I’m sure we’ll see more of this, but Levi’s are one of the first brands to integrate the new Facebook ‘Like’ feature into their online shop. Judging by how many people are ‘Liking’ their jeans, it’s working pretty well. It seems the whole experience is based around ‘social shopping’, when you visit a product which one of your other friends likes, you see their profile image alongside it. Clever clever.
We’ve been discussing this in the office today, some thing it’s a bad idea, I think it’s a great move. Asda are engaging with a (sometimes very opinionated) community in a positive way around an emotive subject and have gained some great press.
We all know that Asda are more than capable of working out what is sexualised clothing and what is not without the input of Mumsnet, but they’re being seen to be listening: this is great social media.
I was thinking this morning about the new Twitter ads, and i’m sure they’ll take off. But I think there’s another revenue stream which Twitter could be investigating which could make them many, many millions.
One of the frustrations for search marketers with Twitter is those pesky short urls. They just don’t provide any link love. Redirects through Bit.ly, and “nofollow” attribute in the link source code combine to ensure that beyond direct traffic driving, the links are worthless in search marketing terms. That’s a whole load of lost link love.
Recently Bit.ly launched their ‘pro’ service, which allows brands to create their own short url, which for vanity purposes is nice (Techcrunch use one, along with about 6,000 other brands). It’s pretty smooth… try typing the http://techcrunch.com domain into Tweetdeck to see it in action, but it still does nothing to boost page rank whilst the links are “nofollow”.
So here’s my model I’d implement if I was at the helm:
For Twitter to do this, they’d need to cut the cord with Bit.ly… wait a minute.. what’s this on Techcrunch yesterday?!
Watch this space…
This is simply brilliant. It’s a web app which allows you to provide structured feedback on a website in a matter of minutes. Explaining design issues to someone remotely (which is increasingly the challenge in today’s outsourced world) can be tricky.
Notable (not-able? really!?) makes this easy, by taking a screenshot of the webpage in question, and then allowing the reviewer to add notes using a simple drag & drop mechanic. Within minutes you can feedback clearly what the issues are, and simply share the feedback link with the original designer (or download a feedback pdf). And as if that wasn’t genius enough, you can even feedback on the HTML source code, the CSS styling, the copy and (my favourite bit the SEO.
Minor bugs.. the copy section didn’t work too well for me, and the screenshot didn’t capture a youtube video (flash plugin missing from the screengrabbing browser) but there relatively small issues (unless you’re reviewing a flash website!)
Best bit… it’s free for the basic account which does most of what a small company might need, but i can see this being used heavily by bigger companies.
This is an interesting concept. For users of Google Reader, this browser plugin / extension replaces the existing design (css stylesheet) with one which uses helvetica, and strips out a lot of the advanced functionality which your average punter wouldn’t use. It makes the whole experience much simpler and pleasing on the eye.
There’s already a load of scripts out there which improve the functionality of pages (Greasemonkey etc) but this is the first i’ve seen which focuses on just altering the design. There’s probably a campaign in there somewhere… for a game or movie theming every site you visit for launch week with a special colour scheme.
Absolut have created a near-feature length film in association with Spike Jonze, a love story about 2 robots. It’s amazing quality production, and is viewable only at certain times each day (trying to recreate the cinema experience). This is big brand thinking, and it’s working: over 230,000 views of the film on the opening weekend.
Great piece on Mashable about how Twitter is being used by the film industry to predict box offices, with better accuracy than any other existing measure. Further proof of the power of the crowd.
they call it ‘brand butlers’ but it’s essentially about how brands can be useful to their target audience. A lot of the examples seem to be Iphone app-centric, but there are plenty of other on/offline examples. Interesting read and definitely an area where there is still huge scope for innovation and customer impact.
Eric Whitacre asked hundreds of youtubers to upload a video of themselves singing Lux Aurumque, spliced the audio together to make the participants into a ‘choir’, and then created this virtual video wall to show the whole thing back on Youtube. Genius, and beautiful.
Pressy theme is developed by Wordpress developer & designer Brandy Digital
Reading List Plugin Activated.
I’ve just added a reading list function to the DDD website which is pretty nifty… rather than manually creating a ‘blogroll’ in the sidebar, I wanted to show my full reading list on a page.
Creating that list was seeming like quite a pain, as it’s pretty extensive… then I hit on a clever WordPress plugin called Link Harvest which automatically generates a reading list based on the outbound links which appear in your posts. Bingo.
Saved me a load of time and ensures that the actual linked sources get the credit.
Mmmm… WordPress.