Since March 1, 2010, I am working for TBWA\ZURICH, a Swiss division of TBWA International, which is part of the Omnicom Group. Aside of daily business and client projects, I am in the process of rebuilding the Online team, which all in all is a time consuming process.

Tumblr has been my rescue. Because I simply haven’t got the time to write long articles, I sometimes jot down a few thoughts, bring them in shape and post them. This whole process doesn’t take up more than five to ten minutes. A great side effect is, the shorter format forces me to keep my thoughts concise and crisp.

My thoughts on the state of advertising is a first example of this new style.

You should add it to your news reader.

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.

I find Nielsen’s research results interesting and I agree to 99% with his conclusions. However, that is not always the case, especially when it comes to jumping to conclusions based on raw viewer data, such as the results for “how many users tend to look at this part of the screen”.

This gathered data may be correctly reflect user behavior on tested Web sites, but then again it also depends on what these Web sites were about. Where they news pages? Blogs or magazines? Corporate Web portals? Intranet solutions? And how does this affect the trend of Web apps, which are more and more replacing “regular” Web sites?

In a recent article called Horizontal Attention Leans Left, Nielsen presents data that clearly shows a tendency towards left of the middle, inside a regular browser window (I assume it was tested on standard 1024 pixels width resolution).

Nielsen concludes, that because the user’s attention leans towards the left area of the screen, it means that navigation side bars should always be placed on the left side of the screen. I value his observation, but I fully disagree with his conclusion.

The data shows that the highest peak of attention starts around the 400 pixels area, counted from the left side. That is where the content of a regular blog or magazine starts. That is where most pages have main content. Sure, there are still quite high bars even further to the left side, around the 100 pixel area. Now, it may be true this is a result of links or navigation elements placed next to the main content on the left side. But does it mean that all navigation systems need to adopt this behavior?

Clever enough, Nielsen points out the correlation between user behavior and existing layout patterns. That may be the case, but I question his conclusion for various reasons.

For one, Web applications require more action and interaction than regular presentation Web sites. The majority of people is using a mouse with their right hand. Even with an iPad they are probably using their right hand more than their left hand. And even if all that is not the case — the right side is still second in order to the main content.

Why put something above the main content in hierarchy, when content today is the main driver of interaction? Thinking in left-sided navigation bars is retrospective Web design, it isn’t fit for modern Web applications.

If you would like to leave a comment for an article, please e-mail me your note and I will add the comment manually. This is a temporary solution until I have figured out a better way.

Some of these tools rely on the Scrum method, others just use tickets to burn down, or even more agile workflow principles. I did some research today, and most of the tools I encountered use monthly subscription models. In fact I could not find a single solution that would allow free usage beyond a 30 day trial limitation.

I have three projects which I need to organize and restructure, and since Basecamp stopped its free offer (which was limited to one project, but at least it was for free), I have no alternative left. Today’s research results left me pretty frustrated. Apparently there is no good solution out there that just covers a few basics, which I have outlined below.

I don’t need a system that requires extensive manual studies and adopting strange behavior patterns, like “getting things done”. What I need is a simple tool to assign tasks and track them along a timeline. I need to be able to communicate with production team members and generally know what is going on and where we are standing with the project.

Of course I’m somewhat flexible with my requirements. If the catch is that only one project can be handled simultaneously, but otherwise it’s a great tool, I could live with that. If the catch is that uploading and sharing files is allowed, but limited to 250MB or 1GB, that’s fine too. It just needs to be simple, easy to learn and use and easy to adopt by team members. I need something to work with.

Here is a brief list of what I need and don’t need:

Requirements

• Simple project management (if possible, no single project limitation)
• Collaboration tools (text only is fine)
• Free (no 30 day limit)
• Good usability and ease of use (perhaps like WhoDoes 2.0)
• File repository (no absolute must)
• Content database (text files with access data, logins, etc.)
• Calendar (GANTT chart would be nice, but is definitely not a must)
• Reasonable space (250MB to 1GB would be enough)

Not required

• Division between client and team access
• Code repository
• Conferencing or chat
• Time sheets or time tracking
• Self-hosting
• Open Source or API access

If you know such a tool, please leave a comment. All hints or constructive comments are welcome.

There is no Social Media (Or, How Brands Will Survive The Internet)

A great gap is opening right now. A separation between consumers and vendors, brands and the people living with them. In this changing era of media, one kind doesn’t know what drives the other, so it seems.

While some companies are going ahead, staffing up entire teams to handle Social Media profile accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Vimeo, others are in a waiting position. They are trying to figure out what they should do, reconsidering their strategies over and over, looking for familiar patterns of a return on their investment. The big question is no longer if or how to participate in Social Media, the question has become how it can be measured.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Measuring and reading data doesn’t grant your brand success. Statistics and empiric data can teach you a lot about the number of participants, it can show the intensity of usage and reveal trending keywords. But will it help to prevent sudden market shifts? Will it give you control over the landslide of branding, with consumers claiming their participation on their own terms?

“Brand Streams” is a term that describes a revolutionary idea about how branding will work from now on. It takes what we know about marketing and turns it upside down, revealing the benefits of an open brand strategy. It is a model that helps in adjusting our product strategies to current developments in an evolutionary way, a way that people want to participate in, making it a firm part of their lives.

I’m interested to hear what you’re thinking about this. Do you have questions? Feel free to comment!

• Extensive experience in Ruby on Rails or Python development
• HTML 4 (or HTML 5) experience
• CSS 3, JavaScript, AJAX
• Database experience such as MySQL or equivalent databases

This is a freelance job for a startup project with an application idea, not a fixed position. It is ok if your skill set only covers a portion of these requirements. The idea is to form a small team and expand from there. Job applications should be sent by e-mail, containing a couple of URLs and a brief description of your experience. Feel free to comment on this post, but please contact me by e-mail.

The width of 960 pixels is used by many frameworks these days, for one because it makes calculations easy, allowing you to set up a grid pattern. Secondly, it still fits in a browser window with the scrollbar taking up to 20 pixels off.

A few tweaks were necessary to match the new page width: slight changes in font sizes, padding and margin for some elements. There may be still a few glitches in the system, so please comment if you find an error.

For one, living on the island of Switzerland, I cannot access a service if it is relying on locality (Foursquare) or if it’s based on the entertainment industry’s content (Spotify, Pandora). These sites and services are blocked, depending on where your ass is located on this planet.

Secondly, I want to invest my time wisely. Forementioned services appear to be excellent and I’d love to get my hands dirty with them, but since I cannot do that, in the meantime, I am checking out the apps that aren’t so restrictive. The Web is all about open communication in all directions; it’s about connecting, merging, learning and organic growth. And I just love it when a new service relies on that principle at the heart of what it does.

All on one

OnePage is such a service. Now, I could say something like: It’s Friendfeed meets Twitter meets RSS meets all your life. But that would be the way everybody else describes it, and that’s not really telling you why you should be looking out for it.

OnePage lets you unify most of your Web activities in a single stream.

OnePage is currently in beta. It was founded by Joel Gascoigne and Oo Nwoye. Lead developer is Daniel Gafitescu and the Design was created by Laura Kalbag. I’ve been following Joel on Twitter, so if you want a beta invite too, you should contact him there and let him know that you really need to join this awesome Web app.

OnePage is that kind of site you want to add to your e-mail signature. Not because it does more than Facebook, but because it does less, and that it does very well. The average reader of my blog knows what I’m talking about. We are on Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, Flickr, YouTube, Delicious, Vimeo, Digg, LinkedIn, Picasa, Brightkite, even Last.fm (although their service is currently overrun by competitors who remain to offer their services for free).

Hassle-free

OnePage doesn’t force you to add more friends than you actually have. Neither does it suggest that you must add another super-poke app, or join the supposedly hilarious mafia wars. It does something else, something a lot of us wanted for a long time. It brings everything you do together, on—you got it—one page.

I’ve tested OnePage for a while, particularly by adding it to my e-mail signature, and responses have been good so far. People like to get a single link where they know they can follow everything you do online.

Room for improvements

OnePage seems almost perfect. If you’d ask me what I would improve, I think I would add a personal v-card option, but not an automated one like the one on LinkedIn. And I would definitely add an option to post to all my services on OnePage, so everything that supports a status format like Twitter or Facebook would get the same post, sent from OnePage, similarly like Ping.fm and Hellotxt are offering it.

Another thing I’d like to see is RSS output. It seems to be a natural extension to add someone’s live stream from OnePage to an RSS reader, such as Google Reader or the free NetNewsWire (Mac OS only).

If you want to learn more, have a look at the video clip on OnePage, or check out its feedback channel.

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

In February 2008, I wrote about Safari 4.0 when it was first launched as a beta. Back then, I focussed on the learnings Apple had made by being inspired by the innovations introduced with Google's previous release of Chrome.

(Image by Apple Inc.)

All that glitter

I don't know how much Apple changed under the hood, but the most obvious rip-offs were the tabs which were now placed above the address bar. Apple changed that back to the original design with the release of Safari 4. The second UI copy-cat was what Apple calls "Top Sites", a page that displays your most visited pages in a gallery—in all Apple-glory—with lots of shadows, glossy surface mirror-effects and of course presented in a concave 3D-view.

I had my doubts about Safari's innovation factor, but it didn't really matter. Apple's Safari 4 update was clearly an attempt to impress the average Mac user, not necessarily to please the geeky audience of Web app developers.

Safari 4 later introduced a set of developer tools that are pretty impressive, including a nice data-flow chart, catapulting Safari 4's value as a developer tool in line with Firefox and its combination of popular developer plugins.

Never the less, the new innovator in the browser business seems to be Google. While it is apparently struggling to finalize a release of a non-crashing version of Chrome for Mac OS, Google Chrome's innovation factor and its influence on the industry cannot be denied.

Apple brand versus Apple innovation

Apple has a great way of glossing things up. If they continue with this pace, they will have to be careful not to lose focus of real questions and needs consumers may have.

I know it is hard to be the leader in what you do, and the constant need of living up to high expectations, appearing as innovative and fresh as Apple has always been perceived, is probably a lot of pressure. Apple has managed to withstand this pressure well in the past, repeatedly emerging as a victor over various attempts to diminish its great spirit.

The problem with focussing on being the best is, you cannot focus on being really good at the same time. With your eyes fixated on how people may perceive your brand, the foundation of the values that make this brand are an endangered species.

Why Safari 4 has privacy issues

In the past couple of weeks I tried to revive my love Safari 4 again. Playing around with Firefox 3, Chromium (an Open Source version of the upcoming Chrome for Mac OS), I always ended up being frustrated, be it over Firefox 3's continued memory leak (600MB of constant RAM usage are not normal for any application) or Chrome's incapability to handle Flash. With hanging head and remorseful feelings I returned the open arms of Mother Safari 4—only to get slapped in the face. So what's wrong with Safari 4.0?

Simply put, Safari's glamour feature "Top Sites" cannot be turned off. Try it, you may turn it off for one session, but you cannot turn it off for good. The preferences interface suggests you can, but that is an illusion. Once you startup Safari 4 again, every new tab will show Top Sites again, until you set it back to open new tabs with an "empty page". You can play this game for a few times, but it won't change the fact you cannot change the Top Sites setting to "empty page" for good.

You may say that's not such a big deal. It looks like a minor flaw Apple oversaw when it changed Safari's beta status to "release". I would agree, if I didn't have second thoughts caused by serious privacy issues.

Let Safari decide what you like best

Let me explain.

Every time you create a new tab with Top Sites, Safari consults a database that is hidden in your system. This database was created by the Top Sites feature and it is constantly updated as you are surfing the Web. Its content is never completely deleted when you reset Safari. Selecting "Reset Safari..." from the application menu may give you a warm, secure feeling, but it is nothing but an illusion. There are a number of things Safari claims to be erasing, but in the case of Top Sites it just resets the sites to the default set (Disney, Monster, C-Net and other sites you may or may not want to make your favorites).

I for my part do not consider Disney.com one of my favorite sites, and I am also not on a steady job search. I actually never visit Disney.com or Monster.com. Yet, this is what my browser stores about my surfing behavior.

Again, let me be clear about the issue: You reset Safari, but Safari doesn't let you. You may also try resetting it first and then changing it to open new windows and tabs using an empty page, or any homepage you define. However, the database of Safari's Top Sites remains intact in your System Library. Resetting Safari's Top Sites is futile. You may as well try cooking an egg in cold water.

It doesn't take a developer to figure out that anything that remains on your hard drive can be located by third party software, some way or the other.

Apple's lack of care

You can try establishing your own set of Top Sites, by pinning them on the wall. Resetting them using the "Reset Safari..." menu though will reset them, but it will not not empty the database. All it does is putting you back to what Apple thinks are your favorite sites.

I am sure, somebody at Apple's Safari team is aware of this situation. This is naturally not something they are going to talk about publicly, but I still find it surprising that, two or three updates later, Safari still has this bug. So is this actually a bug?

My theory is, this is less of a technical concern for Apple than more of a marketing- or branding issue. Apple wants to be popular, and it assumes that the most popular sites must be the best option for a default set that never changes. A default set wouldn't be an issue if you could actually get rid of it.

Technically, having Top Sites actually erase all previous top sites and never adding or changing anything unless you choose to do so, wouldn't be very hard to do. It is actually the normal way for all other browsers, including Google's Chrome.

Apple is messing with its Brand Stream

If you think this is about making an elephant from a mosquito, think twice. Think of your bookmarks, by they locally stored or on a social bookmarking service, like Delicious. Would you like someone to mess with them? Sure, a fresh installation of any browser introduces a number of bookmarks you may want to get rid off as soon you opened it first time. But the point is, you actually can get rid of these default settings. Your browser won't reinstall those bookmarks after you chose to erase them.

I am just one blogger who wrote about this issue. I have read stories about privacy issues of Safari elsewhere, but they were mostly about the beta version. Safari 4 as a release is not that old really, so Apple still has a chance to correct what went wrong. But if they are waiting for too long, it might be too late. Google's release of Chrome for Mac OS is not so far away.

From a Brand Stream perspective, Apple's ignorance is not helpful. Again, it is a really, really small issue. But to me, it is symptomatic of an Apple that seems to care less about the core of what made its brand rise above the level of average tech brands.

So the talk has been up again, coming back like a boomerang: Apple is expected to release a Mac Tablet-PC. Of course, a few fans hoping for this to happen and Apple-focussed magazines dreaming about it, doesn't make it any more real.

Michael Scalisi from PCWorld believes, the hype about the much rumored Apple Tablet is simply ridiculous and based on unfounded speculation. He calls it a train wreck. John Gruber responded aptly. And I think they're both partially right.

I won't quote Apple's views on the computer tablet market, but in reference to Netbooks, according to The New York Times Bits Blog, Steve Jobs said in October 2008: "We don't know how to build a sub-$500 computer that is not a piece of junk.". For people not so familiar with Apple's history, the translation of this could be read as "We know there's a market of low-cost crappy computers, but we won't join it.".

If you look closer, that doesn't really mean they will not come up with something awesome, which doesn't join the low-cost crappy computer market, but will be superior to all existing products in hardware and software quality.

In short, if Apple is going to release something in this market, it will most definitely fulfill the following criteria:

• It will neither be a classic Netbook, nor will Apple call it a Tablet-PC.
• It will be the most awesome piece of hardware this market has seen, but...
• It will be super-slim in terms of hardware connectivity, and...
• It will serve for a very narrow range of usage, say watching movies, listening to music, editing text docs and browsing the web.
• It will be very thin and extremely light.
• In terms of hardware, it'll be a mixture between a MacBook Air and an iPhone 3GS.

There is no doubt that Apple actually knows very well now how to make a low-cost computer that is not a piece of crap. However, low cost, to Apple, will mean an entry price range between $500 and $800. So it will rival products like the Sony Vaio P series.

However, the question remains: Why would Apple want to enter this market? Isn't it better off with focussing on the existing (and prosperous) markets of iPhone, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air?

By upgrading the product name from its MacBook range to the Pro line, Apple left the white MacBook line more or less untouched, but it seems clear that this product family is going to see some change in the near future. Either the MacBook Air is going to get siblings, or the white MacBook range is going to be merged into the MacBook Pro line with 15" screens.

So a Mac Tablet wouldn't really alter the existing MacBook product line. But it could fill the gap between the iPhone 3GS, iPods and the MacBook Air. Being even thinner and lighter than the Air, it could be something like an Apple MacBook Helium. Still a MacBook, but without a physical keyboard. Instead it would introduce the world's first notebook with haptic touch-screen technology. (You can feel the keys on a virtual keyboard.)

It'd be perfect for students, journalists and anyone who needs to carry around a really lightweight Tablet-style computer, that does just a few things, but it does it extremely well. It'd be that kind of lightweight computer Mr. Jobs would love to carry around to meetings. Now, that would certainly be something Apple could be interested in.

At one side, that's pretty normal. It's actually how it should be, because regular people aren't actively thinking about brands, even though they are more influenced by them than they are aware of. On the other side, in this digital age, where the consumer power rises and the general model of business is beginning to change, it is quite astonishing that not a bigger number of people seems to be interested in brands. After all, this is at the roots of business, and it is changing the economy right now.

Brand Streams are the next generation of branding, and it is already happening. I started talking about this phenomenon a couple of weeks ago and I intend to continue writing about it for the upcoming months. Because I think Brand Streams are not just a theory (it is for now), but really a simple model which we can study, explore more and find examples for, to understand the principles of modern branding, to learn from it and to draw practical conclusions on how we can improve our brand's life-cycle.

The best blogs on all topics

Today, Core has been accepted by Alltop, a search service that aggregates and lists good content from blogs about all kinds of topics. Alltop aggregates these blogs and adds them to topic lists, which are ranging from entertainment over culture to geeky topics, from food over music, to travel, work, health, culture, technology or—you guessed it—branding.

In Alltop's own words:

You can think of Alltop as the "online magazine rack" of the web. We've subscribed to thousands of sources to provide "aggregation without aggravation." To be clear, Alltop pages are starting points--they are not destinations per se. Ultimately, our goal is to enhance your online reading by displaying stories from sources that you're already visiting plus helping you discover sources that you didn't know existed.

Here's how some other people have explained Alltop. First, Dan Roam, author of Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems with Pictures, used these three pictures to explain Alltop vis-à-vis Google. Second, read the review by Sarah Perez in ReadWriteWeb. In a nutshell, Alltop is an information filter to help you find your nuggets of gold.

Alltop's founder

Alltop was founded by Guy Kawasaki, author of the blog How to change the world. He has worked for Apple twice, founded a Garage Technology Ventures, a startup venture capital company, wrote nine books and built Alltop, which I think is pretty awesome.

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