So, what’s Pond ?  It’s an aggregator and publishing tool for social media services, that allows anyone to manage their social graph on a single place. You can import your friend list from social web services, merge friend contacts and update your social web status on the web, mobile or desktop.

The wide range of platform support is certainly the highlighted feature:  Besides the web, Android, and Symbian mobile apps are available (iPhone soon) and desktop software (Mac, Windows and Linux) will also be released.

Currently Pond supports Twitter, Flickr, SAPO Fotos, YouTube, SAPO Vídeos, Facebook and SAPO Blogs, as well any RSS or Atom feed. It will surely be a great way to introduce the power of social web to a wider portuguese audience, since the application is sponsored by TMN — the largest mobile carrier in Portugal (disclaimer: TMN is a Fulllsix client) — PT Comunicações and Meo (it will be interesting to see a social app on a IPTV service: social TV).

With smartphones becoming more affordable, growth on the social web will be fueled by mobile web with centralizing services like Pond or Vodafone 360 taking full advantage our digital identities. I only wish i could add more metadata to my friends info, like birthdays, tags or events. Give me that, and i’ll be a happy ? Ponder ?

Great work, SAPO team!

P.S.: the service is on beta — invitation only for the moment — with early registration for TMN clients.

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The enormous growth of social media services, with Facebook now over 175 million users and Twitter having a yearly growth rate of 1382%, validates the need for companies to start using these social platforms to engage with customers. And with more people joining these platforms, the amount of content created and shared also increases, with users becoming more sensitive on the way they build their personal network.

At first, users are driven to sign up by curiosity or bombarded by constant friend requests, joining their close circle of contacts. The trouble is that it doesn’t stops here. You then become a fan of your favorite author, start following you favorite basketball player on Twitter or discover that old colleague from trainee years.

The social network, once reserved to our closest friends, is now growing beyond any reasonable Dunbar number and providing much more value that keeping us connected and building group stability.

Friending is a social verb

We can’t deny it: we love groups. We need to belong to a social circle. Bigger online social circles usually imply an increasing complexity of filters and preferences necessary to make it manageable, with revised criteria for friending people. As personal networks grow in size and influence, we also get to the see how artificial barriers to entry are built, with cultural groups creating psychological boundaries (from celebrities to intellectual prejudice).

From Coleman’s concept of network closure as social capital to today’s social media rise, we’ve kept the need to include in our social graphs both weak ties and strong ties. What changed was the way both geographical and social circles were affected by the Internet. Twitter, for instance, favors an asymmetric behavior regarding groups, by not requiring two-way acceptance to get updates. Facebook, on the other hand is focused on a reciprocal relationship that implies social approval.

The nature of these social network relationships also changes according to the stage of a person’s life, with younger demographics having fewer and closer friend evolving to adult life with connections more essential to structural sustainability and innovation. Linkedin, a professional social network, is based on more private conversations and encourages these weak ties, quite valued on today’s economic uncertainty.

In most of these online social networks, users put a great deal of effort to perfect their profile, showing that it goes beyond fine tuning preferences, it’s also a public expression of the self. At social music service Last.fm, your playlist is a pretty good psychographic profile of who you are. Or at least, how you want to be seen by others.

But all these profiles, filters and preferences, where users spend hours so they can have a better experience, are mostly useless. Useless in the sense you can’t easily get this data out of centric platforms.

Portable me

These platforms have been evolving slowly, from pre-api times were each user had to login on services and invite all his relevant social circle to today’s APIs with password anti-patterns and OAuth Support.

If Facebook started providing closed filtering and grouping mechanisms, Google has pushed even further by releasing Portable Contacts. The open standard makes it easier to access your social circle information in a safe way, using existing standards and libraries (OpenSocial, OAuth, vCard).

Users can port in their existing network of friends and see who they know is already using a site. It goes beyond the Facebook feature of optional grouping when adding a friend, by enabling 4 system groups for each user, accessible by service providers. Any user can manually add contacts to the Coworkers, Family, and Friends groups; the My Contacts group contains contacts added to contact groups by the user.

Your mom

What’s your mom have to do with this? Well, let’s put it bluntly: most of us don’t want to share some of our social network updates with our mom, the same way most of us as teenagers didn’t want her to know who we started dating. Or as Clay Shirky mentioned last year at Web2.0 Expo: “What filter just broke ?”  As experience architects, we should be thinking on providing context to social circles and encourage the integration of third-party applications that respect this behavior.

Your mom probably doesn’t have a clue what Microformats or Data Portability is, but she still would love to have a future where she could setup a TV with her media preferences, thanks to a simple Facebook Connect on a Boxee device. That way, you don’t need to worry that she messes your remote when staying for the weekend.

With each consumer defining proper contexts, with new tools and better ways to manage their portable profiles, brands and services that encourage this open portability will get to build better behavioral approaches to this ubiquitous vision. The structural holes that will be detected once the data starts flowing will provide immense growth opportunities and gains in productivity, as each person starts connecting their networks with the appropriate context.

Cross posted at DraftfcBlog
Revised by Andr3

Illustration remixed from Mags and Bryan Veloso

You can also Discuss on the Facebook Page. (See what i mean: the irony of writing this post ad inviting people to closed conversations)

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Brands as facilitators: Illustration by David Armano

The brand positioning envisioned by the company isn’t always how the consumers perceives it: remember the blockbuster Snakes on a Plane or a more classical brand like Dr. Martens, initially a gardening shoe for senior womens, until teenagers hijacked the brand with ideological purposes.

Things can get even dirtier, with the next-generation cybersquatting practices, fueled by search engine marketing or plain digital identity squatting on a new malign form of brand hijacking, with Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and all the social media universe making things even more complicated.
No matter how well intentioned Alex Wipperfurth was with his book Brand Hijack: Marketing Without Marketing, there will always be people using the (social media) FORCE for the wrong purposes.

On top of these misuses, one big issue remains: most companies are completely out of touch with brand hijacking in social media, with no Online Reputation Management strategies whatsoever.

Mad Men on Twitter

One of the recent episodes of brand hijacking involved AMC Series “Mad Men”, a TV Show that revolves around the advertising world in the 60’s, and Twitter users that were impersonating some of the series characters on the microblogging service.

Mad Men main cast: Photo by MACTV

Don Draper, Betty Draper, Joan Holloway, Sal Romano, Bobbie Barret, Jimmy Barret, Roger Sterling, Pete Campbell, Trudy Campbell, Peggy Olson, Bertram Cooper, Helen Bishop,Paul Linsey, Duck Philips, Bud Melman and even David Ogilvy were all playing their Twitter role, extending the series beyond the TV set, with great respect to the tone of the show (I even suspected at first they were really hired by AMC).

It turns out AMC wasn’t involved at all and when they find about it, a take-down was issued to Twitter with most of the accounts suspended. It can’t really get more clueless than this about social media, when a legion of fans (Don Draper has almost 2000 followers) is evangelizing the show for free and a company silents their voices like this.

With all the Twitter uprising and bad press afterwards, AMC came to their senses and reinstated the accounts (although there was no disclosure of future intentions). At wearesterlingcooper.com, the Twitter Fans Blog, it was summed up pretty well:

Fan fiction. Brand hijacking. Copyright misuse. Sheer devotion. Call it what you will, but we call it the blurred line between content creators and content consumers, and it’s not going away. We’re your biggest fans, your die-hard proponents, and when your show gets canceled we’ll be among the first to pass around the petition. Talk to us. Befriend us. Engage us. But please, don’t treat us like criminals.
This site exists to catalogue the conversation around AMC’s Mad Men and its fan base across the social web. But it’s just the beginning. ‘We are Sterling Cooper’ is a rallying cry to brands and fans alike to come together and create together.

This sad episode (not of Mad Men, which I’m also a fan), highlighted the dangers and opportunities that brands are facing in social media. On the one hand, brands should listen and participate, being igniters of positive hijacking. On the other hand, it is becoming evident that the same amount of attention that was being put on domain squatting, must be taken in regards to social media identities.

It could happen to your brand

The Mad Men example is mostly about companies being clueless and getting punk’ed by social media. Most of the times it’s a case of not being able to understand these communities. At Twitter for instance, there are plenty of brand hijacking examples, with big names like iPhone, Vivendi, Motorola, Nokia, Intel or WindowsXP not being run by the company. Just imagine the amount of harm to a brand an individual with wrong intentions or resentment could do to your brand.

With this, i’m not defending that a company should go out and start issuing take down notices in every social media service there is. Instead, you should check what you could protect today and start providing these hardcore fans a safe harbor to continue evangelizing your brand, They’re your best friends, your customers, don’t turn them into enemies.

If things really go wrong, you could always go the judicial route or contact the service regarding the issue, but that’s something you should be really be sure, or you could turn into another RIAA.

These concerns not only apply to company brands, but also to individuals. Celebrities, politicians, writers, musicians, everyone that has a digital footprint should care about their social media brand. Just imagine if someone registered your name on Facebook and started using your name. Wait. Perhaps it’s already happening. You’d better check it out.

MySpace and Facebook have plenty of digital copycats, fans with the “me-first” mentality, creating unofficial profiles that are so credible that everyone adds as a friend. Again, most of the times, it’s positive brand hijacking, but what if?

What if someone uses your aliases and start spreading rumors? What if someone takes your Twitter username and then tries to sell them? What if someone starts astroturfing and overlinking on your behalf?

Always use protection

Flickr photo by Corey Ann under a Creative Commons License

So now that i’ve warned you about the problem, what’s a company to do?

• Register your brand/product name early. How early? As soon as a social media service is generating consistent buzz about your brand. That means that you should have registered yesterday on MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, while monitoring promising services like Friendfeed or Disqus.
• Ask your agency what to do. I’m sure there is someone smart enough to give you the right answers.
• Define procedures for brand hijacking as one of your social media best practices. A simple social media policy will do.
• Get your voice. Is it a push model, or do you actually engage with the users? Delegated or internal ? Formal or Informal conversational tone? Does your company have a a Digital Curator ?
• Provide aggregation mechanisms. It’s hard to keep pace with all the services. If you don’t have internal resources, services like Friendfeed or SocialThing are a great choice.
• Track your brand buzz, with free services like Trackur.com, Backtype.com, Google Alerts and Technorati or more professional ones like BrandsEye, BuzzLogic or StartPR.
• Have a consistent alias/nickname in different services. This is also a great marketing tool, making it easy for fans to guess your channel on YouTube or even getting a few more SERP hits.

All these measures have a preventive character, shielding your brand from being used in harmful ways by users. It mostly relates to domain squatting, that has brought so many troubles to brands, forcing them to take legal actions.

The implications for online advertising are clear: if you’re to launch a new campaign / product / service, be sure to register the most significant aliases in the main social media services. It’s obvious you can’t register all variations, but at least assure the most obvious ones. Think about it as if you were optimizing for search engines. Better yet, think about it as Social Media Marketing.

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• The FWA

  (Favourite Website Awards)

  
  Awarding sites since 2000, it’s probably the most famous web design gallery of them all. Created by Rob Ford, it features the ribbon-famous SOTD (Site of the Day), Site of the Month, People’s Choice Award and the most coveted Site Of The Year. It is now a full feature web publication, with interviews, articles and even a video channel at FWATheater.

• CSS Mania

  
  Probably the biggest CSS web gallery, with over 11000 entries. Tip: if you’re looking for references on a particular industry, just browse the topics.

• DarkEye


With impressive metadata features, we can search at Dark-i by color or keyword. If you’re a web designer, you’re encouraged to create a gallery and promote your work.

• NetDiver

  
  More a webzine than a gallery, but covering trend categories such as Flashware, Imaginative or Powagirrrls.

• StyleGala

  
  It used to have the best selection of all CSS galleries, but now it’s rarely updated. Nonetheless, you can find there all the CSS classics, from Jason SantaMaria to Marius Roosendal.

• Best Web Gallery

  
  Maybe not the best, but it sure is one of the most crafted ones, with a quite useful thumbnail preview on each selected website, and comments on each entry.

• Design Charts

  
  Not truly a gallery, and not always about webdesign, but always with the hottest new work

• Webcreme

  
  Covering both CSS and Flash web design, it’s one of my favourites, thanks to the the clean layout and RSS with thumbnails.

• Straightline

  
  The new kid on the block, from Japan

• Daily Slurp

  
  The companion gallery to Design Meltdown, a blog discussing themes and trends on webdesign. Both websites are managed by Patrick McNeil that has just published his new book, The Web Designer’s Idea Book.

Related Articles

• Tim Burton at MoMA
• The Rotten Fruit Tardis
• 24ways.org, a web design advent calendar

The term hardlink is used by mobile industry to represent the connection between the physical world with the mobile web. QR codes for instance, allow users to capture the data and translate it into a URL.

Mobile technologies offered us multiple solutions to connect the physical to the virtual. And yet, we seemed to forgot one of the most widespread form of these connections: the URLs printed in ads, on the back of business cards, displayed in TV commercials, even in our own skin or landscapes.

Photo: Christian Johannesen, under Creative Commons License

… to softlink

Shortening the description of “URLs used in offline promotion” i’m calling them a SOFTLINKs. They are indirect hyperlinks between a physical object or media and the web, with the intent to create a future recall on the consumer and induce him to visit the website. Hyper-graffiti, call-to-action or content traps, offline URLs have a increasing importance in a brand’s image.

Do you remember the URL?

So what’s in a softlink? What’s the effect of placing it on your marketing materials? Do people actually remember it?

According to the The Magazine Publishers of America and The Newspapers Association of America, they do.

• Offline media perform well in driving web traffic and search, with media sinergy being a strategic asset. Ads with URLs are more likely to drive readers to advertiser sites overall, with study subjects 13% more likely to visit advertiser websites.< br />
  MPA, Accountability Guide

• 47% of people who responded to a newspaper ad by going online went directly to a URL they saw in the advertisement, but a full 31% chose to use a search engine (overwhelmingly, Google.com).
  NAA, Newspapers drive online traffic

Source: Clark, Martire & Bartolomeo and Google study for NAA, Newspaper Drives Online Traffic, PDF

Not only do these studies highlight the importance of a web presence, but there’s a sweet irony in being print associations to reinforce it.

While a web presence is obvious to big US centric companies, many small businesses are yet to get their URLs and companies in developing countries are still looking for the right way to build their web strategy. It’s still quite ordinary to find small business owners that don’t realize of the web’s importance on the purchase funnel, so these reference studies should help broaden their minds.

Keeping your customers URL happy

It sucks when reading a newspaper article and realizing you can’t bookmark it for reference or later review. Perhaps that explains how the Amazon Kindle is performing better that expected. Or why QR technology is booming, even if it’s mostly used as a hack to insufficient advertising real estate and excuse to accountability..

Photo: Chika Watanabe, under Creative Commons License

When creating an offline media ad, it should be taken in account that people do take mental URL notes for later reviewing, so let’s keep their task simple. A memorable URL is even more important offline, and from big brands to small business, it has become common practice.

It’s my opinion that prefix subdomains should be used only if there’s a clear need to reinforce the brand name. Web aliases and brand/campaign domains are much better way to insure a later recall (heck, they’ve got less dots).
As for the long, long URL, with dozens of query parameters, don’t do it unless you invested in some heavy SEO. You’d better use URL shortening services like TinyURL, that now even allows a custom alias (altough i never seen it offline).

I know unique names are hard to get, and with all that cybersquatting around (now with the new ICANN brand TLDs), it’s a legal and brand manager nightmare, but if you want your consumer share of mind you have to play the game.

Softlink like Adwords

The next time you need to choose a softlink for offline promotion, do it like you’re optimizing for AdWords, with some of their performance tips:

• Choose an effective keyword: that means find a short, distinctive and sticky domain or alias
• Make your URL bold: don’t put it a 7pt size, near the footer, in a 2 frames sequence or whisper it on a radio spot.
• Avoid the use of similar or confusing character sequences (I and l, or example). ALLCAPS is a bad idea, but you could try Camel case for a change.
• Target your softlinks by using several matching options: i wouldn’t go as far as Converse did recently by using dozens of URLs in a campaign, but registering similar domains, synonyms or type mismatches are all valid domain options to consider.
• Optimize your softlinks with a focus on themes and call to action phrases: That means that sites like GetTheGlass.com or halo3.com/believe should be awarded also in this category.
• Include prices, numbers or promotions. It doesn’t get closer to direct marketing than this: audi.com/R8.
• Use your powerful brand name in the softlink. If your brand isn’t there yet, you could try your luck with some unique domain names, like this one
• Drop the http:// and the www. Your users are not that dumb, and your webmaster should know how name servers work by now. Save a few keystrokes, save the ad.

With this info and tips, go ahead and spread some softlink love on your next campaign.

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It was about time that Lisbon had such a prank, and with Rodrigo as the organizer, we managed to get 65 agents downtown Lisbon.
Rua Augusta is one of the busiest streets, with lots of tourists, and this last Saturday was particularly crowded with people getting ready to watch Portugal-Turkey for Euro 2008. All went well, with no police intrusion or harassment of the agents, but i’ll let the video (in portuguese) speak for itself:

Paradinha video on Youtube

I found myself freezing for 5 minutes, while carrying the book Groundswell. Oh, the irony.
If you want to to be on the next mission, join us at our Ning group..

The full story, in Portuguese, here.

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Time Magazine, since the beginning of this century, has elected as Person of the Year:

• Rudolph Giuliani in 2001
• Worldcom and Enron employees in 2002
• In 2003, the american soldier
• Again Bush in 2004
• And in 2005, benemerits Gates and Bono

And who was elected Person of The year for Time Magazine in 2006? You.
In fact, all of us who are now part of this digital democracy, where our role as citizens found a new importance.

In 2006 we created and shared videos, did book reviews, edited our profiles and avatars, developed open-source applications, wrote blogs and uploaded our photos online. We did a bit of everything to be Time’s Person of the year in 2006.

To celebrate the award, the magazine placed a outdoor screen in Times Square and those who walked by, could send a photo and appear on the cover of the magazine during some brief seconds.
Online, users started to change the cover to highlight those honored: themselves.

Advertising Age, one of the main marketing publications, later confirmed our importance as digital citizens, electing us – consumers – as agency of the year in 2006. Two of those consumers go by the name of Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz, and these two handy-man shared with us the “Diet Coke and Mentos Experiment”. The video was placed at Revver.com, with millions of stream views and with a direct impact on Mentos sales revenue of about 15%.

Communication is now starting to leave the marketing department and beggining to engage in conversations with consumers. SuperBowl, one of the biggest advertising events, had in 2007 several ads created by the consumers.
Frito-Lay in a partnership with Yahoo video, invited users to submit their own 30” commercial for Doritos, with the winning ad broadcasted during the event.

Consumer gained all these new possibilities thanks to a broader media scenario, where we can go a whole day listening and viewing only what we choose to. From pay-per-view networks, to iPods with custom playlists, the Internet helped us filter our own relevant content.
Along with these new tools, we have now a lack of trust in traditional media, leading consumers – now with easy access to production tools – to create their own content.

This new media scenario, where the consumer is the king, has taken several names:

• Wired magazine proposed the term Crowdsourcing
• Some may call it Consumer Generated Media
• and Wikipedia has finally chosen User Generated Content

We now live in a model where content providers and consumers face a constant and live interaction.
Users have access to several distribution channels, with tools and activities building a new digital democracy..

Companies like Procter&Gamble embark in this new model with initiatives such as the website InnoCentive.com, where an external worlwide community is awarded whenever they come up with creative solutions to industrial problems.

Or take for instance Nike or Lego, allowing users to create their own custom product online.
Through the internet, consumers are able to connect with brands in a much more personal and strong way, with new tools adding even more value to this conversation such as the capability of inserting subtitles to online video.

One of the clearest examples of the new dialog of consumers are weblogs. Lighter publication technologies and ease of sharing is helping the blogosphere to double it’s size every six months.

Most of this content comes from amateurs, in areas where they established themselves as specialists.
The earlier the companies and brands understand these tools the better, so they can connect to consumers in the same channel and language that consumers talk to each other.
And before the same consumers start to use these tools against the brands.

(continue to part 2)

Also of Interest

• Draftfcb Portugal – 2007 holiday card
• The Brand Gap Slideshow
• Webby Awards 2007