My brother, a friend and I started a bamboo t-shirt company recently as a hobby. The premise is simple – each t-shirt comes with “a month of guilt free (carbon-free!) living” in the form of carbon off-sets (Carbon Karma!) financed through the profits of the t-shirt. The site is still in its infancy. The store is live, but the brand and education website around the sea-saw of reduction and offset is in the works and launching soon.

“Sea-saw reduction/offset” – by this I mean if you work on both reducing your carbon footprint AND off-setting the stuff you can’t or don’t want to reduce by paying/building/planting something that removes carbon from the atomosphere, you’re actually accelerating environmental success. Cause let’s just be honest… no one is going to give up all carbon-generating aspects of life just ’cause the world is dying. So the point of Mad Monkey bamboo t-shirts is to make it easy to be cool and be green.

This is a for-profit company. I endorse the theory that environmental causes are accelerated if they have commercial viability. If there is a profit centre in it, investment money will flow. If investment money flows, innovation and consumer adoption will accelerate. You want to speed up the formula? Focus on innovative for-profit investment-backed start-ups.

mymadmonkey.com

Buy a t-shirt!

This was a talk given by Clay Shirky at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco (April 2008). I was in the audience, it was brilliant. Basically it describes how gin lubricated humanity’s transition from 7-day a week work-survival mode into the 5-day week industrial revolution. Now that people had free time on their hands… what will they do!?

Here are highlights from my notes, but the best parts I wasn’t writing or Twittering, so below my highlights is the link to the full transcript.

Where are we finding all this new “extra” time for playing with Social Media sites (Facebook, etc)? Well… “Human’s now have a cognitive surplus that TV has been masking for 50 years..”

We spend “200 billion hourrs of thought per year in the USA watching TV”. Or to put it another way “now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television…”

Web 2.0 is developing an “architecture of participation” – best, and most succinct Web 2.0 definition yet, this is quoted from Tim O’Reilly actually, so he gets the cred.

“The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there’s an interesting community over here…those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can’t predict the outputs yet because there’s so much complexity.”

“… someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, … enough of the collective goodwill of citizens, to create a resource you couldn’t have imagined existing even five years ago.”

On speaking to a TV producer about World of Warcraft, “I could see what she was thinking: “Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.” At least they’re doing something. Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? Yeah, I saw that one too….However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, from personal experience, it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter..”

Traditional media was about consumption, the new paradigm is about consumer consuming, producing and sharing; so if it is “targeted at you but does not include you, it is by definition broken.”

Transcript:
http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

[addendum] Video:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/04/web2expo-clay-shirky.html

Here is my third proposal that went in to speak at the Web 2.0 NY conference taking place in Sept-08.

What do you think? Which of the last three do you think will draw the most interest? (see the last two posts for the other proposals)

———————————————————————————————————

What do a 19^th century Italian economist who accidentally defined a pseudo-law of nature, a post World War II American statistician who is responsible for today’s dominance by Japanese car manufacturers, and the 80’s poster boy for glam rock Boy George, have to do with Web 2.0?

Better yet, how can these diverse individuals help your organization leap frog the competition, create consistent and constant innovation, and drive your marketing so hard and fast that your operational people hate you?

So many questions! Come, listen, and participate. I may not have your answers, but I do have tools for you to use to come up with your own. Learn lessons exemplified by popular Web 2.0 successes (and failures).

Who should come: you are a bricks and mortar organization selling products on shelves, you are selling services at the boardroom table, you are a non-profit raising awareness, you are a pure Web company trying to manage its meteoric success, you are a corporation trying to find new ways to be nimble. Everyone can take something away and apply it immediately to their organization.

This talk can be personalized to use the audience to provide examples of how Web 2.0 success principles can be applied to your organization. If you’re interested in having me personalize the talk for your organization, please email me ahead of time with your organization’s background and I’ll see if I can fit you into the presentation. Take advantage, this is free consulting!

Tags: Business Strategy Innovation Audience Participation

Technical expertise: Low

Here is my second proposal that went in to speak at the Web 2.0 NY conference taking place in Sept-08.

———————————————————————————————————

Total Mash-Up Web Design and Development

There is no point in starting from scratch anymore. This talk will show you how to create a web architecture for your organization that takes advantage of world-class applications. Mash and grind up together the best the web has to offer to create an enterprise class web presence so you can spend your budget on content and marketing instead of re-creating the wheel.

These websites:

• Are fully scalable; they will grow as your organization’s needs do.
• Are easy to administer – they are designed to be user friendly.
• Allow you total flexibility over design, layout, look and feel.
• Are Search engine friendly.
• Are primed for all sorts of marketing tactics.
• Can be constructed iteratively; get pieces up as you need them.
• Are cost-effective to build and design.
• And much much more!

Your project can range from a simple small business web page to major corporate rollouts supporting client log-in support, customer service ticketing systems, e-commerce, fund-raising, and many other applications.

Stretch your budget and impress your stakeholders – come and learn how to mash and grind at Web 2.0!

Here is my first proposal that went in to speak at the Web 2.0 NY conference taking place in Sept-08.

——————————————————————————————–

People are Googling your organization and keywords related to what you do. Are they finding you? Once they find you, they Google you to learn more about you from other sources. What are they finding there?

This talk is about building more (higher quality) traffic and ensuring that traffic converts through establishing the expert presence with a golden reputation.

Your reputation is priceless – don’t let it be left to chance. Experts are respected, experts who are validated and recommended by others, receive more business. It’s that simple. The perception of your online reputation is critical and you must learn how to take ownership of it.

Learn how to use on the Internet to dominate search engine rankings for your keywords and your organization’s name at the same time. This talk will expose the powerful concepts of Web 2.0 – where giving more means getting more – to market your site. You will learn how to position your organization as an expert in its industry/sector and dominate search engine visibility using wikis, blogs, forums, social bookmarking, and other Web 2.0 sites.

Who should attend: Corporate, Start-ups, Government, Non-Profit, and Small and Medium sizes Businesses; any organization looking to the internet for marketing and communications – that’s you!

Tags: SMO, PR 2.0, SEO, SEM, Authority Engineering

Technical Expertise required: Low

Blog writing will be a priority soon. It’s been 18-20 hour days for several weeks now, but the work load is tapering.

I did make it a priority last night for an hour between the web audit and e-marketing plan due last night and a database of members missing critical information (um.. usernames) for a huge site launching last night, anyways, I submitted 3 proposals to Web 2.0 conference in NY Sep-08.

Today I met with a new client, and while sorting schedule meeting times for the next few weeks, I found out one of them will be at Web 2.0 in SF later this month. I mentioned the talk proposals and they asked me what the topics would be. So I pitched them, and they wanted to hear the talks immediately! So that is a good sign.

So here’s what I’m going to do – put up the pitches over the next three days to get your input.

But before that, I’d like to get some advice on something else. You may notice that my diagrams are.. well.. sketchy at best. I have no artistic talent, but I tend to use whiteboards extensively to draw out sticks, boxes and circles for clients, and they love them. But I guess putting up online is a different game.

So to my point – what do YOU think of my diagrams? Unprofessional? Too ugly to make a point? Comments please!

So I recently returned from a vacation near Cancun, Mexico. First let me say, that a week off sucks. “Wow Bruce you’re finally starting to relax!” – that was quoted to me on the day before we left! Ack. You need a week to unwind and at least another week to start recovery. Anyway… just a little life lesson, do with it what you want.

Let me tell you , i was shocked, SHOCKED!, at the cost of food. On an enclosed resort with no competition, they can charge whatever they want. So I forked out $20/meal on average. Good food, fine, I can take it. But then I went into town. It was the same damn thing. Seriously, I paid more for a cab ride in Cancun, Mexico than I did in Manhattan. Nonetheless, how can food and service be the same cost? $75 for a 60 minute massage. $6 for a mojito. Come on..

Then I walked one block up from the beach. Massage, $33 for 60 minutes, mojito $4, meals $10.

2 blocks up, massage $10, mojito $2, and meals $4-5.

I didn’t venture further away…

But this is what the cost of pretty much anything in Mexico looks like:

Essentially the further you are from the beach, it’s an exponential decay in cost. Things get cheap fast the further you are from the beach. From food, drink and service to real estate.

So how does this relate to web usability?

Well let’s take the same graph, but this time, let’s replace the horizontal scale to the # of clicks it takes to pull your prospect into your funnel and close them on whatever it is you ar trying to get them to do (buy, sign-up, click an ad, etc).

So the further you engage your prospect from your home or landing page, the less likely you are to close that individual.

Lesson?

Get them intruiged fast.

Answer their questions faster.

Get them into your sales/action funnel ASAP.

The longer you let them drift on your site, the less likely you get the results you want.

Questions? Drop me a line.

Bruce

Ok, I’m pitching another website redesign project, and this is my favorite client so far – why? – They are paying us to pitch them a new design. This does not happen very often… believe me!

The client sent a list of sites in and around their field – ie. similar institutions, organizations, etc. with similar setups, mandates and/or subject matter. It’s interesting when you look at 10 sites in a row within a peer group. Most of the sites were heavy in content – lots and lots to of useful, practical, necessary information. They are partially marketing sites, partially to provide information and resources, and partially to inspire action.

Fundamentally all these sites looked different – style, look and feel, etc. But they all had one thing in common, they broke rule #1 of building site navigation… CONSISTENCY!

Rule #1: Be consistent

Your navigation should be consistent from page to page, section to section. If you are using a horizontal and left vertical menu system, for the love of all that is reasonable in this world, STICK WITH IT. Don’t change it half way to no left nav, or introduce a right one now and again, or change the buttons, order of the items, or what/how it appears there! Pick something, and EVERY PAGE MUST HAVE THE SAME STRUCTURE! You must build expectation for your users. Look left to see X, and look up to see Y. Don’t change it to A and B half way through the site. Stick to this rule and you are half way to great usability.

Rule #2: Maximum 3-click Policy

You should be able to get to any main detail on your website with a maximum 3-click policy. I try and do it in 2-clicks if the volume and diversity of data is low. What this means is that if i’m reading a news article on your site, i should be able to get to your Products and actually looking at a list of products within 2-clicks and a specific product in 1-click.

ex. 1st click I’m in the house, second click i’ve picked the room i want, third click i’m into the activity i was looking for. That activity may then have its own clicking structure (House –> Living Room –> TV (click away to channel surf!).

General guidelines for this:

Rule #2.1: 1st click
The 1st click gets you to a broad category, department, or target audience profile. On the 1st click i’m SKIMMING. That means I’m only looking for headers and links to find what i want.

Rule #2.2: 2nd click
On the 2nd click I’m starting to get specific. Here I am SCANNING content. Skimming is a glance, scanning is a systematic breakdown of the headers, subheaders and links. If i get into the bullets or 1st line of a paragraph of text you’re starting to lose me.

Rule #2.3: 3rd click
The third click I want details. I want to read, consume, absorb. I’m ready for the content! If i’m not reading by the 3rd click, you’re likely to lose me.

Rule #3: Navigation is overhead, keep it lean

I’m talking about bandwidth and screen space here. Navigation should account for 25-35% of screen space depending on the depth of content you have. In terms of bandwidth, keep it minimal, you want the menus to load FAST and FIRST. Avoid images if you can, use text, and keep banners and other decorative functions to a minimum –> unless these serve a purpose other than navigation.

Rule #4: Simple

There really aren’t that many navigation options. You don’t see cars developed with 10 different ways of arranging the dashboard. There are differences between each car and maker, but in general you can expect certain elements in certain locations to tell you specific things that you need to know to drive the car. You really don’t want to spend time trying to find your speedometer WHILE driving. Treat your website the same way. What are the archetypes of web nagivation?

• Horizontal top navigation, usually just below the banner. Elements may contain drop down lists, or pull up a second level horizontal nav. Do not go more than 2 horizontals navs. If you need a third layer, use drop downs instead. I don’t like drop downs, because you can’t see them. Once a user clicks on a menu item or a secondary menu item, you want to keep the options for that section displayed, which is why i prefer the secondary horizontal menu vs the pop-up list.
• Left navigation. This creates the uber popular, how websites started, L shape. Upside-down L shape that is. It’s been done and done and done, yes!.. for a good reason. It works. If you have a heavy content site, stick with simple.
• Right navigation. Blogs have made a right navigation system popular. Because today’s (and for last 3-4 years) the screen resolutions have been tending to wide formats, the side scroll is no longer a pressing issue. Depends on who your target audience is however. I recommend right navs only for a 3rd or 4th tier of information. Content page specific navigation where your content topic requires it to be broken down into multiple pages for easier consumption.
• Bottom navigation. I highly recommend a text-only bottom navigation which incorporates either ALL your navigation options, the most popular, or the top level navs. People tend to put Privacy Policies and other legal jargon there. But I recommend even having those sections appear in your main-navigation schema somewhere for completeness.

That’s it! Why re-invent the wheel? Horizontal on top + left vertical = main navigation. Right nav = in-content navigation. Bottom nav = repeat all as text only, most popular, and/or “extra info”.
Rule #5: You can play in your content area

If you want a place to play with high bandwidth, unique design, interesting layout, etc., then use your content area. This is what it’s there for. Don’t mess around with your navigation to make your page different – remember rule #1.

Ok, if you’ve read this far in this blog post, you are keen and want to develop a great navigation schema for your website. Good for you! Go out there, kick ass take names and let me know how it goes.

Bruce

ps. Here is a Bonus Tip: Use a Cookie Crumb Trail to let users know where they are when tunneling through your site.

pss. If you need help, drop me a line. Why DIY when you can get a pro to come in and get it done right!

A little case study for you today:

http://theclimateisrightfortrains.com/

I came across this URL on print recruitment campaign targeting university/college students in a magazine a client publishes.

First of all, the site is awesome. I love the design. Unique use of space.

The site takes great advantage of the widescreens. On my 1920×1200 22″ screen the site looks awesome. On my 1280×768 12″ laptop screen it looks great. It reduces well to < 1024 as well. Kudos and high marks for use of screen real estate at the same time as maximizing horizontal space on the new wide format.

Clicking on any one of the menu items brings up some beautiful photography and a little two line pitch. Nicely done. Great copy, pulls well, I was immediately intrigued.

So far so good!

But… here is where the site totally fails.

You click on the link to learn more and it takes you to a page of scrolling text.

First of all I’m not a big fan of internal scroll bars, but in an all Flash site that is well dimensioned, it can work. Second, the page is 2-3 pages of scrolling text. What the hell? I went from beautiful images of trains and a gorgeously designed website, to text. Honestly, you can write the most profound copy that would change my life forever, but no one will read it. You just set yourself up for failure.

But I read it. On my 4th visit to the site and just to write this blog entry, I read it. And you know what? The copy is fregging interesting. It’s snippets of articles and quotes that lead you to original sources flogging trains as green commuters. Great stuff – well it could be great stuff, except it’s badly used.

Honestly, how hard would it have been to put in some <Prev | Next> and made those pages into a slide show with a few lines of text, some great supporting photographs and actually PITCHED the information.

And here’s the clincher. Ok, here’s your scenarios “so I’m a student and I couldn’t care less about trains except to get my home on breaks. I’m an engineering student and i never thought of getting into trains, cause it was a dead technology.. I’m more interested in aerospace and Virgin’s new airline… or hybrid/hydrogen car technology, etc.”

Ok, so now you’ve convinced me trains can be cool and appeal to my youthful idealism…

Where’s your close Bombardier? Where is the “come work for us, cause we’re a great company, we’re green, we’ve been green for a long time cause we build trains. See – trains do rock, and green has been the colour of our blood, our ethos, and we want YOU to drive the next generation of mass transportation vehicles to make this world a better place…”.

You’ve hooked with this website, you’ve then just as completely fallen over. You have to close the loop.

I can totally ignore the buried copy, but seriously where is your close?? “I AM A STUDENT AND I WANT MORE INFORMATION ON WORKING FOR BOMBARDIER’S MASS TRANSIT DIVISION! Oh well. Time to check out the latest YouTube video and see if anyone posted anything new on my Super Wall…”

Lessons for everyone else:

• Great design – use it for inspiration
• Great use of horizontal screen real estate
• Nice use of photography and copy
• Internal scroll bars are ok in this scenario – but are too narrow
• Mouse scroll wheels don’t work on internal scroll bar, this is doable, do it!
• NO CLOSE! You have to close the loop. This is like an e-commerce site that has convinced you to buy but no BUY NOW button. Don’t make the same mistake, think through the whole loop – intrigue, entice, inspire, and CLOSE.

The climate might be right for trains, but it’s not for recruiting using this website. Too bad, it’s a beautiful design…

Ok, most advertising campaigns today are brutally short sighted and missing the big opportunity that technology is enabling. And those that are taking advantage of the tech, are probably not maximizing, or anywhere nearing the potential they can realize…

So what are the approaches that should be used if the spot ad is dead? Here is a list to start with:

Interaction, interdependence, grass roots initiatives, multi-channel interactive media, conversation catalysts, customer driven feedback cycles empowering iterative product development, automated tracking and recursive real-time changes and so on.

Ok, so what does all that stuff mean?

Interaction is the key to engaging customers. It was difficult to do 10 years ago, but we now have the technological capability, via Internet and wireless (and other), to automate interaction with our customers. Better still, it allows us to build a relationship not just between an advertiser and the target audience, but, and this is the most important step – between the target audience members themselves.

Look at the success of MySpace. Its success rocketed when it became a venue for like-minded music lovers to find each other and support their favourite indie bands. You had overnight indie band sensations. There are countless stories of 4 guys in a rock band that had been doing evening and weekend gigs while choking down 40 hour a week day jobs for the last 5 years. They had fans, but they were scattered. 20 fans here, 50 there, another few over that other town. Through MySpace they were able to consolidate their fan base, associate themselves with a genre, and the fans spread the word about their music. A month later, all the day jobs were quit and instead of selling 3000 albums a year, they were selling 20,000 self pressed. All of a sudden they could make a decent living off their own music – live their passion.

So what does music bands and MySpace have in common with big brand advertisers?

It is a simple lesson in consolidating your passionate fans in a given market segment and empowering them to tell your story FOR YOU.

This is the TRUE interaction – it’s not about brand-X shoving another message down customer-Y’s throat, it’s about encouraging customer-Y to meet other customer-Y’s so they group together, and in numbers they have a voice, and that voice can be empowered to expand the brand. The collective voice of the brand loyalists turns them into activists – and they voices should be listened to closely.

ASIDE — I love how big brands spend so much money on market research. Wrigley’s did it recently trying to figure out what kids want in a pack of gum. The outcome? That kids tie their identity with the things they have in their pockets, the clothes they wear, the music they listen to, and the activities they engage in. Conclusion – let’s make a cool package for the gum so it looks good when you pull it out of your pocket and put it down next to your cell phone and iPod. Wow, staggering! They should have bought me a cup of coffee and I would have imparted the same wisdom while proving my point with a hundred case studies of other companies that did exactly what they did, but for shoes, shorts, shirts and so on. I’ll be using Wrigly as a case study for my clients when they ask me what kids want. Save them a cool mil or two. Anyway…

Ok, so what does that have to do with the original topic? Well market research is skewed. You’re picking a random assortment of your target audience to get a sense of what your brand should do, say, be. Honestly, how do you get anything but average results from the approach? I can prove it to you statistically if you want. It’s a simple relationships between the larger your human sample size the further your return will approach an average value. What do I mean by average value? I mean you’re going to design a product that is average and entirely forgettable.

Instead look to the LOYALISTS! They are your fan base, your market, they are the early adopters and those who will vocally judge your product. They are the people who others seek advice from when looking at buying your product, cause they know the category so well. They are the ones who will trumpet your cause for you. They will do an infinitely better job at selling it than you can ever do. You just can’t have the same relationship with their peers as they do (friends & family!).

INTERACTION people. It’s not just about you and your audience, but creating a circle of loyalty around your brand, and have them trumpet your greatness!

Next post – a bit more on interdependence…