Running an interactive agency in Atlanta for the past 8 years has made me painfully aware of the contrast between the tremendous amount of industry talent we have here and the perception of that talent outside (and sometimes inside) of Atlanta. So I’m always looking to find ways to make it more obvious that Atlanta is a leader in the interactive community. It’s why I’m on the board of the Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association (AiMA). It’s also why I like to point out events that are in town that showcase some of the talent we have in the city. So here are a few events coming up that you might be interested in checking out:

April 10th - Collective intelligence, collaboration and user-generated content

April 11th - Social Media, The New Face and Voice of PR

April 17th - 18th - Customer Relationship Management Association’s First Annual Summit

April 25th - AiMA’s User Experience Event (details coming).

Hope to see you there! And thanks to Sherry Heyl for pointing some of these out to me.

Our very own Wade Forst moderated this month’s Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association (AiMA) last night, titled Branding 2.0: The New Online Community. The event had an amazing turnout of around 200 people.

Wade was able to pull two speakers from heavy-hitting consumer brands; Tom Daly with Coca-Cola’s Global Interactive Marketing and Michael Friedman, who is in charge of Strategy and Planning for Darden Restaurant’s interactive marketing.

The topic of Web 2.0 is a popular one. Last night’s event touched on some very interesting ways consumers are interacting with brands online.  For those of you not able to attend the event, here are some of the key take-aways:

• Consumers will be part of the brand with or without you. It’s your job to leverage and enable the consumer’s interaction - without it feeling unauthentic (i.e. Dove’s video advertisement on YouTube).
• Support what customers are doing and do not dictate their actions. To work you have to let them interact freely with your brand.
• Seeding can be risky because people can be vocal about authenticity.
• You can’t buy viral.  Something will either catch on or it won’t. Forcing it won’t appear natural and consumers will be turned off.
• Fish where the fish are - don’t try to get them to swim in your pool first.
• It’s not just about sending people to your website any more.  Interaction with your brand happens within multiple, fragmented mediums.
• Companies have less and less control over brand today. You must relinquish full control and seek to guide and influence it.
• There are different kinds of KPIs for user generated content. It’s not all about driving traffic; there is a reinvigoration of the importance of brand lift online. 

So, in the bizarreness that is celebrity endorsements, Kevin Federline, (aka K-Fed, Fed-Ex, aka white-trash baby daddy and bad rapper) has his own search engine.  You heard that correctly.  So, on this beautiful Wednesday, let me encourage you to explore the web via: http://searchwithkevin.prodege.com/ where you have a chance of winning a prize from him such as a copy of his new album or an invite to his birthday party.  Wow.  I’m speechless. Thanks?

If you aren’t enticed by Kevin’s generous offer, perhaps you’d like to benefit someone else while you search.  There are several search engines that donate to selected charities every time you search.  EveryClick and Click4theCause are good bets for your magnanimous searches…  Microsoft gives wads of their money pile to AIDS Charity ninemillion.org every time you search via Click4theCause.  EveryClick (and other sites like it) give a portion of their revenue each month to a selected charity. 

My question: Are these charity sites any good at searching?  I’m curious to hear your feedback.

Thanks to Dumb Terminal Live! for the idea.  http://blogs.pcworld.co.nz/pcworld/dumb-terminal/2007/03/nine_million.html 

Ok, so I just posted about how everyone is overusing the 2.0 label. But I saw something in this month’s issue of Fast Company that I thought I’d share that I hadn’t seen before. It looks like they took an article and somehow (I’m guessing on their website in what they call the ‘readers network’) let some readers see the article beforehand and comment on it. You’ll see in the image below - click to enlarge so you can actually see it - what I’m talking about. On the right side of the page you’ll find what they call “instant feedback”.

I think its a great idea. I personally still enjoy reading offline and I think finding a way to apply social media to that world is pretty compelling.

All excellent products and services have one trait in common: They meet a need. It seems simple, doesn’t it? Sure, we can all name a few products and services out there that are useless, but certainly most that we use every day meet a need! Dry cleaners, high speed internet, cookware, appliances, utilities – they all meet a need. Or do they? Too easily – and too frequently – this most basic of concepts gets lost in sales.

Think about what it’s like trying to cancel your AOL service. You no longer have a need, but out of sheer gluttony, AOL insists you stay with them – forcing free months of service on you. What about that water bill? You don’t use 3,000 gallons of water, but you get charged for it anyway – the ‘consumption minimum’ – or maybe just a way for your water company to report more sales.

Inspired by Melissa Read’s blog post (I Heart Mr. Hutchins), I have decided to discuss this concept through example. I have an incredible mechanic. Yes, I did just use the words ‘incredible’ and ‘mechanic’ in the same sentence.

EXCELLENT products and services meet their customers’ needs and often identify what they are when they can’t see it themselves. John (the incredible mechanic) has been working on my car for the past 4 years or so. A co-worker referred me to him, who was also referred to John by a friend. Never once has John misdiagnosed a problem or suggested work on my car that wasn’t needed. John has also identified problems on my car and worked with me to correct them before they became major (and expensive) troubles.

I am getting ready to buy a new car, but (of course) this week I found myself needing to take my car to John with some “funny noises.” I had a rental car reserved and was fully prepared to leave my car for him to work on. Knowing I would be soon getting rid of my car, he suggested we take a spin together and let him do an informal diagnosis. In the end, I didn’t leave my car with him – he told me to “save my money” because he didn’t see any problems with the car. Yes, a mechanic told me to “save my money”.

John met my need. He could have just as easily suggested that I fix things on my car for the sake of selling it, but he knew that wasn’t what I needed. Because John has so consistently met my needs, I have referred him over and over again to friends and colleagues, and I will continue to do so.

The lesson here is: a good mechanic is one who diagnosis YOU, not just your car. Big business should use John as an example – evaluate the needs of your customers and provide them products and services that they will rave about, not just settle for.

The world has gone insane with the 2.0 talk. I’d love to blame Microsoft for introducing us to this way of thinking, but now that they’ve moved to naming their software after the year it comes out is supposed to come out I have a hard time blaming them too much. It’s great that they name their new products things like Office 2007, but what they fail to mention to us is that it won’t run smoothly until we’re using hardware from 2010. Thanks again Microsoft.

But I digress. The real culprit is O’Reilly Media, who in 2004 so cleverly coined the phrase “Web 2.0” in order to explain the new phenomena of the web being more than a one-way communication tool and started being a more collaborative, user-generated one.

And I could have lived with that being the only 2.0ism out there, but it’s creeping into everything! Fast Company’s recent issue has an article entitled, “Business 3.0“. People are even talking about RSS 2.0. I just yesterday saw this graffiti on a bridge in Atlanta:

Apparently Faster Mustache is a biking website (who knew) and although I can’t find it on their site, I suppose they feel like they’ve progressed to the 2.0 level of bicycle racing, whatever that means.

Unfortunately I don’t see this going away anytime soon. So I’ll leave you with this - recently the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, was quoted as saying, “Ebay and Google both benefit from the adoption of Web 2.0, or Web 3.0.” Yikes.

My wife was perusing Art.com the other day looking to fill the walls of my 9-month old baby’s room.  As I was looking over her shoulder, I couldn’t help but notice how well certain aspects of their interface were designed from a usability perspective.  But then I thought…is it that the page is “usable” or is it “persuasive”?

It’s both really.  But the thing that caught my eye the most was how simple the visual layer was and how it created a perception of usability.  Are there only a few items on the page that make it simple?  NO.  And that is the beauty of it.  In a recent blog post, I talked about the Misconception of Clutter and this site does a great job of illustrating my point.  There are actually a lot of items on each page.  But Art.com has done a great job of stripping away fancy creative elements that don’t serve a purpose and uses the power of visual design to create not just a simple, usable page; but one that subtly persuades users to follow a path towards making a purchase.

They use lots of white and very light grey tones as the base color for the site.  What this does is allow the color they use for their primary calls to action to really pop.  It really makes the eye focus on the primary action, which is Add To Cart.  There is something about that shiny orange button that creates a gravitational pull towards clicking it.  Something about it brings me back to the old dot-com days where anything that looked interesting, made me want to click it just to see what would happen. But the reason why the button brings attention to itself is not just the shiny gradient color, but the absence of color around it.

My point with all of this is that I think the role of the creative designer is often underutilized when it comes to website design.  Everyone wants the site to look good and be consistent with the brand, but the creative designer plays a much more important role in User Experience design.  How information and interaction elements are presented visually are critical in helping the user clearly understand them, as well as persuade them into taking the action we want them to take.  Designers aren’t there just to make things look pretty…although if it’s pretty enough, it might make me want to click it.

Google announced today that they are in the final stages of acquiring NASA.  In a story that broke on CNN early this afternoon, David C. Drummond, Google’s Chief Legal Officer, stated that, “This has been a deal we’ve been working on for quite some time.  Larry and Sergey came to me in early 2006 and told me that they would quickly run out of things to buy on the planet Earth, so we better think of other planets to focus on.”

A NASA chief correspondent had this to say: “About ten years ago Microsoft approached us with a similar offer, but we knew better offers would come.  Although I’m not at liberty to discuss the financial portions of the deal, I can confidently say that Google made us an offer that we just couldn’t pass up.”  He later was heard saying, “Let’s just say I could buy your whole family ten times over, beyotch.”

According to The Smoking Gun, Google’s initial plans include a new application called ‘Google Moon’, setting up a server farm on Mars “just to see what happens”, and, according to Sergey, “trying to fly a spaceship around the Earth fast enough to reverse time like Superman did in that movie, so we can go back and not do the YouTube deal.”

Ok, so I’m just joking, but I had you there for a second right? But after reading recently that Google might possibly be creating a Google Phone, I have to wonder when does it end?  At what point do we go to Home Depot and buy a Google Refrigerator using our Google credit card and drive it home in our new Google pick-up truck?

Marketers and sales people will do crazy things to get your information.  Technology has made it easier to find new and creative ways to do so… visit a web site? Your email may be grabbed without you even knowing it.  In meatspace, your credit card can be used to link together your personal data into a mailing address (and other things). 

Before you all call the tinfoil hat police, let me explain.  Like a crack addict jonesing for a fix, sometimes marketers lose perspective on what lead capturing is all about.  In your rush to meet some sort of misguided sales goal, marketers take heed:  just because you can track a customer, or potential customer, it doesn’t mean you should. 

It’s become commonplace nowadays for all of us to have a few plastic dongles on our keychains for supermarkets, record stores, and wherever you crazy kids shop nowadays.  We accept this. For a few cents off canned peas, we’ll let them track everything about all our purchases to be scrutinized and analyzed for greater sales yields.  (It annoys you that you’ve done this, don’t deny it.)  What about permission-based lead capture on ‘the interwebs’?  To me, there is nothing worse than traveling through a series of tubes, only to be blocked by a page requiring me to enter my name, my email, my income, and my bank account number -  for the Prince of Nigeria for all I know. 

What good marketers should be asking is: What do we lose when we ask for this information?  How many customers are turned off from a brand because the lead you are squeezing out of them for that drop of content is just too much?  Forcing users to sign up before reading an online newspaper article, forcing users to give information before you can access any sort of web content: it’s bad for usability and it hurts the overall brand experience.  Wouldn’t you rather have people visit your content, be completely excited about it and forward the bejeezus out of the link?  This would be bringing you more ad revenue, but not more precious leads.  Well, let me remind you:  quantity does not mean quality.  Wouldn’t you rather people like your content so much they voluntarily subscribed to an email newsletter about related content?  It may be fewer leads, but they would be more relevant.

Let me put it this way:  For a user of your site, it’s like showing up for the free day at the state fair and then finding that there’s a $10 cover charge.  You end up going, “Aww, man…” and then you and your friends go wander around the Wal-Mart for a couple of hours instead.  There will be sites out there that get it, employ laissez faire lead capture and ultimately have a better user experience and more return users.  Isn’t that what it’s all about? 

I was in Barnes and Noble the other day looking for a book for one of my classes when I happened upon the bargain table (LOVE the bargain table). I have collected books ever since my English Literature Major days, and now have an extensive library. So, when I get a chance to add to it, I do. There is an author who writes about Western Pennsylvania (where I’m from) and one of her books was on the bargain table. WHOO HOO. Jackpot. I gathered up a few other goodies on sale (plus the original book I came for), whipped out the Amex and was on my way. So, what’s the big deal? Well, the other day, I get THIS email:

“Ok, cool!” I thought. At first. Then I thought about it. I bought that book in the STORE with my CREDIT CARD and they somehow knew who I was and how to contact me. EW. Anyone else kinda creeped out about this or is this the new, cool target-marketing method?