In response to the Ad Age article To Lead Overall Brand Strategy, Digital Shops Have Much to Do David Armano has posted on the Critical Mass blog the 10 things he thinks Digital Agencies have to get better at, he calls it a moment of truth for digital agencies.
It’s worth reading and chewing on.
Someone on LinkedIn just posed this question “How can one make Blogs more enjoyable or What is that you do to maintain the popularity/readership of your blog?“. Here are my thoughts on this, this may not be all that leads to a successful blog, but these are for me pretty essential ingredients: Focus, Passion, and Originality.
Focus - I think one of the most important choices a blogger makes when they start their blog is what their focus is. Think about a first time visitor getting dropped on your blog from a search engine or stumbleupon, are they going to understand in 2 seconds exactly what your blog is about? If the answer is yes you will have a much better chance of building a readership quickly and you will have a successful blog. If not, you may well build a successful blog but it will take years as opposed to months.
Passion - This is the only possible way that you will be able to sustain regular posting of a high enough quality over the course of years. If you don’t have the passion your blog will become a ghost town very quickly. People talk about the passion in the writing, and how important it is for readers, but IMHO the passion is all about the ability to sustain you through the emotional roller coaster ride of writing a blog. Sure your passion will come through in your writing, but it is your passion that will keep you plugging away when no one is coming back, no one is commenting, and no one is linking to you. Passion may not be the only thing that will drag you along, but it is the most enjoyable so unless you are a masochist you better love what your talking about.
Originality - In branding terms, what differentiates you from the crowded playing field of blogs all talking about the same thing. They don’t call the blogosphere an echo chamber for nothing, because most of the time everyone is reflecting and amplifying what else is happening around the blogosphere. Original content and original ideas in the blogosphere stand out like beacons in the night, and not to labor the metaphor but they also attract other bloggers like moths to a flame 
Beyond blogging I actually think these are often the ingredients for great brands as well, which begs the question is good blogging good branding?
I just noticed this post from Adaptive Path and i tell you what, this would be one kick ass job for the right person. I’ve visited their offices and they have a great space, they do amazing work, and despite their rather intimidating resumes and bios they are a really bunch of people.
Our consulting work enables us to fundamentally affect how firms, ranging from Fortune 100 to bleeding-edge startups, engage their customers with multi-channel experiences, including web, mobile, software, and more. Our public events provide opportunities for teaching, directly imparting skills and concepts. Our blog, essays, and reports allow us to spread the word far and wide, because we believe that by sharing what we know, we make the world a better place for everyone.
We’re looking for people who mix the left-brain and right-brain. Who can break it down analytically and can craft an inspiring vision. Who love user research, and drawing valuable insights from what’s observed. But what we’re really looking is for people who make. People who write scenarios, sketch storyboards, draw wireframes, and build prototypes. People with an urge to create things that will delight and empower others.
We also love people who can get their geek on, with a passion for metadata, vocabulary control, and who think infrastructure is sexy. People who will speak up about why this stuff matters and how it enables other cool things to happen. Passion, not just for design, but for the impact that design can have on people, is a must.
At Adaptive Path, we promote a live/work balance including five weeks of vacation per year.
Please email experiencedesigner AT adaptivepath DOT com if you are interested in this position with a resume, pointer to an online portfolio, and thoughts on working with us.
I read a great article in the SF Bay Guardian written by Annalee Newitz who blogs at techsploitation.com (awesome name). Anyway, the article is called And the real anonymous trolls online are . . . . In this article she skewers the very un-anonymous troll Andrew Keen, who’s been crying about how the internets is undermining his word view of authority and modernity (maybe he should check out Bioshock). Anyway, this is a rather round about way to talk about a tool called wikiscanner which basically looks up the ip address of any anonymous edits on wikipedia and then looks up what organization owns that ip address. The result, lots of egg on government and corporation faces. With Pepsi editing some of the negative health effects of diet pepsi, to exxon adjusting the size of past oil spills, or wal-mart changing facts about their wages. Some of these edits actually reveal some stewardship of course like Pixar editing the Shrek 4 entry to reflect that it was a Dreamworks Animation and not Pixar.
All of these gems were taken from the Wired reddit list of most salacious wikipedia anonymous edits
If you’re a company that doesn’t have a wikipedia policy get one now.
Relate see my article on uncommon uses for the wiki
About a month ago I went to a blogger event that was laid on by Monster Cable the guys that make those expensive video and audio cables. The event was organized by Jeremy Toeman’s new consultancy Stage Two Consulting, and was particularly interesting in the fact that it was only for bloggers, and it wasn’t just for “A” list bloggers, so mere mortals such as myself were able to come along. In fact one “A” list blogger from Gizmodo was complaining to me that the event was waste of time for him because there “was no story”, or at least no exclusive for him I guess. The event itself demo’d some of the Monster products, and even engaged the talents of Cali Lewis from Geek Brief TV to help them do a little product launch (much to my chagrin an iPhone holder, a little bit “off brand” IMHO).
Cali and head Monster Noel Lee (he’s not that tall, he’s standing on a Segway)
For me the event was interesting for a couple of reasons, it was interesting to see a company engaging bloggers in as a key part of their communication strategy, and second of all they sent me an amplifier to try out. The irony of course was the offer to send me an amp came from a conversation I was having with one of their business development chaps where I was explaining I wasn’t really a gadget blogger so therefore the event was more interesting from a marketing perspective. I told him I had a pretty good home theater set up with an Denon receiver and infinity speakers, so he offered to send me an amp to see if “I could tell the difference”.
From a marketing perspective I think the event provided a decent venue to tell the Monster brand story ie. started by Noel Lee in a garage in San Francisco, Noel was an audiophile and audio engineer etc. I think the brand story is pretty important for Monster as they are selling (certainly in case of cables) an intangible benefit for most people, that is very hard to convince people through traditional advertising. In fact the most convincing argument i’ve seen for their cables making a difference was on Gizmodo, way more convincing than any point of sale, or product packaging marketing claptrap.
I think in some ways Monster did not capitalize on this event as well as they could have, and that was primarily due to a lack of follow up mechanisms, or lack of “conversation worthy” happenings (iPhone holder anyone?). What would have been nice is a common tag for photo’s and stories so they could more easily track the conversation after the event. With people like Cali, Thomas Hawk, gizmodo, Daniel Riveongand Scott Beale there was plenty of the right people there to continue the conversation, Daniel also points out the lack of mechanisms for follow up on his blog.
So what about the amplifier? Could I tell the difference between my Denon receiver alone, and sending the signal through a $3500 amplifier, uh yeah, I could tell the difference and so could my neighbors.
That’s the amp on the left, the reason it’s on the floor is because it weighs 101 pounds and I wasn’t sure my glass and wood stereo shelving would be able to take it. The amp itself is the Monster signature series 5 channel amplifier, which has a very conservative rating of 150 watts per channel. A really nice feature of the design is the actual power readouts on the front of each bank, which give you a readout of how many watts the amp is putting through each speaker. In my apartment I managed to get it up to about 11 watts before the walls started shaking.
It’s pretty clear that this is an amplifier that most people would buy if they were getting a full on home theater installation, it even comes with all the hardware for rack mounting, and in fact I can’t think of much stereo furniture that could fit or support this monster (pun intended).
So what was the difference? Louder? Sure, but I think the biggest difference for me (an i’m not an audiophile) was the separation of instruments/voices even at a nominal volume. I’ve played various cd’s and dvd’s that i’m very familiar with and the separation and clarity was distinct. Anyway, like I say i’m not an audiophile, so here’s a much more in depth review.
So even the most edgy brand, especially condiment brand could possibly say their product has sperm in it, even as a joke so it’s a safe bet that this entry into the Heinz create your own ad competition will not make it to the finals. But it may be the most successful entry for Heinz, most watched, funniest, most human.
So is one of the advantages of UGC campaigns plausible deniability when something goes viral?
This ketchup video predates this competition by a year but still a classic.
Thanks Steve
Well the “people search engine” spock.com just launched and they are getting hit hard serving 300-400 pages per second, a little above the 100 page views a second they had predicted. And what’s the first thing you do when you get to spock.com, well search on your name of course.
It’s brilliantly simple and in many ways a service I didn’t even know I needed, as I was quite happy googling myself, until I tried spocking myself and I am a convert. Spock picks up various data about you and aggregates it into a search result, including known web sites, social networking profiles, tags etc. Funnily enough it only found my t-shirt blog tcritic and my linkedin profile which is a rather limited view of my online activity, but it is early days.
It seems to me that being careful with your online persona is going to become increasingly important, I noticed another Karl Long on my search result had some rather unfortunate tags:
It seems to me that spock is potentially a very big, very comprehensive social network dedicated to managing your identity.
Ironic Sans has an very thought provoking blog post that looks that the brand/logo taxonomy of terrorist organizations. Here’s the group that use stars as their key visual element, and as Ironic Sans points out “stars inside circles” is a distinct sub group.
In many cases when people buy products they are buying into a story, in many cases a narrative that has been crafted by marketers to tweak your heartstrings in the right places, to push the right buttons. in some cases the brand story is very closely aligned with reality, so there are few incongruence’s, or contradictions of the brand story. Take Patagonia for instance, everything they do in the way they run that company and the people they hire aligns with their brand story, from the frisby world champion that works the front desk, to the wet suits and surf boards they’ll lend to visitors if the “surfs up”.
In other cases the brand story is a wonderful window dressing that hides some ugly truths. Take Fiji water, or should I say Fiji Artisan Water. Their brand story is something like this:
There’s no question about it: Fiji is far away. But when it comes to drinking water, “remote” happens to be very, very good.
Look at it this way. FIJI Water is drawn from an artesian aquifer, located at the very edge of a primitive rainforest, hundreds of miles away from the nearest continent.
That very distance is part of what makes us so much more pure and so much healthier than other bottled waters.
Now i’m a fan of Fiji water, nothing rational about it, it was always the most expensive, but there was just something about the brand and the packaging that made me think it was a bit better than all the other waters, especially that cheap crap from Maine (I may not have thought that explicitly but why else would I choose Fiji over Poland Spring?).
So what’s the problem? Well I was just reading the Fast Company article about bottled water and I just could not get past some of these facts:
This is probably the first time i’ve thought about the sustainability of bottled water, but it has had an effect. I certainly won’t be buying Fiji any more, and if I do buy bottled water it will probably be based upon how close it is sourced.
In another related story Chez Panis, a restaurant famous for pioneering the local food movement in an extremely swanky restaurant setting, recently announced it will no longer be serving bottled water due to it’s lack of sustainability. Instead they will be serving filtered tap water, which in the end tastes just as good, and is much better for the environment.
With the bottled water industry hitting 16 billion a year it’s no wonder it’s starting to have an environmental impact, the irony of course the messaging is almost always about the purity of the source.
IMHO i think Fiji could probably use a blog to start talking about these issues, as it is now it is not part of the conversation.
Crocs are of course the ubiquitous rubber clog that seem to be in every mall in the country and do seem to be on everyone’s feet in starbucks. As with many super popular trends there are often detractors, often counter culture-ists who like to ridicule the fashion/trend victims who are following the trend. Ihatecrocs.com falls into the counter culture category and is also a lot of fun with videos of Crocs getting cut up and burnt, I of course found out about them because they have a t-shirt. I really like this fake ad as well:
But Crocs are getting some really bad publicity, ranging from a story on boingboing about a Swedish hospital banning Crocs, to a blog that is dedicated to documenting Crocs accidents with some horrific pictures. As it turns out Crocs rubbery texture makes them more susceptible to getting caught in escalators. This may be just a small niche right now, but if this turns out to be another blogstorm like the burning laptop, and the pictures are more dramatic, then Crocs will need to address this issue. Ihatecrocs.com is already the number 4 result on google for a search on the term “crocs”.
Latest Comments
RSSAndrew, Kelly, Greg [...]
pH, clnb, murph [...]
random, Holy Man, NJPDMAN [...]
julian gipson
Melissa, Graham Hill, Chris Stock [...]
Christen Dybenko, daniele, Minna [...]