Clearing the cache, part 1

I’ve got a lot of links clogging up the RSS feed and del.icio.us bookmark. Here are a few for your consideration:

Presidential campaign logos, 1960-2008, an interesting study in the evolution of design, marketing and sloganeering. Via Jordon Cooper.

The linkbaiting playbook. A must-read for all bloggers.

Playing it safe is a trap: 5 syndromes in online marketing, a good article by Michael Gilbert, who obviously has read the linkbaiting playbook. Via Karlyn Morissette.

Brands of the living dead. A thoughtful NY Times Magazine piece by Murketing‘s Rob Walker about how dead brands live on in our collective conscious. “A great deal of what happens in the consumer marketplace does not involve brands with zealous loyalists. What determines whether a brand lives or dies (or can even come back to life) is usually a quieter process that has more to do with mental shortcuts and assumptions and memories — and all the imperfections that come along with each of those things.” All brand managers should read this piece.

Hand-coding is still in vogue. “[A]fter 14 years of such editors — FrontPage, PageMill, GoLive, Dreamweaver, and many others, with few surviving the hecatomb — hand coding still rises to the top as the preferred method of building pages.”

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Now playing: Various Artists – Mamie Van Doren – Cat Fight
via FoxyTunes

Testing Utterz for higher ed marketing

The Missouri S&T communications team just created our very own Utterz account to use for on-the-fly reporting about certain events that involve our university. I’m getting ready to try it out this weekend, as I and Missouri S&T video guy Tom Shipley will be joining up with our school’s Formula SAE team — one of dozens of teams involved in an annual formula-style race at Michigan International Speedway. This weekend’s event is a test for Utterz, which we hope to incorporate into our marketing and communications efforts during a long road trip with our solar car team this summer. We’ll be incorporating Utterz into our university Twitter presence @MissouriSandT and a student design team blog called Experience This!

I’m not aware of any other universities using Utterz. Are you? If so, any advice?

Here’s my first attempt at Utterzing:

http://www.utterz.com/fp/slimline.swf?1209065416

Off to Detroit!

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Now playing: The Detroit Cobras – ÿNothing But a Heartache
via FoxyTunes