As a futurist envisioning digital things to come based on analogous developments in other mediums, and—just to come clean—as a cinéaste (by training and in temperament) interloping in the digital space, I’m patiently awaiting the aural web. I’m waiting for Garbo to talk, and I don’t mean in a podcast. I mean in a moment that signifies a sea-change. I’m waiting for the web’s Jazz Singer hour (the 1929 version obviously), when we create a wholly different human experience with digital sound, music and voice—for the mainstream customer, not just the gamer, not just the MySpace indie band fan.

Sound online is overdue, delayed perhaps by early experimentation that left the cube farm-dwelling populace apologizing to workmates for sudden unsolicited rock concerts on their pc’s.

By now, there’s sensitivity to the context of the listener, and a new playfulness, even artfulness to sounds that are, strictly speaking, functionally unnecessary.  What would our experience of the iPhone’s accelerometer be without that great clickety, clickety? You can set your alarm but you can’t come up with straight jackpot cherries, figuratively speaking, without it.

There’s a new, already wildly popular Mac app called the Poladroid that is a visual tool for retrofitting your digital images with Day-Glo surreality and the occasional midday poltergeist (and can make you channel Woodstock, if you look at an image long enough). You can even add the clean white border of a Polaroid to your digital pix, always so unceremoniously unframed. Some of the nostalgic irresistibility apparent in the Poladroid demo for me derives from the exact duplication of the film paper’s distinctive auditory dispatch from the camera. (There are other reasons the demo is so delightful; for instance, it makes you wait just as long as you have to with a real Polaroid for life forms to emerge from the brown murk. And the picture is shaken, as if by an impatient hand trying to accelerate the development.) But ocular time travelling aside, Poladroid had me at the clackety-click…whoosh.

Google results are paltry for the “aural web” but buried among them is a prescient post on oreilly.com from 2006 that describes our prolonged ‘silent era’. O’Reilly pops up again with his Where 2.0 2007 conference, where we can find not only a strong argument for “soundscapes” for digital maps (putting the there in the where, as the copy says) but an intersection of two of my favorite trends, aural branding and cartocracy.

Here is the question few brands are prepared to ask, let alone answer: what do you sound like? What is your aural identity? Many brick and mortar retailers have brand–reinforcing soundtracks for their shoppers but by and large leave them listening to sounds of silence online.

There are notable exceptions, and many are found in the luxury category. (I believe that the luxury value proposition online is, frankly, untenable without sound/music/voice in the right places at the right times.) Nordstrom’s Designer Collections online plays the song “Madrid” by the French band Holden. (I had to check them out on last.fm.) The repetitive nature of the music, plus its worldly cred, is the right note to strike on the charmingly illustrated home page. Cartier has a MySpace Love collection profile with commissioned music by the likes of Lou Reed and Marion Cottilard. Talk about atmospherics; the brand’s signature scarlet background and the songs swallow you and your better judgment whole. RalphLauren.com features glamazons descending a chateaux staircase to the strains of the Pierces’ “Bored”; colossally snooty fun. And LouisVuitton.com brings us downloadable MP3 soundwalks of Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai—essentially travelogues by three famous Chinese actresses serving as seductive narrators that further reinforce the love affair Asians (and the burgeoning Chinese middle class) have with this innovative luxury brand.

Accessibility experts have studied sound as a form of non-visual navigation, and there’s something in this idea for everyone. Sounds can reward our decisions to move through a web site, unearthing auditory surprises as we go. Music can be a powerful brand differentiator, but so as to accommodate a brand’s every consumer segment, music should be made available as a highly curated selection.  

Sound not only has to be used creatively to reinforce the brand, it has to be used judiciously, and always with the on/off option and a fade in or fade out (lifted right from stage directions) once the choice to listen or not is made.

Brand differentiation we know is essential to business survival, particularly because brand loyalty is, among certain demographics, on the wane. Sound and music are memory narcotics and to help a customer remember your brand in a certain way is the first step to putting your products invariably in the “consideration set.” Some day, we’ll have thousands of brands with Intel jingles and—to modify the title of Alex Cox’s Pulitzer Prize Finalist book on 20^th century music—the rest will be noise.

I’m wondering if the makers of Motrin are thinking about their tag line, “We feel your pain,” in an all new way this week.

In case you’ve blinked and missed this lightening-fast marketing fiasco (it’s technically old news today, 3 days in), Motrin launched a new campaign that upset a lot of women. The crux of the idea is that moms who wear babies (carriers, slings and wraps) may experience various types of pain that Motrin can fight. But that wasn’t really the message women heard. The primary offense was basically that women wear babies as a fashion accessory. My personal cringe line was the one that read, “It’s a good pain, a worthy pain. And it totally makes me feel like an official mom…”

Subject matter aside, as a marketer you need to look at the enormity of the response. And if you’re one of those marketers still scratching your head over Twitter, listen up.

How much damage can you do in 140 characters or less? Well, a lot if you’re offended, and a lot more if you’re networked. Twittermoms, a group of about 4,500 moms who twitter about kids, fashion, technology, politics, travel, unleashed a twitter-storm of feedback. Here’s just a sampling, pulled together into a 9-minute video on YouTube by blogger Katja Presnal.

By the time that it hit the ad mags and even USA Today, Motrin had already yanked the ad (that was running on its web site but can still be viewed on YouTube ) and issued an apology front and center on its home page. There’s also a group on Facebook called, “Babywearing isn’t painful. Boycott Motrin for saying it is.” This group has more than 1,000 members and a topic on the discussion board titled, “Showing your disgust.”

Thank goodness Motrin was listening when thousands of consumers didn’t just throw up their arms in disgust, but threw down their thoughts on the web. Maybe now they’ll keep listening to their target audience, or better yet, sensing their pain.

Title Nine offers a compelling spin on the tried-and-true-but-a-little-bit-boring gift card. It’s the Title Nine Gift Pack. (Don’t cringe, it’s not as generic as the name.) Choose from two options.

For $89 you get:

• $50 gift card
• 1-year membership to T9 (gets the recipient free shipping, 5% off purchases, a subscription to Women’s Adventure Magazine, advance notice of online sales and members-only holiday shopping hours in-store)
• reusable water bottle
• spot light
• draw-string bag

Or, for $149 you get all that plus a larger gift card ($100) and an additional bag. Two great gift options for the “women on the move” in your life. While I love the convenience and flexibility of gift cards (especially when you’re being so careful about where you’re spending, and especially when you’re shopping for as many sisters and nieces as I do), I dread their one-dimensional (literally and figuratively) nature.

While my holiday email and catalog threshold are already being tested, I look forward to more retailers packaging up easy, can’t miss gift package ideas.

Customers find products either by using search or navigation.  For those customers who use site side search, their satisfaction relies on the quality and speed of your search results.  Regardless of how good your search results are, it is inevitable that your customer will enter a search term for which you do not have a product match.  Hopefully you have already eliminated the following error message

and provide smart cross links or suggestions to similar things that may be of interest to your customer.  If you listen to what your customer is telling you, you are regulary running one of my staple analytics reports - the shadow demand report. 

The shadow demand report provides meaningful customer insights because it reports the search terms your customers have entered which did not return products. Is there a better way to get into the mind of your customer? They are telling you what they want to find and this report tells you when they reach a dead end.  Since dead ends are bad for customer experience, the shadow demand report is instrumental in preventing these in the future. 

The shadow demand report can provide direction to your merchandising team.  If you see a sizable bump when customers are searching for a particular product, you may identify a trend. This report represents customer demand and an untapped opportunity to meet customer demand by adding this product to your site or at a minimum, providing alternates to what they seek.

Understanding this element of your customer is an easy report to create and may even be standard in your analytics package. It is a tool that can be used to gain actionable insights about your customer.

Activate this report, review it regularly and serve your customers by offering them products they are telling you they want.

There is no limit on voting, so do it to it!!

And you can check out the Visualizer itself here: http://www.sherwin.com/visualizer/

I was inspired today when one of my colleagues pointed me to the new president-elect transition web site. I continue to be amazed at the remarkable communication strategy of the Obama team, and this new digital hub builds on the team’s OPEN approach.  From the invitation to submit your ideas, the presentations of the top agenda items, to how to apply for a job in the administration, it’s all there for everyone to share, comment, and post.  I think our very own Karen Scholl summed it up best when interviewed about Obama’s approach for the March cover story of Fast Company. She said, ” With Obama, not only do people feel they know who he is, they feel trusted to share their views,” Scholl says. “And they get constant feedback from the campaign and from each other.”

But, back to the fun part. There was that, too.; )

Remember the third place?

Digital Millennials are the first real post-PC generation; their smart phones are not only their primary digital device but some would say their primary means of discovering what it means to be a social being. For brands, millennials’ perpetual connectedness via mobile phones and social networking profiles has been their most salient trait for about five years. Facilitating and being part of this perpetual connectedness was a brand’s route to relevance. But another millennial trait is about to usurp simple connectedness: their collective location awareness—and the importance they ascribe to place as a marker of self (yes, just as brands endeavor to be).

Mobile phones once again are the technological driver of this generational trait, but only those that are location-aware (thanks to cell tower triangulation and GPS). These phones and their geo-applications, along with cyber cartography—the constitution of information-rich up-to-the-minute digital maps of astounding physical accuracy, mean that brands have to put themselves on the map, literally. Why? Because the more accurate and personally useful digital maps become—with the help of anyone willing to geotag their photo or geoannotate a place—the more people expect them to constitute a complete “mirror world,” as the gamers call it.

Brands must recognize that there are consequences to being left out of this mirror world. As web surfing gives way to world surfing, brands have to be at the right places at the right time. Most important, they have to be part of the Fourth Place. After home (first), work (second), coffee shop/athletic club/church (third), the Fourth Place is a fusion of virtual and real, a spontaneous hot spot created by people oscillating between digital co-existence in a geo-annotated space and the heightened possibility of suddenly meeting up—at a store, nightclub, park—in the real world.

]]> http://blog.resource.com/2008/11/the-fourth-place/feed/ http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetItemData?uri=ri_blog&itemurl=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.resource.com%2F2008%2F11%2Fthe-fourth-place%2Fhttp://blog.resource.com/2008/11/the-fourth-place/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ri_blog/~3/443342021/ http://blog.resource.com/2008/11/obama-made-history-in-more-ways-than-one/#comments Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:35:04 +0000 Kelly Mooney http://blog.resource.com/2008/11/obama-made-history-in-more-ways-than-one/ Maybe you were one of millions choked up last night as Obama gave his acceptance speech. Or, maybe he wasn’t your candidate and you had to stomach historically key red states flipping to blue one after the other. Regardless of your personal politics, you have to marvel at the marketing efforts of the Obama team. They made marketing history. And, experts of every type will deconstruct his strategies for months and years to come, but this simple email may some it all up — his tone, timing and message of gratitude. He has mastered the Love Triangle that I wrote about in The Open Brand. See for yourself:

Kelly —

I’m about to head to Grant Park to talk to everyone gathered there, but I wanted to write to you first.

We just made history.

And I don’t want you to forget how we did it.

You made history every single day during this campaign — every day you knocked on doors, made a donation, or talked to your family, friends, and neighbors about why you believe it’s time for change.

I want to thank all of you who gave your time, talent, and passion to this campaign.

We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next.

But I want to be very clear about one thing…

All of this happened because of you.

Thank you,

Barack ]]> http://blog.resource.com/2008/11/obama-made-history-in-more-ways-than-one/feed/ http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetItemData?uri=ri_blog&itemurl=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.resource.com%2F2008%2F11%2Fobama-made-history-in-more-ways-than-one%2Fhttp://blog.resource.com/2008/11/obama-made-history-in-more-ways-than-one/ http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=ri_blog