ml haynes design

Just when you think you’ve got your social media strategy down — constituents profiled, contingencies considered, centralized messaging plotted — REI pulls up the stakes and takes their show on the road.

Well, they’re taking their show out to the 53 markets they have a presence in nationally. And with an approach that takes into account the regional needs of its customers rather than the restrictive needs of corporate, it would appear that we all may want to slip a look out from under HQ’s tent.

REI will now be tweeting via market-based handles, talking up climbing gear in home-base Washington state and cycling wear in NYC, one of its newest locales. Retooling brick-and-mortar stores to better serve consumers partaking of local and regional recreation aligns perfectly with a social and digital direction designed to better dialogue with friends and followers.

“We are not moving away completely from a national presence. The local teams will be in addition to our national presence. Also, in terms of staffing, we have a handful of employees at each location participating in social media. They may play different roles within retail (customer service, outreach, product specialist, etc.).”

Jordan Williams, manager of digital engagement for REI, told AdAge recently that certain staff members are being identified as experts at handling customer complaints, others at communicating new product arrivals and features, and others as people who can provide local travel advice. Claiming no real difference from the offline world, he entrusts more than 9,000 employees every day with these responsibilities as they communicate with customers in person. Why wouldn’t he and the company trust them to do the same online?

Is your company or employer engaging in localized social media? What would it take to make the switch and how likely is it that Twitter would be the channel of choice?

Much has been written in the last few years about gaming and the users that play, and how much we might learn about experience, usability, and strategy from perhaps the least obvious source. Game on!

In a recent Mashable article titled, “7 Winning Examples of Game Mechanics in Action,” Gabe Zicherman suggests that “seven gamified innovations should inspire you to strategize via game analysis.” Here, some quick cheats point you to the starting gate. Read the entire post and see if there’s something to putting some play into your work.

1. Make a Market: Foursquare
Foursquare’s founders, exposed to gaming while working at Area/Code (Zynga’s recently acquired New York City-based game design shop), believed mobile social networking would work as a “single player” experience. Competing for badges and mayorships — whether or not anyone is there — proves that location-based networking and simple game mechanics can affect the behavior of users.

2. Get Fit: NextJump
NextJump built a custom application that enabled employees to check in to each on-site workout and rewarded top performers prizes. After double-digit adoption by staff, NextJump’s CEO retooled the fitness “game” to become a team sport. Leveraging the game themes of tribalism and competition, 70% of employees now exercise regularly, and have improved workplace and staff health and attitude.

3. Slow Down and Smell the Money: Kevin Richardson
Kevin Richardson, game designer at MTV, re-imagined traffic cameras and tickets using game thinking. The Speed Camera Lottery idea rewards drivers who obey the posted limit with a split of the fines colllected from speeders. Richardson used gamification concepts to turn a negative reinforcement system into a positive, incremental experience.

4. Generate Ad Revenues: Psych and NBC/Universal
Club Psych, the online branded and gamified platform for the popular show Psych, has incorporated game-like incentives to raise page views and return visits. Registered user counts are at nearly 3 million since the launch of the gamified version and NBC/Universal has incorporated gamification to online platforms for Top Chef and the The Real Housewives.

5. Make Research and Evangelism Count: Crowdtap
Crowdtap offers virtual and gamified rewards to complete research tasks and to share brand advocacy with others — something mere market research simply cannot do. CEO Brandon Evans reports that competition-oriented users are four times more likely to create quality comments and 12 times more likely to refer others to the platform. Instead of competing against the system, they challenge themselves and peers to excel — an extraordinary achievement by any measure.

6. Save the Planet: RecycleBank
Across the U.S., incentives experts at Recyclebank are using gamification to improve home environmental compliance. They’ve used game mechanics such as points, challenges, and rewards to drive double-digit increases in energy conservation, sustainability and recycling.

7. Make Teaching Fun: Ananth Pai
Executive-turned-school-teacher Ananth Pai grouped students by learning style and retooled the curriculum to make use of off-the-shelf games (both edutainment and entertainment) to teach reading, math, and other subjects. Points are up on leaderboards. Reading and math levels improved and students call learning “fun and social.”

Rob Gatto, CEO of Pointroll (provider of digital marketing services for interactive advertising), recently posted an article on Ad Age’s Digital Next titled “It’s Not the Size, It’s How You Use It.” Provocative title? Yes, but perhaps not in the way that first comes to mind. If you’ve been tasked with creating effective online display ads you know that it’s not easy to break through the on-page chaos of content, advertising, lists of “relevant” links and enough visual noise to make even the most driven user to click off and away. How you use the space you’ve been “given” is the ultimate challenge.

Or is it?

Gatto goes on to support his title with this bold statement: “Putting the Creativity Back Into Online Display Advertising.” He asks us to consider that it’s not the size at all, but the stuff inside the IAB approved pixel width and height. Maybe you’ve been schooled to believe — and to create toward — the concept that online display and disruption don’t play well together. Studies have shown that synergy between on-page content and display ad content, and by that I’m referring to look-and-feel or “creative,” increases the click-through of these ads. So what are we to do when challenged with injecting our work with creativity? Well, the author’s got an answer for that too.

He suggests that new ad formats might be well and good in engaging users and improving the user experience but size is not the solution. He insists on “a resurgence of creative.” And in his insistence he indicates what that might look like, using four broad categories where creativity can, and must, have a place in redefining what is possible with online display advertising. See if you don’t agree.

Redefine Creative for Digital Advertising
As the digital landscape evolves from a small number of circumscribed touchpoints to a more fluid experience across devices, locations, and activities, campaigns must shift their focus from platforms and formats to people: finding the right audience wherever it may be, and delivering creative that audiences will respond to.

Engage Consumers with Dynamic, Interactive Creative
Invite consumers into an ongoing brand relationship that both fits their current context and experience, and actually adds value to one or both.

Measure, Optimize, Repeat
As campaigns span platforms, so must our approach to marrying creativity with analytics. Constant technological and creative innovation is key.

Make an Impression
With so many ways to understand and target audiences, so many ways to reach them, and so many ways to channel our creative energy from mobile and tablet to social to out-of-home, we have an unprecedented opportunity to put our creativity to use in service of the brands we represent.

If you haven’t heard about the stolen laptop and the deadbeat dude that boosted it, you’ve been asleep at the wheel, my friend. There’s a Tumblr page with blow-by-blow descriptions of the theft, the lack of help from the local cops and — wait for it — images of the thief taken with the on-board camera by an installed app built to identify just such an evil-doer.

Such Astroturf marketing is becoming more common at the same time it’s becoming less distinguishable. And to those in the biz who make it their work to blur those lines, we salute you. Who hasn’t had the client request for a “sure thing viral campaign”? Who hasn’t hoped that a bit of creative “magic” will take off and rack up hits in 6-digits and then some? To all of us, here are some stealthy contenders aggregated by Todd Wasserman and Mark Book. Can you tell which is which?

Evan Longoria’s Crazy Bare Hand Catch (Gillette)
 
 
How To Hack Video Screens On Times Square (Limitless)
 
 
Walk On Water (Hi-Tec)
 
 
Kevin Durant Is Moving In Right Now (Nike)
 
 
Bike Hero (Guitar Hero)
 
 
Are You My Man In The Jacket? (Witchery)
 
 
Rear View Girls (Levi’s)
 

Butterfly Attack (Qualcomm)
 
 
Danish One-Night Stand (VisitDenmark)

Bizo, a business-to-business ad targeting platform, recently released data that highlights who in the business world is most inclined to take action when presented with an online ad. With access to third-party certified demographic data on more than 85 million business professionals online, Bizo found that those working in the Legal, Retail, and Software industries were most likely to do what an online ad asks them to do, while people working in Operations, Legal, or Sales roles lead the pack from a job function perspective.

Bizo gathers and organizes vast amounts of non-personally identifiable business demographic information (e.g., industry, job function, company size, seniority). The company tracks conversion objectives or “actions” (e.g., white paper downloads, free trial sign-ups, online purchases) across the hundreds of targeted display campaigns it supports so it is able to get a rich, aggregate view of the demographic profile of business professionals that are most inclined to take action against an ad.

Ready for Action: Top 10 Industries and Job Functions

Based on campaigns run over a 12-month period across the 85 million business professionals currently in the Bizo network, the data showed the business audiences most likely to take action against a display ad as well as their Action Rate Index (ARI) ranking.

Top 10 industry segments included:

1. Legal (ARI: 223 percent)
2. Retail (ARI: 192 percent)
3. Software (ARI: 185 percent)
4. Media Publishing(ARI: 184 percent)
5. Wholesalers(ARI: 157 percent)
6. Telecommunications (ARI: 121 percent)
7. Hospitality/Hotels (ARI: 116 percent)
8. Real Estate(ARI: 108 percent)
9. Business Services (ARI: 108 percent)
10. Consumer Services (ARI: 107 percent)

Top 10 job functions included:

1. Legal (ARI: 257 percent)
2. Operations (ARI: 218 percent)
3. Consultants (ARI: 157 percent)
4. Sales (ARI: 156 percent)
5. Marketing (ARI: 147 percent)
6. Finance (ARI: 146 percent)
7. Government (ARI: 102 percent)
8. Education (ARI: 102 percent)
9. Scientists (ARI: 100 percent)
10. Engineering/Technical (ARI: 97 percent)

The ARI is determined by the rate at which users performed a desired action after receiving a display ad impression. The percentage is calculated by comparing the number of online ads shown to a segment of business professionals to the number of times that same set of business professionals took an action against online ads. An index was then created, normalizing the data.

“The typical business sales process is long, complex, and involves multiple decision makers, requiring sellers to build trusting relationships with their buyers. This means companies that market to business professionals need to reach, educate and motivate the right audiences to close the sale,” said Chris Mann, director of product management of Bizo. “The data released today highlights the power of data-driven online advertising, giving marketers insight into who is taking action in response to an ad, and enabling them to precisely target decision makers with ads that will impact the purchasing decision.”

If you aren’t aware of the current infatuation with street art and graffiti, well, you have definitely got to get out more often. From Oscar-nominated “Exit Through The Gift Shop” to MOCA’s “Art In The Streets” in Los Angeles, graffiti has taken a prominent position (again) in pop culture. But now technology enables all of us (with an iPhone, at least) to bring out our inner street artist.

The San Francisco Arts Commission has tapped McCann SF to create a free iTunes app that lets graffiti artists tag their work using their iPhone. They can also share these techno-tags through email or social media share functions baked into the app. The Arts Commission hopes to support creativity while taking a chunk out of an annual graffiti clean-up cost of $22 million.

Using the iPhone’s accelerometer and augmented reality, GraffCity turns iPhones and iPod Touchs into virtual aerosol cans. Artists can “tag” any wall or surface, duplicating the experience of real-world tagging. And with two modes, different brush options and filters, plus an AR (augmented reality) view, street artists can make their mark without worrying about the mess and hassle.

The app will be incorporated into San Francisco’s StreetSmARTS and Where Art Lives programs, two initiatives that support the creativity of established and emerging urban artists. The question is: Who will really be “expressing their creativity” with this iPhone app — urban taggers who have decided to put down the can or hipsters who want to impress Facebook friends and co-workers?

Logo Lounge’s annual survey of logo trends is a great resource for researching what’s hot, what’s not, what’s timeless and what’s flavor-of-the-month. The selects for 2011 are no different: the lounge folks have gathered a comprehensive collection of color, shapes, effects and general direction.

If you are about to embark on a strategic redesign or you’re creating a visual identity from zero, this work will show you where others have gone — and sometimes many others — and what solutions hit the mark and which fall short. Bookmark the Logo Lounge site. Join and become a contributing member. Check out the catalog of books for sale. Enjoy.

Gradation

Juvi

Vibrate

O

Earth

Monoline

Series

Brown

Dandruff

Concentric

Loopys

Banded

Comma

Buckys

Fruit

Well, it’s not that simple, really. Orange, California-based Adzookie would like to paint your house in a bright color palette, their logo, and the usual SoMe marks. You agree to have your house painted like a clown car (for at least three months, possibly up to a year) and the advertising firm will pay your nut, just as long as the abode remains its new vibrant hue.

Launched last week, Adzookie CEO, Romeo Mendoza, claims the company has already received more than 1,000 applications from people willing to have their houses turned into billboards. “It really blew my mind,” he told CNN. “I knew the economy was tough, but it’s sad to see how many homeowners are really struggling.”

This is not the first guerrilla advertising stunt blurring the line between public and private. Last month, Ecko began offering lifetime 20% discounts to people willing to get the company’s logo tattooed on their skin, calling it “Branded For Life.” Hey, these guys will repaint your place due to cancellation — bet that tattoo offer doesn’t come with a free-laser-removal clause. What’s next? How far will consumers go in search of the ultimate freebie?

And how far will businesses and brands go to show up in unexpected — and unavoidable — spaces? Will the far-out and funky be effective? Will this over-sized billboard promotion push this agency out of self-funding subsistence into fully funded bliss, acquisition, or beyond? Or will it be a few weeks of press, a spike in website traffic, a couple of wacky single-family dwellings and ticked off neighbors, then back to business as usual?