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The new Publicis & Hal Riney site is beautiful, innovative and simple in its language and design. The menu is hidden in an awesome graphic of a plume of red dye that floats in the center of the browser, video is used throughout the site and the copy is kept to a minimum. All good ingredients for a great site, but it still lacks the most important ingredient of all: functionality.

True, the option of webcam navigation is a nice touch. It says a lot about the company—they’re not your typical agency and they have the tools to implement cutting edge functionality. Unfortunately, to get what you really want from the site, you’re going to have to dig pretty deep. The awkward in-and-out transitions of the “liquid” menu is often confusing and abrupt. In the mouse-controlled mode, the menu items themselves are hidden until you hover over them. Each page takes more than a few seconds to load, which doesn’t necessarily cater to our impatient society. In short, extensive amount of time HR & P spends branding themselves on their site takes away from their foundation—the great work that they do. This should be their focus. After all, this is what prospective clients will judge them on.

Always choose function over form.

Sure, it’s great to have a beautiful site, but beauty comes in all forms (I love her for her personality!). Seriously though. Look at craigslist.org. Horrible, ugly, basic html that is oh-so-functional and oh-so-easy to use. Beautiful. On the agency side of things, a great example of choosing function over form is Modernista!’s redesign of their site. Well, that’s if you can even call it a redesign. Check it out. Open another window and type www.modernista.com in the address bar. You’ll arrive at their “homepage,” which, as you can see, is actually just their wikipedia page with a hovering “Modernista!” logo, menubar and message to the viewer reading “Do not be alarmed. You are viewing Modernista! through the eyes of the Web. The menu on the left is our homepage. Everything behind it is beyond our control.”

They use existing Web 2.0 social networks to share their company info and share their work. Click on “work” and you’ll find that all their print pieces are on a flickr page and all of their broadcast is on YouTube. Click “news” and you’re brought to “Google News” with search term “Modernista!” already entered in the search field. Click on “contact” and you have the choice of speaking with them via Skype or AIM, or you can click their address to bring to up a Google map pinpointing the agency.

What’s so great and beautiful about this? Modernista! is approaching their market instead of the other way around. They’re engaging rather than interrupting. The site employs technology that people already know how to use, which says a lot as far as the agency’s ability to evolve with the market goes. Most importantly, you get very easily get the information you came to get when you visit their site.

If I am sitting in a chair in Portland, Oregon, traveling at zero MPH for 8 hours a day, five days a week, how long will it take me to get to South by Southwest Interactive in Austin? Yes, you guessed it, I’m not going—maybe I’ll get there next year. One small consolation is that SXSW does a pretty good job of getting podcasts up on sxsw.com. While it is far inferior to being there (and picking from a mindboggling array of events), at least I can listen from afar at the comfort of my desk and get an idea of what the power players in the industry are talking about.

Yesterday I listened to “The Suxorz: The Worst Ten Social Media Ad Campaigns of 2007,” which was pretty entertaining, especially considering the viral marketing ideas that fly around most advertising agencies, including ours. Having crazy ideas is a healthy thing, but in these cases the agencies went through with them and failed miserably. When you’re in this field you have to be willing to laugh about things like that because you can imagine them happening to someone you know.

I’m excited to listen to “Video Production for the Web & Mobile Devices” as well as other panels with names like “Creating Findable Rich Media Content,” “Quit Your Day Job and Vlog” and about a dozen others. Keep an eye on the list as it continues to grow as the festival progresses.

It’s also worth noting that similar podcasts are online from last year. Of particular interest is “Browser Wars Retrospective: Past, Present and Future Battlefields” and “Design Aesthetic of the Indie Developer.” These are great for multitasking because you can just have them running in the background without being too distracted.

A friend recently showed me a local site called “Urban Edibles” that bills itself as “a community database of wild food sources in Portland, OR.” It’s a fantastic combination of ideology and technical functionality where you can easily find free fruit, vegetables, herbs, berries and so on. The site is equally geared towards people looking for food and those posting sources of edibles, making it easy to submit and search, either by category or location. The authors have taken care not to encourage people to abuse the information and you will find warning notes all over the site like “The status of this source is unknown. Ask before you pick!”

Currently the database is not extensive, it is in the process of being built, but it is clearly a fun project for those involved. Urban Edibles employs a variety of technologies including a very active wiki with recipes, resources and information on identifying plants, and discovering what is in season. Perhaps most impressive is the “Browse by Category” section which uses some nice Ajax and javascript animation effects (using the Prototype Library), and then ties into a link to Google Maps.

This is not the sort of website that will see huge traffic but will likely see some repeat visitors who completely fall in love with it. Sites like this make me glad to be a Web developer in Portland, Oregon. There are great ideas everywhere with folks willing to make them real.

KGW ran a story on Urban Edibles as well:

Today our department is buzzing in anticipation—Mitch and Mike seem to have made a full recovery from the disappointing college football season. Patrick and Christina are battling East Coast weather while on a book tour, and most of us used our lunch break to do last minute shopping for today’s annual gift exchange. The office vibe is downright festive. There were even holiday-themed sprinkle donuts this morning (Thanks, Mitch!).
As Holiday Season 2007 closes in you might be wondering what to get that special blogger in your life. Here are a few gift ideas from a department full of people who are never far from their keyboards.

1. A comfy, ergonomic office chair.

2. We often talk here about social marketing and Web presence. Now you can read about. This book is getting great reviews for examining the extent and possibilities of viral marketing.

3. A good roller-ball mouse and headphones.

4. Anyone putting content online should have a dictionary, thesaurus and “The Elements of Style” by Strunk and White within reach. Even in the holiday season there is no excuse for bad grammar on websites.

5. We spend so much time at our desks that they soon become littered with crumbs, hand sanitizer and random printouts. Improve the look of a blogger’s desktop with goofy or practical desk decorations including the USB Doomsday Device Hub and or the Stapleless Stapler.

Is social media taking the place of resumes and other self marketing materials? Probably not, but you better believe social media is becoming a funny–but important–component in the hiring game. Maybe I’m biased because I work in Web 2.0/new media/interactive–or whatever we’re calling it these days–and it’s second nature for me to Google, Myspace and Facebook any and everyone. Nevertheless, I hear more-and-more about managers and recruiters doing the same.

I venture to guess the aforementioned occurs more in small organizations as apposed to larger ones, mostly because of corporate hiring processes. To me, in smaller creative settings, where you’re working close to someone every day, it’s important to really know that person. Case in point–criminal histories, addictions and fetishes are all good things to be aware of. Furthermore, social media can be a great tool for managing employees. Take Kevin for example, Anglo Bank’s rising star who was busted by Facebook for lying about why he had to miss work. Here’s what happened:

1.) Kevin sent this email to his boss:

2.) Kevin’s social media savvy boss, Paul, had been on Facebook early that day and wrote him back:

3.) Paul included this attachment:

In the end, be careful what you put on the Internet. More important, be careful what you contribute to existing conversations (ie. blog comments, forums, etc.) The lesson learned is that it’s alright to research, but face-to-face interviews should not be denied because of findings online. You never know, your candidate might have a good explanation.

If you don’t know about Digg.com, you surely don’t spend enough time on the Internet. While I say that as if it’s a bad thing, I guess that’s really just more of a reason to read this blog. That said, by definition (per Wikipedia) Digg is a community-based popularity website combining social bookmarking, blogging and syndication in a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control. Sounds boring, right? Actually, quite the contrary, as Digg is probably the best thing to happen to the Internet since Al Gore and Google. That might be a bit of an overstatement, as YouTube, pop-up ads and e-mail marketing communications from Nigeria are revolutionary achievements in their own rights. Nevertheless, Digg is extremely insightful and can do wonders for marketers and ad folks alike.

All moderately funny jokes aside, Digg is something everyone in the digital world needs to know about. There are a number of community-based popularity websites on the Internet, but Digg is unarguably the most popular. Why? Probably because Digg did it right from the beginning by enabling its users to pick what makes it on Digg’s front page. Sure, not everything on the front page of Digg is newsworthy, but you better believe that whatever article, picture or video makes it on the front page is going to be seen by tens of thousands of people. Take for example Apple’s iPhone-if the cell phone’s announcement wasn’t the second-highest “Dugg” item this year, would it have been such a big hit? I venture to say yes; nonetheless, with nearly 25,000 Diggs under its belt, I’m sure there was some impact.

So, I guess the question you need to ask yourself is -”how do I (you) get on the front page of Digg?” To tell you the truth, there isn’t a straight answer to that question, or fa magical ormula to get on Digg’s front page, but it can be done, either purposefully or by accident. For something to be truly Digg-worthy, it needs to be at least one of the following:

1. Shocking - Which entails being funny, disgusting or just plain wrong; either way it needs to be something the reader feels like he/she needs to tell their friends, and possibly the world, about.
2. Important - The definition of what is important is up for debate, but in order for someone to Digg your piece, it must be truly newsworthy. Beware, “Net Surfers” are savvy and if you try to trick them you might still make the front page of Digg, but in the inverse of what you were trying to do.
3. Insightful - The item at large has to encompass applicable information, something new to the reader and be easy and fast to implement.

In the end, breaking into the Digg culture isn’t easy, but with some amount of effort, strategic thinking and a bit of luck, it can be done and the results can prove to be invaluable.

There are thousands of blogs—probably hundreds of thousands—on the web nowadays. It seems almost impossible to build readership on a new blog when you’re in the same arena with more long-standing, well-established blogs on the same topic, but I have 25 tricks to the trade that one person or company starting a new blog should always keep in mind. Here are the first five:

1. Choose a unique domain name. For example, if your blog—let’s call it “How to Peel Oranges”—is set up on Wordpress, the default URL will be something like www.HowToPeelOranges.wordpress.com. Shelling out about 15 dollars a year can buy you a unique domain name like www.HowToPeelOranges.com (same URL, sans the “wordpress” bit), which has a certain sense of legitimacy about it. It becomes its own standalone site and is more likely to appear to be the ultimate blog for discussing methods of peeling oranges.

2. Use blogging software. I may have jumped ahead a bit with #1, so first things first is choosing software with built-in blogging functionality. WordPress and TypePad are two popular ones. They are essentially the same product, but WordPress has one major bonus—it’s free!

3. Make it pretty. And make it your own. The more professional and relevant your design, the more appealing it’s going to be to those who visit your site. If HowToPeelOranges.com has a generic blue header with “How To Peel Oranges” bolded at the top of a block of black text, it’s gonna be much harder to engage your target than if it had an engaging layout, color template and design.

4. Do some research. Without researching keywords, your blog is nothing more than an online diary. A blog is a source of information, and the number one way people seek out information on the web is through search engines. Use Keyword Discovery, WordTracker or any other keyword researching software to discover the keywords that people are searching to find the information you have to offer.

5. Optimize accordingly. It’s important to have your blog target specific search terms that would draw readers that would benefit from your site as much as you would benefit from them going to your site (that applies more to company blogs than personal blogs). So, for HowToPeelOranges.com, I’m going to want to target keywords and phrases such as “oranges,” “orange peel,” or “peeling oranges” in order to direct relevant readers who don’t just land on the site by accident. I’d be sure to insert these search terms into the content (without forcing it—the quality of the content is equally as important).

Back in October I blogged about the rules of Faceboook in an entry appropriately titled “Frickle’s Rules of Facebook.” I posted about sticking to your core brand, establishing continuity and adding relevant value. Below is a list of companies who are kicking butt on the Facebook playground.

Pepsi

Pepsi has created an excellent page targeting generation Y. One promotional tool to attract visitors was “Design Millions of Cans.” Facebookers competed by creating their can via on-line interactive tools. The competition drew 10,000 competitors. J. Jackson claimed the $10,000 prize and is the first consumer in Pepsi history to design his own can. Nice job J.

Victoria Secret- Pink:

Damn me for saying it, but this sight is “hot.” Everyone from teenage girls to 45-year-old cougars love the brand—so why not dedicate a site to it? The page includes free desktop downloads, videos of their promotional hit “Worlds Largest PJ Party” and holiday gift ideas. Victoria Secret has promoted their brand so well they boast an impressive 335,000 members. Chalk one up for Vicky’s.

Target:

Back in August, Target jumped on the ‘Book featuring a page targeting incoming college freshmen. The page included relevant information with an online tutorial guide on ways to decorate a dorm, laundry tips and how to live an active college life. The page sparked conversation, as eager incoming co-eds were commenting on their love for Target and were passing along college advice. Moving forward, Target has revamped their page to appeal to a broader spectrum. Below are some of their up-to-date features.

Build Your Own Poster:

Target gives users a chance to design their own poster and resources to print them out.

Dress Like David Bowie:

“Lets Dance”—Young males online how-to-guide on dressing like the infamous rock star.

Target Gift Card:

Facebook friends of Target are automatically entered to win a $250.00 gift card. Further, at the end of the year they will give away five $500.00 gift cards.

If you know if any businesses that are doing an incredible—or horrible job—on the ‘Book, please feel free to leave a comment.

As marketers, we have to get more and more comfortable with the fact that consumers aren’t only making their own purchase decisions, but have more and more impact on the product, price, place and promotion of our marketing mix. Personally, I think this is a wonderful opportunity for savvy marketers.

We’re constantly involving customers in the promotion of our clients products and services by facilitating community.

T-shirt e-tailer Threadless.com lets visitors design the product that’s being sold.

A couple of weeks ago, Radiohead let consumers determine the price of their latest album.

Now Springwise is reporting on consumers being able to determine the price for their magazine subscription.

Who has an example of a company letting consumers decide where their products or services are being sold?

On a Portland-y note for today’s entry, I present you with a video of “Evil Bee,” a song by the local group Menomena.

The video has been online for a couple of months now, exclusively on the PF Flyers website. As of today, October 31, the exclusive hosting privilege appears to be up, at least according to their site. PF Flyers, if you’re unfamiliar, is a company that has been making stylish shoes for the last 70 years. Through this exclusive hosting agreement, PF Flyers underwrote the video, which is entirely animated and entirely awesome. By doing this they have associated themselves with the band’s scrappy indie appeal and made their site a destination for music and animation fans alike.

Past Menomena videos have all been entertaining but this one certainly takes the quality up a notch. It is exciting to see a company supporting a band in such a productive way. PF Flyers clearly realizes that they don’t need to make a shoe commercial with a Menomena soundtrack—rather than simply licensing a song they have found a way to add value and credibility to their brand without compromising the band in any way.

Aside from the PF Flyer’s page which explains the arrangement, or the actual page the video is played from, the video itself has remarkably little branding. The only hint of PF Flyers involvement is the Pablo Ferro-esque title cards at the end. It’s a refreshing, mutually beneficial take on the business of advertising and music videos.