Celebrating a campaign well launched
// November 6th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
Left to Right: Howard Betel, Marco Bailetti, Robert de Korte, Stephanie
After a long and fun run of late nights, countless meetings and a LOT of collaboration with many partners it was finally time to celebrate the launch of Because I Am A Girl PLAN Canada’s latest campaign to empower girls all over the world. Both PLAN Canada and Wunderkind put together a beautiful event where the food was delicious and the company as much fun at night as during the day… Well maybe a little more fun than during the day.
There are 4 more pictures in this gallery over here
Twitopocalypse
// August 14th, 2009 // No Comments » // Emerging Trends, Social Media
For those of you that do not use Twitter, it was predominantly unavailable last week due to several DoS (denial of service) attacks which resulted in a few interesting outcomes:
1. Many unfortunate users became victim to a plot by the attackers to become distributors of spam and other socially damaging things.
3. Twitter users were unable to express their frustration via… Twitter.
2. More power was given to an organization called OMB (OpenMicroBlogging) which acts as an open source platform for microblogging. In layman’s terms an alternative to Twitter where users can create their own microblogging social networks.
You can read more about the full story regarding the attacks and OMB on Wired.com’s site.
The truly interesting issue that has surfaced as a result of these findings is in how Twitter is surfacing as a pure channel of communication and is shedding its former skin of being a “Social Networking Site”.
In other words, Twitter is not a social network in the capacity that you want to add all of your friends to your list. Twitter is a two-way feed that allows you to absorb and spread all of the thoughts, trends, links, pictures and video that you provide and request access to.
When Twitter goes down we lose the ability to broadcast important news, keep peers up to date on trending habits and otherwise listen in on what’s going through each others heads on a minute by minute basis. In a sense it’s the same as losing your ability to listen to, or read, the news.
When Facebook goes down we lose the ability to view vacation pictures, receive invitations to events that we probably don’t want to go to in the first place and otherwise “browse” and/or “troll” through other profiles.
Mac Strikes Back at PC’s Latest “Laptop Hunter” Campaign
// May 22nd, 2009 // No Comments » // Advertising
In the never-ending battle between PC and Apple for Laptop world domination, Apple strikes back with their tried and true (but maybe getting tired) Justin Long campaign. The basic message is simple - Yes you can get a PC with all the accessories you want, but will it be as stable as a mac?
The bi-partisan truth to the whole story is that both platforms will crash on you as your computer is only as good as the software you load on to it as well as it’s user (I myself have had to reboot my mac on many an occasion).
I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next out of this back and forth.
Microsoft Does It Right… Almost
// April 6th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Advertising
It’s been a while since I’ve talked about the Mac vs PC war and with good reason, nothing interesting has happened; until now.
Microsoft has finally decided to stop trying to look cooler than Mac and just show the straight facts; Macs are EXPENSIVE! Great timing, with the recession and all, as well.
So here’s how it pretty much went down:
David Webster, GM of brand marketing at MSFT has been working with Agency of Record - Crispin Porter & Bogusky to redeem themselves from the failure that was the “Seinfeld / Gates are actual people too” campaign, and they have come up with a great idea. Film reality based ads around people actually buying computers. Give them $1000 to buy whatever suits their needs and let them keep the difference. The idea behind the positioning is that Macs are simply value adds and in a recession that’s just unecessary. To quote Webster “Not everyone wants a machine that’s been washed with unicorn tears,”.
Well gee… Free computer? Keep the difference? Great! I’d buy a netbook!
Yes, I’d buy a netbook and I’m a Mac user because it’s a FREE COMPUTER!
Logistics and details aside, it’s a great idea, but once again the execution is all wrong for a number of reasons.
- There’s a good reason why Macs are expensive. They ARE washed with unicorn tears.
- Some random woman on the street who probably just needs to check her email and use Microsoft Word now and then is hardly an ambassador to the “Which computer do I need” debate.
- This random woman is not random at all. In fact, she’s a paid actress and people are already picking away at the apparent performance. Oops.
Apple Brings Social Apps to Your Next Kegger
// March 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // Social Media
Whenever I throw or attend a party, I tend to get lumped into the DJ corner to take care of tunage for the night because of one of two reasons:
- I used to do exactly that back in the day before I started working for shops and agencies.
- Between my Last.fm account, Songza and existing collection of music it’s probably just easier for me to keep things going.
Should All Software be Intuitive?
// January 27th, 2009 // No Comments » // Design, Development
TechRepublic Blogger Justin James has a great post about the pressure to make all software (and web application) interfaces intuitive. He argues that given a complex task, the interface for dealing with that task is going to be likewise complex, and that the insistence on making it “intuitive” is unrealistic in many cases.
There’s some good points made by the commenters (software should be made intuitive to the target, skilled user, but not for John Doe off the street) and Mr. James laments the state of modern general computer education (learning how to use Facebook is not learning how to use a computer).
One of the things that struck me while reading the post was how the web industry in particular has put so much focus on things being “usable” and “intuitive”.
I would argue that this has created a mentality that everything in the world can be designed to be “intuitive”, no matter how complex the task. This has manifested itself (in my experience) with clients who look at a design or interface for 5 seconds and say “I don’t get it”. Sometimes they’re right, and we’ve missed the mark, using terms and iconography that don’t make sense, but other times the demands on the interface design are just out of line with all the tasks that the interface is required to handle.
Problems also arise when the client has a different idea of what is “intuitive” vs. what the designer thinks is “intuitive” vs. what is actually “intuitive” for the person who will be using the app.
Designing things to be intuitive is a great goal to aim for, don’t get me wrong. However, sometimes the only way to handle a design problem is to write better documentation and provide better training.
Marketing Through the Decades by Scholz & Friends
// January 20th, 2009 // No Comments » // Social Media
Thanks to Jeremiah Owyang for posting this on his blog. Check him out.
“Hello, [first name] I Want to Sell Things to You.”
// January 15th, 2009 // No Comments » // Social Media
Josh Bernoff (co-author of Groundswell) wrote an interesting post today about his distaste for the practices of certain Email Marketing campaigns (Which you can read here). More importantly than his thoughts regarding best practices in Email Marketing etiquette is his profound and yet obvious statement about simply communicating to people as human beings.
To quote Bernoff: “All three annoyed me by treating me as a target, not a human. Influencers and journalists are human, too. We get mad at this stuff. You want us to like your products, so why do you behave like this?”
As of late, I’ve found myself getting into many debates with colleagues at the office about the usage of social media in marketing.
As a web shop with a ton of agency experience in house, many of us are marketers and have very rich experience in working with brand shops. This has made us a perfect partner for Ad agencies and clients with strong relationships with those agencies and it has also given us the ability to think about any digital strategy from a brand / marketing perspective; however, social media requires a more in-person touch than anything marketing has ever provided.
My personal stance is that the Public Relations team must to be involved in any communication strategy within social media tools as marketing and social media typically results in, dare I say it, a lack of trust from users in the brand. In the case that you don’t have a PR team, all you really need are people who believe in your brand and are willing to take the time out of their day to actually talk to people on Twitter, your blog, your forums and even venture out into the rest of the world where people are talking about you in places you probably don’t even know about yet.
Social Media tools / outlets / channels / sites / whatever you want to call them, are direct portals to specific human beings. They are key opportunities to speaking directly with a customer about their thoughts on your products and services and yet most companies are only interested in pushing brochures to them, rather than actually talking to them.
Now is the time to empathize with your customers. Their wallets are getting thinner lately, but your brand will probably be around longer than the recession (I hope). The opportunities you have today to truly connect with your audience and prove that there are real and genuine people running your company are enormous and plentiful; take advantage of them.
WSJ + MySpace = WySpace?… J
// January 9th, 2009 // No Comments » // Social Media
The Wall Street Journal and MySpace announced the merging of properties (although both are owned by Rupert Murdoch anyway) in order to hold a contest that would allow one privileged person to attend The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
I know this blog is not exactly recognized for ever truly praising MySpace when it comes to quality of content, so we found it a tad bit odd that WSJ would be teaming up with our favourite provider of clashing colours and the Comic Sans font.
The strategy is a good one, you’re essentially crowdsourcing for somebody who can offer a different take on a typically staunch event, and we applaud both organizations for that… But couldn’t WSJ have merged with maybe Digg? Digg’s been pimping out Walt Mossberg as of late, and it would certainly fit their current agenda to bring more credibility to their space… But I digress.
This is hopefully a sign of the times where we begin to see some velvet ropes start to drop for individuals that society might not have been exposed to before, but thanks to the beauty of crowdsourcing we can now spotlight as a diamond in the rough.
If you’d like to see a great example of how YouTube is finding hidden gems in the orchestra space, check this nifty video out:
A potential Sign of Things to Come: Pownce Announces Impending Shut Down
// December 1st, 2008 // No Comments » // Social Media
A few years ago I decided to jump on to the microblogging bandwagon. No, not Twitter… My first foray into this space was actually with “Pownce”, which not only acts as a microblogging platform, but a mish-mash of event announcement, file sharing, link sharing and a whole slew of other things. It was probably the first app I’ve ever used that leveraged the Adobe AIR platform, and was a nice introduction into the potential of things to come. However, much like the results of the Messenger wars in the late 90’s Pownce did not capture a critical mass of audience and was beaten to the punch by Twitter and Jaiku.
Where did Pownce go wrong? They had a pretty decent UI to most of their properties, offered a nice app right off the bat and certainly had a great concept.
The problem? Well… Nothing really. It did the same thing as the rest of the platforms out there. That wasn’t the issue. Maybe the issue was simplicity, maybe the issue was simply being late to the microblogging game as Twitter was already out and being leveraged for all kinds of nifty/sneaky/crafty purposes.
Whatever the reason was, we can certainly look to Pownce as an example of KISS. They built the be-all-end-all app, but early adopters aren’t looking for the swiss army knives. They’re looking for the fresh out of the factory - oops we forgot to install safety features - machete of a knife.
Twitter is still that machete. It hasn’t built out an obscene amount of added value tools, as everyone seems to have done that for them already. The entire app is basically a giant RSS feed of people’s thoughts/pitches/responses and the audience has made it their own goal to build supporting tools around it.
If you’re interested in seeing what’s been built or what kinds of tools you can use to add to Twitter, check out the following sites:
Brightkite - http://brightkite.com/
Brightkite allows you to leverage GPS data to add geographic context to your tweets, ie. “I’m at a bar located at [GPS position] at a surprise Foo Fighters show”.
Tweetscan - http://tweetscan.com/
Tweetscan allows you to see who’s saying what about “x”.
Twitpic - http://twitpic.com/
If you can’t tell from the name, Twitpic allows you to share photos through Twitter.
There are many others, but this was supposed to be a post about Pownce :P.
