This weekend marks Four51’s second annual Track and Field competition with the Special Olympics of MN (SOMN). Last year, Four51 partnered with SOMN as part of a new program giving organizations like Four51 the opportunity to organize, manage, and run local area competitions!

The day-long event takes place on Saturday. Over 70 volunteers from Four51, including friends and family, will facilitate every aspect of the event from Opening Ceremonies to Awards. Having participated last year, I can say that it is an unbelievable experience and look forward to a continued partnership with Special Olympics going forward.

~Maren

I think it’s safe to say that most of us have shopped online before–whether it’s that one dollar transaction to download an mp3 or bigger ticket items, like purchasing electronics– online ordering is as much a part of our culture as hamburgers and Tom Petty.

Since Four51 is an e-commerce company, I consider myself especially in tune with the way credit cards are processed over the web. Worrying about the security of my information is often the last thing on my mind when I proceed to checkout on popular sites such as Amazon or eBay, but what about smaller merchants? Are we more apprehensive to make purchases on sites that do not proudly display their security statement? I would argue yes.

That is why Four51 would like to take a minute to re-assure you that regardless of your role as a seller, supplier, or buyer exchanging payment card information on the Four51 network, ALL transactions across Four51 have been validated as secure by a third party auditor. In other words, Four51 is Payment Card Industry Compliant. You can see us listed on Visa’s site of PCI compliant merchants.

What this means for you is that when you’re buying on Four51, you’re buying on a secure platform. The $239 million dollars consumers lost in cyber fraud in 2007 is of no concern to you when entering your payment card information on our network.

What it could also mean if you’re a seller is that you have a new marketing tool to bring into the mix when prospecting. Odds are you’ve already had inquiries from your customers in the financial, healthcare and insurance industry about payment card security. Answer them with confidence and proudly state you run all your commerce through a PCI-certified merchant.

Being PCI compliant and providing a safe, secure e-commerce environment for our users and their customers wasn’t just a switch we flipped- it is an ongoing, arduous process, but giving our customers a secure place to do business is the most important thing we can do.

Mara

(Looking for more information? Check out the News page of the website.)

Big morning here at Four51! We have just updated our website with a cleaner, fresher look and feel.

How does this affect you? Well, for customers we have grouped every resource you might be looking for into a new Four51 Customers category. There is a list of useful links on the right.

For prospective customers, including suppliers and buyers in addition to distributors, there are new categories for each of you. (Existing distributor customers, you can point your buyer prospects to the new Buyer category so that they can get an idea of how they can benefit from the Four51 application.)

Let me know what you think (especially if you think something useful is missing!)

Laura

I’ve really noticed an uptick in green discussions here in the print industry. As mentioned, WTT just had a whole green week and, almost overnight, every e-newsletter to which I subscribe has added a section on the environment.

Now, I will be the last person complaining about all this. My enthusiasm for the topic of sustainability has been well documented on this blog, but with any encouragement must come a note of caution (especially on this front). I’ve written about greenwashing a few times, and I’m extending the reminder yet again. As more green discussions happen around you and you’re more tempted to quickly latch on, don’t forget that honesty and authenticity are really at the forefront of this issue. Your customers want your commitment, not your slapped together, “but it has green font!” marketing campaign that really has no chops.

Last week, Brand Channel had a great article, Grading Green: The Watchdogs CMOs Must Appease, that discussed the leading groups that are working to regulate the green front. As the article points out:

In the lawless and unregulated landscape of going green, it became clear that someone, somewhere, needed to step in to provide some semblance of order and a credible means of measuring the myriad of ways companies can go, and pretend to go, green.

I definitely recommend reading the article as it describes the top three watchdog groups and what they’re looking for.

Then yesterday I was reading Seth Godin’s marketing blog and came across this post about the impending backlash against all the green marketing consumers are currently seeing. Seth’s argument tackles the idea of authenticity in a different way; he suggests the power of proof, especially when consumers get sick of all the green marketing and just want the bottom line:

The power of a number is the effect we saw when they put a number on restaurants (Zagats) and wines (Parker) and gas mileage (the EPA). People notice a number, and they work to improve it.

Seth’s thoughts on the topic are very interesting, especially considered in conjunction with the Brand Channel article. The warning signs are clearly flashing and we’d all be wise to heed the alarm.

Laura

This post comes from Savannah, GA, where the PSDA (Print Services Distribution Association) is hosting another fine event for its members, the Spring Technology Conference.

Steve Cone’s keynote address focused on the power of strong brands. Cone, a Madison Avenue agency veteran and author, made the point that “the difference between B2B and B2C marketing communications is BS.” People are people in business and consumer settings, yet B2B marketers often ignore what they know to be true about human nature and play it safe. In doing so, they create “Me, too!” campaigns that gently disappear into the white noise of their targets’ lives. And you can’t spend enough money to transform a dull concept into a vital one; a big budget behind a bad idea is simply a really expensive bad idea.

I’m not suggesting that B2B marketers throw caution to the wind, but neither should we wrap ourselves in caution.

Jim

Today will be the culmination of the spec control validation series of posts. I’ve covered the plethora of built-in validators, the custom validation functions and the various event overrides. The last topic, as promised, will be the custom regular expression validator. You may not realize it, but most of the built-in validators actually use regular expressions.

Regular expressions are not for the faint of heart, but what can they not do? They are the utility baseball player of software development. At the end of the post I’ll provide you with links to some resources I use as references.

For now, let’s get into the example discussion. Here is the function signature: regex([options], regular expression).

The concept is really not much different from the regular built in validators. First, I should point out that the custom regular expression validator function name is regex. You can see, as I’ve shown before, the first parameter is the optional settings. I’m defining the action and message properties in the example. The additional parameter is the regular expression string. I’ve gone with a simple example that enforces a minimum of 6 characters.

Here are some resources I use when working with regular expressions:

RegExLib.com is a decently organized community participation site for canned expressions.
Mozilla Developer Center explains the concept very nicely.
Expresso is a great tool for building and testing regular expressions.

You can read all about every validator in our API documentation which is available at http://myaccess.four51.com. As always, you can go to my demo site to find the “Spec Form API Playground” to see most of the validators in action.

 Spring Technology Conference Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Our most recent podcast features Rich Landa discussing how you can add value to your business with technology-based services. The recording summarizes his presentation given at the 2008 PSDA Spring Technology Conference in Savannah, Georgia.

Rich talks about the evolution of web-to-print e-commerce from just a simple tool used for convenience’s sake to a dynamic and necessary tool that allows businesses to customize their operational workflows. Rich also touches on the ways Four51 has designed its platform to be a value-added community that can integrate with companies like SAP and Pageflex. This allows Four51 to effectively serve a wider range of print buyer, seller, and supplier needs that a lot of competitors can’t. Rich explains that when evaluating what system is best for your business, your thought process should extend far beyond just features and functionality.

Check out the podcast to hear more!

I suppose it’s a little odd to discuss blogging on the blog, but a customer asked me a really good question about blogging and I thought what better forum than Insights to answer it?!

The customer asked why we had started a blog and if a blog was the right choice for his company (a midsize print distributor). We started Insights because we have a great community of customers with whom we wanted to keep an open dialog about ideas that are of interest to us and them.

Although I’m quite biased on the topic of business blogging, there are definitely some things to take into consideration before starting a blog:

-Do you have a clear audience? Obviously if you’re blogging for your company you have customers–but are they an audience as well? Would they be willing to visit your blog and read what you have to say?

-Do you have at least one person who can be dedicated to the blog internally? (Believe me, it’s a big job!) If nobody is willing to be responsible for posts, comments, and all the other fun tasks that seemingly fall from the sky, then it’s probably not really worth it to your company. Blogs have to be well-maintained to keep readership alive.

-Do you have anything to say? Of course you can think of ten things to post about right this second, but do you feel you’d have a lot to say nearly every day? Ask others at your company (especially those who might become contributors) what they think and assess possible topics and threads.

Starting a blog is a great way to reach out to customers and engage them in a new way. It also asserts your voice within your industry and gives you an opportunity to connect with prospective customers simultaneously. The Marketing Profs blog had a great post on this topic that I’d highly recommend reading. The post explains that ’successful blogging is about creating and nurturing relationships’–couldn’t have said it better myself.

Laura

In my last post I promised to cover custom validation techniques using regular expressions and functions and that’s exactly what I’ll do today and next week. For today’s post, I’ll cover the custom function capability. I’ve mentioned several times in the last few posts that we are providing numerous built-in validators. They are the routines we believe are most commonly needed. That being said, we know there are so many other needs and we cannot compensate for them all. The solution to that problem is to provide a mechanism for plugging your own validators into the validation framework. It is much easier to do than you’d think.

Let’s start, as I often like to do, with a full sample of code for the custom function:

First, note that we have one variable spec named “CustomFunction“. It is the variable that will be provided for user input and therefore have the validation applied.

We instantiate the validator with the “custom” function. The parameters of this method differ from the other validators. The first parameter is the actual function that will fire for validation. This function must return a boolean (true/false). In the example, I’m simply checking that the value equals “The Suns” (because they will beat the Spurs!!) and returning that result. The result, true or false, triggers the correct onSuccess or onError methods, which you learned in my last post, is also overridable.

The second parameter is the familiar JSON object of optional property definitions. You can see that I’ve chosen to fire the validation onBlur and display a custom message.

Pretty straightforward, yet powerful validation tool. With this capability you can validate any scenario in your spec forms.

Next week I’ll take you through the custom regular expression capability. If you have an idea of a validator you’d like to see covered, mention it in the comments section.

In the meantime, you can read all about every validator in our API documentation which is available at http://myaccess.four51.com. As always, you can go to my demo site to find the “Spec Form API Playground” to see most of the validators in action.

I’ve seen and heard quite a bit of positive feedback about Discover Four51. It has been active for about a week now and based on the data I have seen, it’s being used well. Thanks for helping to make the implementation smooth!

I’ll be periodically writing to let you know of new articles posted as well as to share tips and tricks for searching the knowledgebase better.

We just made four new articles live for your use. First is an article about the Pageflex MPower file size restriction and how to get it lifted. The second covers Payflow Pro’s new application that is attached to an article discussing credit card processing options. Third, for those of you wondering how to submit a case through the knowledgebase, I’ve written an article that explains the process. Lastly, we have created an article that discusses custom themes, how to create them and what basic token placeholders are needed to make your theme work with the Four51 application.

As Four51 grows and we connect more and more sellers to suppliers and buyers, our knowledge will expand as will Discover Four51. Please check back here and be sure to search the knowledgebase for your answers. You’ll never know what you don’t know unless you search for it!

Jeff