scurvypirates

It appears while many brands are pussy-footing around building out Facebook Fans through their brand pages, K2 walked into town, swung the saloon doors wide open, and just started shooting. Several articles picked up on the fact that K2 recently put a redirect up from their corporate website, and sent all traffic for  limited time to their Fan Page on Facebook. A visitor would default to an application tab that asked for a “Like” in exchange for a sneak preview of their 2010/2011 product line. This raises a lot of questions. By redirecting all site visits to their Facebook Page, are they duping unsuspected visitors to click the “Like” button to get them to the content they were looking for? The point has been made that for many unsuspecting web searchers, this might be a poor SEO strategy, sort of the antichrist version of SEO. Here’s the deal: if you don’t want to “Like” K2, then you can wait 2 weeks to see the product line when their site goes back up. Is it risky? Will someone skip this and then go to the Rossignol site, pissed off that K2 inserted a gatekeeper in the form of a Facebook “Like” as a magic password? I doubt it. I think it’s a bold strategy that wouldn’t work for everyone. Kind of like the kid on skis who hucks the biggest cliff first, the one that everyone else is too afraid to attempt. That kid may not stick the landing, but you have to admire the gusto.

Here are some articles with more details:

Is a Facebook Like Button Click for Website Access Evil?

K2 Skis Redirects Entire Company Website To Facebook

There was a white paper or a blog post circulating around the interweb recently that explained the reality that digital advertising and interactive advertising are not necessarily the same thing. Digital advertising like banners and flash microsites, in some cases are no more interactive than newsprint ads, and interactive marketing doesn’t necessarily have to take place on a computer or a mobile device to be considered interactive. If anybody out there knows the specific  article I am referring to, please post a link in the comments below, since I can’t seem to find it. The infographic below (courtesy of davidarmano.com) shows a spectrum of engagement, with traditional (broadcast, print, radio) on the low end, tradigital (banners, microsites, search) in the middle, and social engagement (blogs, networks, communities) on the high end. I love the term “tradigital”, which aptly describes so much of what is getting produced in the digital advertising world these days.

Social Engagement Infographic from David // Armano

On the verge of burnout of looking over some exhausting RFPs for website projects, I always look back to the post from Seth Godin’s blog (September 19, 2009). I wish more people responsible for issuing website RFPs would read this list before having their corporate purchasing zombie nail together pages upon pages of meaningless boilerplate. Seriously, a recent RFP came through for a $50,000 maximum budget, and asked for our shop’s financial statements for the last fiscal year. It might surprise them to know that we wipe our asses with $50,000 bills. Not really, but the level of detail of this aforementioned RFP, only 1 paragraph on 1 page (out of 36 pages) really describes or hints at what they want. Then the word “state-of-the-art” creeps in, and that begs the question, what does state-of-the-art mean? That term reminds me of Electrolux vacuum cleaners, not websites. Our of Godin’s list, the first question is the most all-important. If you don’t have this figured out, why write the rest of the RFP?

• What is the goal of the site?

Read the rest of the list here.