First Tweet Martini Lunch Question...

Out of respect for the holiday weekend, the inaugural launch of our Tweet Martini Lunch promotion starts with a whimper and not a loud bark...

Our first week's question is this: the attached image is of a lesser known dog breed with ancient origins. Name what sort of pooch is pictured above AND name the year in which this pooch took home the biggest honors in the world's largest dog show, Crufts...

Does Facebook's Privacy Policy Presage a New Era of Virtual Civil Rights?

(Sitegeist is written by David Hitt, Chief Creative Officer at Splat Productions, a Philadelphia based interactive design and multimedia studio...)

I had yet another either wacky or, maybe, prophetic revelation this morning. I was reading a post on "Augie Ray's Blog For Interactive Marketing Professionals" which details the flap that recent suggested privacy changes on Facebook are creating within the Facebook user community. Essentially, Facebook is floating the idea by its users that would authorize Facebook to share user profile information with other websites, but only when FB users are signed in and browsing the internet. So, in other words, if I happen to log into Facebook and, while I'm using it simultaneously log into another website, FB might share information it has on file for me with that other site, so they can offer me a "more customized" experience.

Reaction to Facebook's idea has been swift and pretty universally negative. Turns out that there are lots of folks out there that are resentful that, now that Facebook has created a desirable online environment for them and collected a lot of (valuable) demographic information, they might actually want to sell that information and make some cashola.

All of this has gotten me thinking about much larger political and cultural issues. This dilemma Facebook finds itself in is fed by the obvious yearning by many for some sort of "universal" public space on the internet. These desires, currently, are at odds with the legitimate commercial interests of that space's creator.

Facebook, it seems, is finally realizing one of the earliest promises of the early dot.com era. They've created a single forum on the Internet where virtually everyone and their grandmother hangs out. (I knew this universality was real when I get a friend invite from my nearly 80 year old Mom two weeks ago...) Their success, though, might prove to be their undoing.

The problem with individuals or companies creating a wildly successful, "game changing" paradigm for the way we live our lives is that sometimes folks start thinking that it's their right to indulge in that new paradigm, absent the commercial aspirations of its creators.

I guess what I'm driving at is: suppose we begin to take the idea of a universal "virtual world" as not a privilege but an actual right? So much of our lives now revolve around our worlds online. I spend my day checking email, Tweeting, writing a blog and checking out CNN.com. At night I play an online multiplayer game for a couple of hours, which is basically like spending my evening in a Virtual World. My experience is more the norm than the exception these days.

So, much in the way that we, as a society, decided that there needed to be public spaces, marketplaces, parks, etc, in the actual world, might we not decide that such places online are also universal rights that everyone should be afforded?

I dunno, maybe it's a wacky thought...

Get ready for the Tweet Martini Lunch!

Hey all --

Next week we're rolling out our homage to the way Old School Advertising used to be done -- with closed doors, some puffy stogies and a couple of Martinis to lubricate the dealmaking...

Here's how it works:

Every Friday we'll be posting a trivia question or contest to our fan page on Facebook. (We'll also be tweeting from Daaveey...) Questions will be posted sometime between noon and 1 p.m. each week. Questions and contests will range in content. The winner of each week's contest will be the first responder to either post the answer on our fan wall, at Sitegeist, or send a direct message to my twitter account at Daaveey. Winners will receive a $25 gift certificate (which oughtta buy you about three martinis!) from either a Philadelphia restaurant or, if the winner is not local, we'll send you a certificate to the national chain of your choice.

Current or past employees or their relatives are not eligible for the contest and winners must sit the bench for six months before they can compete again.

So, roll up your sleeves, square away your paste-ups and join us for a Power Lunch!

A Little Unsolicited Advice to Facebook

So I had an epiphany of sorts today... As I was walking to the gym, I was coming to grips with a challenge that's been troubling me in business for the last few months. Basically, our company, like many of our clients, is attempting to develop a comprehensive approach to integrating social media with our business blog and website maintenance. The strategy pretty much exists in my mind...

On the one hand we are about to roll out our new website, which we've built from a Wordpress platform which supports not only blogging but makes the site search-engine-ready. We created a business fan page on Facebook and I'm regularly updating it. Finally, I've been tweeting for months now and, yesterday, was at last able to get my Twitter app (Tweetdeck) to feed directly into our Facebook fan page.

This morning, on my way to the gym, I began banging myself over the head over my lack of blog-writing discipline, when a thought occured to me. Facebook should build a blogging platform
directly within the application. Here's why this would be a good idea:

1. Businesses, as well as individuals, are already using FB everyday to both market, position and interact with their clients. Blogs are, of course, both a personal and professional means of reaching out and engaging clients or friends.
2. Social media interactions, it seems to me, fall into three distinct content ranges currently. The first, most transient and sparest in range are the micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter or SMS. The second would be mostly anecdotal or conversational interaction -- longer than what SMS or Twitter allows but often spontaneous and unscripted in nature. This would be the sort of interaction which make up the bulk of communication on Facebook currently. The last piece in the Social Media puzzle is blogging, which represents longer-format communication which, often, is more premeditated and planned. Facebook already has a lock on the second "content level" and is the unchallenged place where this sort of communication takes place. With the easy integration of Twitter feeds into Facebook, it also makes integrating microblog content into fan or personal pages a breeze. If Facebook is interested in getting more businesses to advertise and interact on their platform, which it clearly is, why not go the final mile and build in a blogging platform?

This sure would make my life a lot easier, as I could use FB as a pretty complete portal to the outside world for my business. Customers could still visit www.splatworld.tv when they need detailed information about Splat Productions but, by and large, our FB presence alone would give a pretty complete overview of who we are and what we do. This seems like such an obvious observation on my part that, surely, someone out there must be
working on this...

Better Late Than Never...

(Note: Sitegeist is a regular blog focused on issues related to design and marketing and is written by David Hitt, a principal at Splat Productions.)

The great thing about the blogosphere is that, despite the common perception that everything web-related is ephemeral, blog articles actually live for what seems like a relative eternity. Because of the catalog-oriented nature of blogs, a simple reference to an article someone wrote two years ago can instantly resuscitate an idea or discussion.

This happened to me this morning while I was reading a Twitter feed... I came across a blog post written by Jay Ehret from The Marketing Spot. He was talking about a recent facelift he gave his business and was talking about the development of his new logo. He then referenced this blog post he had earlier written, about the relative unimportance of logos for new brands. Having just written an article for the Philadelphia Ad Club about ugly brands, my curiosity was aroused.

Jay's earlier post begins:

"I hate to be the one to break the news, but the importance of logos in branding is overblown. Don't get me wrong, they have their use...somewhat. But when it comes to branding, logos have nothing to do with the establishment of your brand. If you're about to spend some money having a logo designed, you may want to wait."

He then goes on to illustrate a number of well known logos -- Coca Cola, Starbucks, Microsoft, Wal Mart & McDonalds -- and asserts that, essentially, their logos do little to maintain or acknowledge the brands they are paired with. Really, he notes, most logos have little meaning and are only important "after you establish your brand."

He has a point. Certainly the marketing landscape is clogged with big name brands featuring visual slop for identity. (I wrote about those in a previous post...)

But that doesn't mean visual identity isn't important or doesn't play a role in the way your business is perceived by your clients or consumers. In my previous post, I used Google as an example of a business that paid a price for the sloppiness of its visual identity. When I saw the Google homepage for the first time I remember thinking it looked, well, pretty amateurish. I get spareness but, frankly, the designers of that UI looked like they just didn't really care what it looked like. Which, as their customer is, for me, somewhat insulting. (I applaud the simplicity and functionality, though. Functionality and attractive design, though, are not mutually exclusive. ) The brand succeeded in spite of its amateurish mark and look. Imagine if its founders had spent only a few thousand bucks paying a competent design firm to create a memorable mark and finessed their UI a bit.

Which brings me to my last point...

Jay makes the reasonable observation that logos are only important "after you establish your brand." But, if I'm starting a small business, wouldn't my money be better spent if I allocate a small amount of it upfront to get a visual identity for my brand that I don't feel like I have to retroactively fix two years down the road?

In the end, getting it right the first time might be less costly than fixing something at a later time.

Kudos to Kristine Wirth for Some Basic Website SEO Tips

(Note: Sitegeist is a regular blog focused on issues related to interactive design, marketing and computer graphics, written by David Hitt. David is principal and founder of Splat Productions...)

This is a very short post, which I also retweeted. Kristine Wirth posted a really concise blog post about "must do" Search Engine Optimization steps that website designers often overlook. The entire article is here, but, in her closing, she lists a few "don't ever do this" no-nos which relate to meta tags (or H1 tags). For those of you that don't know, meta tags are the descriptive phrases or keywords buried in the code of each page of your website. The viewer can't see these but the crawlers that ultimately see and help determine search engine rank can. Kristine's list of meta no-nos include:

• Missing, empty or duplicate title tags. (Note the duplicate title tags especially). What Bing is saying is that you should not use the same title on more than one of your site’s pages (sage advice).
• Missing, empty or duplicate meta description tags.
• Missing, empty or duplicate H1 tags.

These are really basic issues which can be fixed quickly by someone with only limited coding or Dreamweaver knowledge. If you'd like us to do a quick assessment of your site's search engine readiness, send me an email...

Has Web 2.0 Killed Good Design?

Recently, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the ascendency of Web 2.0 driven companies and the conversation-starting technologies they’re based on. It seems like I can’t go to a professional event anymore without watching a speaker evangelize about social media or search engine optimization. (Okay, I know, SEO isn't really a Web 2.0 thing, but the social media is usually placed within the context of search engine optimization, so the two are virtually inseparable these days...)

“Here’s How to Integrate Facebook Into Your Business’ Marketing Plan...” might be the title of one talk.

or

“Strategies for Content Generation for Long Tail Search in SEO...” might be the title of another.

As someone who straddles the world of both marketing and design, I’ve watched the rise of Web 2.0 and -- unless my forty-something eyes are suffering from more than just midlife farsightedness -- I’ve noticed something. The internet -- and the brands it has spawned -- is becoming an uglier place.

Consider the extinction of the all-Flash website. Four years ago, at the height of the real estate boom, nearly every developer client of ours wanted us to design these luscious, all-Flash web sites for their projects. Flash, as many of you probably know, allows for the creation of truly immersive web experiences. You can have musical underscores, overscores and lots of pretty, moving pictures and type. But Flash has a big downside. Namely - for a lot of technical reasons I won’t bore you with - it's pretty stinky from the standpoint of search engine optimization. So, in the last couple of years, we in interactive design have witnessed the virtual extinction of websites authored exclusively in Flash. And, although it's true that diehard design devotees (like the folks at webcreme.com) are still out there, championing beautiful design, we've found that, these days, aesthetics are having to take a back seat to a whole range of other Web 2.0 generated concerns. (Try designing a site which - besides having to feature the usual navigation bar - also needs to feature link buttons to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Digg, Delicious, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon... you get the picture. Making something like that look pretty and uncluttered is a challenge.)

Then there's the accompanying rise of what I call the "visually brandless" companies of the internet universe. Let's start with the biggest Gorilla on the web, Google. Do you remember when the search engine phase first took hold and you logged onto Google for the first time? I do. And, boy, I remember being confused about what all the hype was about. (That barren screen, with only the centered logo and search window drawing your eye's attention...) I can appreciate the simple functionality of the interface and I think that's a good thing but -- if the only visual element you plan to feature in your user interface is your logo and the technology behind your product is next generation -- wouldn't you want that logo to be at least a little edgy or visually provocative? I mean seriously, from the standpoint of design, that logo is suspect. From a designer's point of view its use of off-the-shelf typography seems lazy. And the embossing and drop shadows are Photoshop cliches which young designers are cautioned to avoid.

Which brings me to my final observation. As I was researching this article, I discovered that Google's original logo which -- essentially -- is the visual ancestor of the current logo, was designed by none other than one of Google's founders, Sergey Brin. His technical and entrepreneurial brilliance aside, Brin's professional training is in mathematics and computer science. Frankly, his lack of formal design training is evident. Why he didn't "get" that the mark he was creating would have far ranging impacts on his business for years is a point of puzzlement.

All of this "geeks driving design decisions" makes me realize that, in the entire 30 year span of time dating back to the dawn of the personal computer, not much has changed. With the noteworthy exception of Apple, tech brands have often overlooked or even devalued design. For decades now, the Microsoft vs. Apple competitive feud seems to express the ambivalence technology companies have about design and brand. On the one side, Apple has embraced sleek, straightforward design and married that sleekness to intentionally spare interfaces. Design is integral to the brand. Microsoft (and other tech companies, like Google or Flickr, for example), have been more reluctant to embrace design as significant components of their identity, though. Apple's commitment to design has served them well, because it has created such a strong identity for the brand that -- even through down times -- people understood what the brand stood for and steadfast loyalists stood by it.

I wonder if brands who place less of an emphasis on design as a core value earn this loyalty? If Google falters in the next couple of years or starts losing market share to an upstart, will its fans rally around its corporate standard? Or are Google users simply "information mercenaries" who will change sides at the slightest suggestion of a technology shift?

Technology companies -- including all the current Web 2.0 companies -- are at the mercy of the winds of change. And the winds of change are as predictable as the Santa Anas in the world of high tech. Buffering their reputations with thoughtful, well designed brand identities would serve more than couple high tech companies well.