PR Week just came out with their Book of Lists for 2007 and in the #1 position in the category "Agency Sites that Awed" is the GCI Group website which we strategized, designed and developed with our good friends at GCI. This was a fun project made even better by having an integrated client/agency team of marketers, designers and developers.

This is not all of the widgets we've designed and developed but it is a good cross sampling of 2008.

Click to make me life-sized.

We often speak about creating a Network Effect around content and messages. Simply put that means:
           
1.) Expose more people to your message/content by getting it placed on 3rd party sites – digital influencers, casual bloggers, social network pages and news sites.

2.) Create a larger SEO and traffic footprint by getting mentions and inbound links from those same placements.

We just finished a very successful month-long campaign for a political widget so I asked one of our designers to visualize how well this little piece of content propagated itself in just one month. I think the result is a simple but compelling view of what we mean by Network Effect. Promote your site by promoting your content and you will get great returns. 

We just got word that VM Foundry has been awarded at Gold level for the Interpretation of Murder website we did earlier this year. That site included a lot of custom Flash and coordination with the New York Historical Society to leverage their image archive.

We just launched this banner campaign for CNBC with our friends at Yield. This is one horizontal banner and varitions of these brand ads are running on major financial sites.

This is a great little chat widget built in Flex. You can get here http://www.chatopica.com/widget/ if you're interested. The interesting thing is that this is a shared window/chat so you can keep it on your page or blog and follow the conversation without being on the host site. We're going to incorporate a version of this on a current idea management project so users can chat & follow ideas they support.

In the evolving world of digital media AE's must evolve their roles and skill sets or else fear their clients finding a new agency. The good news is that the basic focus and success factors of the AE position have not changed. I see two imperatives that AE's have always had to master and two new ones which they cannot afford to miss.

AMEX has a great campaign going that includes two powerful components of social media – user rating and widgets. You should check out the site at http://www.membersproject.com or just browse the widget below.

AdAge is running a story about Del Monte launching another consumer feedback site/social site. The article mentions Ideastorm (thanks) and points out that "Marketers increasingly are tapping consumer opinions to help shape and market their products..." We've seen more and more interest in this type of communications programs as it seems companies lose the fear of public conversations about their products and services. We'll have another site to add to this category in a couple of weeks....

Numeric domains are going to make mobile web surfing easier and faster. The idea of numeric domains is growing in popularity due the consolidation of key strokes or input clicks.

For Example: If you were on a Motorola RAZR (or any other phone without a full keyboard) and you wanted to go to CNN.com you would have to type in 222 66 66 .com. Or with numeric domains you could simply type 266.com and go straight to the CNN mobile site. Or for even a greater disparity think of ESPN. it's much easier to enter 3776 (.com) -- four input clicks -- than it is to enter a lengthy sub-domain required to get to the same Web site such as mobileapp.espn.go (.com), requiring 32 input clicks.