social settings

Developing a secure social media app.

tylerbrowning — Tue, 24 May 2011 18:00:50 +0000

Last week I presented for The Denver Ad Club’s 3rd 3rsday Interactive Round Table. The topic was “Creating Secure Social Media Apps”. It is a topic that I think needs to be covered in the creative industry more. As we dive deeper into the digital vortex of the Internet with our creativity, we need to understand what actions have reactions, where we may be exposing brands we diligently represent or the users we engage on the regular. In my opinion there are 5 key things to consider when developing a social media application. Although there is soooo much more than 5 things when it comes to security on the social web, the list below represents a good starting point to diving in and researching further.

Educate the user about security.
Understand the security practices of the social platforms you are tapping into.
Plan for a security breach.
Always test for vulnerabilities in the system and keep your security dynamic.
Think like a hacker.

Again, this is a very brief and very loose set of definitions about social media application security or even social media security. Creating engagements and experiences on the Internet comes with the cost. Brands and creative agencies need to be secure. Whether it is hiring a 3rd party or internal team to do so, we need to preserve our amazing creativity in marketing by being secure.

Creating Secure Social Apps

Tagged: developing secure social media applications, secure social apps, secure social media app, social media security

Alternative Sports Labels Are Set Up For Social Design Initiatives

tylerbrowning — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 23:31:49 +0000

Photo via http://www.flickr.com/photos/floralfreshness

I am somewhat shocked that alternative/action sports brands are not more entrenched with the social media movement. I certainly see great executions on certain platforms, but it is rare to see these brands consistently engaging across multiple platforms, using their website as a social aggregation locale and truly designing a social experience across the web with an understanding of goals and functions. With the new social economy, alternative sports and lifestyle brands have a significant opportunity to grab new market share by through the social web. Designing a process for social engagement, much like a media plan, must be well thought out, and much like a great product, it must over deliver for the target audience.

Photo via http://www.flickr.com/photos/kristenlanea

The general target market of the skate, surf, snowboard, skiing, wake lifestyle brands, is very technologically savvy. Without getting to bogged down with stats, I believe there is two main target groups associated with these brands. The young 13-22 age group who is learning technology and will eventually surpass all of us and probably will be writing new code to create their own on-demand TV show that they host on a Vimeo channel that we will be watching on our Apple iTablet phones; when they turn a quarter century. Then there is the 23-38 age group. These chico(a)’s are currently the most tech savvy and have the most tech products, up to 4 screens to view the web throughout the day. Along with the target age groups comes the trends within the industry. The shredders of this target audience loves to film, record, share, listen, voice and prove themselves to their peers. All this amounts to an industry which may have one of the greatest opportunities to build the brands socially.

Photo by www.benengphotography.com/

The challenge for these brands will be to really allow transparency and allow the brand to grow via word of mouth online and off. How will they harness the good and the bad will be equally important to the social design. Traditionally, action sports brands have been great with experiential branding and they are getting even better. Take Nike 6.0, they recently executed an experiential campaign at surf and skate events that also crossed borders into social media and interactive realms. I imagine that strategies like this will be huge in coming months and years.

Photo by www.benengphotography.com/

Tagged: experiential branding, experiential branding for action sports, skateboard social media, snowboarding social media, social design, social design for alternative sports, social media in action sports

Athletes can highlight a brand’s social experience

tylerbrowning — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:02:32 +0000

Advertising is moving more towards experiential moments and events. I am fascinated with this. The barriers of traditional media have been broken down. A brand is increasingly being chosen over another because of the experience they have provided to a consumer. The consumer is less and less interested in the creative execution across media, they are more interested in the unique experience a brand can provide for them. To me, this goes hand in hand with social media or social design. Consumers can interact with a brand in real time through social media and they are being starting to be heard. If brands are listening, consumers can be heard discussing their personal experiences with brands online. Athletes representing brands can substantially enhance the brand experience. More then the brands they represent, athletes can be more transparent, more interactive, more nimble to providing social experiences to fans and consumers.

Historically, brands have contracted professional athletes so they can plaster them all over traditional media and make them the face of the brand or product to impact sales. While the end goal remains the same the game has completely changed. While brands are busy trying to understand social media, how to gauge it, how to best use it, they are missing out on a very important piece to what will be their new social design structure. Meanwhile athletes build blogs like the one created by the snowboarder pictured above, Gigi Ruf, post comments on Twitter and create videos on YouTube like this one of J.R. Smith. Brands do not seem to be leveraging the relationship with these athletes over new platforms.

On the front end of social media is now experiential branding. Brands like Nike are creating experiences like the Nike + running community. Volcom has quietly been one of the best companies at experiential branding. They have had a rail competition running for the last 8 years called the Peanut Butter and Rail Jam contest going coast to coast at ski/snowboard resorts. This is not just another sponsored event either. Volcom built it for amateurs only, allowing the common rider to enter and feel a closer bond towards the brand of Volcom. The judges? They are heavy hitting pro riders sponsored by Volcom.

Adding the athlete to the recipe for experiential branding and social design seems to be a missing link for most brands. The professional athlete brings a face and a reputation to the experience. This could not only help the brand connect with the consumer at events, but it also helps bring a seamless transition between brand experience and social media experience. With social media platforms today the athlete can help distinguish brand about as well online as off. I could even see new products being developed specifically for this experiential/social relationship.

Tagged: athletes and experiential branding, branding with experiences, experiential branding, social design experiences, social experiences

Echo Mountain implements some social design.

tylerbrowning — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:20:50 +0000

Echo Mountain's, echospace

I am amazed that over all the big Colorado powerhouses, Echo Mountain is one of the few who has created its own social network. Unless I am mistaken, Steamboat is the only other one who has done so. Pumped to see them take this step and move forward with progression.

To be sure, I do not think that social design is just building your own social network, nor do I think to be successful in our new social economy a brand must have a Twitter account and a Facebook page. It is all irrelevant if you are not captivating your audience. And that is just what Echo Mountain is doing with their social network (but fellas/ladies next time pay the extra money to lose the ning inclusion in the URL). They have received tons of new profiles since launching. The reason is that snowboarding and skiing is by the pure love of nature, social. From the riding style we bring to the hill to the gear we pimp, it it is all done because it is a social scene. It is a seamless move online as well.

Huge opportunities for social design in skiing/snowboarding. Let’s make it happen.

Tagged: echo mountain, skiing social design, snowboard social design, social design

Emage skate shop gets it.

tylerbrowning — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:20:58 +0000

Just a quick Web 2.0 101: Check out the website for Emage Skate Shop in Denver. Dynamic content of info relevant to local sk8ters and snowboarding shredders. They publish the content that my friends and I want. I keep going back to there site time and time again to feel connected to the industry. It certainly helps that they some of the best gear in town, so I want to see what they have in that is new. Simple steps to creating that conversation online. They also bring in a ton of unique events to Denver.

Next steps? I would follow them on Twitter if they had an account and I would share photos with them and connect with other customers so we could create content together. I would certainly be open to interacting with the shop more. I don’t think I am alone, perhaps I am too metro for social media. At the end of the day, the first steps are good ones.

Tagged: social media 101

Amping up the social experience for ski/snowboard/shredding resorts

tylerbrowning — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:55:31 +0000

I have been banging my head on a wall as to why ski resorts have not truly engaged customers with social media. Sure they have Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, but from what I have seen they rarely manage them well, it looks as if the ski resort industry thinks blogs are illegal and user generated content seems to be understood as well as Rush Limbaugh understands skateboarding.

I was checking out Steamboat Ski Resort’s new social network they developed. Splendid concept. I noticed nice engagement of users including posting photos, interacting with other members, posting videos, even selling equipment. There was even some good interaction by Steamboat employees, one where the terrain park manager was asking for input about features they should build for the upcoming season.

I am not sure they totally get it though. The tagline for the community is ‘vacation planning community’. I think they might be missing a large portion of the audience if they start managing the place purely as place to sell vacation packages. They would be better served to just allow the community to grow organically as it already has. Keep updating valuable content to their main audiences, mainly out of state members who visit once a year and front range Colorado members. Problem is, I did not see much updated content valuable to these audiences. If they are not creating a back and forth conversation is the social site of any value? I don’t believe so.

Going further, I believe they would be doing themselves huge favors by opening up the social experience to the ski hill. Videos and photos are awesome, but perhaps there are other ways they can increase this social experience. Live cameras skiing along with guests? Mobile app for demo skis and snowboards? Interactive terrain park that takes photos of the riders on rails and jumps? hmmmmmmm……..

Tagged: skiing social network, snowboard social network, social experience

Strategy meets creativity

tylerbrowning — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:50:15 +0000

From our homeboy’s up north.

Tagged: advertising strategy video, creative strategy, marketing strategy

Engaging your brand with social design

tylerbrowning — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:17:13 +0000

When I discuss social design, I am talking about social design structure of a brand’s efforts in the space of Social Media marketing. Not the aesthetic design of a blog or Twitter page or a social network. I love graphic design, I deeply appreciate it and it is of great importance in, and around social media or any other interactive outlet. But, to me the bigger picture is the creation of a social design to engage with a brand’s audience and turning them into passionate brand advocates. Plus, I have art skills equal to that of my 9 month old.

All brands should be very concerned with the structure of their social media design. They may have a Facebook fan page, a Twitter account(or multiple Twitter accounts), a flickr account, a community forum etc. What I have found in my experience is that all these efforts are wonderful, but they tend to be very disconnected. There never seems to be a strategy for each network and more importantly the brand does not have an overall social strategy of how each platform works to achieve a similar goal. Perhaps brands should adopt a social design how the brand engages with the audience in these platforms and how they can flow, how they work together.

Each social network has it’s own ecosystem and culture; it goes without saying that a brand ought to engage with their audience in a manner equivalent to the culture of that particular social space. The efforts of brands on these platforms should have a social design structure that:

Listens to the audience.
Empathizes with them.
Gives the audience content valuable to them, not the brand
Breaths authenticity.
Build a process to learn from experience and better understand the analytics of social design.

Tagged: social experience online, social marketing design, social media design

Branding is now an experience of participation

tylerbrowning — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 20:29:53 +0000

Branding with experiences

I was awake for quite a bit last night. Not sure if it was the Corona before bed or my 9 month old baby boy crying due to the pain of some lame teething. So I was thinking, perhaps we are not going far enough with the participation of brands and consumers online. Could the participation online be seamlessly translated to experiences on the street, in the tangible world?

Media mogul Mark Cuban recently challenged a group of other media luminaries of‘what’s next’. Cuban basically argued that the next big thing will not be through the internet but rather in the form social experiences through leveraging digital technologies outside the internet.

Cuban has an interesting take. I think he has a strong point, and I am not sure it is what he was trying to make but, maybe how I am interpreting him. He states that major opportunities lie elsewhere other than the internet. He may be absolutely correct, after all, we marketers have been so focused on the internet, we may be missing part of the bigger picture. After reading this I immediately thought of a great example.

For those who are not aware of Rise Against, they are a punk rock band that has been killing it for the last decade. Each album they have released has sold more then the last and by quite a bit. That said, in today’s fragmented music industry where album sales no longer pay the bills, Rise Against gets a large amount of revenue from live shows.

If you ask any of their loyal fan base or even the ones who have only attended a show or two, you will hear a common positive response and I bet you they use the word ‘experience’ in the description. Rise Against brings one of the most genuine acts on stage. They continually bring passion of music and their beliefs to every show and they do it through relating to their fan base. They have absolute empathy with their fans. This breeds a strong connection between the two. Recently, they handed out digital cameras and video cameras to about 15 fans at every tour stop. Rise then asked the ones with cameras to aggregate the photos and video of each show on a designated social site online. Fans could get several views of the show they were at, leave comments and share the photos and video. They went crazy with this, people responded hugely by making their own slideshows and customized music videos.

This is one example of how Rise Against is branding themselves by way of experience and participation. Plus, this directly relates back to Mark Cuban’s point of social experiences beyond the internet. Clearly, involving the internet as a tool, but it is larger then the internet. Rise Against could have gone further with the concept, maybe they will after they have seen what happened here. Could it lead to customized songs for different locations around the globe? Too far?

I know that I am going to be seeking out more opportunities like this in my work.

Tagged: brand experience, social experience offline, social experience online