Slammed. Overwhelmed. Overworked.
Take your pick. I know that’s no excuse to abandon my blog, but I’ve barely seen my apartment let alone my friends. I just haven’t had time to post anything new.
I do have a ridicuoulous back log of half thought out posts waiting in my drafts folder, so when I have time I’ll be back in a flurry!
My boss promises next week will be better….we’ll see…
Favicons are the most underrated design elements of any website. I love this execution and they made a pretty kick ass video about it FTW.
Enjoy!
A week ago Skittles relaunched their website and it looked strangely familiar…reminiscent of Modernista’s unwebsite, Skittles.com’s site is merely a redirect to social networks, Wikpedia, YouTube and a couple of static pages.
Initially, the Skittles homepage was pointed at the results page for a ”skittles” twitter search but within a couple of hours there were hundreds of inappropriate tweets making onto the results page. Hilarious for those of us with a juvenile sense of humor, but probably not what Skittles had intended. They have since redirected the homepage to their Wikipedia entry, but those twitter search results are still the redirect for the “chatter” section of the site.
There was no clear consensus within my Twitter friends if it was genius or a lame attempt to jump on the bandwagon. I can’t understand why would they attempt to feed off of a social network without someone who was actively twittering as the face of the brand? Unless of course Skittles the Cat (@skittles) is the mastermind behind the candy.
While I applaud the attempt to “go social” and I love the idea of the unwebsite, I really don’t think that it fits with the brand of the product. Once all the attention dies down from the new site, how is the unwebsite going to further the brand, continue to build awareness or make me want some Skittles? Just because the unwebsite is a great idea, doesn’t mean its a great idea for the brand.
You can read some great posts on the Skittles redesign here, here and here.
Now if I could have had a hand in this site redo, I would have taken a look around the internets to see what people were already saying about the brand. Check out what I learned about Skittles in 5 minutes. Starting with my first two Google searchs (auto completes say a lot!):
I’m a sucker for random videos that include cats, hamsters and hedgehogs.
David&Goliath know this about me and created my most favorite car commercial of all times. I’ve never considered a Kia before, but I just might have looked into it had this spot been in rotation before I bought my Jetta.
Check it here.
I am normally not a fan of McDonalds commercials, they are usually pretty terrible (like the McNuggets love story spots). But they’ve taken a new direction with the McDonalds Quarter Pounder.
Creepy Chester Cheeto voice + mention of a QP in short shorts + random dudes in short shorts stretching = Awesome.
While I still don’t think I could ever shove a Quarter Pounder down my mouth, I certainly love their new campaign for the artery clogging, fat inducing burgers. There is something about the guys stretching in sync with each other, like some strange choreographed dance while the woman inhales her burger. Seriously, her mouth is totally full and she takes another bite at the end. Is there crack in those burgers?
According to a Hitwise study found search queries are getting longer. Check it out here.
As you can see from the chart below searches with 4 words and more (8 words are up 22%) are up year over year. While Hitwise doesn’t offer an explanation of this, I think its due to a combination of the increased number of sites being indexed by SEs and the increase in SEO.
Search is a journey (I picked up that gem at one of the online marketing conferences).
It makes sense that the further you are on that journey (or further in the funnel or closer to grandma\’s house, whatever you want to call it), the wordier your search query becomes. You\’re asking questions and searing for information without being able to engage in a conversation. Most of the time you know what you are looking for, from the address to a bar to the history of a sports team, and its hard for a simple term in a search engine to understand that.
Search engines are still inadequate at reading minds and SEOers are busy trying to tell it that their sites are the ones that have all your answers. There have been rumors about Twitter taking over Google as the place to search for information and while Twitter search and asking my tweeple questions is super quick and reliable it is not going to replace my love for Google.
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