Honestly, I didn’t think I’d see that day when Apple surpasses Microsoft in market capitalization. Of course, measured by how many operating systems are being sold, Microsoft is still leading. But in terms of market value, Apple has now become the biggest tech company in the world.

A bit scary, so much success. Is there a break? Apple’s success may increase, but alongside I see an image problem arising, with Apple’s attitude and an incapability to grasp people’s interests. Apple has clearly reached that point where it has the power to decide to become the next Microsoft — with all bad karma included — or to clean up its strategic orientation and figure out how to work with people’s interests.

The introduction of the idea of Brand Streams a couple of weeks ago caused a little stir in the scene. Interesting enough, both blog posts related to the topic didn’t get any comments, but I got a few direct responses through Twitter and direct talks with brand experts and people who work in the marketing field.

I think the Brand Streams theory divides them into two basic camps: Those who say “Yes, I can see this is how it actually works” and those who don’t understand what I’m talking about. The latter are the people who promote a kind of branding that relies on concepts like “repeat your message for long enough and people will listen” or “if no one listens, shout louder”. I don’t want to sound disrespectful, but I would say it’s the old-school marketing crowd that has trouble embracing the changes that are already happening.

There is a third camp in there, and that’s the group of people who grasp the idea of Brand Streams, they do see the changes, but they simply don’t know what to do with it. They are looking for clues how they can incorporate what they’re learning from Brand Streams. So I set out to write a list of principles, perhaps rules to follow, some sort of “10 ways to make it work” guide. But I got stuck, it didn’t work out.

I don’t have a turn-key-solution that will enable you to control a Brand Stream. This would defy the very idea of a Brand Stream, which is all about the natural flow and observation. Maybe in time, we’ll come up with more conclusive rules, principles that remain true for every kind of Brand Stream.

But in the meantime, I think it’s easier to focus on what you can do to avoid mistakes, or how you can reduce your misconceptions on the relationship between brands and people.

I think the following 10 points are summing it up:

1) People have been waiting for your brand

I put this on the top because it is this sort of background information few marketers will ever tell a client. To most ad- and marketing agencies, the client is still king. And you can’t blame them. We all have profound fears of decreasing business, so it’s understandable that many just do what they client likes, not necessarily what would be good for its business.

Never the less, realizing that you are just one voice in the crowd and no one has been waiting for your contributions is a crucial lesson. It makes even the most successful brands demure and realistic about their prospects. You don’t hear Olympic athletes blurt out “I’ll flatten the competition” before a run. Instead they are consolidating their powers and focus on the actual competition.

A lot of old-school marketing people will tell their clients they just need to be heard. Be loud, visible and boost your brand presence. Sure, it can’t hurt to be seen or heard. But what you tell your audience needs to be of some substance. It needs to be relevant to them. People are not waiting for your brand, but if you have a message for them that relates to their lives, chances are higher they will stop and listen.

2) Your audience belongs to you alone

The main reason why people have not been waiting for your brand is not because they are not interested in your story. It has a lot to do with the great amount of noise out there. You can try to put more force behind your campaign efforts, but in the end, it only matters what you have to tell.

People don’t live in isolation. They don’t consume just one kind of soda, drive the same car or wear the same style of clothes all their lives. We are surrounded by a lot of brand noise and we try maintaining a course of our own decisions. Come on, executives—you live in this world too. Humans like diversity and we love the luxury of choice.

People make choices based on various influences. Pricing is just one of them. A low price may help certain products to temporarily increase sales, but on the long run, it will be other values that make your product stay and float in the market.

3) People live online only

I already said it: people don’t live in isolation. They live their lives fully, not just offline or online. In fact, most people are not even aware of any difference between what they’re doing online or offline. Of course, this doesn’t count for everything (I still know the difference between a newspaper and an RSS feed), but in general, online is just another track of our life. It has become a main contribution and communication channel, enriching and enabling our lives on many levels. But we don’t “go online” anymore. With iPhones, laptops, at work, in coffee shops or on the road, we are practically online most of the time.

Yet, this online activity is not isolated from our other activities. It is so much tied in, you won’t even notice how much. Phone calls, email greeting cards, invoices, business cards and websites, TV or YouTube, Apple Store in a mall or online, grocery shopping or pizza delivery, text messaging and door-frame chats. What’s the difference? It all comes down to activities offline or online, but does it really matter where it happens?

What really matters is what we’re doing, how and with whom—not where. And we never do these things without context. They are always related to some need, wish, dream or random activity that makes our life what it is.

4) People need to be engaged

It started sometime in the nineties. I was working in advertising and all of a sudden, everybody seemed to talk about tribes and how they needed to be engaged. It got even worse when the Web business emerged and marketing companies were proposing engaging websites.

People don’t need to be engaged. If someone wants to engage in something, they will engage themselves. By forcing someone to click a button, fill out a form or enter a competition, you don’t do your brand a favor. You are still forcing people to do it. It’s somewhat like saying “you don’t leave this room if you don’t have sex with me”.

Better than any media before, the Web has made clear that people engage in everything but what companies want them to be engaged with. This is why many companies are still afraid of the Social Media moniker. It’s like speaking of the flying dutchman: “What do you mean, they can write whatever they want?”.

If you have a sound offer, a great product and benefits your brand represents, you don’t have to worry about disengaged customers. You should rather focus on finding the Brand Stream, because you can be assured: great products and great services always draw waves of attention.

5) People won’t share what they experience

Dream on. Seriously, this is never going to happen. People will most definitely use the Web with all the power of the tools it provides. And why not? It’s the greatest communication medium since the print press revolution. You are witnessing a new age of consumer empowerment. It should be celebrated as the greatest time to live in.

Communication is likely the most fundamental root of our civilization. It’s what made us learn, grow and finally shop. The Web is a source of inspiration, not only for startups and technology developers, but for regular people who are consuming products and services from your brands. And since companies spent decades on making people memorize and buy their branded products, they shouldn’t be surprised that people start talking about them.

This is something you should never try to suppress, control, or worse, ignore it. In fact, it’s quite dangerous to ignore the buzz around your brand. You should rather use all the tools the Web provides, to listen, learn and participate.

6) High traffic or click-rate equals measurable success

Recently I was working on a study about Social Media. It was about an analysis of usefulness of Social Media to a number of brands for this particular client, a retail business chain. I was working on it for three weeks and regularly sat together with a small team, to discuss the results and finalize next steps. The whole process was designed to ask questions and condense the output, so the client would not only see conclusions but also understand which steps could be taken to participate in a Brand Stream.

In one of these meetings one of my colleagues said: “So you’re saying there are 28,740 people who are fan of this product. That’s an enormous number of people!” and I replied “Yes, the number is big, but it means nothing. Look at the content on this page. It has no posts.”

Quantity on the Web is very relative to quality of content. It doesn’t matter how many members your brand’s profile on Facebook has. As long they are not participating, these numbers are like sleeping bats in a cave.

You can create fun games, develop surreal patterns that force fans to pull in more people, but all that “engaging” won’t work if your product is in the wrong category. See, if your product is iced tea, it won’t make people talk about it. If your product is organic meat from happy pigs, yes, then your customers might potentially have a high interest to talk about this topic.

You need to understand where your brand fits in and where there are already large groups of people who may have an interest in your brand. Only then you can count on those user numbers.

7) Microsites help every brand

I think it was some time between 1998 and 2000, I had started working full time in the Web business, when I first heard the term microsite. It was the time when clients started asking what the difference was between a homepage and a website. Once they thought they had figured that out, they said: “Ok, so a website is a bunch of Web pages, but I have this product or brand here and I want to give it a home, but I don’t want to call that a homepage. What do I call it?”. And the marketing field created an artificial label called microsite.

From 2001 until 2007, microsites became extremely popular term among our clients. I have been fighting a lost case against their popularity, because despite the fact microsites are nothing else but websites with a different label, the misconceived idea of their mystical success rate doesn’t seem to die.

What is worse, most commonly, these so called microsites are simple HTML containers for a giant Flash file. Lots of animated, blinking, flashing and noisy stuff, but nothing to do, participate or share.

Let me be plain about this: Microsites don’t work, period. They are a collossal waste of money, colorful and probably pretty, but they don’t do anything.

Microsites are based on the idea that people are desperate to play games and have nothing better to do but send you their “experience story” with your product. They are based on the idea that your audience has been waiting for a certain brand name to show up on the web, and they spend hours looking for that particular chocolate bar, mayonnaise or face lotion. Just because your brand has a microsite, nothing will change in the relationship between your customers and your brand.

8) Visual branding is the key to success

As a marketing- or Web consultant, you may hear this often from a client: “We like it, but we don’t see our branding”. By branding, many clients are referring to what is often misunderstood as design, checking off items from a list of graphical elements used as visual identifiers.

True design comes from the core of usage. The Bauhaus rule “Form Follows Function” is not just a phrase or an outdated school of thought. It’s a basic principle all good design has been following, ever since design was used, even before Bauhaus existed.

A visual identifier may be helpful for an audience to sort out where the respective Website belongs to. So of course, visual identifiers, such as colors, graphical elements like lines, boxes, typography and the use of images are all part of the total brand experience. But they play an insignificant role compared to the actual design experience, the usage of the website.

The role of visual branding is even lower in the greater context of the brand experience. In other words, if your logo sucks, maybe that will make people go “ugh…”. If your product and your brand experience sucks, people simply don’t buy your product. Looks may please your audience and give it a comforting feeling of a nice finishing, thus enforcing people’s trust in your brand’s authenticity. But visual branding is not the triggering element that will make people actually buy your product.

Visual branding has its role, but it’s not a key element in participation.

9) A 360 degree cross-marketing campaign will create a Brand Stream

Not too long ago, I emailed a former client about their brand. We had worked together in the previous year and I was interested to hear if they had plans for further marketing activities. After three months, the client wrote back: “We have a new agency doing our 360° brand campaign”. I don’t know who sold them to a “360° brand campaign”, but I feel sorry for this client.

Covering all media money can buy, blasting your message through all channels you can access, doesn’t do anything for the people. To think the repetition or increase of budget for presence would change any of your customer’s behavior patterns is simply an illusion. People don’t buy more stuff just because you’re telling them your product is great. People will only repeat buying what they made good experiences with. If your product breaks, tastes bad, has side effects or sucks in any aspect, people won’t change their mind because of your 360° marketing campaign.

It’s the core values that make a brand worth looking at. Of course it is harder to sell a good product if you don’t have a big marketing budget. Because before I make a good (or bad) experience with your product and brand, I first have to know it’s out there. But it’s short-sighted to assume that more money can buy more customer loyalty.

Brand Streams emerge on their own. You can promote your brand’s values, but you cannot influence people beyond of what they’re willing to take. If you are expecting wonders from a 360° ad campaign, don’t be too disappointed. If your product is solid and your brand represents clear value, chances are higher your brand may be in a Brand Stream already.

10) Be on every Social Media platform you heard of

For many who embrace the current changes in marketing and branding, this sounds like a no-brainer. Of course, they say, you need to be out there and use every Social Media platform there is to promote your brand. No matter what kind of brand you have, no matter where your audience is—ignore all that—you just need to have a profile on Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, LinkedIn, Twitter, Jaiku, Identi.ca, Delicious, Flickr, Picasa, Shutterbug, YouTube, Vimeo, Qik and Ustream. By just being there, you’ll have a Brand Stream going.

This kind of thinking could be counted as number one of all mistakes, because it is the most dangerous idea. If you do this, you go ahead and create profiles on all these platforms, without thinking about your audience, without taking it step-by-step, analyising your brand assets, creating a brand profile and basically knowing what you’re doing, your endeavours will fail with certainty.

Conclusion

Brand Streams are not created artificially, out of nowhere. The fact you create profiles on those social networking platforms doesn’t magically produce more audience. To work with a Brand Stream, you need to understand it’s natural flow. You need to learn where your audience is, what they dream about, what they wish for and what makes them sleep soundly at night. You need to know their worries, hopes and expectations from products your brand is promoting. You need to understand what they are talking about, when they are referring to bad personal experiences with brands. You need to recognize these experiences as “brand experience” in the first place.

In short, you need to listen, watch, read and most importantly, you need to participate as a being, not as an anonymous brand. You are no longer corporate voice, or product branding. Your voice is one in the crowd.

Recommended reading

• Brand identities are not singular
• What Are Brand Streams?
• FriendFeed Group on Brand Streams

Because people treat brands like personalities, some companies think that brands have a singular identity, defined just by their source. They are talking about brands as an entity, which should express its personality with a single voice, across all media.

Of course they’re right about the expression part. But like personalities, brands have a certain type of character. If your brand isn’t extrovert, your communication shouldn’t be extrovert either. If your brand stands for innovation, more than your advertising should speak about it.

Brand personality

Your entire brand strategy should be laid out to express the personality of your brand, which you identified during a process of collecting your brand assets, to build a brand equity. And your brand equity should reflect your corporate culture, your company’s perception as well as its policy and behavior. This is exactly where the personality of a brand is measured: in genuine behavior.

Brands are summaries of a lot of things. A lot of people confuse brands with branding, with advertising, marketing or corporate design. All these things should follow brand principles and express the values of your brand, but they are not the brand itself. They are representers.

Brand advocates

Psychologically, a brand may be perceived like a person: identity, character, personality and values are all there. But that doesn’t mean brands have singular personalities. They consist of a hive of personalities: your company’s employees, your marketing and communications division, your products and what people expect from them.

This is what brands are all about: the people. Without their perception, without their image of your products, your entire output, your brand wouldn’t even exist. So how come advertising companies, marketing specialists and brand consultants still assume it is one brand?

If it was one brand, the power of communication over this brand would be entirely in their hands. But it isn’t. In fact, more and more parts of brands are shaped, influenced and even defined by the people using them. The Internet has empowered the people to have a share in brand identification. They’re no longer just recipients, like they were with traditional advertising. With or without your marketing and your brand messages, people will always say what they’re thinking. They will express themselves too, and if you are not careful, their voice might be more powerful than yours.

Sure, brands can benefit from brand advocates—people who are feeling they are part of your brand will passionately defend it and convert more people to believe in your brand’s qualities. However, those voices are not the broad mass. And they are not driven by introvert people—to the contrary.

People shift your brand

A Brand Stream is a continued flow of information about your brand, from sources like your company, your marketing team or—you may have guessed it—the people.

Look at the technology sector, mainly handheld devices, a market that exploded in the last five years. Blogs are reviewing those gadgets, and their reviews rank on top of the lists of technology product reviews, even higher than those of traditional media, such as the New York times.

People who buy these products and test them (admittedly they are mostly geeks), post comments on those blogs. The majority of people visiting those blogs though are not necessarily geeks, they are the people who love gadgets, and they admire geeks for testing those products at first hand. They can’t afford visiting every technology trade show there is, but they are eager to learn about those products.

What you are perceiving on blogs like Engadget is a Brand Stream. A brand’s identity is not only shaped by the manufacturer and vendor of a product, but largely also by the people. This may sound terrifying to most traditional marketing expert, but it cannot be denied that this is happening right now.

The next generation of branding: Brand Streams

This is not only a short phased phenomenon; it’s not just a trend. It is the way branding will happen from now on. It is out of question that, as the originating source of your brand, you are its owner. So you should make the best of that and promote its true, honest qualities. However, it would be a mistake to assume that you will be the only one maintaining power over your brand’s stream.

The brand’s life is largely dependent on your output, your products, your company’s public and internal behavior. The larger your company is, the tougher it is to maintain that single voice-feeling in the perception field of your audience. But nevertheless, you will always be the owner of your brand. It will be in your responsibility to show the world what your brand represents, but it isn’t up to you to decide what people will do with it.

The difference in branding

The difference is to old-school branding is, you will have to adjust your behavior accordingly to the brand stream’s flow. Ignoring trends, tendencies, swirls if you will, may disturb your brand stream and give it a different direction than you may have intended. It’s quite dangerous to keep a Brand Stream unattended.

Don’t make the mistake to look at your own output only. And don’t try to cut off or censor the people’s voice. This would backfire on your brand even more. The best you can do is to look at what people are saying about your brand and learn from it. There is an enormous amount of data out there, and you just have to read it and make logical conclusions.

The future of your brand is in the hands of the people you made it for, and it is up to you to fulfill their expectations. And if that means you need to change your product- or marketing strategy, then it means just that, but you can’t avoid following up on it.

Related Links

• What Are Brand Streams?
• FriendFeed Group on Brand Streams
• You have no control

A Brand Stream emerges when there is not just a single source involved in shaping a brand image, but it is also influenced by people participating in that brand experience. Those people become an interactive part of the brand, passionately defending it and, to a certain degree, even defining its identity.

A recent example of a Brand Stream is the presidential election campaign for Barack Obama. The person brand Obama was not only built by the campaign team. Of course, its initial creation was strategically planned and orchestrated by Obama’s campaign managers, but it was a chain reaction of factors beyond their direct influence, which were eventually leading to the campaign’s successful result.

To understand the working principles of Brand Streams, one has to examine the principles of branding and the liberation of media by consumers. Brand Streams are an entirely new phenomenon, following the basic principles of game theory and networking theory.

Experience fields are shaping the brand experience

The brand image is an summary of values, so called brand assets, which begin to take shape in our heads as soon a brand enters a market place. This is already the case when the product was manufactured and brought to market, even without any effort in adertising and branding.

A consumer’s view of the product, his decision-making and how he’s going to interact with it, are happening in response to the brand values it represents. That process is affected by various influences, but anywhere where humans get in touch with products and become aware of certain values they see in them, it will form characterization, a brand personality in their heads.

In the life cycle of any product, various experience fields and interaction points are shaping an organic impression of a brand. This has a direct influence on purchase-decisions. It isn’t rare that customers can’t tell why they were preferring one product over another, after they had bought something. Being questioned, they may refer to the quality of the product, point out its features, or try to explain the superiority of their product of choice. Alternatively, they may have wanted to try something new, and the appearance and presentation of a particular brand just left a good first impression. Sometimes we decide for brands that remind us to similar brands, or trigger memories of positive experiences related to other aspects of our lives.

A purchase-decision is personal and it is strongly driven by psychological factors. Even the most conscious and logical selection-process (like comparing camera reviews of a photography magazine, or browsing a list of comparable functions of different car models), is depending on the influence of your brand experience.

Aside of tangible products (things of matter), also abstract products, like services or performances, can create a brand experience. Additional performance services, which are not directly related to the basic functions but are supporting the condition of the brand experience, are called Added Value.

Experience fields

Classic experience fields can be found at the point of sales (POS), where you buy the product. It is the product experience itself, its packaging, the simplicity or complexity of its first application, its longterm-application, your interaction with customer support, durability of the product, related advertising, public relations articles and reviews from journalists.

Somewhat newer experience fields have become an extension of the classic set of experience fields. They have recently gained importance in the perception of consumers. Among them are public forums, personal experience reports, comments on blogs, magazines and newspapers (who are largely adopting the blogging principle of a conversational medium), microblogging (like Tumblr, Jaiku or Twitter), customer satisfaction-services (Like GetSatisfaction), media platforms (such as Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo), social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn) and interest-driven communities.

Not only are classic and new experience fields linked to one and another, they exist in a seamless integration. It’s imperative to understand that consumers are not perceiving a difference between these experience fields. An offline-experience is easily shared and therefore transformed into an online-experience. “Online”, after all, is nothing but another channel that lets people do what they’ve always been doing: to communicate with each other.

Interaction points

Interaction points are areas that provide a direct interaction with the brand experience. These can be the product experience, for an example, when freshly purchased computer isn’t working as expected and you are calling customer support. Also, the point where you decide to buy something, in a store, or when you are about to sign an insurance contract, are all interaction points. They are the crossing points, the conversion points, where you transfer from the emotional brand experience to an actual transaction.

Not only purchases are transactions, also filling out forms, giving your information, or retreiving information, are all transactions made through these interaction points.

Especially online, where you are surrounded by all sorts of brand experiences, these interaction points are playing a steadily growing important role. Because your awareness of interaction is reduced to pure intuition, and because your interaction with Web services is mostly a personal, sheltered act (you are sitting alone in front of a computer in most cases), these online interaction points have a large surface on the Web. They are the very fabric the Web is made of.

About three years ago I was thinking a lot about brands, consumers and the reasons why they are buying products. I started talking about people, not consumers, and gave my clients the advice to treat them as such. People, I said, want to be taken serious. They don’t regard themselves as consumers anymore. They care more about their own needs, their passions and their daily lives, than about a glossy advertising world they are confronted with.

From this point on, my research and conclusions about people and brands started spinning towards a new thinking model, which I later called Brand Streams. I began talking about Brand Streams in early 2008. In a recent article in German, I thoroughly explained what Brand Streams are. I used this expression in my presentations and speeches, and it seems that the message found reception, because today I discovered a FriendFeed group called Brand Streaming.

What are Brand Streams?

Here is an excerpt from an upcoming series of articles, which will explain the correlation between Brand Streams, people, experience fields and interaction points:

A Brand Stream emerges when there is not just a single source involved in shaping a brand image, but it is also influenced by people participating in that brand experience. Those people become an interactive part of the brand, passionately defending it and, to a certain degree, even defining its identity.

A recent example of a Brand Stream is the presidential election campaign for Barack Obama, in which the person brand Obama was not only built by the campaign team. Its initial creation was strategically planned and orchestrated by Obama’s campaign managers, but it was a chain reaction of factors beyond their direct influence, which were eventually leading to the campaign’s successful result.

To understand the working principles of Brand Streams, one has to examine the principles of branding and the liberation of media by consumers. Brand Streams are an entirely new phenomenon, following the basic principles of game theory and networking theory.

More Links about Brand Streams

• The FriendFeed group for Brand Streams
• Twitter post on May 13, 2009
• Another early definition of Brand Streams, also on Twitter, on April 20, 2009.
• On March 16, 2009 I defined Brand Streams on Twitter

For future reference, please respect the CreativeCommons license when referring to Brand Streams:

Brand Streams by Henning von Vogelsang is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at corebasis.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://corebasis.com.

Twitter has a problem with usernames, but it doesn’t admit it is a real issue. Actually, it is ignoring it, most likely because the Twitter team doesn’t think it is a significant issue. They are probably looking at it from a programming- or database-perspective, when they should understand the implications it has on the Twitter brand.

At the point where Twitter is now, with more than a million users worldwide, it has already reached the zenith of social applications. Like Facebook and Myspace, it has gained enough strength that it can afford to ignore user requests or even bad press. This only works until a certain point of course, as if there’s enough users and enough press demanding different behavior, any brand can be forced to change.

What’s the issue?

There is an option on the Twitter user profile that lets you enter your real name. The space is limited to 20 characters, including empty spaces. This is probably more than enough for the majority of names, because most regular names are somewhere between 15 and 18 characters, even if they include middle names.

The idea of providing space for your real name is to let other people find you. If a friend of yours knows you are on Twitter, but he doesn’t know your Twitter name, he can simply search for your first or last name. I don’t know why, but Twitter’s name search is very limited. It doesn’t allow you to search for a full name (first and last name) at once.

My name is Henning von Vogelsang. It’s not Henning Vogelsang and not H. von Vogelsang. But if I want to use my real name, Twitter forces me to cut it off at one or the other ending, because otherwise people will never find me through Twitter’s people search. I am probably one in a hundred people with this problem, and therefore my issue does not pose a relevant problem to Twitter. They don’t see harm in ignoring it. When I reported this problem to Twitter, I got a simple answer: “As of now, this all the space we have. Sorry.”

I wanted to know if I am alone with this problem, so I ran a little experiment using the IMDB (International Movie Database). Out of 50 names, only nine had names with more than 20 characters. That doesn’t seem a lot, and the experiment wasn’t really scientific. Still, 4.5% of all names I found in this random search wouldn’t be able to use their real names on Twitter. The actors Stephen O’Neil Martin, Clifton MaCabe Murray, Ricardo Antonio Chavira, Desiree April Connolly are out of luck.

Why is this an issue?

Plane tickets produce a similar problem. You cannot enter long names on tickets because there is not enough space. But a plane ticket isn’t a business card, it is used once, thrown away afterwards, and the only people looking at it are flight attendants and yourself.

Imagine the same restriction would apply to all business cards. “I’m sorry Sir, but 20 characters is all the space we have”. What would Barrack Hussein Obama do, or Robert Louis Stevenson? Sure, the president doesn’t use his middle name anyway. But what about people with long first and surnames? They are out of luck. If you have a long name and you want a business card, you either change your name or you’ll have to cut it off. Your business card is your personal contact you put in the hands of your acquaintance. Who wants a crippled version of his name on a business card?

What the Twitter team forgets is that a name is very personal. It’s part of your identity. Whether you liked it from the start or not, you end up living with it all your life. You introduce yourself to someone with your full name. “Di Caprio”, “La Roche”, “McGuire”—no one is looking for “Caprio” only. And none of these people would want to give up a part of their name, particularly not when they’re introducing themselves.

A name is not a message. It’s the signature of your identity.

There are some Twitter-users who get upset when someone types “Twitter” with a capital T. It’s spelled “twitter”, they say, based on the logo on the Twitter homepage. I’m a consultant for brands and I hear this all the time: people working in a company have a strong connection to how their brand is spelled. Dare you, if you spell the “new at&t” with capital letters, like it used to be until they changed their corporate design. People have a strong connection with names, even more so when it comes to their own.

Technical background of the Twitter name issue

If you wouldn’t know what was the reason behind the limited name space, you might assume it is a stupid restriction, comparable to the millenium bug. It looks like no one ever thought of the implications a 20 character space restriction could cause.

If you know a little more about how Twitter is built, you’ll understand they are now stuck with 20 characters, unless they are changing a substantial part of their database-backend. For each message, Twitter provides a total space of 160 characters. 140 characters are for your message, 20 characters are for your name, which is assigned with each message. Should they ever want to change one of these two numbers, it will automatically increase or reduce the other number. Adding a single space to the name field would cut the message off at 139 characters. Given the fact that by now Twitter must have several million messages stored in its database, it is highly unrealistic they will ever change the 140 character rule.

What’s the solution?

For now, there is none. While I’m left with speculation regarding Twitter’s further intentions to address this issue, I assume they are aware of it. If it was easy, I guess they would have changed it already. A blog post by Paul Holmes indicates that they’re aware of the restrictions caused by the current setup, which apparently doesn’t only affect regular users with long names. On the long run, this may become a big problem for Twitter’s expansion as a service and brand.

According to the Twitter VP of Operations, Santosh Jayaram, who previously worked on Google’s search quality team, big improvements on Twitter’s search capabilities are in the works. It is not unlikely that Twitter will improve the current name search with wildcards and live-search capabilities.

Whenever there is no good solution, there is usually a workaround. In my case I changed the first name to its initial letter, so at least people can find me by my last name, which is pretty unique. If I would have changed the last name, the chance of finding me through people search would be nonexistent.

It is not a satisfying workaround though. It was forced upon me and frankly, it put a little bump into my image of the brand Twitter. Nothing is perfect in this world, but Twitter was pretty much perfect for me up to this point.

It is an open secret: Web browsers have emerged to be the number one platform for applications that tie Internet activities into our daily life. From email over social networks to photo management, Web browsers are the centerpiece-software users want to use. From this viewpoint it is surprising how little innovation browsers have seen until just recently. First Google Chrome stirred a lot of media response, and now Safari has received an update that seems to follow on the path of Google’s Chrome.

Browsers and the social Web

Introducing major improvements on browsers is not an easy task these days. Look at Flock, which has been out since five years, but it never really took off. It is based on Mozilla, just like Firefox, but adds a couple of interesting social features. Flock integrates account management and easy connectivity to services like Flickr, Facebook and Delicious. Flock had its debut in 2004, and at its time it was a spark of hope, the browser with the most innovative approach.

Despite its high range of capabilities and availability for both, Windows and Mac OS, Flock never had a chance to establish a broad user base. I personally believe that the target audience of Flock was not focussed enough. There was a niche market for this kind of browser, But Flock attracted mostly geeks, like Merlin Mann, Chris Messina (who designed its interface) or myself. Maybe it was the developer’s team hope, that eventually, Flickr, Facebook and alike would get a grip in the mass market, and along with it, Flock would get a chance as a popular player. But the rise of social applications is a slow and ongoing process, and the new battle ahead of us might not even take place in browsers, but in mobile devices.

Apple’s claim of leadership

True to its core, Apple has always tried to be on the innovative side of software introductions. It is this kind of company that claims innovation as their DNA. Add style, a great sense for user experience and ignorance towards customers, and you got a good idea of what makes the Apple brand successful.

Initially, Apple had been quite successful with Safari. It’s market share climbed a little bit after its introduction to Windows, even though it’s unclear whether this market share was cut off on Internet Explorer or Firefox. The more likely scenario is the latter, because Internet Explorer users typically don’t care what kind of browser they are using, while Firefox users are the ones who likely try something new.

Chrome versus Safari 4.0

If you run Windows and gave Google’s new browser, Chrome, a test ride, you may feel familiar with a lot of “new features” introduced with Safari 4. Most prominently, the tabs are placed on top of the window bar, just like in Chrome. The behavior of dragging pages off and on from this tabs bar, say, to give a tab its own window, is also exactly the same like in Chrome. However, I’m not sure, but I think it was Apple who introduced this feature in Safari 3. before Chrome adopted it. The main difference is—and this is probably due to the limited capabilities of Mac OS today—that Chrome runs an actual application in itself for each individual tab. It is one container (the main window), but each tab is a process of its own.

Safari 4.0 doesn’t have such a feature, and it will likely never be able to run individual processes in each tab, unless Apple makes fundamental changes in its operating system. This may also explain why Google engeneers (not the dumbest on this planet) are having such a hard time adopting Google for Mac OS. You could easily create an application that looks and (to an extent) feels like Chrome on the Mac, but you cannot run it the same way like on Windows. Not, unless you figure something out to work around this particular limitation of the Mac OS.

Safari 4.0 tries to keep pace with the big players in the market, Firefox, who has shown true innovation in the past, and Chrome—but despite Apple’s effort to improve the user experience on Safari 4.0, it fails to deliver on the true innovation level. It’s a step forward, but some of the added features wouldn’t be missed if they weren’t there, and that is never a good thing for an application.

A friend of mine once said he believes that we geeks live in a bubble of our own. We always know the world news before everybody else, we are always up to date with the latest gadgets, we claim we have invented the trends we are following. And of course we constantly cite famous people’s books we are reading right now.

Truth to be told, we are humans like everyone else, but we suffer from a narcissistic ego trip.

Which is the very reason why we are successful at what we’re doing, and—believe it or not—it actually helps the world tackling some of its current problems. Celebrity geeks are not only entertaining, they actually change things. In order to become a celebrity geek though, they must become a person-brand and make use of every channel they get their hands on.

Which leads to the common misconception that “spreading the word” across all channels is the proven new marketing strategy, and all you have to do is sign up for Twitter and you’ll have the masses listening to you.

If this was true, Robert Scoble wouldn’t have 69,631 followers and Barack Obama wouldn’t be President by now.

What is Twitter?

People often ask me what Twitter is. The common answer you may hear is, it’s a micro-blogging channel for people to share their thoughts with the world, using only 140 letters. But that only tells you about how it works, it doesn’t tell you what it is.

Twitter is your teacher. It’s a confession booth. It’s your announcement board. It can be entertaining, boring or overwhelming. It is a source of inspiration as much as a source of distraction. Twitter can make your day, or it can ruin it. It is a great way to meet great minds. It is a way to figure out great minds think alike.

In short, Twitter adds something to your life that wasn’t there before. It connects you with people like in a direct conversation, which is much more alive than any thread of blog comments or email exchange.

But is this useful for you? And how do you make Twitter work for you?

1) Say something!

You have a Twitter account. Sitting there and waiting doesn’t do anything. You need to add a couple of friends and say something. Don’t be shy, your first post doesn’t have to be brilliant. This isn’t blogging and it isn’t literature. But beware; this isn’t text messaging either. It is something in between of it all. The point is, and this may be the most crucial thing to understand how to make Twitter work for you: say something. Anything, just say it, dammit!

2) Start listening!

Once you got used to contribute to the crowd of sparrows, and once you added a few of your real life-friends who are already on Twitter, you may notice that they too have something to say. Don’t act surprised. Yes, you will actually have to work for being noticed, and starting to listen to people is not such a bad idea. Your friends, celebrities, even startups and brands may have to say something interesting. Behind great products are often great minds, after all. Not every celebrity or great thinker is automatically a great conversationalist, but many of them share what comes across their lives. And this is where Twitter actually starts making sense for you.

3) Follow the bright minds!

Listening to tweets (the unofficial term for Twitter-posts) of Al Gore, Barack Obama, Stephen Fry, Om Malik, Michael Arrington, Tim O’Reilly, Kevin Rose, Jason Kottke, John Gruber, Jeffrey Zeldman, Merlin Mann, Emily Chang, danah boyd or Julia Roy is probably more important than telling us what you had for lunch today. Think of any celebrity name that comes to your mind. Book authors, geeks, actors, musicians, politicians (but forget Paris Hilton and sorry, Seth Godin doesn’t use Twitter). If they published anything at all, chances are they are on Twitter. Like I said, it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but if you want to learn something about life and succeeding with it, it is not a bad idea to follow brilliant minds on Twitter.

4) Be interesting!

You don’t need to copy-cat those bright minds you are following. You may have noticed that they sometimes sound pretty human, in fact to an extent, they might be humans after all. They too make typos, forget manners, say something just for the sake of having said something and they sometimes inform you that they’re sick, tired or hungry. They are as human as you are, and what distinguishes them from you is the only fact that more people are listening to them than to you. Why is that? Simply because they are more interesting. These people know what to say and how to say it. They have proven it by writing books, in interviews, blogs and Twitter posts. So when you say something, try avoiding to report on your cat’s increasing loss of hair. If you think something interesting, say it, but make sure you don’t look dull.

5) Don’t be stupid!

Which brings me to the next point. Don’t attempt to post formulas for propulsion-engine physics on Twitter. Don’t try acting smart. You are allowed to be mundane sometimes. What makes you interesting is your personality, your way of observing and sharing things. Your wit, your insights, your experiences. One bad Twitter message cannot ruin your life, but it can make you look pretty stupid.

The problem with “stupid” is, that every person you ask defines it differently. But we all seem to have a common belief that our personal idea of “stupid” is an accurate representation of what stupid actually is.

Stupidity online isn’t about being less brilliant or spreading dull messages. It’s about the opposite of what makes you interesting; it means taking money out of the account of your person-brand. Once you start spreading nonsense on Twitter, people will start blocking you. It’s almost impossible to get out of the blocking-pit.

6) Timing is crucial!

I’ve used the expression “crucial” one too many times already in this post. If it was just ok to use “crucial” previously, the next rule is really crucial if you want to get the most out of Twitter: Timing. A lot of people think “timing” means to say something at the right time. That is not all there is to it. You need to say the right thing at the right time.

Think about this for a second. “The right thing” doesn’t mean it is the best thing or the necessary thing to say right now. It means it is the thing of interest, the topic of discussion, the one thing people are thinking about right now. Of course this is not singular: a lot of things are momentarily hot topics, and in many of those cases it’s debatable whether these things are actually important or not. But timing for your statements means you listen to the world, and when there’s something you have a valuable insight to add, just follow rule number one.

7) Don’t hesitate!

If you are a blogger, a journalist or a book author, you may be following many of these rules already. However, for media like blogs, books, newspapers or magazines, it makes a lot of sense to be thoughtful about what you are saying to the world. You are writing it down, you revise it and you think about it. In many cases you sleep a night over it before you actually reveal your words to the world.

I won’t go as far saying this isn’t true for Twitter. (See the rules of being stupid or interesting.) But there’s another element of timing, and that goes with the rule of being on top of the topics the world finds interesting: You need to be quick. I don’t mean the Western-style pull-or-be-dead kind of quick. But if you are thinking about something interesting, there is no point in holding it back. Make it a concise, simple line that fits in 140 signs and post it. You can show up late to the party and no one will bash you for it—just don’t wait for the right moment for too long.

8) Make sense!

It may not be obvious, but this is a little different than “Be interesting!” or “Don’t be stupid!”. Twitter is not text messaging and it isn’t a giant chat room. Remember, whatever you have to say on Twitter, the world is listening. If you respond to someone, try making sense. Think for your audience, don’t make them wonder what the hell you are talking about.

Making sense excludes tweets like “Hell, yeah!” or “What was that?”. It isn’t enough to add the names of the people you are responding to (which is done by adding an @-sign to a Twitter name). You can’t expect people to respond to your tweet out of context, let alone make them listen to you. On the long run, if you keep doing this, you may annoy a couple of people and they will end up thinking you are a douche bag.

9) Don’t abuse your powers!

Ever since Twitter started out, marketers in- and outside the blogosphere have been glancing at it with skeptical eyes. While many self-proclaimed experts engaged in long debates over the usefulness of Twitter, concluding in mutual agreement that Twitter wouldn’t survive the next year. Several years later, Twitter climbs the charts of Web 2.0 applications and by now it is often mentioned in one sentence with Facebook and the President of the United States.

Talking to people and have them listen to you is a powerful thing. It can change your life and make you rich, if you play your cards right. If you have a product like your music, your t-shirts or a dying brand, you might be intrigued by the idea of an audience of six million potential followers. To the outside world, Twitter looks like a giant mailbox system where you just have to open an account, post a message every thirty seconds, and people will just love it. They will cheer and celebrate your joining of Twitter, and boom, your brand or product will gain more market share.

I know it sounds tempting. But wake up. It won’t happen.

I admit this is a somewhat simplifying explanation, but never the less it is true to its core. Skittles recently tasted this medicine, when the brand tried to make its Twitter account its brand-homepage. Two days later they made the Wikipedia explanation of Skittles their home.

The truth is, most brands don’t know how to make Twitter useful for their marketing, so they are just blindly stumbling around in social applications, putting themselves in the middle of the party and hoping someone wants to dance with them. Most corporate heads simply don’t get it, but those who do get it actually do benefit from social media. They learn a great deal about their customers and they get the chance to improve their product-value based on this information.

10) Don’t be pretentious!

The thing about rock stars is, they actually rock. (Which you may apply as a general rule -of-thumb next time you attempt calling Madonna a rock star). Rock stars don’t need a stage or a guitar to rock, they usually rock all the time. It’s their life. A rock star can say anything and girls will start shrieking and jumping on their heels. Rock stars often suffer from their fame, but they usually got there because they were following the drug of fame like mosquitos being drawn towards street lights.

Becoming a rock star doesn’t happen over night; it is rock-hard work. You need to be up for this. You need to become numb for the question whether you really want to do this and lose your privacy or even your dignity over it. But all that aside, you can try as hard as you want and you’ll never be a rock star, unless you actually rock.

A lot of people try being rock stars, but they fail. Some of them make it to the charts, others actually manage to move the masses when they are on stage. They may call themselves rock stars, the media may call them rock stars, but in fact they are just people who figured out what people want. They don’t rock. They may even have talent, but the more they try being a rock star, the more pretentious they actually are.

And this is where this rule applies. Don’t try being a rock star. Just be yourself, be upfront, don’t hold back with the truth, say what’s on your mind, be helpful, insightful, interesting and naturally funny. Use all your talents but don’t think about them. If you hear someone saying “you rock!”, try to not let it go to your head.

Ok, I can see your where you’re coming from, but I still don’t have the hots for Twitter (and stop using exclamation marks, will you?)

By now you may have figured out what this post is all about. It is not only useful for Twitter nerds. Think about it: Apply the rules above to any situation in life, and you are actually better off with everything. Because the rules of life are not so much different than the rules for Twitter, or any other tool of communication. Your reality, your life consists of people surrounding you and interacting with you. Friends, family, co-workers, students, teachers, acquaintances and cashiers at the grocery store.

Be direct and upfront, honest but polite, interesting but not at any price. Talk to them about topics they are interested in and they will start paying attention. Who knows, they might even start following you.

Brent Simmons, creator of NetNewswire for Web and iPhone, recently noted in his blog:

When I read that Apple’s solution to the problem of the negative press around apps being rejected from the App Store was to add an NDA warning, I thought it was satire. It couldn’t be true. But it appears to be true. If so, then someone is making a mistake. This behavior is definitely beneath the company that makes the software and hardware I adore and love developing for.

It seems odd to me that a company who knows so much about marketing, and does a lot of things right, begins to fail where it matters: at the user base, the people using Apple products, and creating products for Mac OS and iPhone.

This kind of reaction is a cry out loud; it reminds me of overreacting parents who are grounding his and her teenage daughter because she asked why she isn’t allowed to go out. This kind of message to the public is like saying “I don’t know what else to do!”.

The problem is, this kind of reaction fits in a row of recent observations with Apple, of a company which simply experiences too much success. Ever since the introduction of the iPod, and lately the iPhone, Apple is growing quickly. Not only as a company, also as a brand. From this brand, you don’t expect behavior that makes Microsoft look like a soft lamb.

Don’t you know this Apple? People are part of your brand experience.

A little more than a week ago I was asked to design a logo for a Web startup. It’s a bookmarking service, quite similar to Diigo. I negotiated with my friend who had sent me the request, evaluating the process of branding. It would have been a low-budget job, so I reduced the process to the most limited set of needs. In the end, my friend informed me that they had chosen to go with a different offer. I wasn’t unhappy, because it appeared this client didn’t understand the purpose of a logo anyway.

I don’t do logos

Clients who have worked with me know that I don’t do logos. I do brands, and brands may or may not involve the finding of a name or creation of a logo. If a logo makes sense for a brand, it should become part of the branding process. The goal of that process shouldn’t be the creation of a logo (or the creation of a visual identity), it should be the creation of a brand. A brand involves the entire user experience, from product- or service experience to customer management and internal company behavior. A brand is based on virtues (or values), which should be naturally reflected in a brand’s identity design. Consequently, designing a brand doesn’t mean designing a logo or just the visual interface where the brand interacts with people. It means designing the entire brand experience.

To: feedback@hulu.com
Subject: Imagine there’s no countries

Dear Hulu,

After you ignored my first email, I will give it one more try, before I’ll go ahead and post this message on my blog.

In my first note I tried to point out the futility of putting shackles on a service that is hosted on the Internet, which by definition is not locality-based, but independent of countries and regions. The only binding element of the Internet is the technology it runs on and the people who are using it. Of course humans are bound locally, but the Internet frees them of this barrier, a boundary many acknowledge as the last frontier of free communication.

The nature of the Internet is communication, not restriction thereof. If you don’t get this simple principle, then I, and with me millions of Internet users, simply don’t get you. Let me have a look at your business idea: you want to bring your TV content to all people, for free, and I assume with this you want to envigorate your hosting TV brands, Fox and NBC. You allow everyone on earth to become a member, but you won’t let everbody watch the shows. You are excluding everyone who is located outside the US. A couple of weeks ago I was in Austin, Texas, while I was attending SXSW. I had no problem accessing your content from there. But because I’m in a different region now, my rights to get your content have been crippled and I find myself demoted to second class customer.

You couldn’t know I have a blog, but you should have assumed it. These days, everbody with access to the Internet is somehow, somewhere conntected with other people on the Internet. Everyone who consumes online is also publishing online, even if it’s only micro content. The Internet just enables the nature of ourselves, to communicate freely. And the longer this thing we are calling the Internet goes, the more it becomes apparent, that this is just the beginning of something different than anything you know from TV. Consumers are not consumers anymore, they want to be treated like people. And they treat brands like people too, so you should be careful with your actions. If you want to be my friend, you need to behave. You need to be loyal, honest and true. Betray my trust and I don’t buy your brand any longer.

Communities are not built, they grow by themselves. You should know this most basic principle of all communities. You might have a growing fellowship of users in the US, but by overruling one of the most fundamental ideas of how communities online work, you not only ignore those other users worldwide; you shut them off, you close them out, you actively dismiss them.

In your mission statement, you wrote:

“Hulu’s ambitious and never-ending mission is to help you find and enjoy the world’s premium content when, where and how you want it.”

Did I read “when, where and how you want it”?

Let’s have a look at what this means for your brand. A minor effect? Seriously? Do you honestly believe Europeans keep their thoughts for themselves? Do you think they have a different Internet, restricted to the European Community? Like a French, a German and a Dutch Internet? In what kind of world are you living? If you are offering a service that is accessible worldwide, with the very idea of providing content everywhere, but then you are refusing to enabling us to consume this content, you are basically telling us we’re not worth it. You are hurting your brand. You make people angry. And you don’t need a marketing guru (not even an old-school push-marketing guru) to tell you that this is bad, very bad. Angry customers telling other customers about a miserable brand experience is a pure nightmare for any brand. It has the power to let stocks tumble and fall. It has the potential to bring you down.

I am not really sure if you know what you are doing. It seems to me your actions resemble the same arrogance and paralysis like a government most famous for its failures. Of course you can treat climate change like a local problem too. I’m sure at US command, clouds, winds and storms make a full stop at your country borders. Maybe you should look at the Katrina files in this regard.

Back to your actual problem, blowing off potential customers with an unfulfilled promise. A commending review in Fortune magazine won’t cure your problem.

Let me quote one of your statements in this Fortune article:

“‘They said big media was too stupid to do anything appropriate on the Web, and that NBC and Fox were incapable of partnering. Both charges have been wrong from day one.’ Whether or not that’s true, the world will soon judge for itself.”

I couldn’t find a better conclusion than Fortune authors David Kirkpatrick and Adam Lashinsky. (To get that, you first need to grasp that the world is not flat.)

I really recommend you go back to your drawing boards and reconsider different options. I don’t need to lay them out to you, but here’s a hint: Make your stuff accessible to everyone, or no one at all. Stop playing China or Cuba, by attempting to control the Internet and applying artificial barriers. A polite information that the content is not available in “my country” will not cut it. It will provoke more blog posts like this one.

With Best Regards,
Henning von Vogelsang

You don’t need to get dug to feel the digg-effect. Meet the Netdiver effect: On Saturday corebasis.com was featured on Netdiver news. On Sunday Google Analytics counted 300 page views and 192 unique new visitors, and MyBlogLog counts 151 visitors from Netdiver.

Netdiver has been around for, like, forever. Seriously, it has remained to be a great source of inspiration, stirring the news in the digital design age long before CSS Zen Garden saw the daylight, or any of the newer CSS inspiring sites were born. My Internet experience today grew alongside with Netdiver over the past seven years. They never ceased to be great source, and I am glad and proud they have featured core once again.

After trying to make Apple’s new Safari 3.0 beta work for three hours, I give up. I will have to live without Safari for the next couple of months, because the old version got deleted by the new one and I have no way of bringing it back.

In the history of Apple’s software, this was the most disastrous updates I ever experienced. Granted, I should have waited. Beta software is called beta for a reason. On the other hand, there is not much that can be beta about it. Moving tabs is not really the feature I expect to crash my whole system and make Safari die.

I was fine with the previous version except of two things. Speed and the disability to remember my browsing. Firefox on the other hand lets me save sessions and it remembers the tabs I closed when I shut down the software. Why not Safari? As far as my perception goes, this was one of the longest awaited software updates since the release of OS X. Even with proper CSS support, Safari was outdated compared to modern browsers like Firefox.

Now I am sorry to say Apple killed it for me. I don’t know what made it incompatible with my system. Frankly, I don’t care, because I am deeply disappointed. I would have expected something more stable out of Apple’s development. I could have lived with a browser that crashes now and then, but I think killing a functional software, making it plain unusable, is not acceptable. Not from any browser vendor and particularly not from Apple.

Here’s a warning to all Tiger users. Do not install Apple’s Safari 3.0 beta. It will not work.

Advertising Age writes in a report:

Mark Greatrex, senior VP-marketing communications and insights, will launch the “Sprite Yard”, a mobile community where its young-adult target can share information, photos and chat. And by using numbers printed under bottle caps, they’ll be able to collect mobile treats such as ringtones, mobisodes and other content. The U.S. launch is June 22; the Yard was launched in China in early June.

Treats? So that is what makes me go and use communities? Interesting. Coca-Cola’s brand Sprite tries to delve into Web 2.0-like community spirit. But they don’t use what is already there, they’re trying to start something new. I’m not sure if this is a mistake. Okay, you can start something new, but then you need to offer something that makes a difference to what is out there. They still haven’t got the right idea about how these things work. Even worse, they think it’s ringtones that makes people participate and start with yet another community site.

“Sprite wants you to participate in its brand new community site!”–“Why should I do that?”–“Uhm, because we’re Sprite?”

I’m not saying it’s going to be that way, but they have to be careful to not come across like that.

Here is an interesting tidbit I got from Tribe in my email this morning.

“… we (Tribe) sold the software to Cisco and most of the engineering team went along with the deal to reduce overhead.”

Tribe is a social network similar like MySpace, Friendster, Facebook and the fresh rising star called Virb.

To me, Cisco’s strategy becomes more and more obscure, or ominous at best. Okay, I got that they want to enter consumer market with a VOIP concept. I also understand that they are attempting to spread into a wider base of markets, broadening their footprint, so they are not solely dependent on networks and network hardware. But what has a social network like Tribe got to do with it?

Of course it’s never easy to tell from the outside about a company’s motivation. Any strategic moves may not make sense if you don’t know the big picture. On the other hand, if you see a row of strategic moves falling in place, you usually get closer to the picture with every stroke. In this regard, the acquisition of Tribe.net doesn’t really make sense to me.

It looks more like a “we can buy you too”-kind of thing, to mimic Google and Yahoo and still be in the buzz of the industry. As Cisco undoubtly realized at some point, in comparison to Yahoo and Google they are aging. After the rather embarrassing iPhone trial with Apple they need good press. Tribe was Web 2.0 before the term even existed. Maybe this is an act to rejuvenite Cisco from the inside, to demonstrate to themselves that they are up to the game with the big boys playing in the Web 2.0 field.

By the end of this month, I will hand my landlord a form with a formal application to turn off cable TV. That is right, I will no longer be able to watch TV through cable. (I need to apply for the disconnection through the landlord, because in Zurich most households have cable by default, it is a service that comes with the rent. In other words, you always pay for cable. Whether you have a TV or not does not matter.)

Instead of cable, I will start a contract with a new TV provider, an alternative to Cablecom’s offerings, called Bluewin TV.

Cablecom is a monopolist Swiss cable provider. Until November 2006, no real alternative to Cablecom existed. That changed with the introduction of Bluewin TV, offered by Swisscom, a Swiss telecommunications company, which was run by the Swiss government until 1997.

Bluewin TV works with regular phone lines utilizing ADSL. My current Internet connection is set up with Cablecom as well. Both, TV and ASP are subscribed through Cablecom. With the switch to Bluewin TV I will also get ADSL instead of cable, which doesn’t offer any improvements on the Internet side. It will be about the same speed. I also need to install a land line which I previously didn’t need. Still, all in all, the new contract with Bluewin TV will be cheaper than the Cablecom offering.

If I count Internet and TV as a single package, I get more channels with Bluewin TV. It’s over a 100 channels in the basic package, whereas Cablecom is decreasing its offerings. They are gradually turning off channel by channel, to make users switch to what they call “Digital TV”. In truth, Digital TV may use a digital signal, but to the end user, there are no obvious advantages in quality or content. They may get a few channels more than in their regular TV offering, but most of those are the ones Cablecom had previously deleted from their analogue offering. There is just one fundamental difference to the end user. Digital TV by Cablecom costs more money than their analogue version, a service they are closing gradually.

Communication Arts is considered a leading source for design in the U.S. I have been looking at it every now and then, ever since I got my first copy in hands in 1991. They have have published yearly annuals too, about topics like photography, design, typography and interactive design.

If you compare Communication Arts as a magazine with others in the industry, they have been followers, not pace makers. Hong Kong based iD magazine does a better job covering what is moving the design scene. (But their website could be more Web 2.0.)

I think Communication Arts has a conservative approach towards design, which doesn’t make it bad, it’s just not a leader in visual arts. It’s covering the arts and crafts of design on an established level, giving a good cut of the design mainstream. For this, I had a lot of respect for Communication Arts. But their views of design and mine, and those of the entire Web movement, fall apart.

Communication Arts considers two aspects of interactive design as good Web design. For one, they look at how beautiful a page is made. If it’s got a cool look to it, then it must be good. Second, they love Flash, because it is serving this purpose perfectly, overcoming all obstacles web developers have to fight with, like a limited set of fonts or helping to create animated interfaces.

The problem is, this is not what web design really is about. These days, the very idea of how to design a website has changed entirely. We don’t have 2001 anymore, but apparently Communication Arts thinks so.

Ziki is a mixture of a RSS aggregator and a social network site. It aggregates the feeds of your websites and your other profiles on other networks, such as Myspace, Flickr, Tribe and so on.

I was aboard of Ziki from day one. There was not much going on in the beginning. Ziki had only few members, and the interaction between those was somehow limited. But now as time passes by, and they keep adding stuff, I begin to grow fond of it. Ziki has changed a lot over the last couple of months, and their service package has improved.

TravelPost is a good example of best practice for branding and usability. The site is simple, friendly and comprehensible at first sight.

On the landing page, three blocks of content serve as a starting point: “Unbiased Hotel Reviews”, “New Travel Blogs” and “Explore Travel Destinations”, plus there is a sidebar with contextual navigation. Atop of the main information you have a prominent search bar, and above it all you have a global navigation with logical taxonomy. This flexible IA gives you options to explore places virtually, but you can also explore opinions, photo blogs and ratings. In its best sense, TravelPost is a site about exploration, a voyage in itself.

A friend of mine sent me a link with an iPod-packaging parody. It is funny indeed, but an old hat to an advertising fellow like me. My work in advertising included a lot of branding and thinking and conception work, involving brand philosophies. So this is a natural habitat for me. It reminded me a lot to the discussions we had with clients, over and over, about “using white space” and “adding emphasis” with bulleted lists or “consumer benefit lines”… This kind of discussion always came with packaging as well as with print ads.

According to various sources quoting an article from Associated Press (Alex Veiga), Microsoft has teamed up with MTV to create a music service of its own, called URGE. I don’t know how many previous attempts Microsoft and MTV made, each for his own, to come up with an iTunes killer. But it seems to me that in times when a product or brand different than Microsoft is widely accepted as a new standard, former leaders in the music business and giant software companies find themself threatened enough to join forces with their former foes.

When I started out with the idea of core, it all seemed very simple and obvious. The idea was to strip off unnecessary weight, to simplify and reduce a communications venture to its essence, its core. At the same time I saw an opportunity in this philosophy: Let companies, brands, products communicate with their very core. In my experience, a certain kind of pragmatism and a focussed output is what most clients want. Focussed output has a lot to do with economical reasons, but it is also obvious that a clearer message, a streamlined branding idea is what customers understand more easily.

The idea of core is basically threefold: economically streamlined communications, focussed on a simple, easy to understand message, and a kind of no-fuss attitude towards customers. Because customers are users these days, they participate in brands, or they neglect them. It may not always be that simple, but it definitely is a general trend in communications. A more mature and less addictive audience is driving the markets.

Fortune Magazine writes: Steve Jobs Speaks: What’s Next for Apple

Apple may be just a minor player in the computer and consumer electronics industries in terms of revenue ($14 billion in fiscal 2005) and market share (less than 5% worldwide), but it is now undeniably setting the pace for both of those industries in terms of hardware, software, and industrial design. Jobs Jobs’ latest surprises, announced in mid-October, include thin, flat-panel computers with built-in video cameras and one-button video teleconferencing to connect as many as four people, and pocket-sized video iPods with the largest color screens in their class.

In her CNET blog article, Google Wi-Fi in New York? Stefanie Olsen writes:

According to Google’s Web site, the company is testing a free wireless service called Google WiFi. And with the recent launch of Google Talk, instant chat and voice over IP communications software, Google seems to be quickly forming a voice and Internet broadband network, which could soon offer those services free in many U.S. cities for the price of people’s privacy.

Stephanie Olsen concludes, this move was motivated by improving advertising contacts. That may be an immediate effect, yes. It will be interesting to see the entire ad-universe changing over the next couple of years while this is happening.

I’m looking at this development with a bigger scope.