Here’s a presentation from a recent TED Conference from Eric Whitacre, a composer and choirmaster who stumbled upon a truly remarkable and ultimately very moving endeavor. If you’ve never been quite entirely convinced about the emotional potential of the Internet (this is still just the beginning, folks), watch this.

When the world of blogging, online journalism and all things “new media” opened it’s doors to the public, bloggers everywhere were not only encouraged to learn all they could about the process of developing individual websites with HTML and CSS — they were also offered the open source software known as WordPress. WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code that was created to enhance typography. The concept came out of a desire for an elegant, well-architected personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

WordPress is an easy-to-use package that enables the user to start a personal or professional blog in seconds without any technical knowledge. One can effortlessly personalize any number of the elegant templates offered. Since it’s humble beginnings, both readers and developers of WordPress blogs have been pleased with the site’s built-in aesthetic charm and user-friendly experience.

What started out as just a blogging system, over time evolved into a full content management system, with the help of thousands of plugins, widgets, and themes. There is basically no limit to what WordPress can do — throw in technical chops and the sky’s the limit.

With big name clients such as CNN and The New York Times running on WordPress, there’s no doubt that this highly customizable CMS is very attractive to mainstream bloggers as well. Other notable WordPress users include GM, UPS, Ebay, Sony, VW, Forbes and Reuters. WordPress has made it easy, accessible and free for everyone — from Fortune 500 Companies to mommy bloggers.

In fact, WordPress leads in the percentile of websites using various content management systems, with a whopping advantage over other systems such as Joomla and Drupal. 10 – 12% of the world’s websites are on WordPress.

And how could such an unassuming little company become the desired home to clients like Time and Mashable? One word: Quality. WordPress is fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product.

What started out as blog software evolved into a technology as vital to the net as Google, Twitter, Facebook, web browsers, etc. WordPress is an enabling technology and marketing platform for every kind of business. Millions of users have chosen WordPress to create and design all sorts of websites that have served as eCommerce stores, private membership sites, corporate presence websites and so much more.

When asked about the future of WordPress, it’s founder, Matt Mullenweg said, “I think the biggest opportunity for improvement will be in making our user interface faster and easier to use with the capabilities afforded by new browsers using HTML5.” As for what we create, well apparently, that could only be limited by our own imaginations.

The biggest difference between today’s online world and that of Web 1.0 or even 2.0 is the level of skepticism from most commercial interests. Once upon a time, and for a long time, digital was for most businesses an afterthought; where the need for some form of mere presence was grudgingly acknowledged and reluctantly addressed.

No more. Businesses now prioritize online efforts for any new initiative above almost anything else – because now, digital is delivering. Delivering prospects, customers, conversions and revenue.

Is your brand delivering in digital?

With the entire customer lifecycle now commonly playing out entirely online even for offline products and services, digital has gone from last to first in both consideration and perspective. And those of us with expertise on the axis of brand and digital strategy are no longer met with blank stares and condescending grins. Woot.

What is a Digital Brand?

Perhaps the most ironic thing about the digital brand is that it sounds like something terribly technical and therefore impersonal, when in fact it is precisely the opposite. Brand in the digital age is actually far more intimate and human than in the age of mass communications, when the very concept of brand first flourished.

There are even those who would argue that the notion of brand itself is irrelevant in the consumer-driven, socialized digital channel. The premise is an intriguing one, but it falls apart when you realize that only the brand label gained currency in the media explosion of the last century. Customer relationships and a trade reputation have been around since the Middle Ages at least; one blacksmith flourished and another faltered due to the same basic business factors in play today. The square peg in the round hole was actually last century’s attempts to shoehorn relationship-driven values into one-way media and call that brand.

Consumer empowerment through technology is what changed the landscape in the new millennium, but it only seems new because we’d been without it for so long. When the planet was populated with small villages and communication was verbal, we had plenty of consumer empowerment. The back fence and the local market could make or break the new hat maker. Social media is the town square on a global scale.

Most of 20th Century branding was about how to make up for the lack of human connection. Most of 21st Century branding will be about how to manage an avalanche of human connections.

The 5 Critical Steps

To paraphrase Tip O’Neil: All digital branding is local. It’s about the customer experience at every brand touch-point. And those experiences are far from passive – there’s a reason why the word “audience” never caught on in the digital channel, and why “user” is still the most ubiquitous term. Whether they are interacting with a system or a person, your prospects and customers are tabulating impressions about you across a complex network of branded moments.

1. Think Like a Retailer.
Even if you are the most industrial b-to-b brand in the world; even if you have no actual e-commerce transactions, your online presence is a retail environment. A storefront. Not a catalog. If you were to design a literal showroom location for your company, what would it look like? What behaviors would you want your staffers to embody? What would make your visitors want to send their friends and colleagues to your shop? As a public, retail-style presence, be aware that your visitors won’t be limited to the vendors and clients with whom you already do business. Your virtual foot traffic will include trade press, potential employees, investors and prospective clients. Are the needs and interests of each of those constituents being met on your brand and social sites?

2. Kill the Campaign.
There’s a reason why traditional ad agencies have had such a hard time figuring out what works to engage customers online. Even when advertising is at its best – when it succeeds in creating an emotional connection – it rarely if ever translates into a functional connection. Only functional connections become relationships. Advertising never had to (and, for the most part, still doesn’t) feel responsible for managing what happens after the hook. Campaign thinking is short-term and tactical. Brand thinking is long-term and strategic. The campaign seeks a response; the brand seeks a relationship. Brand building online can certainly benefit from advertising support, but don’t make the mistake of believing they are synonymous.

3. Curate.
Nothing will ever replace a direct human connection. Our job is to use this understanding as a basis for developing surrogate experiences. One of the most important impressions we get from commercial human contact is the perception of someone’s expertise. But we’re not inclined to be impressed by mere product knowledge or capability. That’s table-stakes. What is ultimately memorable and truly desirable is the sense that someone has a grasp on – indeed, a passion for – an entire category. It’s nice if the sales associate knows how the garment’s fabric holds up in the laundry, but if she can talk about trends, competitive pricing, and what they’re wearing in the hip neighborhoods, I’m coming back. I want a relationship. That’s the premise for thought leadership online: Spend more time curating category knowledge than hawking capability.

4. Diversify Your Formats.
It is virtually impossible to replicate through media the sensory cues created by face-to-face interaction that cause the brain stimulation needed for implanting powerful memories, perceptions, and emotional triggers. Given the challenges of breaking through the clutter in today’s marketing environments, it would seem absurd not to take advantage of the ever-increasing array of formats and features available to achieve as much stimulation as possible. And yet, how many brand websites and social pages have you visited that still rely on endless paragraphs of text for conveying information? Video, infographics, surveys, call-outs, accordions, tabs, tweets – the breadth of content diversity offers multiple ways to keep users engaged and stimulated. Use them!

5. Be Who You Are.
Threading through all of these critical steps is this single, most important factor. It’s an essential digital brand value that falls on the axis of authenticity and transparency, and it’s a very difficult concept to embrace or even accept for the pre-digital mindset. The intransigence on this issue comes from that security of distance that was so pervasive in old-school, one-way media. “Never show the man behind the curtain,” was the unchallenged, unquestioned tenet of 20th Century marketing, when the simplistic notions of size and power were enough to impress a public whose only direct experience with communications technology was turning a radio button or dialing a telephone. The whole man-behind-the-curtain perspective places the emphasis of the brand decidedly away from the human element. It is the very opposite of what’s working for brands today.

Today’s successful brands don’t think of their markets as a mass of nameless, faceless people “over there” looking at “us over here” and wondering “how we should appear.” Today’s successful brands understand that the proximity enabled by digital media carries with it a different set of values and expectations, and demands a different set of approaches for engaging customers who are too media savvy, too sophisticated in the ways of communications technology – too skeptical of anything that feels contrived – to give credence to anything that doesn’t turn out to be what it purports to be.

Brand confidence today is about the willingness to be human. The digital brand is about making technology transparent to foster a human connection.

What I particularly love about Tom’s perspective is the way he conveys an appreciation for the very processes he deflates with his insightful and delightful eviscerations. Used properly, Tom’s work is a great reality check for whether you are truly innovating and accomplishing, or just going through the motions.

Click the arrows above to see some of our favorites.

The landscape of company Intranet solutions has changed significantly over the last few years, from self-hosted technologies managed by local IT support teams, to cloud-hosted web-enabled applications with centralized technical support. Usage and setup has become easy and intuitive such that business users can manage the “who, how and what” of the intranet themselves. Even small companies, for whom the costs and hosting issues associated with early Intranet solutions were prohibitive, can easily select a cloud-hosted service and reap the benefits of a shared and structured workspace that fits their business requirements.

A quick review of available products suggests that there are three key design intentions that distinguish these products from one another: Social Business, Project Management and Collaboration, and traditional Information and File Sharing. Although there is significant overlap among these platforms, they are designed to support and enhance a specific work type.

Social Business platforms (Jive, Salesforce) are structured around the concept of the community – whether a community of work peers or a community of subject matter experts – who communicate and collaborate with one another and with customers and partners within the framework.  Integrated with CRM, these platforms focus attention on engagement and relationship management in a business context.

Project Management platforms (TeamLab, Huddle, Basecamp, Podio) are built around the shared team or project workspace, with tools to manage milestones, deliverables and tasks as the key components of the structure.

Information and File Sharing platforms (Igloo, OfficeAbility) are more reminiscent of the traditional Intranet with files and folders of information as the cornerstone, although these modern versions incorporate some of the features of the all of the other platforms such as streaming conversation, team workspaces, and shared contact management.

Typical features of these intranet products include:

Costs run the gamut from free to thousands of dollars per month, depending on the number of users to the integrated features and add-ons one requires. But in the array of options, there is one to fit almost any business, large or small, simple or complex. Establishing your business goals for a new work platform and understanding the type of work processes your business engages in are the keys to selecting an “Intranet” solution that can support and enhance the activities of effective and productive work teams.

Yes, video chat has been around for quite some time, now, with services like Skype setting the bar for quality and ease-of-use. But the availability of video chat on websites as a customer service option has only recently emerged as practical option. Land’s End is one of the early adopters.

The market for website video chat has exploded in just the last 6-12 months. As a technology, online video chat capability is not new, but the underlying infrastructure to support it – speedy bandwidth, in-line video windowing, tools for tracking and transferring of video sessions from one agent to another – have improved significantly in just the last few years, making it possible for organizations to consider adopting it successfully for customer service applications.

There are two models of video chat implementation available:

1. self-hosted video chat, and
2. cloud-hosted video chat.

Depending on the nature of the resource engaged to install and configure it, a self-hosted solution might appear, at the outset, to be the more economical choice. However, conventional technology issues such as browser updates, bandwidth changes, infrastructure versioning, and a multitude of other factors create ongoing maintenance, upgrade and troubleshooting requirements resulting in mounting costs and, more often than not, service interruptions. Moreover, the dependence of a self-hosted system on local, on-site IT personnel is such that the organization is a virtual captive to such resources.

A number of cloud-based options are already available for deploying your own video customer service, including Vee 24 and ClairVista at the high end, and Netop Live Guide and Chat& on the more moderate side of the price spectrum.

Here’s a quick breakdown of primary features:

Now rapidly emerging as one of the leading-edge features of premium customer service, the ability to instantly connect with – and see – a real live person adds a distinctly personal feel, a human touch, to what might otherwise be remote and impersonal communications. This can be critical – game changing, even – to an organization whose brand value is dependent on, or even significantly amplified by, a human connection.

And really: What brand isn’t?

An Arch digitals DPA is a great way to get the conversation started – both internally and externally – about the opportunities, challenges, and potential directions for growing your business online.

Give us a shout and we’ll get you set up with an analysis as soon as possible.

Shout!

The marvelous art direction is done in that enduringly popular mid-century style, perhaps best exemplified by one of the iconic animated shorts of the era, the legendary Toot, Whistle Plunk and Boom from Walt Disney Productions, first released in 1953.

Decades of budding artists and  musicians in darkened elementary schoolrooms throughout the country were blessed with this masterpiece, which contains some remarkable design work headed by director Ward Kimball and storyboard artist Tom Oreb. Sketches and concept art samples from this production, such as those in the gallery below, are now coveted artworks.

Using technology that only recently became available, HD images of the Great Barrier Reef will be accessible on Google Earth and Google Maps, allowing even those who can’t swim a virtual dive. Approximately 50,000 panoramas will be available on a new Google feature called “Panoramio” which links photos to locations. A prototype of the project, called the Catlin Seaview Survey, launched Thursday in Singapore. The project will also have a dedicated YouTube channel, and will broadcast Google + Hangouts, which involve group video chats, on-air – allowing viewers to watch livestreams of the expedition from the ocean floor.

It would difficult to calculate how much favorable brand value initiatives like this bring to Google, but suffice it to say it is substantial. As long as the company continues to balance what some characterize as nefarious neglect of its users’ privacy concerns with good-will projects that (not coincidentally) highlight their technological leadership and media innovation, Google will handily retain its substantial brand luster.

A major new trend will change not only what the Internet looks like, but how we interact with it.

The seemingly sudden emergence of responsive web design over the past year reminds me a lot of how social media finally delivered on the long-held promise of the Internet as a place where human interaction and transaction would be fully enabled. Before social media, the Internet was always talked about as something truly new and different because it was the first mass medium that wasn’t passive, but interactive. Or at least potentially so. Problem was, few people really used it for anything other than passive purposes such as information gathering. Social media changed all that by giving users easy ways to broadcast themselves; to publish, comment, and truly interact online.

Although unlikely to be the paradigm shift that social media was, responsive site design also delivers on an Internet promise: that of giving users a truly unique way to consume and interact with content.

The vast majority of web pages today are based on print models: large headers across the top for cover story content; secondary sections for regular features, and the rest falling into table-of-contents style lists and columns. When arriving on interior article pages, the dependence on centuries of print layouts becomes even more obvious. There’s nothing wrong with this, people are accustomed to it; these layouts didn’t evolve arbitrarily. But information consumption online overall – across websites, social media networks, and on the range of devices we now use – is changing the way people want to select and engage with content. And site design is now starting to respond.

Strictly speaking, responsive design wasn’t developed to address user interest in alternative or more contemporary ways to consume content, but to make site display more efficient for the variety of devices now being used to access it. From Smashing Magazine:

Responsive Web design is the approach that suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation. The practice consists of a mix of flexible grids and layouts, images and an intelligent use of CSS media queries. As the user switches from their laptop to iPad, the website should automatically switch to accommodate for resolution, image size and scripting abilities. In other words, the website should have the technology to automatically respond to the user’s preferences. This would eliminate the need for a different design and development phase for each new gadget on the market.

The consequences of this quite practical requirement, however, are more far-reaching than just reduced development cost and greater consistency in brand experience. The display flexibility that is an inherent aspect of responsive site design is deconstructing the print-based layout model and replacing it with something more like having multiple windows open on your laptop screen. The flexible grid structure even allows for user-controlled display options based on interest (see the services page of this site for an example of this).

As you’ve probably started to notice, websites are rapidly jumping on the responsive design bandwagon, and Arch Digitals is no exception. Even as we launched an initial site just a few months ago, we were already in the concept stages of the fully responsive design you can now explore.

above: Thirteen Rectangles by Wassily Kandinsky, 1930