Author: Michael Litman

Google Envelopes, Beta Of Course

Designers Rahul Mahtani & Yofred Moik from the Industrial Design program at Syracuse University came up with this concept called Google Envelopes. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to map the course of mail and how it can tell a story? They came up with Google Envelopes, which can be sent through G-Mail itself. It’s only a concept, but totally viable and something people can immediately understand.

Designers: Rahul Mahtani & Yofred Moik

I love the integration with web Gmail. You can see it happening so easily. There’s a whole art lost of sending and receiving a letter in this day and age which I used to love. There’s so much more emotional involvement with a letter than an email.

Last week Music in Manchester produced the final poster in a series of four designed to promote Manchester City Football Club’s “big four” Premiership home fixtures of the football season – complete with an illustration of Carlos Tevez by Shephard Fairey’s studio, Studio Number One…

Music commissioned four illustrators to each produce an iconic image of a City player who would be the focus of the campiagns for the games against Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United. Each City player depicted used to play for the opposing team at one time – hence ex Manchester United player Tevez appearing on the above poster which promoted Saturday’s game (April 17) against United.

“We wanted to treat the games for what they really are, a unique experience more likened to a gig than a game of football, explains Music’s Dave Simpson. “Our aim was to work with illustrators and produce pieces of iconic artwork that captured great moments in the club’s history.”

Here are the other three posters produced during the season and posted up around Manchester:

Todd Slater created the illustration for the above poster which features Craig Bellamy and which promoted the game against Liverpool on 21 February

This poster to promote the game against Chelsea on 5th December features Shaun Wright-Philips as envisaged by illustrator Chris White

And this illustration of Emmanuel Adebayor by Michael Gillette adorned the poster for the September match between Man City and Arsenal.

“The Big Four games provide an opportunity to celebrate those cult players who relish such occasions and transcend the barriers between culture and football,” says Chris Kay, head of marketing at Manchester City. “Creating a stylised campaign, unique for a football club, puts Manchester City at the centre of the cultural fabric of Manchester.”

Love these illustrations. Man City really are ahead of the pack when it comes to this kinda thing and embodying the brand.

The SWP one is my fave (number 3)

“Robin of Shoreditch, a merry little band of creative outlaws looking to help brands in a slightly different way.

Our first project is the 100 Brands Project, as you’ll see from the video below. Over the coming months, we’ll be providing every one of Brand Z’s Top 100 brands with a creative idea that can make a difference to their company.

In return, all we ask for is 1/10,000,000 (that’s one ten-millionth) of the value of their brand as a fee. We’ll then send on 100% of that fee to the continued relief efforts in Haiti.”

Via http://robinofshoreditch.yolasite.com/

Challenge:
Be the manliest Foursquare user

Beef up your check-ins to win 500 bucks
worth of going out outfits

It’s International Foursquare Day today, so we’re gearing up for a challenge. Oh, you’re not acquainted with Foursquare? It’s basically a live man-map for you to show off where you’ve been. A phone app for ‘checking in’ where you go. It tells your friends where you are. They smugly pretend they know all about it as they frantically Google to research the venue.

For the next two weeks, we’re asking our brothers in the UK and USA to stake their claim for the manliest check in.

Prove you’ve been to the manliest guy-den by checking in to the most eye-catching venue. Have you been to B&Q recently? Or a burlesque parlour? Or a prison?

Here’s how you do it…

#1Download the FourSquare app

#2Become our friends by clicking here

#3Check into the most masculine places possible

#4Then it’s over to us. We check out your check ins, and the most impressive location wins the 500 big ones towards a going out outfit.

And if you cheat and check in at venues you haven’t been to, we have SWAT teams of vigilante Foursquare location-busters ready to crash through your window and catch you in the act. See terms and conditions here

» Sign up to Foursquare here and man up to the challenge.

Love this from French Connection.

21.6% of US adults own or use an iPod, iPhone or Mac computer. That’s right, one-fifth of Americans own some type of Apple hardware.

Stop explaining math to me like I’m in high school.

I get it. ROI = money earned – money spent / money spent. Thanks for clearing that up.

How do I prove how much money social media earned (or saved) for my business? That’s the real question here.

Every time I see someone try to figure this question out it has something to do with measuring referral traffic to the Web site and that leading in some way to online sales that can be attributed to the link you shared on Twitter. Sure, in a perfect world that’s the way it works. But we don’t live in a perfect world. And guess what – your fans? They’re real people. They live and breathe and walk and talk and they do things offline sometimes. So what about that? What about when a customer writes on your fan page: “I don’t like widgets when they don’t have this function.” and you write back and say, “Well actually we have a whole line of widgets that have that function, they’re just more expensive and so less popular. What are you using it for? Let me help you find the right widget.” Then the fan takes that info and visits your store to check out the other widgets. I realize that’s also a “perfect world scenario” but my point is that providing a level of relationship building and support can lead to repeat, or higher value, customers and that isn’t going to show up in your Google Analytics.

The next most popular model is where someone graphs out monthly sales, then they lay social metrics (like fan count) over that graph and say “Look, a spike in fans! and it’s right next to a spike in sales!” And that’s great, because if you have that graph and you can trick someone into thinking that correlation is causation – go for it. If you do no other marketing besides social, or you were very careful not to change any of your other marketing during your test period, it may even be true – though you could still argue that it’s the opposite way, the sales actually led to customers who wanted to become fans in order to get information on the product and maybe future offers. Suffice it to say that overall this method is shaky at best because it fails so massively to take into account all the other variables at play.

So how do you capture the real value – the actual money earned – from social media?

I don’t have answers. I have questions. I have ideas. And I have a desire to talk about this on a higher level where we can start addressing the actual core issue here and stop reviewing basic math equations like it’s a revolutionary concept.

Who’s with me?

Super cool.

This is seriously all kinds of awesome. Combining Nike + Japanese people + Macs. The best combination.

Amazing.