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I applaud Park City-based The Canyons Resort, (or maybe just Canyons), for committing some serious bucks towards creating content. Check out How Do You Mountain. Is this a social media campaign? Or is it a PR campaign? Yes, it’s all of those things. If you are going to shell out a $40k stipend for 4 months of work, put the winner up in a luxury suite at the Waldorf Astoria, spiff them out with content creating tools like a camera, video cam, laptop, then give them an all-access pass to one of the largest ski resorts in North America, people are going to notice. Here’s what I really like about their strategy:

1. the selection process to find their pro blogger for a season in itself is creating user-generated content. A 2 minute video is required with every application. Tons of people are going to submit. Heck, I’ll bet some marketing staffers at neighboring resorts are going to apply, just for the fun of it. Aye mateys, why not? I’m sure there will be some funny ones that will end up on their YouTube channel later this fall, regardless of who wins the coveted position.

2. Forget about turning screws in the rental shop, bumping chairs, slinging nachos in the bar. This would be the highest paying ski bum job you are going to find in Park City this winter. Most other resorts and DMOs pawn off blogging and content creation to an intern or someone who is currently on-staff and chronically overworked. Kudos for bucking up the cash.

3. Who cares if the person who wins ends up being a tool? The contest is going to generate more PR buzz in the long run just for the high stakes nature.

What do you think? Smart move?

Facebook announced awhile back that they would be making significant changes to how Profile Pages and Fan Pages are displayed, mainly, they would be narrowing the page width to 520 px wide, and would be doing away with profile boxes. For anyone who has custom tab applications that are sized to anything other than 520 px wide, this is going to be a problem and will require you to tweak those tab apps. Today, as I logged in to one of the many Facebook Pages that I am admin for, I saw a little box at the top saying essentially, now is the time to make any changes, as the new 520 px wide pages will take effect the week of August 23rd, 2010. Check out the official announcement from the Facebook Developer’s blog.

This post was originally going to be a shoot-out between AutoStitch which has been in the App Store for awhile, and the newly released 360 Panorama App, which was published by Occipital, the same company that brought us Red Laser (which by the way, was recently purchased by eBay). Unfortunately there is nothing to compare. 360 Panorama is a joke. After spending $2.99, I feel like I made a contribution to Occipital’s AR (augmented reality) research and development fund, because this app is not a Photography app. AutoStitch, on the other hand, is thoughtfully-designed to be useful, and creates amazing results. For both tests below, I was using an iPhone 3GS with iOS 4.0.1.

How you use 360 Panorama
You launch the app, hold your phone in the air, tap the screen, then you slowly rotate where you are standing, while passers-by think out loud, what in the fuck is that guy doing? What may seem odd turns sarcastically funny when you look at the result, only the joke is on you. The resulting image is poor quality, with visible overlaps, jagged transitions, hardly something you want to share with anyone you know.

How you use AutoStitch
First of all, you don’t actually shoot through AutoStitch. So it’s not a camera app per se, it’s more of a post processing app. The first time you launch it, you get instructions that tell you to exit the app, and shoot a series of still shots through the native camera, making sure the images overlap in terms of point of view. Once you have created and saved a bunch of successive images to your camera roll, you go back and launch the app, choose the images you want to stitch together, and the app takes it from there. The results are amazing. There is a crop tool inside the app that auto-crops, or allows you to drag the corners for custom cropping, and it then saves a high resolution file to your camera roll.

The images below were shot during a recent weather event that created amazing light and a variety of colors and clouds during sunset. You tell me which image is the result of $2.99 well spent, and which one looks like R2D2 ate a bunch of mushrooms.

Sunset shot with iPhone 3GS and AutoStitch App

Click the image above for a larger version. This was composited by AutoStitch from 19 different still shots. As instructed, I made sure each image overlapped the previous, as I moved from left to right to capture about 180 degrees of this beautiful sunset. Then I launched the app, selected the sequence from my camera roll, and created the pano. I then uploaded straight to my Facebook Wall, and sat back for the oohing and aahing to begin. I even had a professional photographer friend ask what I shot this with. If you want to get AutoStitch, and you are convinced by this review, the good captain is an iTunes affiliate, so click here if you are convinced and want to pony up for AutoStitch.

WTF? Really? I expected so much more from 360 Panorama App

I don’t even know what to say about this. 360 Panorama supposedly uses live video input, and uses GPS pitch, roll, and yaw data and takes the image in realtime, but the results are not very impressive. I can’t recommend this app to anyone, and frankly, can’t believe it ever got approved as a paid app in the first place. Maybe it is a hint of things to come with some cool technology that Occipital is working on, but for a consumer, it’s a dead fish.

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.

I was recently working on a big project for an agency client that suddenly went all wrong. The end client, a giant web portal conglomerate from the Pleistocene epoch decided they were going to take the project in-house for technical reasons that could not be explained, and hence the great floods of watering the concept down began. Our creative comrades at the agency continued to soldier on, in hopes of maintaining some integrity for the project, but yesterday, I received this email of condolence from the lead Creative Director:

“Thanks guys. And once again sorry. if it makes you feel any better, they’ve been slowly crushing our souls and using the bits and pieces to ensemble a monument to mediocre. so I guess, you kinda dodged a bullet.”

We’ve all been there before, most often when the client is actually a committee. Reminds me of an old phrase I once heard Gordon Bowen (of McGarry Bowen) repeat often, although I don’t know who to attribute it to:

“In all the towns and all the cities, there are no statues of committees.”

Here is an example of what I think is a tourism destination marketing FAIL. Although I love Wyoming, and I think this recently-launched site is forward-thinking for a state sponsored tourism promotion site, there is an issue with some of the user-generated content aggregation. For example, why do I want to see footage of a tornado? People die in tornadoes. Who wants to load up the kids in the 5th wheel and drive across a state that gets twisters? Kudos for aggregating UGC, but I’m curious why a state with so much to offer shows a funnel cloud dancing across barren plains. What do you think?

Come see our lovely tornado: roadtripwyoming.com

Maybe not, but it sure as hell can’t hurt. Check out these staggering numbers regarding the iPad app version of Wired magazine. Not only did they rock out 73,000 downloads in 9 days at $4.99 a pop, they claim it caused a 20% lift in their ad sales. Granted, Uncle Jobs gets a cool 30% of the app revenue, but who gives a shit? It’s the cost of doing business. Read this article about the Wired iPad App.

This article is very disturbing. Apparently Facebook is trying to tie use of 3rd-party developed applications that live on the Tabs of brand Fan Pages with advertising sales. Here is an excerpt below:

“This afternoon Facebook announced via the developer forum that Facebook Pages now need to be authenticated in order to have landing tabs. This means any new visitor to your Facebook Page will not be able to land on a custom tab unless you have greater than 10,000 fans or the Page administrator has worked with an ads account representative. This is a massive blow to smaller companies (or individuals) looking to build their presence through Facebook Pages.”

If this is in fact true, it creates an advantage for brands who can buy their way into developing a tab app. Some smaller scrappier brands have invested in developing tab apps as a way to create engagement and boost their fan numbers. Now they will need to pay, or have 10,000 fans to be “authenticated.”

Here is a real world scenario: SLC-based developer Welikesmall built a robust tab application for Benjamin Moore Paints Fan Page. At the time the application was launched, Benjamin Moore had roughly 5,700 fans. They spent a lot of money to build and launch the application, then had a PR and paid-media drive to bring more visitors to that page. A very publicly-reported campaign, rumored to be in the neighborhood of 15 million dollars, including TV, print, and a high-percentage spent on social media. One could assume they spent a lot on ads with Facebook, and they would have had no problem launching the campaign with “authenticated” status, due to their ad buy. The goals were to gain more Fans, and have visitors participate in their Forum, part of the application that Welikesmall built. A month after launching the application, Benjamin Moore has over 15,000 fans.

Benjamin Moore Experts Facebook App

What do you think of this move by Facebook?

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