Similar to popular location-based games like SCVNGR and Gowalla, Indy based digital marketing agency Boost Media & Entertainment and Publicis Indianapolis have partnered to create an innovative mobile game that will be played at the Indiana State Fair.

The game is called BeanGo, and coincides with this year’s fair theme, “The Year of Soybeans.”

There are eight bean statues distributed throughout the fairgrounds. Players use smartphones to find the statues, where they’ll discover clues to help them solve puzzles in the game. Once a puzzle is solved, a square on the in-game “Bean Card” is completed. Once three squares in a row are completed, players display their app at the soybean display in the Pioneer Our Land Pavilion to win prizes.

Prizes include a free milkshake, pork burger or all-beef hot dog. If all eight squares are completed, players receive a secret prize.

“With millions of people already playing location-based games on their smartphones, we thought our own game would be great for this year’s fair,” said Hannah Brescher of the Indiana Soybean Alliance, the app’s sponsor. “We’re very pleased with how it’s turned out.”

BeanGo also includes a State Fair map and connection with the Soybean Alliance’s mascot Bennie the Bean’s Facebook and Twitter accounts. In another innovative feature, app users “shake” Bennie (by shaking their phones) to get him to share fun soybean facts.

BeanGo is available now in both the Android App Market and Apple’s App Store.

According to SCVNGR, over 1000 companies, universities and organizations nationwide have commissioned location-based games like BeanGo.

For more information about Boost and its projects and services, please contact Jason Zickler at jzickler@boostmediaentertainment.com or call 317.624.0300.

BeanGo is available now in both the Android App Market and Apple’s App Store. Check it out!

Each week, marketers from around the world join the ExactTarget Nexus partner ecosystem on Twitter for a conversation about trends and best practices in the interactive marketing industry.  They call it the Nexus Café.

On Thursday, March 17th we will join ExactTarget for a live Twitter Chat about the topic Customer Retention Campaigns.  Follow #nexuscafe and #CustomerRetention

#NexusCafe is a conversation on Twitter, hosted by @ETNexus, featuring the latest topics in the digital marketing industry. You can follow and participate in the conversation on Twitter with the #NexusCafe hashtag.

Each week, ExactTarget will feature a guest and marketing topic relevant to the Nexus Partner Ecosystem. The audience features ExactTarget customers, partners, and employees. All you have to do to participate is tweet during the event using the hashtag #NexusCafe in your tweet so that it gets pulled into the conversation.

The best contributor, chosen by the featured guest, will win a Starbucks card*!

Remember that 80% of sales come from 20% of current customers and clients? With these statistics I am wondering why most marketing and sales campaigns are designed for the new customer.

Successful customer retention starts with the first contact an organisation has with a customer and continues throughout the entire lifetime of a relationship.   At Boost Media, we have a special promotional product to assist with this.  It’s called TalkToCustomers.

TalktoCustomers.com implements successful promotions where customers willingly trade key demographic data for discounts, chances to win, and other incentives.  This strategy achieves two important results: The collection of valuable consumer information – essential for both tactical and strategic marketing efforts. The creation of a growing audience who “opt in” for periodic communications and promotions by email, text and other electronic communication, keeping the conversation going between you and your customers (customer retention).

Our TalkToCustomers product launch was similar to many.  An accidental discovery.  We were contacted by a potential client who had a particular problem.  In this case, it was Mikes Express Carwash and they wanted to use email marketing to sell their coupon books (buy four get one free) in order to maximize customer retention.  The problem, was that they didn’t have a customer email database yet.  Boost Media suggested that we put a unique code on each sales receipt and invite customers to visit a URL to fill out a short survey, while rewarding them with a free carwash.  We ran the promotion for 14 days and the results were amazing.  Of all the surveys that were completed, 54% of respondents opted in for future messages.  Bingo.  Our idea (TalkToCustomers) was born.

Since the Mikes Success story, we have launched our promotion in many retailers producing opt-in results as high as 90%, 95%,and even 98% in one case (customer retention).

To learn more about our customer retention strategies using TalkToCustomers, please check out the live Twitter chat with ExactTarget this Thursday at 11:00.

Float clearing can be frustrating for any new front-end developer. If you don’t develop with floated elements, you should–they’re incredibly intuitive and aren’t really that complex. Here’s a great article about the float theory.

That being said, there are several ways you can clear a floated element. Most use some sort of clearfix — but here’s a better way:

Markup:

<div id="wrapper">
	<div id="content">
		<p>Content.</p>
	</div>
	<div id="sub-content">
		<p>Content.</p>
	</div>
</div>

CSS:

#wrapper{
	width:960px;
	overflow:hidden;
}
#content{
	width:65%;
	float:left;
}
#sub-content{
	width:30%;
	float:right;
}

That’s all there is to it. The trick here is pretty simple. It uses the width and overflow declarations on the wrapper DIV element–the resolves the issue and the wrapper now stretches around both contained DIV elements.

While an Intern at Smithville, their developers turn me on to a wonderful Mac web editor I think every front-end developer should use. It’s called Coda, developed by Panic. It’s smooth, one-window approach is incredible–it’s a text editor and file transferer, packed with terminal, live preview, and a full-featured (up-to-date!) css-editor. But, that’s just the start. It has the power of Transmit, built in the space of a sidebar. Also, it has the best web preview I’ve ever seen thanks to Apple’s WebKit.

Most importantly, is it’s seemless integration with its “Sites” feature — both remotely and locally. You can make an edit to a file, and it will save both the remote file and local file–so you always have an up-date backup of your websites.

The only draw back? It’s a Mac-only program. Check it out for free!