In spite of some of my previous criticisms of Facebook, I have finally taken the plunge and signed up for a Facebook page. At first, it was simply a practical tactic to try and maintain some traffic to site during my difficulties with Google, but I’ve since continued to use it and update it to finally see what exactly my peers had said I was missing out on. A couple of initial observations:
1. It’s fun to get friend invitations from both your current cadre of friends and from people you haven’t spoken to in years.
2. 99% of the communication I’ve received thus far has, in fact, confirmed my initial assertions about Facebook: fun, but not much more than interesting entertainment for now.
3. I can absolutely understand the immense economic value of marketing on a network like Facebook. The opportunity to use the data contained within posts, status updates, associtions, groups, etc., is like having the largest and most detailed marketing database available. Oh, and did I mention that the majority of Facebook users fall within the most desirable demographic in terms of discretionary income?
4. Every interactive agency should have a Facebook and Myspace strategy for their clients if their target audience’s demographics (and attitudes!) fall within the required parameters.
5. Within a few days of joining, my Facebook page rocketed up to the #1 search result in Google for my name. In addtion to the day-to-day banter being fun, it’s also another great way for potential clients to find me (although I wish this site would get re-indexed by Google a little faster).
I know these observations are probably pretty obvious to anyone who has already joined, but for professional folks who don’t find a lot of value in it at first, I can say it’s probably worth setting a page up and seeing what happens.
May 22nd has been a deadline that has been staring me in the face for the last 7 weeks, starting with the signing of a proposal I wrote. Today is the launch of the “reskinned” HunterFan.com. It has been an ambitious journey, reskinning an entire site, plus completely designing and building 3 micro-sites for the same customer, all in less than 2 months! I’m proud of the work our excellent creative team has done, and I truly get fulfilled watching a project go from conception to completion. It was also cool to witness some hardcore legerdemain (YES! I used that word in real life!) by our programming staff to resolve server-side issues I won’t even pretend to comprehend.
The new homepage is much, much cleaner than the old version, and it has a variety of ways that a customer can navigate to the same information. As you can see, our client is really making a move to embrace the new green color, which I think works very well on the live site.
All we had time to do in this phase is redesign the homepage, add a few features, and add a new look and feel to the interior pages - still a huge improvement over the previous site. Of course, now comes the real work: Phase 2. Phase 2 will bring this site up to a new standard. Stay tuned!
So, have you ever worked on a project that you regretted? I’ll bet at least someone at the agency responsible for this campaign has.
Fortunately, I’ve been privileged to only work at agencies that had reasonable scruples about promoting clients that are damaging to the environment or to the human populace in general. While I wouldn’t consider myself super-conservative or anything, there are definitely certain products and/or services that I’m happy to not be promoting.
Debuting during the Super Bowl (and what a Super Bowl it was!), Coke’s new ads got my ad-sensibilities as tingly as Mitt Romney in a Utah primary. Gone were the ridiculous, “soft branding” tactics of bubbly music and roller-skating hotties, and in were a couple of ads that really get to the heart of who Coca-Cola undeniably represents worldwide today: America, and her uncanny ability to be the melting pot of the world.The spot with Democrat James Carville and former Senator Bill Frist is definitely my favorite. What other soft drink brand could make the claim to bring disparate people together and not be totally laughed at? Sure, Pepsi tastes better, but globally the world revolves around Coke. Overall, I was disappointed with the rest of the Super Bowl ads. Sure, it’s easy to be critical when my client’s $2.7 Million isn’t on the table, but I was pretty shocked at the overall mediocrity of the ads. Most disappointing to me (besides the horrific salesgenie.com ads) was the fact that several companies tried to bank on the success of a previous idea rather than coming up with something original. During the Bowl, I spotted the following:
Audi R8 – parody of The Godfather “horse head” scene
Budweiser – gratuitous use of the Rocky theme song
Bud Light – “Breathing Fire” spot is a direct rip-off from the DQ and Taco Bell “breathing fire” commercials
Diet Pepsi Max– ripoff of Saturday Night Live “Night at the Roxbury” sketch
Life Water - ripoff of Thriller, with a dancing girl
I use the term “ripoff” and “parody” loosely, just to conserve words. What I’m talking about is using an existing, popular idea instead of a new idea in order to sell your product. Sure, it’s great to make your ad buck go the extra mile in today’s congested, information-laden airwaves, but using iconic, if not the classiest, entertainment parodies to promote your brand doesn’t seem that valuable to me. It was also unusual that only a couple of advertisers decided to push a website along with their ad (Tide and Doriotos).
Either way, even though USA Today would disagree with me, I think Coca-Cola won the day. And I’m pretty non-biased because I only drink a soft drink about once a month, and it’s usually a Pepsi product =).
Okay, so this is an interesting idea, and the new frontier for social media/social rating networks: employers. RateMyEmployer.ca is a new, Canada-based web site that allows registered and non-registered users alike to rate their employers on a variety of scales, including pay, work/home balance, stress, and others. Boasting a tagline of “Who said background checks and Pre-Employment Screenings should be reserved to employers only?”, this site stands in a great position to further empower the average employee.
I recently attended the 2007 Forrester Research Consumer Forum, and social media, along with rating systems, was at the forefront of everyone’s minds. It’s the future of online marketing, because it works: 67% of purchases made online cite a direct referral from someone who had experience with the product or service as the main reason they felt comfortable with the purchase (source: WOM report, 2006).
Huge companies like Dell are paying a lot of attention to the way that customers have rated their products, and Dell’s head-on approach to meeting the challenges that were revealed has resulted in a true success story for both the consumer and the company. But I’d bet my lunch that employers, particularly large employers, are not nearly as comfortable with having their performance reviewed in a public setting as employers.
To some degree, the risks are the same to the employer as a product review: some people will post negative reviews, plain and simple. However, with good, retainable talent already at a premium, and the astronomical costs of fixing a dysfunctional work environment, this move could really have employers on the fence. No one likes to have their dirty laundry aired, especially big companies. I would suspect that a movement towards increased transparency and true reviews of a work place should ultimately result in a better work environment for employees and more honest companies, who will be motivated to fix glaring issues pro-actively before their reputation is slandered.
Of course, it could also result in a lot of libel lawsuits as well. Only time will tell. Until then, I say keep the ratings coming, and for your own protection, your username very, very private.
In the world of marketing, you can score a double-play whenever you can create a promotion that is so noteworthy that more attention is drawn to your methods of promoting than to the promotion itself. A few months ago, the alternative music group (an overly simplistic label on my part) Radiohead released its first major album after parting with its record label. The album is available for download for whatever price its listeners are willing to pay, which was and is an amazing concept for artists and marketers everywhere. Check it out…it’s an interesting site and a great listen.
Of course, this model is only truly economically viable if you are fairly confident that you already have a strong, loyal audience that will carry the majority of the financial burden.
Steve Thorson, one of my friends and a co-worker from a previous life, is a designer for Paste Magazine’s website, and he let me know that Paste is using the same model to sell a year-long magazine subscription - you pay whatever you feel the magazine is worth to you. 11 issues, plus 11 full-length CD’s full of the latest and greatest music for progressive tastes. What’s great about this promotion, is that it’s also a gauge of the loyalty of its current subscribers, as Paste is allowing renewal subscribers to get the same deal. As an added incentive, Paste is highlighting those who pay more than the $19.95 for a standard subscription rate (although Steve tells me this experiment has yielded an unexpectedly high number of subscriptions at $19.96 by those who just want to be featured in the magazine).
This is a great deal for consumer, and a great deal for Paste, as they can expand their subscriber base to uber-frugal people like me that wouldn’t normally pony up the 20 bucks for a magazine about music (yes, guilty, I paid a dollar, but I know that Paste will make it up in ad revenues). Asking people to pay what they want is the next best thing to giving it away for free, and it offers the added benefit of giving you, the marketer, a very real picture of what your value is to your customers.
>>UPDATE: Steve just let me know that the slew of subscribers at $19.96 was inaccurate (and third-hand) information. So far, only one person has done that. On the upside of things, he said the highest price someone has paid so far is $70. So now, I can officially feel less guilty about only spending a dollar.
After a semi-long absence, I’ve decided to go a little Seth Godin on you and post a picture from my camera phone.
Sure, as a photographer this image makes me cringe, but my trusty Treo was all I had on hand. While on a client pitch in NYC earlier this week, I spent a few minutes in a lobby with a DHL drop-off box. I was inspired by the simplicity of the answer for a very important question that anyone about to drop a package in the box may have, “Have they picked up packages here yet, or not?”.
The large, block letters in all caps that indicate if a package has been picked up or not are not sexy, or even all that interesting, but they are 100% functional. I think that can be a hallmark of great design. DHL could have gone with a really slick system of lighted buttons, color-coded tabs, or whatever, but instead they chose the direct route. If I can walk up to the drop-off and see immediately that the packages for the day are “NOT PICKED UP”, I can drop my package with confidence and not have a second thought, which I would bet is exactly what the drop-off box designers were going for. Bravo DHL.
I’m a regular reader of Time magazine and of Time.com (especially their super-friendly mobile edition). Naturally, I was quite interested to see that they had put out an article that highlights the top 50 websites and top 5 “Worst websites” on the internet today. Their criteria is much different than the design community would use, so I anticipated some head-scratching while I read the article.
However, I was totally shocked to see that the number 1 “site to avoid” (also the number 1 worst site on the web) was eHarmony.com. From a design and functionality standpoint, eHarmony isn’t anything to write home about, and it’s probably not going to be at the top of the buzz lists for Web 2.0 applications. It is, however, a solidly designed and functioning site. According to Time magazine, the reason that everyone should avoid eHarmony is:
“Our main beef with this online dating site is its power to cause utter despair. eHarmony claims its more “scientific” approach to matchmaking differentiates it from competitors — its users complete extensive personality questionnaires, in order to connect them to others based on compatibility. In early 2006, eHarmony announced that more than 16,000 couples had married during the previous year as a result of meeting on the site, citing a 2005 Harris Interactive poll. That’s about 90 people finding love every day, a track record bound to inflate expectations. On a more typical dating site, where users are prone to making snap judgments based on photos and sketchy profiles, if you don’t find that special someone you’re less likely to take it personally. It’s easier to shake off because, after all, that’s hardly the real you up there on that site. But if you’ve taken the time to answer eHarmony’s 436 compatibility survey questions and paid its premium charges ($21 to $60 a month, depending on how many months you prepay), and the site then delivers terrible recommendations — or worse, rejects you as unmatchable — what do you tell yourself then? The company’s advice, to stick with it for several months to improve your odds of finding a soul mate, sounds all too self-serving (the longer you use the site the more you pay). The site also discriminates against gays.”
If you read the “discriminates against gays” article, you’ll see the real backbone of Time’s issue with eHarmony and how utterly absurd of an argument it is. The author even acknowledges at the end of his rant that’s it’s perfectly within eHarmoy’s rights as an independent company to choose not to provide services for men seeking men or for women seeking women. The author is gay himself, and he does a thorough job of pointing out that there are many sites that provide dating services for gays only that do not include services for straight people.
Time, normally a trusted source of objective news about what’s going on around the world, has really let their readership down by choosing to publish this article. To be clear - I’d just as quickly blast Time if they were saying that a site for gays was discriminating against straight people by now providing services for them. It’s not like eHarmony is a public institution, or holding back vital services from a particular community…it’s a dating service! People generally want something that is tailored to their particular tastes when it comes to a dating service. It’s no secret that eHarmony is a more conservative site for people who are trying to find that special someone. But so what? Imagine a dating service that did nothing to be selective - how would that do anything to increase the odds of like-minded people getting together?
Rather reviewing eHarmony using objective criteria (or even subjective criteria that is somewhat rational and consistent), some disgruntled writer at Time who evidently has had some bad luck in the dating arena has chosen to take out their personal frustrations on eHarmony.com. The review has nothing to do with site functionality, its impact on the online movement, or anything else. I’m very interested to see if there is any public backlash, as well as how eHarmony will respond.
You can say what you want about the “green” movement, which has as many political overtones as a Dixie Chick concert, but some aspects of it are great. MountainSmith, a well-known manufacturer of outdoor gear, has recently announced the arrival of two new lumbar packs that are made from recycled plastic water bottles. By their estimates, it sales of these products will keep approximately 1.1 million bottles out of the landfill each year, which is great news. The sad thing is, the technology to achieve this isn’t really anything new, so I’m grateful for the political firestorm that’s yielding things like hybrid cars and recycled fabrics. Most outdoor equipment manufacturers know that they cater to an environmentally-conscious crowd, so innovations have been abundant (and well-promoted) for years, but now utilizing such techniques can generate a very real ROI from an increasingly aware public.
Of course, I didn’t see a lumbar pack recycling program mentioned anywhere…yet =).
In the world of marketing, you can score a double-play whenever you can create a promotion that is so noteworthy that more attention is drawn to your methods of promoting than to the promotion itself. A few months ago, the alternative music group (an overly simplistic label on my part) 
