Silberbauer Says:

The four best presentations I experienced on w2e this year.

Web 2.0 Expo SF 2010: Ben Huh, “Becoming One with Internet Culture”
Great talk on the ‘new pop culture’ and subversives vs. hackers.

Web 2.0 Expo SF 2010: Tim O’Reilly, “State of the Internet Operating System”
The man himself speaks about the clash between the ‘new’ open Microsoft, Amazon’s cloud and the closed business model of Apple.

Web 2.0 Expo SF 2010: June Cohen, “Ideas Worth Spreading: TED’s Transition…”
June shows the new TED translation feature that is truly impressive. And she’s just a great presenter.

Web 2.0 Expo SF 2010: Eric Ries, “The Lean Startup: Innovation Through Experimentation. …”
A bit hyped presentation, but still with a lot of good stuff on lean startup tactics.

Just a couple of images of the Concerthouse illumination from last night. We’re changing the illumination everytime a major event is taking place in the Concerthouse and this time it is the Outgames’ Conference about human rights for gays and other minorities. The illumination will be on until wednesday from around 22:30 until 06:00.

Baekdal is absolutely right. Audi fucked up: Why only publish their (probably pretty costly) documentary on Les Mans 24 on iTunes only, and thus only in the US? A European brand makes a movie about a European event, and then only makes it available to recession-struck Americans. Dummkopfen.

The movie is paid for – why not just push it on Youtube and every other available channel? Get it out there!

Here’s the trailer, but you can’t see the real thing, unless you’re American. For some reason, Audi doesn’t want you to.

Yesterday was C-day at Creuna. We launched our new identity and brand platform, and it rocks. Our Danish marketing department and the former Cobra part of Creuna Norway has toiled getting the ID ready. This is a great day for Creuna, as our new profile defines us as the Full-service Digital Agency that we are, and not as a dreary IT Consultancy as we were four years ago.

It’s cool, it’s creative and it’s bold. We no longer have a logo – we have a symbol that can vary indefinately. Every coworker at Creuna soon has the possibility of creating his or her own “skin and bone”- C-symbol with a software tool.

Visit creuna.dk or creuna.com to see our new, more simple websites.

As I told you earlier, my wife blogs about gourmet food. She’s been blogging for a little more than a year now, and her blog has turned into one of the leading Danish gourmet blogs with a huge network of friends and blogs abroad.

Last week the Danish paper Politiken called for an interview and did an article about food bloggers in general (see an English version translated by Google here). The conclusion was that food blogging is a serious competitor to the more established food critics. And they should be. The best of the bloggers know as much (or more) about food than does the critics. The article also lead to a podcasted interview on K-Cast, a pod cast on communications (in Danish).

In the Politiken article, several chefs were asked about the food bloggers. Most of them seem to have understood that bloggers are here to stay, and that a good blogger can be your best friend as they know how to work the net and how to get the message through, in a way that your own website never will be able to. And so it is. One dedicated blogger can advertise your business or products more efficiently than you can yourself. And a network of bloggers will easily outperform your PR agency. Why? Because consumers trust fellow consumers and friends over slick PR guys.

To make a successful business you need ambassadors. Someone unbiased that will recommend your product to other people within his network, and who’s words carry some weight. Several food bloggers are just that: Authorities on gourmet dining that people turn to when they want to go out without the risk of being disappointed. And this goes for all other business areas as well.

Consumers has always talked about products and businesses. The only difference from 20 years ago till now is that today the conversation is taking place on the web for everyone to see. And that’s what terrifies some business owners. But they should be thrilled instead, now they can in fact hear what their customers are saying.

You can’t keep the bloggers away – because they are your customers. But you can win their hearts with great service and great products (as two-star Michelin restaurant Noma and it’s Chef, René Redzepi, has won Trine’s) and then you have made yourself a very influential friend and ambassador.

My best estimate based on traffic on the Very Good Food blog and considering the network effect of blogs, is that Trine’s blog in average may produce up to five new customers for Noma a week – directly or indirectly. She and her blogger friends have put Noma on the virtual land map, and as more and more consumers are relying solely on the web for decision making the impact is quite substantial.

Other businesses must learn from the approach that Noma has to the bloggers. Instead of shooing them away and telling them not to photograph the food, they are made friends of the restaurant. In that way Noma has managed to turn the conventional customer/business relationship into a ambassador/business relationship, and that’s good for business.

Do not as a business owner underestimate the networked power of a well written blog. You can choose to fight your ambassadors or to embrace them. But don’t go over board and bribe them, that will spoil everything. Treat them well with a hint of V.I.P., and show them that you care about their opinions.

There’s a flipside to this: It’s very important for bloggers to realize their own power. With the ability to make or break a brand or a business, bloggers should be careful only to write about things that they truly understand (note to self: Stop the raves…). Blogs have a very real impact on real life – for better or for worse.

A real life moment: Trine and blogger friends Laurent and Guillaume were introduced to Heston Blumenthal (Chef and owner, The Fat Duck ***) who happened to be dining at Noma that evening. It’s Mr. Blumenthal in the middle – René Redzepi, Chef of Noma, is the second from the right. Both Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Redzepi are incredibly nice and dedicated people with a overwhelming passion for quality and food.

Where I am? Well, someone had to operate the camera

Finally, after months of preparation, we have launched the digital signage system in DR’s new headquarter in Copenhagen… and it went well

From a workplace to a place to create.
That was the headline of the project from day one. DR Byen has been built by four different architects who has made four very different buildings.
Pictures from one of the four buildings in DR Byen

Our project was meant to deliver an integrated communication platform and to ‘bring the media’ inside these buildings.
As you can see on this images the last part in the project (the Concert Hall) is still more or less a construction sites (see the official site here). About three quarters of the building is finished and the digital signage project has been launch in three of the four parts of the building.

Number one: To connect the architecture with our corporate identity:
First of all, we needed to make a tighter connection between the architecture and the corporate identity.
Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) is, as the name implies, a media corporation. And although it’s an amazing piece of architecture made by 4 different companies, it is not immediately obvious that it was the home of the largest Danish media corporation, that we are delivering high quality public service content, and that we are the de facto keepers of the Danish cultural media heritage.

Number two
Second, we are experiencing an increasing competition in the media business, and the most important competitive advantage is creativity. Therefore I believe that it is absolutely vital to create a pleasant and inspiring environment for creativity to happen. Of course we can’t do an ROI calculation on how much creativity this project will generate, but I believe that we are creating the ground upon which creativity may grow more easily than usual. And that’s why we have been focusing on the integration of different kinds of visual art in the project and creating an experience instead of just an information screen.

Number 3
Finally, our customers have ever changing needs, and therefore we must able to communicate very fast inside the organization and also be able to change our communication procedures very quickly, if needed. A fully automated digital platform, as the one we have created, is a big asset in this race. In the web-2.0-user-has-the-power communication world of today it’s very important to have non-intrusive way of pushing important communication to your stakeholders, employees and customers.

First of all, the Entrance.
When you step into DR at groundlevel, this is what you see. Three large video projections (one is hidden in this image) on the white and grey concrete walls.

We’ve been working closely together with the architects to create a coherent experience of the room. The content is very abstract and meant to supplement the room with depth, dynamic and a creative atmosphere.

I think it’s important, to be very courageous and to use an abstract and symbolic content that will activate the viewer instead of communicating in the usual corp-speak discourse. We should stimulate experiences with the use of symbols and montage-effects and not with the use the very powerful media to promote corporate taglines. See for instance how Jason Eppink is transforming standard commercials to street art.

The entrance from another angle:

The foyer from one of the side entrances. Four 19″ monitors placed on a white concrete wall.

The ‘Main Street’ on the 2nd floor:
The connection between the four buildings in the ‘DR City’ is a giant glass-covered street (12*18 meters) with a bridge crossing the water channel going through the area called ‘Ørestaden’.

In this part of the building we have placed 6 46″ screens. The content consists of news from our own news-channel and news from the department of corporate communicate. Besides that, there are breakers made by young visual artists. They we’re given access to our media archives and used some of the old material to make new artistic expressions.

The ‘Main Street’ viewed from the bridge on the fourth floor.
Every screen has it’s own unique flow of information configured to the specific physical context and user behaviour.

The Meeting Center:
In our Meeting Center we’ve made an integration to MS Exchange Server. In this way our meeting booking system is automatically updated on the screens next to each meeting room. The interface is based on Flash using xml-data from Exchange generated by AgendaX.

What’s next??

Well, this is just phase one of the project. In the next 1-3 month we will be creating a lot more content to the system, for instance the weather forecast, trailers, traffic information and of course more visuals. In february we’re having the first art exhibition with the project ‘Runner’ in collaboration with Illumenart and EPI. Hopefully, we be able to extend the system to the other parts of DR in Jutland and on Bornholm and most importantly we’re learning a lot about what it takes to maintain and use this kind of communication platform.

Besides this, we’re of course looking forward to completion of the concert hall and to the exciting task of creating the digital projections in and outside the concert hall See the pictures. That’s gonna be amazing!!

I will hopefully be able to upload some video soon. It gives a better sense of the look and feel of the displays.
Please comment if you have any good ideas or experiences with digital signage solutions.

/Lars Silberbauer

Just some slides (in danish) from my presentation at the seminar on “Corporate Branding and Architecture” last week.
foredrags_resume.pdf

This should have been an e-mail to Sterling Airlines but as Sterling is so discount that they don’t accept e-mail – it’s going on the blog instead. Well, you asked for it.

This morning I found a parking ticket in the front window of my car. I spotted it from my apartment (4th floor) and as I knew that my car was legally parked and that my residential parking permit is paid for until January 2008 I got pretty pissed. Danish parking fines are at almost $100, so it’s a real pain to get one, and I’ve been fined before without reason.

I ran down the stairs to my car, just to find that this was no parking ticket. It was a flyer from Danish low-cost, low-end airline Sterling Airlines made to look exactly like a parking ticket. I mean: You really have to read it closely to find out that it isn’t.

Some fuck up at Sterling’s agency somehow had the great idea that to get more people to fly Sterling, we must piss them off. ‘Give them a real rotten morning, then they fly with us, just to extend that rotten feeling’, they thought. It might have seemed real funny during the creative brainstorm but guess what: It isn’t in real life.

I have flown Sterling twice: The service is appalling. If your loose your luggage they couldn’t care less (my parents tried that and Sterling pretty much told them to fuck off). If you want to move to a free seat with better leg room, that’s ok – if you pay for it in cash. Their planes are very often delayed … Sterling just sucks.

Now, Sterling feels it’s ok to fondle my car to place their ridiculous flyer under the wiper and fuck up my morning. The ad even tells me to place it on my neighbour’s car ‘just to tease’. Hell I won’t! I hold no grudge against my neighbor – why should I tease him?

I really don’t need Sterling to make my day more stressful. So fuck you too, Sterling Airways – and keep you goddamn hands off my car the next time.

Just another post on the use of digital billboards in NYC.
On his website, Jason Eppink is showing how to create street-art out of the commercial content on the digital displays in the NYC subway entrances.
There is a lot of money involved in marketing on the digital displays in the New York Metro:
(estimated $274,000 for a ten-second spots every minute on each of the city’s 80 digital displays for a month). That’s a lot of money! But you’re not getting you’re moneys worth if you are broadcasting the same standard made-for-tv commercials as always.
The content should be made especially to the digital displays and be somehow adjusted and relevant to the specific physical surroundings.
Or why not hire Jason Eppink… it looks great!

Check out the interactive installation at Union Square in New York. It’s really amazing and hasm a lot of ‘wow-effect’. But I would love to play with the equipment for a couple of days and try to combine the astonishing visuals with for instance live video/data or live data from a RFID chip

At e-consultancy‘s What’s New In Online Marketing, London June 27, Flemming Madsen presented Onalytica. It’s a tool for measuring your brand’s online impact. Like Google, Onalytica counts links, but unlike the big G, Onalytica weighs each link according to the credibility of the source. Also, Onalytica (partly) understands the context of the link and thus it can judge (with a precision about 93 %) wether the brand (or product, or subject) is referred to in a negative or positive manner.

This opens for pretty nice analysis of brand impact and for targeting those sources that are especially influential. Of course your brand have to be large enough to be discussed substantially online – in reviews, in blogosphere etc.

More from WNIOM to come…

In the late nineties the University of Copenhagen shut down the department of Humanistic Computation. Scholars and IT didn’t mix, the vice deane apparently thought. IT was about programming, scholars were all about poetry and fluffy stuff. Stupid thinking – bad, bad move. Luckily in 1999 the IT University of Copenhagen stepped in and took over the market for well trained usability specialists and designers.

The idea that IT was all about numbers and algorithms also reflected onto the IT industry. Usability, interaction design and visual design were something fluffy that you applied to the web site like icing to a cake. Systems were programmed without knowledge of the user or of the user’s context and needs, and they more often than not suffered from so many conceptual mistakes that a simple revamp of the user interface just wouldn’t do the trick. To stick with the cake metaphor: It may look nice, but if the cake is genuinely bad, the icing won’t help much. The trouble was twofold: The programmers and the management didn’t understand what design was all about and we, the designers, were really bad explaining it to them. We appeared like grumpy geeks that always talked about the users and seldom about the business. No wonder: Designers were not considered a part of the business – just a part of the cost. We didn’t earn any money from the hours we spent consulting on design and concept. The projects didn’t really start, budget-wise, until the programming began.

This was of course bad for business for the web bureaus: All of the earnings had to come from a very short visual design phase and from a large, high risk, programming phase. That the conceptual design was almost non existing made the programming even more risky, as conceptual mistakes or interaction flaws would be discovered much too late in the process. This meant that quite often interaction errors were considered bugs and that we were taking immense losses trying to fix stupid design flaws that should never have been made. Just because we didn’t design before we built.

Nowadays demands are high for well educated scholars with communication skills, technical understanding, design skills, and a ‘soft’ approach to IT. Too many large scale IT projects have suffered badly from the lack of design to ignore the need for these kinds of experts. We know that the business wil suffer from bad design and profit from great design. The clients (the smart ones) are willing to pay for great design (both interaction design and visual design) and thus to bring down the risk of the programming phases.

Although a few (often large) companies still haven’t got it (they will get it, eventually, or they will suffer a slow death), most have realized that design and design consultancy are valuable business areas of their own. Furthermore, they have found out that strengthening the quality of the design and thereby the quality of the product itself may (surprise, surprise) eventually lead to bigger market shares and that branding is also a about usability, web design and the right feature set. Who would’ve known, huh?

Now we need to take the next step: We need to realize that analysis, concept and strategy must be discussed before design starts. That great design comes from a well defined strategy and clear goals.

Both the consultants and the clients must realize that it’s impossible to design – and build – anything if the strategy and business models are not there. …and that “just make it user friendly” is not a strategic goal in itself.

Too much money is still being put into platforms and websites without a well thought through branding and communication strategy. So to further bring down risk and to make each € spent on web count: Think strategic. Define your digital strategy and make sure that every website, subsite, microsite, e-mail marketing system etc. fit neatly into it. Spend the time and money needed to make sure that your consultants and designers understand what your strategy is about – or get them to help you define your digital strategy if you haven’t got one.

A small YouTube clip from a Tom Peters presentation. Play the clip for your boss, the next time he wants to benchmark you against the current Market Leader
Enjoy !




Just a recommendation to check out the Sultan of Slide Shows – Management Guru Tom Peter’s slides. You could argue about the design of the slides, but the message is clear and important for everyone engage in innovative and creative work. In the slide you get fx punchlines like this:

Enjoy!

Microsoft has launched their Project ‘Milan’, which is basically a large touchscreen with a new multitouch manipulation software.





I tried a similar product in New York last year (based a projector instead of a touch screen) and based om my experience it makes a big difference when you’re using a multitouch display instead of a keyboard.

If you’re using a multitouch display on a horizontal surface it’s often becomming a social experience in contrast to using a keyboard where you’re mostly interacting in a individual manipulation and interaction mode. So give me a couple of those, thanks … but could someone at Microsoft please make sure that the blue screen of death is not all over my coffee table?
It would ruin my creative mood, I’m sure.

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Accidentally moving my mouse cursor over the bottom of the MSN Messenger Window I triggered a hidden, brain dead happy-go-lucky video ad from McDonald’s. Suddenly the loud and annoying sound of the ad was screaming out of my earphones making my ears ring.

Do not auto start sound in any way. Not in banners, on web pages or any where else. Let the user choose when to use sound or not. You do not know how the volume levels of the user’s computer has been set, and no ad – no matter how cleverly produced – will work when blown into your head at 120dB.

Also, while the customer might be able to handle ads when surfing the web, it is very intimidating to be confronted with popup video ads and sounds in what you regard as a desktop application.

If this is the new way of presenting ads in MSN Messenger (or Live! Messenger or what ever the name is this week) I’m shifting to another IM that will leave me alone.

[UPDATE: Jacob Hage has the solution! - in Danish. It's all about getting this patch]

A McDonald’s video ad just waiting, ready to jump up and scare the minced beef out me.

Whammo – I’m not loving it.

- and a brand is not a style guide.

To most professionals these are obvious statements. But definitely not for a lot of website owners who still think that online branding is all about Flash and nice graphics, and forget that branding is in every aspect of the site: The choice of features, the tone of voice, the response time, the ease of navigation (or lack thereof), the feeling of real value. And, of course, the looks.

I’ve even heard the top 120 pixels of a web page declared as “the branding area”. BS! Online branding is about using the web medium the right way – it’s not just about putting the right logo and the right colors on some out-of-the-box web solution.

You can’t limit your branding effort to a isolated part of the page – it’s an ongoing process. Your website oozes branding from every pixel, so you better in control of what kind of branding it’s oozing…

Your brand strategy must govern your web strategy and affect all important decisions in the design process – but on all levels, not just on the visual one: A website which doesn’t provide the user with any real value but only wastes the user’s time (or downright annoys the user by being stupidly designed or coded) is bad branding – no matter how beautiful and by-the-styleguide it is.

Now grab 10 minutes of nice, visual branding fundamentals and remember that they all apply to the web too.

Source: http://www.slideshare.net/coolstuff/the-brand-gap