New Creative Reel

Traction has a new reel. Turn up your speakers and check it out.

It's official. Traction is a hot shop.

I'm kvelling today. I just got a copy of BtoB Magazine's Interactive Marketing Guide 2008. Traction was one of five agencies in San Francisco (I think seven in the Bay Area) named on their list of Interactive Agencies in the US. The others include AKQA, Organic, Butler Shine & Stern, Modem Media, Eleven and Publicis. Pretty good company to keep—especially since I'd venture to guess we're the only one on this list under 50 people.

Woo hoo.

Mozilla Prism

Mozilla (the makers of the Firefox browser) has announced a new app called Prism that is an alternative to Adobe AIR for making desktop applications that pull content and services from the web. This is more evidence of the "browser blur" trend I've talked about here before.

Cool tool.

Addy Awards for Traction

The SF Ad Club has awarded Traction a Gold ADDY for the Livescribe Never Miss A Word campaign in the Online Campaign category. The campaign leverages social networks like Facebook and YouTube and a microsite called nevermissaword.com to promote the Pulse smartpen. The effort features a fake organization called "The Livescribe Institute" that has invented Pulse as a cure for a mythical malady called "Restless Mind Syndrome" that has symptoms like being distracted or bored. One video that has had over 60,000 hits on YouTube alone shows a college student being distracted by a tattoo poking out of his sexy teacher's g-string. He is startled back to reality when the tattoo appears to start talking to him. The punchline: since the Livescribe Pulse smartpen records audio, you'll never miss a word.

The agency will be presented with the award on March 20 at the ADDY Awards Gala, along with a gold ADDY award in the Web Sites, Consumer Flash category for their work on the ZoneAlarm ForceField microsite.

Social Network Marketing (a.k.a. Ode to a Facebook Page)

I'm writing a proposal for a Facebook marketing program. Thought I'd work out the introduction here:

Social networking has erupted onto the digital landscape in the past few years with unprecedented velocity. Many marketers understand they need to make use of this new medium, but few understand how or why. This is the reason scores of brands are fumbling around sites like Facebook with marketing programs that are failing miserably. They are failing because they are treating social networks like they treat landing pages—just another channel for direct response.

But nobody wants to be friends with an ad.

Facebook has 65,000,000 members. They claim that 54% of those members log on to their accounts every day—and spend an average of 22 minutes there. That's a long time on the internet. They're spending all that time in their social network because they want to be there—not because they want to be on your website. Unless you can add value to the social network experience, you're just wasting your time.

_________ has a terrific discount for ___________. We absolutely want to trumpet its availability. But is ____ off enough for them to join a group and come back?

Take a look at the top applications created on the Facebook platform and this concept of adding value comes to life. Just about all of them take some aspect of Facebook culture and embellish it in some way to improve the Facebook experience. The Wall becomes FunWall and SuperWall. The Poke becomes Superpoke. Friends becomes Top Friends.

And yes, a discount provides value too. Some of the old rules still do apply.

But Facebook is about connections. Connections between people. Our job—if you choose to hire us—is to do more than connect customers to your brand. It's to connect them to one another through the lens of your brand.

Kiss and Tell

This is a snog post, not a blog post.

Traction has just launched a new online promo for Clos du Bois featuring User-Generated Kisses.

Check it out at kissandtell.com.

People can submit their kissing stories and the community rates them. The best story wins a trip to Paris. Makes for some really good reading. You can kill hours on this site.

Also, super-awesome, C.D.B. is giving a $1 to a women's heart disease advocacy group called WomenHeart every time someone sends an e-kiss to a friend! And join the Facebook fan page while you're at it.


What are you waiting for? Start smooching!

Spoke too soon (MacWorld)

OK, so while the energy wasn't quite what it was in MacWorld's past, but there were a couple of cool things I saw before I left. My faves:

Flow from Gridiron Software - This is some pretty cool software. It basically tracks any files you touch and allows you to manage your assets on a project, without changing how you work at all. So if you open something in Photoshop, paste it into illustrator, export it as an eps, import it into Flash export, add some video and create a Flash movie, you can see all those files and the fonts linked together visually. You can archive them (similar to how you'd collect for output in InDesign, but from an end file) and even see in the amount of time that was spent in each of those files so you can have a to-the-minute view of how much time was spent on a project. Very cool.



The Modbook from Axiotron - A Tablet MacBook. What more can I say?



And if you're going to the last day of the conference today, my pick for Best Tradeshow Schwag is Roxio, who not only gave me a stack of DVD-ROMs, but actually answered my question, "why does this company still exist?" (Answer: they've got a special deal so you can burn what you tape on your TiVo to DVD)

Obligatory MacWorld post

I'm almost embarrassed to be sitting in the Microsoft Office blogger lounge at MacWorld—but they've got free M&Ms, so what can you do?

MacWorld is feeling kind of tame this year. The new skinny laptops are awesome, but the energy here doesn't seem as pervasive as it has in the past. The coolest thing I've seen so far is actually Adobe's demo of Bridge. Basically makes the workflow (their term, but a good one) of linking and placing files between apps a way smoother and more powerful process. I feel like they haven't articulated the benefits of upgrading to CS3 very well, but seeing it in action, the productivity improvements are very clear. Good stuff.

Other than that, just the standard plug-ins, project management software, iPod cases of years past. I'll keep looking.

Real live UGC

Our client Livescribe got their first real live UGC. Kind of weird, but gotta love it:

New Widget Article

I'm writing a piece for the Web Marketing Association's newsletter. Here's the description I gave to the editor:

...about the blurring of the lines between the browser and the desktop, but diving deeper into the widgetization of content so that users can consume it however they want to (in a browser, on a desktop, on a mobile device). Widgets are going to be a big thing in 2008, but marketers jumping on this bandwagon are missing the point—which is about the portability of services— that is the really important trend. 

Draft 2:

Let's face it, there's a lot of marketing trends out there. This is a challenge, but what makes it even more foreboding for marketers is that many of these marketing trends are interlaced with technology. And most marketers aren't technologists. 

So, it's a relief when a trend gets packaged up in a nice little buzzword we can all grasp and take advantage of. Like widgets.

What are widgets? There are actually two definitions. The first are tiny applications that can sit on a user's desktop—but still may pull information from the web. On my Mac, the Dashboard app let's me pull up half a dozen of these: Wikipedia, stock quotes, ski reports, Twitterific... all accessible right from my desktop. At Traction, we've created a desktop widget called exTraction that allows our client service team to automate much of our account management processes.

Desktop widgets are a powerful tool for brands if used effectively because users choose to install them and then interact with them on an ongoing basis. Think about how much you might pay for display ad CPMs and you'll quickly grasp the power of having a direct line to your customers. And, with new software like Adobe AIR that allow developers to create such widgets with their existing Flash and web programming skillsets, the only barrier to entry is a marketer's imagination.

The other definition of widgets is similar, but differs in how things are delivered. These tiny apps are sandwiched between some HTML code snippets so anybody with a bit of front-end programming knowledge can embed them in their web pages, blog or MySpace page. This may be as simple as pasting a YouTube movie into my blog or it could be as elaborate as Amazon extending its sales force by enabling members of its affiliate program to embed a storefront window into a web page. In a Web 2.0 world where 80% of consumers say they'd rather learn about products from friends or peers than from brands themselves, the next best thing to user-generated content is user-distributed content. 

The common thread between these widgets is that they are both ways of making services portable. This is the broader trend that's happening. People want to consume content on their terms. And technology now let's us that.

An example I use all the time is that I log in to BankofAmerica.com to manage my online banking once a week. Why should I have to go through the steps of opening a browser and typing in a url before I can access my log-in. Wouldn't it be nice if I could just launch it with one click? This example might have holes in it because of security issues, but you get the point.

More capable mobile devices. Social networks. Interactive TV. The blurring of the lines between the browser and the desktop. These are all part of reality today. I had a client of mine at SAP, the world's largest provider of enterprise software, tell me about a developer who was running SAP ERP with his Wii. If that's not an example of users consuming content on their own terms, tell me what is.

A more tangible example of portability of content is the explosion of applications and "fan pages" that have been created on the Facebook platform. Fifty-four percent of Facebook's 60,000,000 users log in every single day for an average of twenty-two minutes per day. They are there because they want to be there—not there because they want to be on your website.

Brands are rushing into Facebook and other social networks to ensure they have a presence where their audience lives. Many are fumbling their way around as they struggle to understand the medium because they realize that for better of worse, this is part of the future. This risk of not learning is to become irrelevant.

So, how does one maintain an effective presence in Facebook (or LinkedIn or the desktop or the blogosphere)? By understanding the experience of the social network and adding some sort of value that makes that experience better. Take a look at the top apps in Facebook. That's what they're all doing. Facebook has the Wall. Superwall, Funwall and Graffiti are all top apps (my client has created an app called Livescribe Wall that lets you add audio to drawings you make on the computer to emulate the content you can create with their smartpen). Facebook has the Poke. Superpoke, Foodfight and Vampires are all popular apps that enhance that functionality. Facebook lets you send messages to your friends. Elf Yourself let you send silly dancing elf movies to your friends.

Are these social apps technically "widgets?" No, but that's the point. Widgets are the symptom, not the disease. The epidemic that's really spreading like wildfire is diversified consumption of interactive content (need to come up with an acronym for that one). 

So, what's a marketer to do? 

1. Start with a strategy, not a tactic. How does the value you're creating map back to your overall brand message? Being sticky and irrelevant is not a win. 

2. Make sure there's an incentive. This could be a free box of Cracker Jacks, the ability to update your bank account from your desktop or the ability to poke someone in Facebook while standing on your head. The point is that the end-user needs a reason to care and a reason to engage with your widget or they're not going to.

3. Don't treat this like direct response. Don't create a presence with the intent to drag people out of the experience they are in. Think of an ATM. You can do your banking without visiting your bank. This whole concept of portable services is about bringing value to people wherever they are in their digital world.

4. Be thoughtful about metrics. Remember, an application isn't a banner ad or a landing page. Define your key performance indicators, but be mindful of what else you can learn about your audience from how they engage with your widget. This is an opportunity to measure engagement, but also to monitor conversation, understand viral spread and learn about your customers' needs by watching their interactions.

5. Avoid  bandwagons. Facebook gets a lot of press, but maybe LinkedIn is a better place for you to create a presence for your audience. Widget is the buzzword of the day, but maybe a mobile app is a more strategically relevant place for you to be adding value. By understanding the broader concept of portability, you can take advantage of the underlying trend without getting lost in the clutter of "what's hot" today.

Above all, do something. Carve off some corner of your marketing budget and start learning about how you can extend your brand beyond your website. The age of website as a digital destination is far from over, but people are only going to demand to consume digital content on their own terms more and more. And the customer's always right, isn't she?