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.

the slideshare seven

I'm about to crash firefox for the 11th time tonight, so thought I'd put up a few links to a few fantastic presentations that have been stretching my brain recently... in a good way. Some old, some new:

1. Gareth's talk at VCU a few wks back:

Vcufeb09

View more presentations from garethk.

2. Great stuff from Bud Caddell - "Digital Media Isn't Mass Media for Cheap":

Digital Media isn't Mass Media for Cheap

View more presentations from Bud Caddell.

3. More from Bud:

The Fan Economy: Becoming Fan Focused

View more presentations from Bud Caddell.

4. An oldie but goodie:

The Brand Gap

View more presentations from coolstuff.

5. Happiness + Brands (read: games)

The Rise of the Happiness Brands

View more presentations from avantgame.

6. Social networks will be like air:

The Future Of Social Networks

View more presentations from Charlene Li.

7.Marketing as a service. From Zeus Jones. Thanks @ryclifton

Zeus Jones Credentials

View more presentations from Zeus Jones.

rolling rock

For my money, this Rolling Rock case from Goodby is one of the new classic cases of planning that was involved in launching interesting, participatory ideas into culture: