iWunder | Wunderman New York Blog

w.url - a Wunderman branded URL shortner

Have you tried sharing a link recently that was simply to long for your tweet, yammer or email? When every character counts, URL shortening services reduce long URLs to tiny forms. But which is the best to use, when so many are offered and new ones seem to appear each day? 

Look no further! Our friends in the Wunderman Melbourne office have just launched the w.url.  This is a fantastic new URL shortening tool that can shorten and customize a URL. This new app is great for social media, link sharing, presentations and super-quick customizable Wunderman URL generation.

Visit, bookmark and share http://www.wndr.mn/  today!

What do you "like"?

In late April, Facebook [FB] announced and launched a number of new and updated products for developers.  This set of products is centered on the Open Graph platform that allows the sites, brands and apps to share information about users in order to tailor offers, features and services.

What does that mean for your brand today?
Lets start with the social plug ins.  Imagine a person coming to your website and knowing what their friends thought about the content of your site. FB has developed a set of portable social plug-ins that will make it easy for users to see information from or about their FB friends, share things with their friends or even log in to FB all without leaving your site.

You may have recently noticed that the fan page you were a “fan” of has become more of a community, company or brand page that allows you to “like” it.   Whe you “like” a brand or product page, their content will appear in your personal news feed.  The FB feed is the femoral artery of the FB and social experience.  If you are a brand who wants prime real estate on the social web, the “like” button is the permission you need to deilver your content into people’s daily lives.  Under this new release the “like” button is much more powerful and now more portable. [just look @ the right rail of this blog.] You can implement the “like” button, with a line of code on to your website.

The Activity Feed exposes the actions your friends on any website. When you're logged into FB and visit CNN.com, you will instantly see articles & topics your friends’ sharing, recommending & commenting on via Activity Feed.

The Recommendations Social Plug In helps make sites more relevant to you by highlighting content based on top "Likes" across a site. Think of it as a people-powered "most popular" list. For e.g., if logged into FB, a user can visit your brand web page and instantly see articles, product summaries and features that people are liking & sharing with their friends most often, in real time.

The portable FB Log In now lets you increase sign up rates at your site.  This feature has the potential to catapult the power of the social CRM space. The Log in with Faces plugin displays your friend’s profile pictures that have already signed up for your site in addition to a login button.

Don't forget the FB Social Bar. This nifty toolbar can be added to the bottom of your site. The Social Bar includes a like button, friends who like the site, as well as Facebook chat.  I expect to see chat addition groups pop up across the web.

What does this mean for consumers on sites in the FB ecosystem?

Tonight when I visited Pandora, using FB’s new open graph protocol, I was able to see that it picked up my FB music interests and recommended Bebel Gilberto’s latest and recommended that I create a Pandora station because of it.   That's what I call personalization.

 

We think that the new FB platform will lead to a truly social semantic experience across the web.  

Will you be putting a "Like" button on your client site?

Sources 

• Facebook for Websites
• Hacking The Graph: Live From Facebook’s f8 Conference

Is Google Doomed to Repeat the Mistake of "New Coke?"

For those of you that haven't seen the recent Forbes article on Google's interface changes -

http://blogs.forbes.com/marketshare/2010/05/11/is-google-doomed-to-repeat-the-mistake-of-new-coke/

It's interesting why people refer to New Coke as a failure; the New Coke campaign had some incredibly beneficial impacts to their business:

1. When New Coke was replaced with Coke classic, it netted Coke twice the effective shelf space

2. Changing the name of Coke to Coke Classic allowed them to change the formula as well, reducing their production costs

The point is - Google won't live or die by changes to it's experience, and the complaints of users - if that was the case, Facebook would be dead by now - unless they're loosing, rather than gaining, additional features and functionality. The changes they're referring to are actually ergonomic, and those are things people will live with, since the actually primary interface for search is the input field. The rest is just supporting functionality such as filtering, and those are ones people grow comfortable with or ignore based on exploration and experimentation.

What's your take on Google's new look? 

Single-Tasking is Back

As Apple prepares to release a multi-tasking version of the iPhone OS, early impressions of the new interface highlight one of the fundamental problems that should have kept Apple true to the purity of the original experience and avoiding introducing a feature that adds a level of complexity that compromises the overall usability of the iPhones OS.

The iPad has demonstrated the power of single-tasking, reminding me of the days when personal computers could really only do one thing at a time. It demonstrates how  a modestly powered device – a single core processor, graphics chips, and a minimal amount of RAM - in a very compact and ergonomic form factor that can deliver  an incredibly compelling, engaging, rich, and even productive experience for applications ranging from entertainment to productivity. The iPad’s insistence that you focus on a single application at a time – while still being able to easily suspend and switch between apps as needed – also avoids introducing a level of system management that I feel fundamentally defeats the simplicity that makes this device a better experience than using a desktop for key applications. The iPad doesn’t force you to worry about or manage files, so why would you want to worry about what processes are running in the background?

I think the key driver for multi-tasking requests come from people who are trying to get the iPad to replace rather than complement their other computing devices. When Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) researchers in the 80’s and 90’s talked about ubiquitous computing, their point wasn’t that we’d have one device for everything – it was that we’d have devices everywhere. Our move to the web, and applications into the cloud, actually enables an entirely new paradigm of contextual computing, where your experience adapts to the multiple devices in your life, rather than a single device that provides a portal for all of your experiences.

Is multi-tasking even truly relevant to mass market mobile phone buyers? Multi-tasking as a benefit theme in the marking of mobile devices hasn’t has the type of traction one would expect – the Pre is a case in point – because multitasking in and of itself isn’t a benefit, it’s a feature. And in the context in which you would be utilizing a mobile device specifically, it can be a distraction, something entirely unnecessary for the majority of what you want or need to do at any particular time.

One of the most frequently cited examples if the ability for applications that want to stream background audio. This could have been accomplished in a way that would have allowed for the feature to be tied into existing system functionality – say, within iTunes, as it is on desktops. What are your thoughts on the introduction of multi-tasking to the iPhone OS and its true benefit? What do you see as a good potential application for it? And are the interface complexities that result worth it?

Where are you right now?

If you have been watching my updates lately you have seen me reporting new finds in NYC.  I have been doing this with the new Nokia Nuron and Ovi Maps. Last month this mobile device was launched and we created the social platform and campaign that allows you to update your status through our banner ads, widgets and a FB app.  

Instead of limiting our audience to just facebook, we used a new social authentication API called Socialize from Gigya. This new service opened up the entire social web to our audience. From any one of our banners, apps, widgets or sites you can update your status and share your location.

 

The Gigya Socialize service aggregates authentication and social APIs from Facebook Connect, MySpace ID, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, and AOL to allow for easy sharing.  You can see it in action in the widget above. 

What I love most about this feature is that it's a full on demonstration of how easy it is to share your location, tag a picture or place with the Nokia Nuron.  Another cool feature is that the API allows you to customize just about everything in the status update. We were able to create branded status updates that link you to purchase the phone. [see below]

Check out some of the other campaign links:

• T-Mobile co-branded page
• Facebook application
• NokiaUSA.com product page

 So...Where are you right now?  Click the "share" button on the widget and let us know.

Would You Pay $8.40 for a YouTube Video View?

An article in today's AllThingsD provided some interesting details about the performance of YouTube home page ads, as measured reported by TubeMogul.

 
Source: TubeMogul

That's nearly a 10x difference between the highest and lowest performing ad. According to Ad Age, the cost of a YouTube home page ad is approximately $400,000/day. That means Bertolli paid $8.40 for each user initiated view of its video. In comparison, e*Trade got quite the bargain at only $.88 per view.

Granted, this doesn't take into account the value of the millions of impressions that a site such as YouTube delivers. But if the goal is getting consumers to interact with the ad and to play the video, then cost per view seems to be a reasonable KPI.

What's the takeaway? While home page takeovers will get you a lot of impressions, placement alone is no guarantee of success. You are paying a premium for high visibility and broad reach. In turn your brand and creative execution needs to have mass appeal (think talking babies). And if that's not your goal, reconsider your media placement -- because $8.40 for a video view is no bargain.