As the shimmering waters of Facebook, Twitter and other social spheres are opened, many marketers are diving in the shallow end head first and hoping that the API waterwings their social media guru has supplied will keep them afloat.

I blogged about a few of these examples here, listing some brands gasping for air as their Twitter API “strategy” gets pulled from their lungs, and others just treading water.

Enter Prototype-Experience.com, a console game site (the Mitch Buchanan of this metaphor), where users link the Prototype trailer with their social graph and assets via Facebook Connect.

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Filed under: Flash, Ideas, Social Media, Twitter by Craig Ritchie
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Tags: api, baywatch, bigstage, dr. awesome, Facebook, facebook connect, gaming, iphone, personalization, prototype, social graph, strategy, threeminds, trailer

Apparently, API stands for All Projects are Implemented, according to some agencies. Marketers are trying to find their way in the Times-Square madness of the Social Media space, but when someone is asking for directions, they don’t really want every street on the whole map.

With Twitter, for example, it’s still important for strategy to drive decisions on tactics. An open API seems to be a maddening siren’s call for agencies and developers, causing them to lose all sense and launch campaigns just for the sake of integrating Twitter.

Let’s learn from these campaigns and stop all the gimmickry.

Skittles

If you haven’t heard of the Skittles.com debacle (which they continue to host), welcome to the Internet. Kidding aside, this web site has thrown away caution and its brand, allowing Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to define its message and its value. Upon launch of this “strategy,” users gamed the sites, associating swear words, offensive posts and negative messaging. Now, weeks later, the aggregate social destination sits passive; the brand message confused and tarnished.

The glass-half-full viewpoint: I should, however, acknowledge the 1 million+ fans subscribed to the Skittles Facebook fan page. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, Skittles does with these subscribers.

FixOutlook.org

This recently launched grassroots site hopes to grab the attention of the Windows Beta evaluators, and send a powerful, organized message to Microsoft before they commit to the sin of continuing to use Word to render emails in the 2010 version of Outlook. I admit, it’s a noble cause. But the twitter implementation at the core site is reminiscent of 90s designers using animated gif backgrounds just because they could. It was a terrible idea, and the addition of a Twitter avatar feed doesn’t change this. This is/was a great opportunity to unite these users in a deeper way.

The glass-half-full viewpoint: The people behind this cause did keep it simple, and don’t necessarily have a need for a long-term view. The virulence of the tweets are visible, and I’ve yet (with 17,489 “tweetitioners”) to see any tweets against the campaign.

Terminator Salvation (Resistance 2018)

The film over-promised and under-delivered, so I suppose we could say the Twitter campaign stayed true to the brand. This Twitter game sent Jumbled words to decode and trivia questions to answer to followers who would earn points. It also incorporated some Terminator-world messages, such as, “You have been harvested by the machines, you lose 5 points.” Games on Twitter are starting to multiply, and this one seemed to have good promise, but the challenges became repetitive quickly, and the burning Terminator face rolling by among my smiling happy Twitter friends weakened the impact of the experience. If this is SkyNet, we have nothing to worry about.

The glass-half-full viewpoint: Games on Twitter are still a new concept, and this early attempt did earn some pretty good reach and buzz. It does foreshadow more robust and solid twitter contest and gaming to come.

Polar Ice

The ultimate in Twitter API gimmickry lives at PolarIce.ca. This flash site pulls in what appear to be completely random Tweets, with a muddled interface featuring confusing functionality creating the ultimate why-am-I-here experience for users. It seems Polar Ice just likes Twitter. But what does this have to do with Vodka, or partying?

The glass-half-full viewpoint: If you have a glass half full of Polar Ice, tip it back and Google your way off this site.

Nike’s The Hookup

Nike’s work-in-progress started with a whimper, but is now, it appears, starting to evolve into something a little more useful. The Hookup tweets local shoe drops to followers, and has other functionality pulling key terms for their fashion product/item/lines called “icons.” Fans are starting to use the tag #thehookup, which may connect to this strategy too, but it’s difficult to say.

The glass-half-full viewpoint: There is a lot of activity around these items on Twitter, and this team has a long-term view. A few changes will lead to success for this program.

(Full disclosure: I work for Organic, with Nike Canada as one of our clients. I haven’t, however, worked on The Hookup)

What’s the common thread here? These API implementations are all ideas conceived based on the brand’s needs, instead of the users’.

If instead, one considers the drivers behind users’ behaviours on Twitter and other Social Media, one realizes that these are surface ideas that don’t serve their preferences, desires and needs. Start with user-centric thinking, think long-term, and ease into Social Media with grace and success.

Filed under: Brands, Marketing, Social Media, Twitter, User Experience, User-generated Content, Web Strategy by Craig Ritchie
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Tags: api, campaigns, fix outlook, Marketing, microsoft, nike, polar ice, skittles, Social Media, strategy, terminator, thehookup, Twitter

This video by Google illustrates several issues that have been plaguing product and brand managers, UxDs (user-experience designers) and IAs (information architects) and most obviously, the general public. Google asks “What is a browser,” only to find that less than 8% of those polled have an understanding of the term. (It is, by the way, “a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web” – Wikipedia; e.g. Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (The big blue ‘E’))

This is an excerpt of a post… Read the rest of this post on Organic’s Threeminds Blog

Filed under: Brands, Information Architecture, Sales & Education by Craig Ritchie
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Tags: chrome, firefox, google, ie, threeminds