goggle dog

goggle dog, originally uploaded by joshcarlton.

I really wish my dog would go for these.

building brand communities

In web terms, it's an oldie. but still a goodie, connecting a lot of Gladwell's work to brands:

Building Brand Communities

View more presentations from Lee Dale.

burrito bunny

A closed for Easter message, the Chipotle way. Brilliant.

the true homepages

We had a great speaker, Peter Spande from Federated Media, come in recently and talk about homepages among other things.

Bottom line, which seems so simple after hearing it... there's a difference between company-built sites and what people perceive as a company's website.

Quick case... this is the US site that Ray-Ban built. It's beautiful and has a lot of cool features/navigation/videos/etc:

And, this is their homepage as consumers see it:

This page has a link to shopping results, a random youtube video, a link to cutwater/psyop's new colorize campaign, and so on... this is how its customers most likely see the web when looking for Ray-Ban info.

This is not meant to be pickin' on Ray-Ban, as this comparison can be done with many brands. Spring and sunshine are on the way so I just happen to have shades on the brain.

thursday links

Some random thoughts/links/etc from this week so far:

• Need to find this article from HBR on brand communities. "Embrace conflict, resist the urge to control, forget opinion leaders—and build your brand." Thanks @herdmeister. 
• Drillable media. 
• TMA put the gecko on youtube. (clip below)
• Twitter is making money! Twitter is dead! 
• Great piece from Ad Age on visualization of data. 
• vitamin water on facebook. Looking forward to seeing how this goes over the next couple of months. It's a very cool idea to send people to facebook.com/vitaminwater
• This set of sketches from sxsw on flickr is awesome. via FEED.
• Seth Godin's interesting approach to building an exclusive community.  
• More BBH... this is kinda old news, but still worth a shout. This time for the Oasis "Dig Out Your Soul" album. (clip below).
• Chaos 2 from Garfield. 
• Would love to see a financially-oriented company do something like this - mint.com.

Oasis - Dig Out Your Soul In The Streets

Numa Numa guy with the gecko

bike accidents/PTI/Today Show

I love how this kind of stuff happens and spreads. One of my favorite shows, PTI, mocks Matt Lauer's bike accident a couple of days ago, then Tony Kornheiser gets pulled into The Today Show this morning:

it's two things: simple + compelling

Another great presentation on users of social media and the shifts in where people are spending time. Via chroma via threebillion.

Netpop | Connect: Media Shifts to Social 2009 Preview

View more presentations from Netpop.

weekly readings

After slowly accumulating/clicking on articles etc in twitter and other places, here's the weekly round-up:

• Excellent read on big ideas meeting two-way communications.
• Time + others partner to produce a customized weekly mag. This is brilliant.
  
• Guy Kawasaki on twitter.
  
• Getting the knee back in shape.
  
• Mark Cuban on the coming bandwidth issues.
• Hamlet in new media. I got a message back from one of the Richmond Shakespeare folks with another one by Ophelia: "Ophelia likes flowers. Flowers, flowers, flowers. Oh look! A river........ Ophelia is no longer online."
  
• Continuing the Shakespeare thing... six new works by the Bard?
• Interesting - kashi has a community section of its site.
  
• Feel so behind. Just found Brian Morrissey this week.
  
• Helping displays ads get better.
  
• Bands still seem to be one step ahead of everyone else. This idea from No Doubt is outstanding.
  
• More tools/ideas for twitter. Thanks @definetigers.
  
• Focus groups are dead?
  
• Ad age: playtime is over for social media.
  
• Read if you have 15 mins... long piece on web advertising, but thought-provoking, from TechCrunch.

couldn't have said it better

Finally catching up on reading Here Comes Everybody by Shirky. It's fantastic - chock full of simple ways to capture what's happening right now, like the last sentence here.

links

Here are a bunch of links that I've been meaning to pull together. I've tested the firefox save feature to it's last limit by keeping a lot of these perpetually open the last week or so:

• If it doesn't spread it's dead - brilliant thinking from Henry Jenkins et al. If only I could stop time to read all 8 part. A coast-to-coast plane flight would do the trick.
• This is what BW's audience is reading about twitter (and the skittles situation).
• Fairly-recent (within last yr) list of brands punk'd within social media.
• As much as I cringe with every Bracketology mention, this time of year still rocks to be a sports fan.
• New mobile app nearbynow puts real-world goods into peoples' hands quicker and more efficiently.
• Great interview with MotiveQuest's Tom O'Brien re: truly listening to what your customers are saying online, and making meaning out of it.
• Wharton asks us is capitalism working?
  
• And, why do companies exist in the first place.
• From Oct '08, but still great thinking. Again from Zeus.
  
• My life for the next couple of weeks.
• Free. Another good preview of the coming book.
  
• For my vcu students. How to think strategically.
  
• Last twitter mention here. How to find companies... pretty helpful list.