The DO's and DONT's of URL promotions

This post is from iMediaConnection

By Aaron Goldman

Choosing a good domain name is only half a marketer's battle. Learn how your URL display can impact your brand for better, or worse.

I was excited to read Jeremiah Johnston's recent column on integrating domains into overall marketing strategy. URL selection and deployment is an oft-overlooked weapon in the marketing arsenal.
In his piece, Johnston focused on securing generic URLs to bolster a brand's position in the marketplace -- e.g., Russian Standard Vodka buying Vodka.com for a cool $3 million.

Supplementing YourBrandName.com with YourProduct.com, YourCategory.com or YourSlogan.com is definitely a sound approach.

However, choosing a good URL to support your brand is only the beginning. Effectively integrating a domain into your program requires careful promotional guidelines.
Too often I see marketers shell out top dollar for a premium domain name -- or worse, cop out with an obscure URL that no one will remember -- and bury it in all lower case at the bottom of an ad. It's quite rare to find a marketer giving his URL the attention it deserves by presenting it in an impactful way.

To illustrate my point, here are screen captures of the last frame of two different TV commercials. See the difference?

For more examples and the full article, visit: http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/19544.asp

List of online communities, networks, etc for all ages

This is a great list of site that people at different life stages and ages are using online. Thanks to Web Strategy by Jeremiah for this great resource.

List of Communities, Virtual Worlds, and Social Networks for Youth, Boomers, Retired, and Beyond 

Posted: 11 Jun 2008 02:28 PM CDT

I’m doing research around how different ages using social networks, communities, and virtual worlds by age, and will compile this list as it grows. I’m looking for established community sites that are mature enough to work with brands. There is already so much coverage on mainstream social networks like Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn that we forget about the other smaller niche networks.

First, understand technographics (how ages use social media) by accessing Forrester’s profile tool <http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/profile_tool.html> , available for free. If you know the demographics for any of these, please leave a comment.

Youth
I’m primarily seeking communties that are under 18, beyond just MySpace.
Club Penguin, Disney <http://www.clubpenguin.com/>
8-12, Virtual World Stardolls <http://www.stardoll.com/en/>
Young Girls 10-17, Social Network, virtual dolls Barbie Girls <http://barbiegirls.com/homeMtl.html>
6-16, Virtual World WeeWorld <http://www.weeworld.com/>
Youth, Avatar based Social network Zookazoo <http://www.zookazoo.com/>
6-10 year olds, Virtual World Club Penguin, Disney <http://www.clubpenguin.com>>
8-12, Social network, virtual dolls Gaia <http://www.gaiaonline.com/>
Teens, Virtual World Habbo Hotel <http://www.habbo.com/>
European Youth, Virtual World Cyworld <http://www.cyworld.com>
South Korean youth, (and now global), virtual/social network Neopets <http://www.neopets.com/>
Youth, Virtual Pets Pixie Hollow, Disney <http://disney.go.com/fairies/pixiehollow/comingSoon.html>
Young Girls, Virtual Pet Teen Second Life <http://teen.secondlife.com/>
Teen, Virtual World Webkinz <http://www.webkinz.com/>
Youth, Virtual World Piczo <http://www.piczo.com/>
Teens, Social Network Shining Stars, by Russ <http://www.shiningstars.com/>
Youth, ‘name a star’
Puzzle Pirates <http://www.puzzlepirates.com/>
Youth, Gaming, Virtual World

50+
Now of course, boomers and retired are also going to be on lifestyle social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, but I’m seeking examples that are focused in on reaching these folks.

Eons <http://www.eons.com/>
50+, Social Network BOOMj <http://www.boomj.com/>
50+, Social Network Tee Bee Dee <http://www.tbd.com/>
Boomers, Social Network There’s a larger list of Boomer sites <http://emersondirect.wordpress.com/2007/11/13/the-top-30-social-network-sites-for-baby-boomers/> , many I’ve not heard from.

Departed
Someone suggests this in the comments in Friendfeed, makes sense.
Legacy <http://www.legacy.com/NS/>
Respectance <http://respectance.com/>
Tributes.com
SweetMemoriesSite <http://www.SweetMemoriesSite.com>
ChristianMemorials <http://www.christianmemorials.com/>
PreciousMemoriesAndMore <http://www.preciousmemoriesandmore.com/> For what it’s worth, I hope this blog lives on past my time here.

Related Resources
Danah Boyd has a great PDF on Youth and Social Networks (PDF) <http://www.danah.org/papers/WhyYouthHeart.pdf>
Many reports (260) on Forrester site tagged youth <http://www.forrester.com/rb/search/results.jsp?N=0&Ntk=MainSearch&Ntx=mode+MatchAllPartial&Ntt=youth>

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog

Seminar at Cannes Lions 2008 "The Social Metropolis"

Newsletter from GoViral:

The Social Metropolis
The main theme of The Social Metropolis is Digital Brand Activation. In the following you will be introduced to how you do Digital Brand Activation and why you should be using a Digital Brand Activation approach.

What does Social Metropolis mean?
Media is democratizing – participation is taking over from more passive media forms. This leads to a greatly diversified and fragmented media place – one where it is harder to engage people.
Ultimately, the attention economy of the Social Metropolis is a zero-sum game. The attention somebody gets, someone else is denied.

One of the key challenges is to stay on top of the developments in the Social Metropolis. Just like a real city, the infrastructure develops all the time. Technology is the driver of all this, but it is also what will help us re-activate our brands in the social media world. Technology can help us reach the right people and measure our activities properly. Just think how well we have defined the traditional formats of mass marketing, and how much time we are spending, planning the right channels to get the desired outcome. The same consistent structure, quality, and insights are needed to achieve and maintain a high quality on your social media campaign plan, only the target can now be 1000 destinations instead of 10. The answer to this challenge is: The right mix of good content, the right technology and good media planning.

Social Citizen Activation
The framework for Social Citizen Activation regards Content, Activation and Attention; a) Content; we need to get content right in order for people to like it. b) Activation; we need professional and technologically aided distribution, if we are to succeed in reaching the right people c) Attention; mapping what we plan to do and measuring properly, what we achieved, allows us to receive feedback, benchmark our social media campaigns and gradually improve our activities. This is basically the three stages we take you through at GoViral – content evaluation, seeding and tracking with some spice and some insights to why these three phases are the right ones.

Digital Brand Activation
Bringing something to the table for users, in order to receive their support, requires a very different mind-set and set of tools than traditional advertising. There is a major difference between getting people to promote a social cause, and the interests of your company. Quite frankly, social epidemics are quite rare, especially for companies to instigate on purpose. The solution can be found in "big seed marketing" and "always on".

Big Seed: The central thesis of our book is that between the traditional mass marketing approach, and the newer influences such as viral marketing, is an important gap that marketers can capitalize on. Inspired by Duncan J. Watts, we propose an approach called 'Big Seed Marketing' that combines viral marketing tools with old fashioned mass media techniques in a new and creative way. Big seed means optimizing your content strategy and your distribution strategy to craft effective campaigns.

Always on: A central concept in marketing is the campaigns. All of marketing are set up today to plan and execute campaigns. 'Always on' addresses what happens when people are talking all the time, and you are only talking three months pr. year. For that, we have described the entire circle of marketing as a) search, b) review, c) buy and d) affect others. This circle covers the user's journey from potential customer to active brand advocate. 'Always on' invites the reader into a world, where people are discussing, reviewing and rating your product and brand all the time. A metropolis that never sleeps…
'Always on' means optimizing your online strategy to make sure you are present at all the main touch points of the consumer journey, that you have enough content available, and that you help the users get the best experience. This includes community building, easy access to help, services and guides, experiences and much more.

Nike Hyperdunk
The Nike Hyperdunk is the company's lightest and strongest basketball shoe ever. Weighing in at only 13 ounces, the Hyperdunk is 18% lighter than the average Nike Basket ball shoe, giving you better performance on the court and, apparently, allowing you to jump over speeding Aston Martins.
Nike produced two co-branded videos, featuring basket ball superstar Kobe Bryant jumping over a speeding Aston Martin and a pool of snakes, together with the Jackass crew.

Content. Activation. Attention.
The content of the video is great, because it just on the verge of unbelievable, but not crossing the line. Did he actually do it? Since the content is of such high quality, the activation phase is easier. People pass it on, if it is good enough. Companies still need to work professionally with placing the content in all the right channels, though. Attention is difficult to speculate about on this one, but having constructed the campaign with multiple clips, Nike managed to generate more than 7,5 mio. views over the first running weeks of the campaign, just on Youtube. More than 1,5 mio. additional views came from spoof videos or responses to the campaign. In addition, several of the spoof videos link to the original ones, creating a more vibrant user experience as well as better results for the campaign.

Did Kobe Bryant actually do the jumps or were they fabricated? Judge for yourself:

Aston Martin < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIWeEFV59d4>
Pool of Snakes <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBJZXyfLrpU&amp;feature=related>

Kind regards,
Pernille Hegnsholt
http://goviral.com/viralradar.php

Building websites for kids

Sorry - this is a long one. Thanks to iMedia Connection for this post.

Conquering kid culture online
By Steve Glauberman

Designing sites for kids isn't child's play -- it takes a careful balance of usability, creative intuition and regulatory compliance.

They represent an internet population that's expected to balloon to nearly 38 million in 2008. Yet in many ways, they're the hardest online audience to reach. They're kids, and they're at the heart of a riddle that's been troubling online marketers for years: How can we effectively engage them on the web?

The emergence of new internet technologies and trends has provided us with some good options for increasing children's awareness of our products and brands. Marketers have been developing all manner of virtual worlds, online communities, social networks and online gaming destinations in an effort to attract and retain the attention of kids aged 3 through 17. The movement toward creating kid-friendly virtual worlds in particular has been likened to an online gold rush, as businesses recognize the potential of these sites to draw millions of dedicated young users each month.

This potential only promises to increase. Online research firm eMarketer reported last year that 24 percent of the 34.3 million child and teen web users in the U.S. visited virtual worlds once a month with that number expected to rise to 34 percent in 2008 and over 50 percent within the next three years. Meanwhile, Mediamark Research and Intelligence recently found that nearly 80 percent of kids aged 6 to 11 routinely play online games, with boys and girls spending almost an equal amount of time on the popular online activity.

Knowing young consumers are eager to experiment with these media doesn't make our task much easier. Marketing to kids has become a competitive business; we certainly benefit from understanding where their interests lie, but simply incorporating social community or gaming components into our sites (or those of our clients) doesn't guarantee their success. Designing sites for kids requires a unique strategy that takes usability, best practices and child marketing regulations into account.

Sounds like fun
The process of designing a site for kids begins as any web project does: by analyzing the needs of its target audience. If that audience is particularly young -- aged 3 to 7 -- sound will be an essential element of your site. Although kids this age are likely to go online with their parents, it's important to make sites as accessible to them as possible. Since they aren't likely to be reading well yet, that means using sound and voice-overs to narrate text intros, site options, even registration information if users are required to become members in order to use the site.

Children's attention can be further captured by the use of video, and in cases where sound is a must, offering an accompanying narrative video makes good sense. Many kids' sites incorporate a narrated video demo into their home page to walk new users through site features and familiarize them (and their cautious parents) with the site.

Rules to design by
The "anything goes" mentality inherent in many forms of online advertising doesn't apply when you're targeting kids. Laws like the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), enacted by congress in 1998, and the Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPR), issued by the FTC in 1999, have been put into place to protect children online and now guide every aspect of web design from site structure to copywriting.

These laws primarily prevent the collection of personal information from children under the age of 13 without parental involvement. Website publishers are therefore required to comply on a number of levels, including by posting their privacy policies, obtaining parental consent before collecting and using personal information (though email addresses can be collected in some instances) and allowing parents to review personal information collected from their kids. The FTC maintains a site where kids, adults and businesses can all obtain more information about both laws.

Even more relevant to web design are the regulations instilled by the Children's Advertising Review Unit. Established in 1974 by the National Advertising Review Council, CARU is a self-regulatory program intended to promote responsible children's advertising. Among other things, the program's guidelines require that online advertisers and publishers prominently identify the name, company or brand associated with each ad, and that online advertising integrated into the content of a game or activity be clearly demarcated as such.

Childrens' site developers abide by these rules by marking banners with the term "advertising" and by creating "jump pages" that site users see each time they transition from an sponsor-free page to one that features third-party ads. In the case of the latter, text will typically read, "You're about to enter the commercial area of our site," and might also provide a friendly warning about internet use in general (i.e., "Remember to never give out your personal information online").

Such site pages needn't be dull; in fact, they should maintain the same playful look and tone as the remainder of the site. Take a look at an example for DiscoveryKids.com (Disclosure: Discovery Kids is a client of Enlighten).

Creative that interacts
Whether designing brand sites or virtual worlds, the focus should be on activity and interactivity. Kids expect a lot from an online experience, for various reasons. They've never known a world without the energizing action of television and film and use these as a barometer for the entertainment value delivered by a medium like the web. They also didn't get to experience the internet the way it looked ten years ago, when deliberate interactivity wasn't nearly as prevalent as it is now. If they aren't sufficiently entertained by a site, there are plenty of other options to choose from. As such, keeping them engaged is a requirement, not a perk.

There are countless creative ways in which to do this. Some sites offer interactive slideshows of new features, transform the standard mouse curser into a symbol or character or provide users with avatars with which to navigate the site's activities. In virtual worlds, kids are often given a private online space to decorate in accordance with their personal tastes and are allowed to shop online for virtual furniture and accessories using credits earned by participating in site activities. This feature can be extended to brand sites in order to increase the time spent on a property and the child's affiliation with the product, but developers should be sure to update assets regularly to retain their users' interests.

Also worth considering is the amount of interactivity available on each individual site page. Our information architecture team has found that while sites that are uncluttered generally receive a higher usability rating, it's quite the opposite with sites for kids. Children have such a high tolerance for interaction that they expect every graphic on a site page to be clickable and deliver an interesting payoff.

Another useful finding is the way in which children interact with FAQ lists and help sections on a site. Because they have little patience for sorting through a laundry list of tips in search of the one that relates to their immediate needs, it's best to identify potential usability issues section by section and offer a succinct list of answers on each site page.

It may seem like child's play, but designing sites for kids requires a concerted approach that takes into account the users' capabilities, online behavior, interests, and needs. But that doesn't mean it can't be as much fun as the end product.

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/19649.asp

Tweet your service

Thanks to NGT for this post on how our brands can make REAL use of Twitter, however, I can't imagine the amount of work involved in maintaining this kind of customer communication!

Jet Blue Tweets Customer Service
JUNE 11TH, 2008 BY ALLISON

More and more, smart marketers are scanning Twitter for mentions or creating Twitter channels for a brand’s “followers.” By microblogging, they can give consumers real-time company news, coupons, contests, etc. Some companies are even running customer service via Twitter. We recently came across a great case study on StyleITOnline.com, which chronicles a users’ actual experience:

For the rest: http://www.nextgreatthing.com/wordpress/2008/06/11/jet-blue-tweets-customer-service/

Mobile Commerce

Remember when you could buy Coke from a vending machine at Central Station with your mobile phone??? Well I think this is a little more techy than that... Thanks to Mobile Crunh for this post:

Your Mobile Phone to become Mobile Wallet
Posted by John Kullman

Report Buyer published a study today that finds mobile commerce is quickly catching on worldwide. By 2011, 25 million Americans are expected to use their mobile phones as mobile wallets. Many countries are finding the ease and convenience of mobile phone commerce is hard to resist.

For the full article check out: http://mobilecrunch.com/2008/06/10/your-mobile-phone-to-become-mobile-wallet/

list, goal and to do sites

Some interesting sites around lists, to-dos, goals etc... Go on, get something done!

http://www.mecanbe.com/default.aspx – a map showing goals, linked to real life action and collaboration tools

http://www.lifetango.com/ - whoa hold the yankee cheese, but a social network devoted entirely to achieving goals

http://www.wishlistr.com/ - create, share, search wishlists

http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ - awesome service based around remembering and scheduling tasks. Really nice social aspects

http://www.zirr.us/ - whiteboard, tag cloud, brain dumping tool

http://monkeyon.com/ - tool for getting other people to do things

http://www.grocerylists.org/ - love this, but it’s a bit out there: a list of shopping lists that have been turned in to book.