Here’s a place to see some cool design work from the other side of the world: http://www.malaysiadesignarchive.org/
Monthly Archive for March, 2010
Last year, the Federal Trade Commission came down mightly on bloggers (large and small, established and fledgling), saying that they needed to disclose any freebie they received when it pertained to a blog post. It was particularly vocal when it came down to sponsored posts, citing previous incidents of several bloggers who receive pay for play but don’t disclose it to their audience.
Which brings me to a recent communications event hosted by Ann Taylor LOFT for bloggers, where the stores’ new Spring Collection was unveiled to those who wanted to go and see the “first look” of the season. The idea was for the bloggers to preview the new Spring collection, post about it and then happily pocket a gift card from the store.
Sounds like a great plan, right?
Not so fast. The fine print on the blogger invite said that the bloggers needed to post their reviews within 24 hours in order to be eligible and that Ann Taylor LOFT would decide on how much the gift card value would be — from $10 to $500.
Hold on a minute –doesn’t that sound a wee bit like greasing the palm? That’s exactly what the FTC is trying to prevent from happening and by the looks of it, it seems like payment after the post, and in an amount determined by the company too.
As blogger traction continues to increase, it’s no surprise that some high traffic blogs are getting a lot of perks from companies (including monetary compensation and tons of freebies) and the FTC is trying to make sense of it all stop the “hoarder” mentality that some bloggers tend to have. The FTC may well be unconcerned with a gift card (some bloggers have received computers and bigger luxuries, like cars), but it certainly gives branding and communication agencies food for thought as to how to word their interaction with the bloggerazi.
If you thought Twitter and Facebook were the wave of the future for social media, you may want tweak your thinking slightly. According to a recent article in Womens Wear Daily, several fashion brands are exploring strategies that connect with the consumer, including harnessing applications such as FourSquare, Chatroulette and Foodspotting, which is a visual and local food guide and game that was introduced at the recent SXSW in Austin.
In other words, the playing field has opened up and the future belongs to companies who embrace multiple strategies, especially from the creative point-of-view. Certainly, this is easy to see: multiple strategies on various platforms add up to huge visibility, especially with cumulative traffic on blogs, Twitter, Facebook and now beyond.
Case in point: Have you heard of FourSquare? Its a year-old Web and mobile community and game that allows you to explore places. You can check into hotels, bars, brunch places and stores and earn points each time you do.
Who would embrace FourSquare? Well, you the consumer, for one, if you want to be a brand advocate. There’s nothing better than announcing to the world that you’re frequenting a retail store (and if you frequent it enough, then you win the title of mayor). The point? To win a badge or free products. It provides a way for retailers to identify their most loyal customers and to see who the mayor of your store is. This is who you would ultimately reward in some way, shape or form.
Marc Jacobs was the first fashion designer to embrace FourSquare, and several other designers are following suit. While FourSquare is just one example in this buzz of people embracing social media, it shows you how creativity and the element of fun plays a large role in how you expose your brand and garner followers.
What does this mean for the social media landscape in the future? It means that the more of a multi-channels you have, the better for your brand.
Time to move to a larger data center.
Make my Logo brand bigger.
We are often confronted to a dilemma when developing identity for a new brand. With creating a new visual language, where does consistency become copy and paste and how do you expand brand recognition by not using the same logo mark anywhere? Over the time and experience I became I big supporter of brand identities that develop a language and visual system, rather than really focus on implementing and applying a same design on as many formats and platforms as possible.
Today it remain one of the most difficult sells to corporation because the brand is an important asset that can be measured in billions of dollars (Coca Cola, the brand and not of the brick and mortar assets, was valued in 2002 at 69.6 billion dollars). Many executives have a hard time buying into a mutable identity that express a brand through variations of visuals as opposed to the strategy or repetition and memorization.
One of the reasons I think variable visual for brands are lot more interesting is because when well crafted they extend to the infinite the reach of the brand in a 360 degree radius. We live in a era of flexibilty and malleability where brands are manipulated and shaped by the end user (think AOL’s new brand by Wolf Ollins – although I criticized the quick rendition as a shortcut to express an idea earlier on this blog, I believe the strategic approach is correct)
Today brands are a lot more pervasive and need to conquer a lot more of our selective minds and taste.
An evolutive brand is also showing more depth and more meaning than one that just satisfy itself by just replicating an icon all over.
Here at two great examples of this case of mutative brands where the logo isn’t really the logo: Saks Fifth Avenue by Michael Bierut at Pentagram and The City of Melbourne Identity by Landor Australia.
And the city of Melbourne below
These examples shows that a brand is a lot more than a logo and how it is applied to stationery or a website. Its in fact a company largest assets because it convey its vision and philosophy as well as its way of communicating through a visual language.
When you’re feuding with a man who has 2,458,559 Twitter followers, this is how you settle it. You apologize.
In case you haven’t seen it, check out Logorama, the 16 minutes brand-based short from French Agency that won in the short -animated category at the latest Oscar.
Metal people are surrounding Madison Square Park in the city’s ever growing commitment to beautify New York and to install outdoor art. There are approximately 30 of them I was told, but I’ve only found four at this point. Here is one of them: 
I recently read an article that talked about how the top 500 fastest growing companies are using social media, with statistics taken from a Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth study.
The study shows how much social media has infiltrated the world of business. Take the case of Inc. Magazine’s 500 fastest growing companies (versus Fortune’s 500 list). Social Networking (e.g. Twitter) seems to be very popular among the Inc. 500 crowd, with 75% of the respondents saying they were “very familiar with it” in 2009 as opposed to 57% in 2008.
Jeff Bullas’ blog on the topic compares how the Inc. 500 crowd fares in terms of embracing social media compared to the Fortune 500 crowd:
• In 2007, the study found that only 8% of the Fortune 500 companies were blogging compared to Inc. 500’s 19%;
• In 2008, the difference was even greater, with 16% of the Fortune 500 companies blogging compared to 39% of Inc. 500;
• In 2009, 45% of the Inc. 500 companies were blogging.
For companies who want substantial growth without incurring too much infrastructure or overhead costs, it makes perfect sense to embrace social media. Microblogging through Twitter, and getting the news out through Facebook or via LinkedIn is so very vogue and real time. In this age of instant gratification, people want information now and they don’t want to pay for it.
The Caveat
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of social media and the digital “universal think tank” mentality. There’s no better way to share information and exchange ideas short of hosting a conference call or do video conferencing (without the costs). But not all the information that is shared can be reliable.
In other words, you cannot believe everything you read on Twitter and Facebook because they are not fact checked. They are opinions and should merely be treated as such. If you want facts, where do you typically turn to? Traditional media. I’m not saying The New York Times and Forbes are flawless – in fact, I know they’re not, and of course they have political bent. But as far as factual accuracy batting averages go, they are further ahead than social media (and blogs too for that matter).
Of course, in the not too distant future, things may change, and fact checking and verification may well become vogue for Twitter fanatics. But for now, a credible placement can be as valuable (if not more so) than a tweet or an update.
This is why companies who are growing need both: traditional and social media. After all, the best way to show your competition (and the public) that you can be both credible and get written about all over the place is to show them results from both forms of approach.