver's license, and recently placed first for women in her age group in the Antelope Dash, a foot race she ran with her sister Wyoming. While her life has been changed irrevocably, she has a very simple hope for the upcoming operation her brother is crowd-fundraising on her behalf: "The surgery will allow me to chew all solid food, again. I haven’t been able to chew, as most of us do, for well over a year, so far. I’m envisioning, in this very moment, a simple arugula salad with lemon, a fine olive oil, coarse sea salt and fresh pepper. After the surgery, this exquisitely basic food is mine to enjoy fully."

Source : fastcompany[dot]com

Limelight Survey Highlights Challenges of Managing Globalized Web Content

Are you actively engaged in a global digital marketing campaign? Or do you lack the resources to effectively manage multiple international sites? According to a recent survey of 200 U.S. based CMOs and VPs of marketing by Limelight Networks, more and more companies plan to add multiple regional websites and languages within the next year to build global brand awareness and drive revenue, but many still lack the resources necessary to make it happen.

The Challenges of the Global Marketplace

Participating within the global marketplace takes more than just showing up. For the purposes of this survey, Limelight defined the globalization of a web presence as the development, deployment and regular maintenance of distinct sites with regionally-specific content. Effectively maintaining and managing these sites requires more than the right tools; it also demands a commitment to global literacy of both language and culture.

More Regions, More Languages, More Content

The report showed that 24 percent of those surveyed actively manage 3 to 5 regional websites, while another 25 percent actively manage 6 to 10. Additionally, 65 percent are planning to add 2 to 5 more regional websites to the mix, with 56 percent intent on adding 2 to 5 more languages. Not only does this put more onus on website designers and developers, it also requires more access to translators and native speakers for content and marketing development, not to mention content managers who can adequately edit and manage the workflow.

Many companies are savvy enough to know that content developed can’t just be direct translations or recapitulations of existing content in order to be effective. The survey showed that a majority of respondents said that a significant portion of content — between 41-60 percent — is regionally-specific.

The result of their efforts is not in vain. Ninety-one percent of participants acknowledged that their globalization strategy has produced meaningful improvements in website engagement, lead generation and revenue.

Lack of Resources Abound

That said, the survey also highlighted the challenges that website globalization brings. A full sixty percent of survey respondents would add even more regional sites to bolster globalization efforts but cannot due to a variety of issues, such as budget and staffing constraints, and technical resources.

Being able to develop regionally-specific content is one thing. Being able to regularly update and manage it, is another. Respondents indicated that a considerable amount of content on their regional websites is out-of-date or behind at any one time:

• 25% answered that less than 20% of content is out-of-date or behind
• 26% answered that 21-40% of content is out-of-date or behind
• 27% answered that 41-60% of content is out-of-date or behind
• 18% answered that 61-80% of content is out-of-date or behind
• 3% answered that 81-100% of content is out-of-date or behind
• 1% answered that they are unsure how much of their content is out-of-date or behind

A Global Content Management System

Put together, the demands and challenges of website globalization identify the need for a reliable and agile Web Content Management (WCM) system that can enable multi-site management from a single account, while making it easy to share and reuse content, target content and changes across multiple web and mobile domains.

Whether the pressures of globalization are too great to bear, or dictating your digital marketing strategy, it’s important to put the right technology, tools and team into place before you start your global campaign.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Twitter, Hootsuite Partner up on Ad Campaign

Twitter and Hootsuite have partnered up for an ad campaign by giving away US$ 100 Twitter advertising vouchers to Hootsuite Pro account holders.

30,000 of them to be exact. Not all Hootsuite Pro accounts are getting vouchers, but the move does give us a bit more understanding of what Twitter is up to now that the company has decided to change some of the user restrictions involved with its API. 

Twitter Sees Value in the Enterprise

Twitter isn't the only social network that integrates with Hootsuite, but those lucky enough to get the US$ 100 advertising credit can redeem it right when they log in to the popular app. Hootsuite is sending out emails to the selected voucher winners, and a dashboard pop-up will appear to nudge them into redeeming it. 

By changing its API rules, Twitter is trying to make better use of its partner and devloper relationships in order to promote its own platform. One way to monetize Twitter is to charge enterprise companies for access to tweets and things like trending topics through apps like Hootsuite. The API changes are also made to encourage people to build apps in areas like analytics and CRM. 

Hootsuite the Big Winner

Hootsuite integrates with other social networks and apps, but with Twitter taking away some features through its API change. Hootsuite now becomes perhaps the most robust Twitter client. The new ad campaign solidifies the Twitter and Hootsuite relatitionship, and whatever future moves Twitter makes will surely include more of this type of cross promotion.

Twitter looking to small and medium sized businesses with its Hootsuite partnership.

The Hootsuite ad vouchers are only available to U.S. based accounts and then only for those who have never advertised on Twitter before. Additioanlly, the vouchers must be used up by the end of the year. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com