Hello Viking

This week in Inspiration

Every time we get a call to collaborate or bid on some work, we end up collecting a bunch of reference links. Looking across multiple projects, these links are totally unrelated to each other. But maybe you'll find something useful or inspiring in the list. Here's our recent grab bag-o-links:

k10k.net
Our pal Sung said, "it still holds its own even though the design is almost 8 years old. On the backend, it has lots of dynamic feeds so that's really nice." This is a great resource for design.

WebCreme
Got this from our pal Cole. A nifty resource for design ideas.

Schematic
Another great combination of intuitive architecture and great design. Love the metaphor. And the main control nav system is very smart.

CenterPlan
Awesome navigation interface. Thanks for the link, Jamie! (The site takes a bit to load, but it's worth it.)

Facebook | Volvo C30
Kristina at MIMA sent us this link. Good reference for the evolution of marketing on Facebook.

Firstborn
We dig their new site design. The info architecture is awesome. And if you don't hire us, hire them!

CSS Zen Garden
We love Flash, but we love CSS, too. This site does an excellent job of demonstrating how simple CSS can dramatically effect design. And it works great on the iPhone, too.

Web 2.0 how-to design guide
This is very well organized and thoughtfully written. Lots of useful insights and guides for strategy, architecture and design.

Panic
Really great product site design. So simple. Check out the download arrow, upper right. You just drag/drop one of their product icons to download it. (And it's not built in Flash.)

What's your inspiration? Please share a link or two with us.

Which one is it?

As Armano tweeted, "Just watch it." (Great dissection of the issues in the current Writers strike.)

Test this.

We attended a very pleasant Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association "salon" this evening featuring Jamie Roach, founder and president of Offermatica.

Our Twitterings from the presentation are vague, but we were excited by Jamie's logic. Optimization and testing can be avenues to increased creativity, more relevant messaging and greater overall efficiency.

If you have a reasonable-sized audience (and budget), why wouldn't you engage in a variety of tests with all factors of your website?

It's as much about providing balance to a culture of guessing--which occurs inside even the brightest marketing organizations--as it is about providing mechanisms for continual learning. From a creative standpoint, this kind of testing isn't about rating the worthiness of a singular idea, it's about the democracy of concepting and the reality that any testing means more than one idea is required. In essence, a culture of testing will produce and "air" more ideas than a culture that doesn't test.

Jamie also mentioned Cliq, a new blog-promoting tool sponsored by Offermatica. We'll test it out.

And kudos to MIMA for hosting the event in the swank Minneapolis Club, with its fascinating wall of genteel past presidents.

We'll be back.

[blank] killed the campaign microsite star?

You saw this coming, didn't you? Of course you did. Interesting piece in Adweek today on the eventual, obvious, presumed "death" of the Campaign Microsite.

"Digital advocates often proclaim the imminent death of the 30-second spot, but the interactive industry might now be witnessing the demise of its own version of the commercial: the campaign microsite.

The growth of social media is causing marketers to realize they cannot expect consumers to always seek them out. Web widgets and video-sharing tools make it easy for any user to take content that formerly might have lived only on a brand site with them wherever they go. And social media sites help them share that content with friends."

Our 2¢: Nothing dies in advertising. The campaign microsite will continue to play a strong role when and where it needs to.

If your audience isn't hanging out in Facebook or MySpace, then perhaps a microsite can act in that role quite effectively. And it's quite easy to provide many if not all of the social networking tools and utility within a microsite (AddThis, anyone?).

Given today's wonderfully complex mix of online venues, the campaign site is simply another option.

Perhaps it's a clearinghouse, or a jumping off point. At the very least, the campaign site does offer the greatest degree of control and distribution.

If you follow Jaffe's three (new) roles for advertising: To Empower, To Demonstrate and To Involve -- it's clear social media/networks are quite wonderful for involving and empowering; whereas the campaign site has unique strengths in its abilities to demonstrate. But it's all part of a coherent whole -- each element crafted or adopted for a specific role in the marketing mix.

To suggest the demise of the campaign site is at hand is quite sensational, but hardly accurate.

Facebooking

Yes, we did it. We took Facebook's bait and created ourselves a Page. Come visit. Become a fan. We would really dig that.

Who do you trust?

We were intrigued by a report on the Discover Small Business Watch by the Center for Media Research that discussed the economic confidence among 1,000 small businesses with five or fewer employees. Most of the article discusses economic confidence and cash flow. But we perked up towards the end...

"The buzz that general-interest networking sites are generating hasn't struck a chord with the Main Street small business crowd... " Rachakonda said. 55 percent of respondents said they would not consider using a service or small business that they heard about on a social or business networking Web site.

The study found that younger business owners use online networking the most. In the 18-29 age group, membership at general online networking sites reached as high as 41 percent at some of the more popular online networking communities. Membership among older age groups at the same sites is still significantly lower.

So we've crafted this poll.

Where do you wind up on the issue of utilizing social networking for business? Who do you trust?