I was recently introduced to a company called 37 Signals by my boss Loic. I had heard of a couple of their products and although I do not use any, I know several people who use Basecamp and Ruby on Rails. In fact, because I’m not a coder working in a coder’s world, I find myself making jokes about how “I did that in Ruby on Rails” or “really, you don’t think that could be done? Well have you tried it in Ruby on Rails?”. I mainly make these jokes because Ruby on Rails is a good name that I can remember and RSS jokes are just getting outdated now. But I digress.
What I was looking for when I headed over to 37 Signals’ homepage was the format of their web pages. I’m working on a new project at work that will bring a new perspective to our company – the idea is to create an atmosphere that brings people back to our site for other reasons than to see what our products are about. Basically we don’t want our webpage to be totally static, so we’re looking to create more content – like we used to do with “Seesmic du Jour“. 37 Signals does this quite well – even stepping outside of their digital presence into the print world.
They have a book! It’s called “REWORK“. I’d like to make a few points here:
37 Signals is a company that makes easy-to-use web apps for businesses. They say on their site “Every day the world’s most respected brands, small businesses, non-profits, and entrepreneurs depend on our products to make their businesses run smoothly. Safe, secure, and reliable. Since 2004.”
So you could go to their site to download software, or to see what people who use their products think about it, but you can also keep up with their “daily thoughts and opinions” on their Signal vs Noise blog. Or, you could get their book “REWORK” which they have made a very clever video advertisement for and posted on YouTube.
So let’s look at this business construct that they’ve designed – it’s awesome. First they’ve made a several products that people love. Second, they’ve designed a web page that is welcoming and informative. When you show up to it you can find figure out what they do – without information overload. They’ve made a blog that they regularly update and therefore bring people back on a constant basis. They’ve written a book. If you read the book, it may lead you to the company – as it did for me. If you go to the blog, it may lead you to the YouTube video, which will lead you to the book. The web page advertises the book. Everything links back to them, their brand, their company. I’m not sure if they’d prefer you use their products, read their book, or follow their blog – but I’m sure they’d be happy if you did any of those. The point is – their reach is massive, now spreading beyond their own web page and into pages that you physically flip in your hand – a book that our boss wants his employees to read.
This is a salute to 37 Signals and their awesome brand presence.
A while back, IKEA made this wicked awesome ad campaign that I never wrote about. I recently came across it again when doing some social network advertising research. The video says it well, but the basic gist of the campaign revolves around photo posting on Facebook. What they did was post photos of IKEA products in a room on Facebook. People then tagged their name on any product, like a lamp. The first person to tag their name on that product won it. The genius part about this is that when you get tagged, you end up on all of your friends walls as a Status Update. In essence, IKEA was advertising through tons of people without having to spend money on Facebook. Genius.
GEICO Careers looks like a pretty cool company to work for. I don’t know that I would necessarily want to work as an employee answering phones anywhere, but whoever has the job of social media marketing for GEICO has a pretty cool job. What makes this particular video really smart is that it highlights the good qualities about it’s employees. They’re cool enough to learn choreography, a song, and take some time to make a video. Yes, the video is made with actual GEICO employees, which just goes to show that they’re normal people, not drones behind phones (I just made that up, I think it’s pretty good).
Not only does this video make GEICO look like a “good” (in the “not evil” sense) company filled with “good” people, it makes it look like a fun place to work. I’m telling you, if your company has the money to hire someone to make videos about how awesome you are, you should. If done right, the video will grab viewer’s attention and remind them about how cool you are. Could you imagine if Coke suddenly started posting videos about the crazy hi-jinks that happen at Coke Corporate? I’m telling you – people would watch it, love it, and think that Coke was the best company on earth. Well played GEICO.
I won’t be making it out to SXSW this week – It just didn’t work out this year. But I have a simple request to my friends who will be there. I’d like you to help me be a SXSW meme amongst each other. The idea of a meme simply put by wikipedia is a “unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures”. This can be done a few ways.
Writing: When you’re out this week, and I would have been out with you hashtag #sxsw #ws – The #ws for Whit Scott. The search looks like this. Speach: When you’re heading out to parties you should remember as a group to invite me. Please invite invisible me verbally. Here is a picture of Thomas, Rachael and invisible me at SXSW last year. Gestures: You’re all creative, I assume you’ll be able to come up with some Whit style gestures. If I was there it’d probably look like this.
At this point I can’t really get much out of South By South West unless I become a meme. Maybe I’ll even meet people this way… Imagine Thomas Knoll tweeting my hashtag and Ethan noticing it. Ethan asks Thomas what he’s doing, thinks about me, then tags me up for the rest of the conference. This meme can be endless. By the end of the conference, people who don’t know me will think I was there.
In the mean time i’ll be participating in #SXSWSF (south by south west san francisco) – SXSWSF happening now all around us.
I’ve heard you can go to: Temper Trap Expression College 12:30pm, Violent Soho Amoeba records 6pm today (Friday) if you’re actually looking to be around people who are participating in #sxswsf. You can follow the SXSWSF hashtag here.
Everyone loves numbers done visually. They’re so much better than numbers done by just numbers, or numbers done by sound. That would just be weird. This is a cool video created by an agency called JESS3 which, by the way, has a very cool web page. It shows the current state of the internet by the numbers, which by the way – have already changed. We won’t hold that against JESS3 though.
