We Are Organized Chaos

What’s New in Interactive – 7/27/09

• Do You Bing? Yahooers May Soon Search With Microsoft
• Adidas: Live Online Interactive Competition
• Windows 7: A great gaming platform?
• Burger King’s New BK.com Portal
• Design ideas show Firefox 4.0 with a Chrome look

Augmented Reality’s Biggest Barrier To Adoption On The Web

Augmented Reality is pretty hot right now and is looking like another evolutionary step not only for the web but for mobile, retail, print and other marketing & advertising channels.  But for the web specifically, Augmented Reality is going to have to overcome a pretty large barrier to adoption in order for it to become mainstream.

Can you guess what that might be?

If you said, “Webcam” that’s only partially right and not the main barrier to adoption. Here’s why:

• 40% of Facebook videos are uploaded via Webcams
• The market for webcams was 1.8 billion in 2008 and is anticipated to reach 3.2 billion by 2015

Most webcams cost less than 50 bucks and are also coming standard in laptops so without doing too much math you can see that webcam usage is skyrocketing.

The main barrier to adoption for Augmented Reality on the web is something that’s proven time and time again to be the death knell of many web based software programs – the Internet Browser Plug-In.  Software reliant on a consumer installing a plug-in when visiting a site to view it won’t increase it’s adoption rate. Anybody remember Shockwave? I can tell you from first-hand experience over the last 10 years that it’s very rare if we ever present any web based technology to our clients that requires a plug-in as it’s become a form of taboo in interactive marketing circles.

Right now there are 3 competing technologies in the Augmented Reality space specific to the Internet Browser. (Note: I know there are more but the 3 main ones I’m going to list for now.)

Those 3 are:

1. Total Immersion.  Requires a proprietary plug-in.

2. Metaio. Requires a proprietary plug-in.

3. FLARToolkit.  Requires Flash 10 plug-in which is currently installed on 86.7% of browsers.

So right from that list you can gather that options 1 & 2 require the consumer to download an additional browser plug-in from an unknown source while FLARToolkit only requires the Flash plug-in that’s pretty much standard on everybody’s browser.   It’s no secret that consumers do not like installing plug-in’s to view content on a website, so this issue might be insurmountable for both Total Immersion and Metaio’s proprietary plug-ins to overcome.  Unless of course they have the type of cash that Microsoft has to pay developers and sites alike to try and force feed adoption of a technology like Silverlight.

Finally, there is one final barrier to adoption if you’re using Augmented Reality on the Web.  Making sure your tech is actually working.  This is from the Coraline site and somehow my top of the line Dual Core, 2.16ghz, 2gig RAM Alienware PC is not compatible.  No bueno…

What’s New In Interactive – 7/6/09

• Air Force Targets Millennials In New Effort
• Crispin Porter + Bogusky launches Beta
• Lands End Swimwear Online Store Does Something Different
• Why the Adwords Top Spot Should be Your Bottom Priority
• What You Would Do To Fix Yahoo
• Email Campaigns That Failed

What’s New In Interactive – 6/22/09

• Dunkin’ Run Automates Your Coffee Breaks on the Web and iPhone
• Can Eric Hippeau Turn HuffPo Into Big Business?
• IKEA’s bedroom secrets
• 9 Reasons Your Website Can Have a High Bounce Rate
• Digital Drives Growth and Business Models in E&M Industry
• The 5 newest interactive trends: How will they affect you?
• Father’s Day ’09 Logos From Google, Yahoo & Search Industry

What’s New In Interactive – 5/19/09

What’s New In Interactive is a round-up of interesting links we pass around to each other.

Here’s the latest list of links that caught our eye…

• Twitter Proves Its Worth as a Killer App for Local Businesses
• Best Buy launches a site so that their consumers can share, discuss, and vote on ideas to improve Best Buy.
• Facebook Turns Down $8 billion Valuation Term Sheet, Claims 2009 Revenues Will Be $550 million
• Twitter not pursuing advertising as a business model because it’s boring.
• New Smartphone Ads
• Is Burger King’s Advertising Really Working?
• Defining Social Media ‘Expertise’
• Hulu Not Happy With Nielsen Numbers
• Facebook On The Verge of Being A Top 10 Video Site
• Facebook Users Have Deeper Pockets Than Their MySpace Counterparts

Beta Spotlights – Ruba

For this week’s post, I wanted to share a site with those of you who love to travel around the world. It’s called “Ruba“, and if you’ve never heard about it; it can be a traveler’s best friend. I will definitely use this for my next trip out of the country. For a phase 2, I hope they integrate some type of video interface to allow users to upload travel videos. Most of all, it would be cool if they make this into a mobile site as well, so users can update their travels right there and then.

“Discover Your Next Perfect Trip – Ruba.com is a community who is passionate about finding and sharing the greatest travel destinations worldwide.”

Key Features:

- Make your own Travel Guide

• Name your own travel guide
• Choose your activity during that visit
• Upload or add existing photos to your travel guide
• Add multiple destinations to your travel guide
• Write a review about where you were
• Share your guide via Twitter, Facebook, HTML embed, and/or URL

- Facebook Connect to ask your friends the best places to visit
- Create a User Profile
- Check out other users’ travel guides for references
- Review a city and/or specific activity within that country
- Google Map mashup of places you or other users have visited

Enjoy…

Joe Jaffe And Steve Rubel Are Wrong – The Website Is Not Dead…Just Evolving

I have the deepest respect and admiration for 2 people in our industry – Joe Jaffe and Steve Rubel.  Both have helped advance interactive as a medium and are forward thinking, intelligent voices in the overall community.  However, I also have a problem with both of their recent assumptions that the website is in fact dead.  Both Joe and Steve each blogged about this issue recently so I felt compelled to offer a retort – or as Joe would say “a counterpoint to advance the conversation.”

Let’s start with Joe.  He recently had a blog entry titled “The Death Of The Website” on Jaffe Juice (a favorite blog of mine) where he made the case that the website is in fact dead and that ‘hubs’ are the new website.  The website is not dead – it is evolving.  What are dead are the Flash based brand sites that are buried in excessive Flash animation, have “Skip Intro” buttons on their home page and don’t allow easy to find content that can be embedded elsewhere (via RSS or other means.)  Basically anything most SODA members create.  These are dying off as community becomes a bigger part of any website initiative.  So in this sense I agree with Joe’s notion that:

“Hubs need to be open and fluid. They need to be infused with “sociability” — teeming with life, alive with conversation. They are decidedly non-linear and diverse by nature, and they need to be loaded with content, information and features.

You shouldn’t measure success or activity within these hubs using only traditional or familiar measures or metrics — visits (unique or otherwise), clicks or time spent. Supplement these metrics with new social metrics like level of conversation, sentiment, consumer-to-consumer distribution and shareability.”

However, I still have problems overall with his assumption that the website is dead.  Here’s why:

1. A hub is still a website

2. Quite a few brand websites have been doing ‘sociability’ for awhile – they’re called community initiatives and are based on platforms companies like Lithium and Jive provide – blogs, forums, etc. These have been around for awhile so is it a matter of the brand not successfully engaging the consumer in conversation or is the consumer really not that interested in having a conversation with the brand? In most cases, I would argue it’s the latter.  What is changing is the nature of open vs. gated communities and how they function on the future web.  I’ll leave this one for @jack2point0 to comment on…

3. This notion social media marketers keep selling on using level of conversation as a performance metric.  Maybe it’s just me but this falls under the ‘all talk no action’ umbrella.  Is it great if people are talking about your brand? In most cases yes, in Dominos case no.

4. The most obvious.  People want information and they want to be able to find it fast.  If I’m looking for the latest info on say McDonald’s – I’m not going to Twitter to find it, I’m not going to Facebook to find it and I’m not going to even Wikipedia to find it.  I’m going to McDonald’s to find it.  McDonald’s Website.  A place specifically setup to communicate everything McDonald’s related to me.  Should this website / hub have conversation flowing throughout? It could but the consumer is there for a specific reason so the website needs to exist to provide clear and precise info on their brand for the consumer from a trusted resource. I’m not arguing that this content also needs to be accessible elsewhere for the consumer, but I completely disagree that the website is dead and has no value anymore.  Interactive Marketing has evolved (especially over the last 9 months) and websites have been evolving with it.

As for Steve, his recent blog entry, “The End of the Destination Site Era” on Micropersuasion (one of my favorite blogs) had the following information:

“In March the average American visited a mere 111 domains and 2,500 web pages, according to Nielsen Online. What’s worse, our attention across these pages is highly fragmented. The average time spent per page is a mere 56 seconds. Portals and search engines dominate, capturing approximately 12 of the 75 hours spent online in March. However, people-powered sites like Wikipedia, Facebook and YouTube are not far behind, snagging nearly 4.5 hours of our monthly attention.

In the post-destination web era the secret to breaking through won’t be advertising. A new study from ARAnet in conjunction with Opinion Research Corporation confirms what PR execs have known for years – we are far more likely to take action when reading online articles that include brand information (51%) compared to search engine advertising (39%) or banner ads (25%).”

While I definitely agree that display advertising is on the way out (I’ve never been a fan of banner ads), Steve is eluding to the fact that people aren’t going to a destination site for information.  And again I disagree.  As the study mentions above, when people are taking action after reading online articles with brand information, are they going to visit a blog to find out further information?  No.  Facebook? Probably not.  Either they’re going to search for the brand via Google or they’re going to go directly to the brand’s website.  So in this instance, I also do not think the “Destination Website Era” is dead, it too has evolved.  By default, brands should have every base covered and that includes having their brand website with information that is accessible elsewhere (i.e. RSS), a Facebook Public Profile Page, and so on.

There’s no denying the fact that the web is evolving at a lightning quick pace.  However, the notion that a destination site or website is dead, is not correct.  Content definitely needs to be accessible in different forms for the consumer to ingest whenever, however, and wherever they want.  But, this is not a future one-way street.  That same content needs to be accessible where a consumer will look for it first – on a brand’s own website.

VW’s iPhone Site

With the iPhone being around for close to two years now, one might have assumed that most car companies would have a website designed for it. Typically this is not the case. The always-hip VW is one exception. They built a clean and simple site formatted to look good and work well on the iPhone. It offers some basic information about their models, a dealer locator and an “Assistance” page. Best of all – you only need to type in vw.com in the address bar. No unnecessarily complicated Urls.

The site is a very “safe” corporate approach. No risks taken. No real use of the opportunities offered by a mobile platform. The site could have been so much more if only approached from beyond the lowest common denominator of the corporate safety zone.

If the site had been developed more with consumers in mind, we might have seen:

• Actual inventory lists from local dealers
• User ratings of local dealerships
• Text search
• Useful information for current owners such as user guides or vehicle specific information

Even from a company perspective more could have been done:

• Current APRs or incentives right on the home page
• Dealer incentives or specials per dealer located
• Build or price with options functionality
• List of pre-owned inventory

Some of these items would clearly require a lot more development effort and may therefore have been too expensive given the general state of the auto industry, and the relative small size of the smart phone ownership. However, some are really low hanging fruit such as current incentives, or detailed vehicle information. Most of it exists online already. VW even has a whole section devoted to videos showing specific features of their cars. The content is there. Just use it.

Even though VW could have done more, I applaud them for at least offering something for smart phone users. Where are all the brands that call themselves technologically advanced and cutting edge? Where is Audi? BMW? Mercedes-Benz? Cadillac?

Granted, some of those companies made specific iPhone games. But how does that really benefit the consumer?

Shopflick: The New Video Interactive Way To Do Your Shopping!

Why is this the first time I’ve heard about Shopflick?! I love to shop, but always do it in-person because I enjoy the experience: seeing, touching, trying on, and viewing in the mirror at all angles. I don’t enjoy shopping online, because more often than not, I find myself returning clothes that looked great in the thumbnail picture shown on the site, but awful on me. Shopflick is the first retail site I’ve experienced that really does a great job at meshing the in-person experience with the online experience.

You can go to Shopflick to browse through very funky, cool clothes. (Yes, even men!) It is not unlike any other retail e-commerce site at first: select a section, click on a thumbnail image of one that looks good to you, and view a detail page about that item. Normally, however, the detail pages on other retail e-commerce sites contain just a single photo with a short text description. Sometimes you can view additional close-up photos and/or change the color of the item. Shopflick takes it to the next level!

When you click on a thumbnail in Shopflick, you are taken to a detail page that will contain the photo, and a “Meet the Designer” video. This video isn’t super high quality, but I think that is part of its beauty. It is a very personal video in which the designer(s) speak to you about their product line and what they try to achieve with their clothing line. It really gives you a feeling that you know the designer personally, and by understanding the craft behind the creation, there is sure to be a higher sell-thru. (Would be interested to find some stats on this!) These videos are short and sweet, encouraging you to watch all the way through. Also, on some of the products, if there is other footage on the specific product you’ve selected, it is included so you can view the item on an actual person from all angles. I am really impressed by Shopflick’s video integration because it is very compelling to a shopper like me, and doesn’t look expensive to make. (i.e. possibly shot on a handheld digital camera!)

The site also encourages you to join the community, where you can save favorite items, post comments/feedback, and even become a seller within the community. The list of designers featured on Shopflick is respectable and quite long! There is also a “Videos” section that contains series of webisodes such as Hall of Style and Kitchen Couture.

I first read about Shopflick on Mashable, and now I can’t get myself off this page. I’m sure to buy a thing or two before the day ends. Because I liked their video integration so much, I thought I would explore what Shopflick is doing in terms of social media. Sure enough, they are up to date, with a Facebook page, a YouTube page, and even a MySpace page! The YouTube page features the “Fashion Designer Series” and other various fashion videos. Nothing too fancy here, but in my eyes, very innovative in the retail web space.

Terry Richardson Puts Cool Into Lacoste

Where did the alligator go? Many moons ago the rage amongst my peers was all about Lacoste. The 80’s, the summer of preteen love, the summer I wiped out on my friends moped in front of my crush wearing a new Lacoste sweater. Ahhh… Jackass comes to mind. Never did get the girl.

In the 80’s, Lacoste was at the top of the food chain amongst the mall rats – but the brand’s inability to market to changing trends led it down a path that left it stuck in the Preppy Handbook.

Well, there is hope. It is the year of change, after all. The new “Lacoste Red” website uses a combination of interactive video and sick beats to bring it back into the realm of cool. Shot by Terry Richardson on what appears to be the Red One; the site starts you off with full screen slow motion footage that reveals the essence of free spirit. Energetic, effortless motion brought to life with vibes that make you want to move while speaking to its core message of modern style. I’m not going to dust off my glow sticks, but my feet are tapping.

Besides the tight transitions, footage and music, the site adorns a variety of community sharing features: an iPhone app, and the obligatory wallpaper and screensaver downloads. The site also features a mini-game based on the ever so popular Guitar Hero. Choose the style you want to play with and off you go on a keyboard-tapping extravaganza. Not an original concept, in fact a little tired, but speaks to the demo nonetheless.

With lots to interact with, ultimately it is the transitions, video and music that elevate the brand into the now. Muffy, I might replace that sweater after all.