“We want both positive and negative reviews of our vehicles.”

“In social media, it must be your authentic opinion or it doesn’t count.”

“Apologize quickly for any mistakes we make.”

Factsheet - Ford’s Rules of Online Engagement

Enter the User-eXperience Designer, the man (or woman) “with the plan” for how the experience will work, grow, spread and evolve. Some argue that this is still the CD’s role, and others see the new emphasis requires balanced influence from more than one skill set. They overlap, sure, but just as the copywriter/designer team was shown to work best in the past in the advertising industry, so too this matchup will become the norm, I predict. It works for building architects and designers; car companies; event planners; game designers… but agencies still seem to struggle with it.

If you’ve hired a UXD, it’s not too late to elevate and socialize their importance and impact. If you haven’t got one yet, it’s not too late. Just be ready to create some Exceptional Experiences.

The buzz words are changing. As the term “Web 2.0” becomes antiquated, and the masses embrace social media, brands, corporations and organizations are starting to understand the implications of the new paradigms of the web.

Transparency is what’s driving consumer decision now, and the trust that is formed through the authentic collective voice of a brand’s management team, employees and customers.

At this point, I’m starting to feel dirty just saying the words “messaging” and “tone” when discussing “campaigns.”

In Boy Scouts, young campers are taught to start a one-match fire – focusing one’s skill on building the framework of the fuel so that it catches with only one match. I’ll do better than that. I’ll give you six matches to start the transparency fire in your organization.

Here are six catalysts to spark your new focus on authenticity and transparency.

Authencity drives consumer choices…

1. Joseph Pine defines the new Experience economy in this TED talk from 2004, and how “Authenticity is becoming the new consumer sensibility.”

… and they trust only human voices…

2. The Cluetrain Manifesto celebrated its 10-year anniversary with a new edition published this year. It describes how consumers are finding trust and truth through human voices within your organization, or elsewhere – that is, however they wish. From the book: “The corporation pretends to speak, but its voice is that of a third-rate actor in a fourth-rate play, uttering lines no one believes in a manner no one respects.”

… and some of these voices are much “louder” than others…

3. Chris Brogan and Julien Smith’s Trust Agents just hit the New York Times Bestseller list. It’s a how-to guide, defining and training the individuals in your organization best practices to be honest as they build genuine relationships. From the cover flap: “Trust Agents wield enough online influence to build up and bring down a business’ reputation.”

… so organizations must find a new way to communicate…

4. Shel Holtz and John C. Havens’ Tactical Transparency presents a framework for dealing with all the scary situations that big brands fear as they dip their toes in to Social Media. From the book: “Tactical Transparency provides dozens of case studies and interviews that address the implementation of transparency tools at the highest levels of the organization and the lowest. Transparency succeeds when it is embedded into the culture of a company, not implemented as a program designed to be exercised by only a few.”

… and it must go all the way to the top…

5. Organic’s CFO and COO Marita Scarfi explains the opportunity CEOs are missing if they don’t participate in Social Media and open conversations, in this recent Threeminds blog post. “Being engaged with your customers allows you to produce better products/services which, in turn, leads to improved customer loyalty. Ultimately this helps increase sales and fosters stronger company financial performance (e.g. increased shareholder value).”

… just like these numerous examples of management-level-driven open conversations.

6. The NewPR Wiki lists dozens of blogs written by Management-level contributors, where issues are being discussed, and trust is growing in brands… and the people that are behind them.

One last tip, campers: Campfires start quicker when the team works together, and when the structure of the tinder allows in oxygen… Keep it open.

When a new technology comes along, or in this case, a new video effect, the first use cases are rarely contextually appropriate.

It must have just got easier to build 3D composite videos, because they’re being churned out faster than auto-tuned hip-hop songs as many creative minds are overwhelmed by the razzle-dazzle of their spot actors invoking Hogwartsish incantations of product features out of thin air. Examples are piling up and running back-to-back in some instances.

Before we look at who’s getting it right, let’s look at a few examples that didn’t quite…

Finance Canada

The Canadian Government tries to metaphorically represent their new website experience with citizens plucking grant options from the clouds, but the message – the benefits – are lost among the gimmicky visuals.

Ford

Ford goes through a similar experience, as the car buyer is building her Escape in her mind’s eye by shoving animated features one-by-one in to the SUV.

SyFy

SyFy’s recent brand announcement is more of the classic high-budget blue-screen big-CG style, but the partygoers are tossing around magic items with abandon. Each one, more awkwardly than the last.

Blackberry

Blackberry attempts to demonstrate that you can control your whole world in your Curve. The representation of the mobile digital experience though is cringe-worthy though, as the actor, as with all of these examples, just isn’t quite sure where to focus her eyes.

So, who’s doing it right?

HP

HP’s “personal” celebrity stories commercials are instantly recognizable – yes, they have star power, but it’s the execution that works so well with this creative platform. Perhaps the best decision here was to cut off their heads. Not only does it invite the viewer to try to figure out who the celebrity is, but the celebrity doesn’t have to worry about looking silly and unfocused as they stare at their waving and empty hands. These ads have earned big viewcounts on YouTube, has boast lots of user-generated videos and parodies, further proving the success of the concept. These commercials could be about anyone, and HP has seized this opportunity, expanding the platform on YouTube with the “You On You” contest (which I wrote about it on Threeminds).

Apple

iPhone ads demonstrate the apps, sell the benefits and dazzle you with the product, not computer graphics of metaphors of potential behaviours that you could maybe have at some point.

You might think using the iPhone ads as a best practice example is a cop-out – the fingers are demonstrating the product itself, you say, not flicking around post-production 3D objects… and to this I say…

“Precisely.”

(Insert Seth Godin Quote here)

Here’s a quick link to the Google Search: ebay wicked sick bmx

50 new Nissan Cubes are driving off Canadian cubes dealer lots this month. Each one’s being driven by a brand advocate you only wish you had hired to tout your brand.

The new cars are the reward for months of creation and promotion by these musicians, DJs, dancers, programmers, designers, bloggers, podcasters, poets, writers and artists, and all kinds of creative thinkers; the cream of the crop of 500 competing “auditions” broadcast online over the last three months via social channels. Nissan openly called The Hypercube a social media marketing experiment, choosing to invest only in this channel, and is now pleased to announce (or tweet, perhaps) the successful proof of their thesis.

Nissan Canada’s creative agency, Capital C, went beyond the boilerplate hey-make-us-a-video and please-retweet-our-propaganda “campaigns” that are all too common these days, by offering prizes on which creative minds could really envision spending time and effort.

The Contest

Of 7000 applicants, 500 elite were given Hypercube canvases to audition for the mass public, stumping for daily votes with photos and animation, video, poetry and song. Competitors even took their campaigning offline, including Telma “TSwizz” Costa, who created and distributed pins to drive traffic, and Sean “Cube Man” Williams who literally drove offline traffic in his homemade cardboard Cube costume.

The cream rose quickly, as canvasses brought out the best from these competitors. And believe me, if you followed or friended any of them, you were hearing about it.

Over the course of the contest, so much exceptional content was created, it’s difficult to “highlight” the best stuff. Here are pieces of just three of the intense and daily updated canvasses:

Tony “Tony Holiday” Elston’s final canvas

Brittany Jade “Gunandagirl” Hanson’s final canvas

Delphine “Delf Berg” Bergeron’s final canvas

You can view all of the winning canvasses at thehypercube.ca

The Platforms

The Hypercube site was just the town hall of this experience, though, as competitors created videos on YouTube…

Posted images to Flickr…

Tweeted (like crazy)…

built web pages and blogs, and invoked social graphs from their other communities. For example, contestant Andre Molnar looked to leverage the passionate Drupal community, by promising to create the “Drupliconcube,” a Nissan cube “decked out in Druplicons, spreading the Drupal love to the streets.

Deeper Interactions

More than just pleas for votes, these daily updates became meaningful interactions between the competitors. Williams sent out a YouTube dance-off challenge to his fellow participants, and created this mashup:

Some social media users voiced disapproval of the campaign, including Shawn Micallef, who questioned the quality of the engagement suggests a line had been crossed, from daily updates from friends and outright spam. I disagree, as social media users are constantly pushing out posts and tweets that may annoy some, but be useful to others. This is the very nature of Social Currency, and one can, in fact, “Unfollow.” Furthermore, this type of repetition occurs with non-marketing events even more than with campaigns. When Michael Jackson died, or during the Obama campaign, the tidal wave of repetitious posts seemed to drown most other conversation. The Hypercube campaign wasn’t perfect, but neither is Facebook, nor Twitter, themselves.

The Finale

Such a momentous story had to end with an explosive climax, and on June 24, it did just that. Contestants gathered with friends at events simulcast in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. (Small-town contestants got together on their own in other provinces, too.) Contestants performed live between DJ sets, mingled over drinks, and sat in the highly-coveted Cubes on display. Winners were announced across the country via big screen video and some tight computer graphics. The dance floor of CiRCA in Toronto was like a minefield as groups of friends exploded in cheers when the local winners were listed off. It seemed like an endless supply of car keys were handed out, and many of the winners were ironically rendered speechless.

One can’t argue the level of quality and vastly disparate creative skillsets with which the Cube brand has been aligned.

The Outcome

Now, Nissan Canada has tons of authentic content to work with, generated by skilled creatives at a low cost. The winners are required to update their canvasses twice a month for the next year, but the brand will get a lot more than that, I predict, as these content generators are eager to share their experiences on the road. And they’ve also got promises to keep with their fans. Singer/Cube-winner Curtis Santiago promised to drive to a voter’s house in his cube, anywhere in Canada, to play a house party. No doubt he’ll be blogging and vlogging the whole trip.

I’ll admit, at first glance, I assumed Nissan Canada and Capital C’s campaign was a huge gamble. All too often, big brands create deep connections with new communities, but then drop these connections as soon as their campaign is over. Nissan has demonstrated how to think and plan long term; find–no, create passionate advocates who themselves created a plethora of content and awareness; and build a brand in partnership with their customers.

The Community

Moreover, this campaign was just the spark, a great success already, but the story of the Nissan Cube and the CubeCommunity is just beginning. Cubecommunity.ca teases us with a “coming soon” page, but the long-term strategy is obvious, as the community has all of the core requirements, starting with deeply invested and passionate community leaders. I look forward to following this community, and, in many ways, the hard work for Nissan and Capital C has just begun.

I’m happy to admit, the bar’s just been raised for “social media marketing.”

There is life in the marketing departments of big corporate. There is energy and understanding at the executive level of many blue chip companies. If you’re a part of these companies, welcome to the new paradigm. If you’re a competitor to a member of the Social Media Council, big brand beware. These old dogs are getting a new social life.

I’m excited because more large businesses are starting to accept and embrace the future — transparency, the social web, some even the inevitability of The Cluetrain Manifesto.

I know this, because last week, Bob Pearson (@bobpearson1845), Dell’s Vice President of Communities and Conversations, and representing the newly named Social Media Business Council (formerly “Blog Council”) presented “15 Key Trends & Observations For Leaders Of Great Brands” to Toronto’s Third Tuesday attendees.

Some of the highlights:

3. Realize that your customer does not care where you want them to go.

4. Less than 1% of a customer’s time is spent actually purchasing a product. (99% is spent browsing and socializing) Pearson then asked, “Why would we spend 100% of our budget on that 1%, when the decision-making process is so well underway?”

Pearson also spoke of his agency partners as “Iterative Innovators” in this space, working with the marketing team, but not leading the social media practice — that, he explained, has to come from within the company.

This is a dramatic shift — from digital experts talking to brand managers and delivering the good news (or bad, if you liked the old ways of interruptive marketing) about the new paradigms of the Internet.

This simple presentation speaks for itself. I don’t agree with every small detail here, but the core ideas are light years ahead of most brand managers’ understanding of what the future and the immediate present requires.

Pearson and fellow Social Media Business Council member (from Molson Canada) Ferg Devins are big advocates of the council, proclaiming it an open, honest exchange of experience and knowledge that is “establishing a practice.”

After listening to Pearson, I think the benefits are undeniable.

You can learn more about the Social Media Business Council at SocialMedia.org.

‘Trouble At The Henhouse’ dropped in 1996, just as marketers were starting to try to think about the Internet. In my opinion, this was and is the much-worshipped (by Canadians) band’s best album. But, until today, when ‘Let’s Stay Engaged’ shuffled through my iPod’s earbuds, I didn’t realize they wrote the anthem for today’s best practice marketing strategies ten years early.

Let’s Stay Engaged

It might be late but it won’t be early
you got me to the gate with time for a coffee
it’s getting late sounds like a departure
it’s getting close sounds to me like a departure
Until we meet again lets stay engaged
until then lets stay engaged
Lies over time float to the surface
lies over time they equal surface
lies over time though the reasons desert us
lies over time with no apparent purpose
Until we meet again lets stay engaged
until then lets stay engaged
See the dead art and you see your reflection
fear no art and you fear no reflection
but don’t look at me, I’m not the artist in question
sounds good to me, but I’m not the artist in question
Until we meet again lets stay engaged
until then lets stay engaged

Maybe ‘Henhouse’ was a full brand/marketing/social web/social commerce concept album…

Gift Shop - “After a glimpse over the top/The rest of the world/Becomes a Gift Shop”

Does this refer to Chris Anderson’s “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business” concept?

They really were Ahead By A Century.

“… Now maybe it’s coming true, because of Internet.”

1. Where Does Brand Experience Begin and End? by Anthony Viviano and Sarah Jo Sautter examines the rare execution of holistic brand experiences, across media and from web to office or retail.
2. Do Social Media Marketers Dream Of Monitoring Tools? by Anna Banks outlines the features needed for deep social media monitoring. This new discipline is noisy, and expanding rapidly. And also;
3. Why You Shouldn’t Care About Seeing Flash on iPhone by Fang-Yu Lin shuts down the speculation. If you care about user experience, you’ll understand why.

Here’s a quick tip. If the list of items isn’t intuitive to the user (provinces/states/countries, departments in their company, or anything else guessable by seeing only one of the items) or if the list is shorter than five items, don’t use a pulldown. That’s what bullet selects, checkboxes, and DHTML/Ajax is for.

Pledge with me:

Photo credits: Marc Shandro.

Back in May, I tweeted eight “Web Strategy Reminders” that got some great responses. Here they are altogether, with two bonus reminders to allow people to laugh like Count von Count when they’re done.

Web Strategy reminder No. 1: If you’re just adding a “Community” tab to your web site, You’re doing it wrong.

Web Strategy reminder No. 2: If you’re pushing Content out through banners, You’re doing it wrong.

Web Strategy reminder No. 3: If everything you build has a unique interface, You’re doing it wrong.

Web Strategy reminder No. 4: If you start with a tactical gimmick on a platform your market doesn’t use, You’re doing it wrong.

Web Strategy reminder No. 5: If your platform doesn’t separate form from function, You’re doing it wrong.

Web Strategy reminder No. 6: If you’re ignoring the fact that Search is the number one way that users find you, You’re doing it wrong.

Web Strategy reminder No. 7: If you’re not considering how your experience will change over time, You’re doing it wrong.

Web Strategy reminder No. 8: If you’re not implementing a holistic measurement strategy beyond clickstream analysis, You’re doing it wrong.

Web Strategy reminder No. 9: If you’re ignoring the fact that your employees are telling the story of your brand (good or bad) better than your corporate web site, You’re doing it wrong.

Web Strategy reminder No. 10: If you’re excited about your new banner ad pushing to your new television ad on your new Flash web site, You’re doing it wrong.

I blogged about a few of these examples here, listing some brands gasping for air as their Twitter API “strategy” gets pulled from their lungs, and others just treading water.

Enter Prototype-Experience.com, a console game site (the Mitch Buchanan of this metaphor), where users link the Prototype trailer with their social graph and assets via Facebook Connect.

This is an excerpt of a post… Read the rest of this post on Organic’s Threeminds Blog

With Twitter, for example, it’s still important for strategy to drive decisions on tactics. An open API seems to be a maddening siren’s call for agencies and developers, causing them to lose all sense and launch campaigns just for the sake of integrating Twitter.

Let’s learn from these campaigns and stop all the gimmickry.

Skittles

If you haven’t heard of the Skittles.com debacle (which they continue to host), welcome to the Internet. Kidding aside, this web site has thrown away caution and its brand, allowing Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to define its message and its value. Upon launch of this “strategy,” users gamed the sites, associating swear words, offensive posts and negative messaging. Now, weeks later, the aggregate social destination sits passive; the brand message confused and tarnished.

The glass-half-full viewpoint: I should, however, acknowledge the 1 million+ fans subscribed to the Skittles Facebook fan page. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, Skittles does with these subscribers.

FixOutlook.org

This recently launched grassroots site hopes to grab the attention of the Windows Beta evaluators, and send a powerful, organized message to Microsoft before they commit to the sin of continuing to use Word to render emails in the 2010 version of Outlook. I admit, it’s a noble cause. But the twitter implementation at the core site is reminiscent of 90s designers using animated gif backgrounds just because they could. It was a terrible idea, and the addition of a Twitter avatar feed doesn’t change this. This is/was a great opportunity to unite these users in a deeper way.

The glass-half-full viewpoint: The people behind this cause did keep it simple, and don’t necessarily have a need for a long-term view. The virulence of the tweets are visible, and I’ve yet (with 17,489 “tweetitioners”) to see any tweets against the campaign.

Terminator Salvation (Resistance 2018)

The film over-promised and under-delivered, so I suppose we could say the Twitter campaign stayed true to the brand. This Twitter game sent Jumbled words to decode and trivia questions to answer to followers who would earn points. It also incorporated some Terminator-world messages, such as, “You have been harvested by the machines, you lose 5 points.” Games on Twitter are starting to multiply, and this one seemed to have good promise, but the challenges became repetitive quickly, and the burning Terminator face rolling by among my smiling happy Twitter friends weakened the impact of the experience. If this is SkyNet, we have nothing to worry about.

The glass-half-full viewpoint: Games on Twitter are still a new concept, and this early attempt did earn some pretty good reach and buzz. It does foreshadow more robust and solid twitter contest and gaming to come.

Polar Ice

The ultimate in Twitter API gimmickry lives at PolarIce.ca. This flash site pulls in what appear to be completely random Tweets, with a muddled interface featuring confusing functionality creating the ultimate why-am-I-here experience for users. It seems Polar Ice just likes Twitter. But what does this have to do with Vodka, or partying?

The glass-half-full viewpoint: If you have a glass half full of Polar Ice, tip it back and Google your way off this site.

Nike’s The Hookup

Nike’s work-in-progress started with a whimper, but is now, it appears, starting to evolve into something a little more useful. The Hookup tweets local shoe drops to followers, and has other functionality pulling key terms for their fashion product/item/lines called “icons.” Fans are starting to use the tag #thehookup, which may connect to this strategy too, but it’s difficult to say.

The glass-half-full viewpoint: There is a lot of activity around these items on Twitter, and this team has a long-term view. A few changes will lead to success for this program.

(Full disclosure: I work for Organic, with Nike Canada as one of our clients. I haven’t, however, worked on The Hookup)

What’s the common thread here? These API implementations are all ideas conceived based on the brand’s needs, instead of the users’.

If instead, one considers the drivers behind users’ behaviours on Twitter and other Social Media, one realizes that these are surface ideas that don’t serve their preferences, desires and needs. Start with user-centric thinking, think long-term, and ease into Social Media with grace and success.

This video by Google illustrates several issues that have been plaguing product and brand managers, UxDs (user-experience designers) and IAs (information architects) and most obviously, the general public. Google asks “What is a browser,” only to find that less than 8% of those polled have an understanding of the term. (It is, by the way, “a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web” - Wikipedia; e.g. Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (The big blue ‘E’))

This is an excerpt of a post… Read the rest of this post on Organic’s Threeminds Blog

1. How Big Brands Can Benefit from Public APIs by Dan Neumann examines the New York Times as a Northern star, while we keep the dream alive for futurist marketers looking to help brands by changing the way they use their data and content.
2. Nasa Rocks The Boat by Alex Churchill points us to a lil’ ol’ YouTube video to which many corporate workers can relate. And also;
3. TourTracker - Tour Of California by Marta Strickland analyzes the dashboard online viewer for the Amgen bike race.

I clicked my laptop out of hibernation the other day, and spent an hour or so working on a screen set at 1024×768, mostly reading RSS feeds in Netvibes. (Click the image to enlarge)

I realized after a long while that my workspace was very small, and just wondered when I decided that this was normal, as I’ve slowly built up a ridiculous navigation-to-workspace ratio, amplified when I have a low res setting.

Just thought this was funny. Shaking my head; now back to work.

The Drupal community is buzzing over the confirmation that the Obama Internet team has built the new Recovery.gov web site on the Drupal platform. This open-source CMS has built a reputation of innovation, stability and malleability that is unmatched. Drupal boasts thousands of modules for almost any type of digital presence, with a focus on personalization, community building and social tools.

Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of this implementation by the White House is the choice to use open source code. Security wonks have long been battling over the reliability of open source software, and many have retreated to the “comfort” Microsoft products because they “aren’t free.” Now, it’s hard to argue that there aren’t any case studies for Drupal where security is a priority.

Moreover, the Drupal community is driven by collaborative gain, a mirror of the Obama social message, as developers produce ever-advancing functionality and improvements for everyone’s benefit.

Oh, and Beyonce is using Drupal, too. At last.

Nike combines their world-class storytelling with modern in-the-moment citizen journalism with this new Nike 5 Tournament Ad. While filming the ad with Wayne Rooney and Rio Ferdinand in Manchester for the Nike Five 5-a-side Tournament, an onlooker catches the best footage on his mobile phone of a SOT (soccer-obsessed-teen) taking Rooney’s pants down. Nike drops it in the ad, with the original mobile phone footage for proof-of-realism on YouTube.

(This was also posted on the Organic Threeminds Blog.)