Last week, Smashing magazine unveiled its top 10 web design trends for 2009. (Thanks to Mindy for sharing.)
Then on Wednesday, they gave us even more trends for this year.
Just thought you might like to know.
Look for this blog to incorporate some of these trends sometime in, oh, I dunno, 2012. maybe?
Just as I was about to log off for the evening Tuesday, this Twitter post from uSphere CEO Dave Van de Walle flashed across my screen:
@usphere issues apology, pulls all ads – http://ublog.usphere.com
I had no idea what that statement meant, so I clicked on the uSphere blog to read. (uSphere, by the way, is a service designed to help students in their college admissions search.) According to Dave’s post, one of the firm’s advertising partners had exposed visitors to the uSphere site to pornographic ads. Dave didn’t go into detail, but was quick to apologize for the “egregious error by one of our advertising partners” and added that “we’ll shoulder the blame, as it’s our site and our partners should have been chosen more carefully. Especially on a site that serves students.”
The entire blog post is also now on uSphere’s homepage.
Dave did the right thing by taking quick action to communicate the situation to those who use his service. That’s rule No. 1 in crisis communications: get your story out quickly and completely, before the rumor mill has a chance to act. And in the online world, the rumor mill works quickly and can spread bad news far and wide. (Just think back to how quickly Brad J. Ward and a few interested bloggers were able to break and spread the news of Facebookgate a few weeks ago.)
But Dave needs to update his blog post to make it clear that he has indeed pulled all the offending ads, as his Twitter post claims. After reading the blog post, I didn’t see anything explicitly stating that the offending ads were no longer a part of the uSphere site. I know from experience that in our rush to get the word out, sometimes we omit important pieces of information. But Dave needs to edit his post to include that important piece of information.
Other than that critique, I think Dave and uSphere did an admirable job in managing a potential crisis.
Is there any bigger brand in the world today than the soon-to-be-inaugurated president of the United States, Barack Obama?
“Barack Obama is three things you want in a brand: New, different, and attractive. That’s as good as it gets.”
So says a guy who knows a bit about branding, Keith Reinhard, chairman emeritus of DDB Worldwide, in an April 2008 Fast Company article about the Obama brand.
But that’s the old-school take on branding. The Obama phenomenon is more than new, different and attractive. As the author of that article, Ellen McGirt, explains:
The fact that Obama has taken what we thought we knew about politics and turned it into a different game for a different generation is no longer news. What has hardly been examined is the degree to which his success indicates a seismic shift on the business horizon as well. Politics, after all, is about marketing — about projecting and selling an image, stoking aspirations, moving people to identify, evangelize, and consume. The promotion of the brand called Obama is a case study of where the American marketplace — and, potentially, the global one — is moving. His openness to the way consumers today communicate with one another, his recognition of their desire for authentic “products,” and his understanding of the need for a new global image — all are valuable signals for marketers everywhere. …
Obama has risen above what he calls a “funny” name, an unusual life story, and — contrary to the now popular (and mistaken) notion that nobody sees race anymore — a persistent racial divide to become a reflection of what America will be: a postboomer society. He has moved beyond traditional identity politics. And whether it’s now or a decade from now, the new reality he reflects will eventually win out. Any forward-thinking business would be wise to examine the implications of his ascent, from marketing strategies and leadership styles to the future of the American workplace.
How will Brand Obama fare in the global marketplace over the next four years? Today is the official rollout. Tomorrow, the product testing begins in earnest.
As our nation honors the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. today with a national holiday, and prepares to inaugurate our first black president tomorrow, I pause to consider a bit how King’s worldview and moral stance against evil has influenced my own life. I’m in no way attempting to compare my life with King’s, for I’m no civil rights leader, no martyr, no leader of any consequence by comparison. But I’ve long admired King not only for his leadership in civil rights, but more for his clarity of vision in the sense of moral and spiritual matters, as well as his PR savvy. The fact that he understood and used mass media to his advantage should not be separated from King’s quest for justice and equality, but it does point to the man’s ability to use the tools and systems of the temporal world to further more idealistic goals, and that’s something any of us who work with the media ought to understand.
One of the most poignant (brief) commentaries on King’s life that I’ve read comes from Philip Yancey’s book Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church. Yancey was a good ol’ Georgia boy when the civil rights movement started gaining traction in the early 1960s.
“When I was in high school,” he writes, “the same students who cheered the news of President Kenedy’s assassination also cheered King’s televised encounters with Southern sheriffs, police dogs, and water cannons. Little did we know that by doing so we were playing directly into King’s strategy.”
That strategy, from a media relations standpoint, was brilliant, for it opened the nation’s eyes to the tragedy and brutality of racism. “He deliberately sought out individuals like Sheriff Bull Connor and stage-managed scenes of confrontation, accepting jail, beatings, and other brutalities, because he believed a complacent nation would rally around his cause only when they saw the evil of racism manifest in its ugliest extreme.
“In that goal,” Yancey writes, “King succeeded spectacularly.”
But separate from what Yancey calls King’s “long view of faith,” that media relations success would have rang hollow. “Already convinced of the justness of their cause,” Yancey writes, the civil rights workers “wanted someone to lift their sights beyond the long string of disheartening failures.” King, with his long view that justice will triumph, was the man to do just that.
We now look back on the civil rights movement as a steady tidal surge toward victory. At the time, facing daily confrontations with the power structure and under constant intimidation from policemen, judges, and even the FBI, civil rights workers had no assurance of victory. We forget how many nights they spent in rank southern jails. Most of the time the present looked impossibly bleak, the future even bleaker. …
For King, the long view meant remembering that, no matter how things appear at any given moment, God reigns. Later, when the famous march from Selma finally made it to the state capitol, the building which once served as the capitol of the Confederacy and from which the rebel flag still flew, King addressed those scarred and weary marchers from the steps:
I know that you are asking today, “How long will it take?” I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth pressed to earth will rise again. …
* * *
It seems the long view has been in short supply in our culture for many years. Witness what has happened on Wall Street, in our banking industry, and just about everywhere else you look in our culture, and you see the fruits of short-term, get-what-you-can-while-you-can thinking. Even in our educational system, sadly, the short view too often reigns. We live from fiscal year to fiscal year, from project to project. Even our long-range plans extend no further than five years out, and the goals are largely based on numbers, rather than the essentials King spoke of — the essentials of peace, justice and love.
What about us? Do we connect our day-to-day actions, our work, our lives, to a greater, nobler cause? Those of us in higher education ought to. It’s pretty easy, really. We’re in one of the most noble pursuits there is. I’m fond of quoting William Butler Yeats, who supposedly said that “education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire.” On my better days, I like to think that what I do helps to fan those flames of knowledge.
I can’t say I’ve always done the best job of taking the long view, or for contributing to King’s ideal of a world in which peace, justice and love reigns. But re-reading Yancey’s chapter on MLK today has reinvigorated me and encouraged me to think more about the long view — in my job, in my life, in my other pursuits. I hope this post encourages you to do the same.
Got into an interesting exchange on Twitter last night about how higher ed marketing people address writing style for Internet lingo.
I found it interesting that many people whom I consider to be “cutting-edge” when it comes to social media and online communication still lean heavily on the granddaddy of style guides, The Associated Press Stylebook. Even when it comes to writing about this online world we’re so immersed in. They still capitalize “Web,” hyphenate “e-mail” and consider “Web site” two words. I forgot to ask whether they still call blogs “web logs.” How quaint would that be?
I have nothing against the AP Stylebook. In journalism school, it was holy writ. And on our campus, we’ve used AP style as the foundation for our own university style. But let’s face it. The AP Stylebook editors are a conservative lot. They’re years behind the time. And they don’t have the humor of the old UPI Stylebook editors, who inserted this witty entry amidst all the stylistic rules:
burro, burrow A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. As a journalist, you are expected to know the difference.
When it comes to Internet terms, I think the AP rules are not only humorless, but unnecessarily staid. Irrelevantly staid, even.
So over the past several years, we’ve veered away from the AP rules for our own in-house style when it comes to Internet terms. We’ve looked to other sources for guidance — namely, Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age, by Constance Hale and Jessie Scanlon. As a result, we changed our style way back in the early 200s 2000s to lowercase “web,” combine (and lowercase) “website” and dehyphenate “email.” I don’t think it’s that radical. As we observe in our in-house style guide:
Missouri S&T uses a combination of Wired and Associated Press styles when writing about the Internet. Because most of our audiences are Internet-savvy, we feel more comfortable embracing the less formal style of Wired as opposed to the conservative approach of the Associated Press Stylebook.
One argument against violating the sacred rules of AP may come from the media relations folks, who will claim (as I once did) that we’re writing for journalists, and journalists follow AP style. Pish posh. We’re not writing for journalists anymore. We’re writing directly to our various audiences, and more and more of them are getting their information from onlline sources.
Back in 2004, Wired decided to lowercase the “i” in “internet, a move that I just can’t bring myself to embrace. Yet.
Still, I admire Wired’s chutzpah. The Wired editors’ argument for lowercasing the i-word makes sense. “The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words [internet, net, web]. Actually, there never was.”
They went on to poke fun at those of us who clink to our style guides like well-worn security blankets:
True believers are fond of capitalizing words, whether they be marketers or political junkies or, in this case, techies. If It’s Capitalized, It Must Be Important. In German, where all nouns are capitalized, it makes sense. It makes no sense in English. So until we become Die Wired Nachrichten, we’ll just follow customary English-language usage.
Interestingly, Wired has yet to incorporate downstyle in its headlines. (The headline to the post referenced above was, “It’s Just the ‘internet’ Now.” Note all those capitalized words. What’s up with that — other than the first letter of every word except the one that most of us would uppercase?)
Anyway, with all of Steve Jobs’ new lowercase “i” words now so prevalent — iPods, iPhones — maybe now is the time to boldly embrace the newfangled lowercase internet.
Or maybe it should be iNternet? I bet Steve Jobs would love that.