My preferences:

email – I was actually surprised that the NY Times would use the old dated e-mail. But as it turns out the AP only updated their style guide sans the hyphen in March 2011.

homepage – Hopefully one day this term will be retired (main landing page?) but for the time being this is one word.

website – It just looks so much better as one word.

smartphone – Ditto above.

wireframe

login- Although log on seems to looks better with the words separated.

ecommerce – Spell check informs me that this is incorrect – e-commerce apparently does not get the no hyphen treatment. This is curious as we’re talking the same electronic that is referenced in email.

One of the lighter moments of the book includes excerpts from a New York Times Magazine roundtable with the creative directors of AKQA (Lars Bastholm) and the Barbarian Group (Benjamin Palmer) discussing how a CMO might raise the profile of overalls. The author said this exchange perfectly encapsulates the era that he believes is about to end and that many more people will be doing their share of farming in the near future and will in fact be wearing overalls. No Facebook overalls necessary.

I. FACEBOOK OVERALLS

Hitt: Let me give you a scenario. I’m the somewhat desperate C.E.O. of a company called Jack’s Overalls. We manufacture functional clothes, and in the era of corporate farming, our market is fading. My younger vice presidents are telling me that we need to try new media. So I’m turning to you: Why should I even consider these emerging media? Can’t I just spend my money on old-school, 30-second spots on prime-time television?
Bastholm: Well, we do have a ton of different new media and new ways to use them. But before we get there, I would suggest that first, you take a step backward and ask yourself, How do I make my brand relevant? Overalls are a staple of Americana, a cultural icon. The question is, How can you make overalls relevant to people today, and how can you use these different media channels to accomplish that?
Palmer: Your customers in the past have been farmers. Overalls are a commodity.
Rasmussen: Very functional. And your market is shrinking.
Palmer: So you have to create a new market. Farming may be going away, but what’s on the rise? Right now your overalls are made with special pockets and holders for farming tools. Maybe we retool them for urban farmers, as it were, and their specialized gear. You have special pockets for your iPhone and your BlackBerry, and a pocket for your headphones, another for your wallet, your subway card, your keys.
Bastholm: Let’s really take the brand into the 21st century, shall we? Why don’t we put a ShotCode on the front of every single pair of overalls. A ShotCode is like a bar code. You scan it with the camera in your cellphone. And then something comes out the other end. With bar codes, it’s a price. But with a ShotCode, it could be a song, it could be a picture, it could be a link to a Web site.
Hitt: People would come up and shoot me with a cellphone?
Bastholm: Yes, with a phone camera. So you’d be wearing a pair of overalls, and you have your own personal ShotCode on the front. The ShotCode might take people online to a new Web site you’ve selected. Or a picture you took that day or your favorite song. All of a sudden you have a uniquely personalizable pair of overalls that can say something different about you on a daily basis. You’d utilize a whole bunch of screens that we haven’t really seen used in clothes before, and this loop of screens is creating something completely unique.
Rasmussen: Maybe that’s something you do in partnership with Facebook or MySpace.
Palmer: But you don’t want to suddenly be seen as, like, this newfangled Internet overall company. If you’re talking to somebody who’s over 40, that’s going to freak them out, you know? So this becomes your special-edition ShotCode overalls. You place ads only on social networks, like MySpace or Flickr. Facebook users can buy the Facebook edition of these overalls. They come precoded with your Facebook page embedded as your ShotCode. But if you’re not a Facebook person, you’re never going to know about this unique brand.
Rasmussen: You can market 100 different kinds of overalls and sell those to different target groups.
Palmer: It’s self-selecting, actually. The more narrowly you talk to your audience through these new screens, the more people and products will gravitate toward one another. And nobody else will necessarily know or care that that’s happening. Take Vans, for instance. They do all sorts of special customized editions. Like they’ll do an Iron Maiden edition of Vans. But if you’re not into Iron Maiden, you might never see that. You see it only if you gravitate toward it through these screens.
Rasmussen: I would recommend a Web presence built around a utility that engages consumers and allows them to take your brand and own it. Maybe you give customers the ability to mix and match your overalls with other clothes. Maybe you create a widget that lets you drag your overalls and drop them onto an existing image. And the program blends the overalls with the outfit, so you can say, “Boom, that’s how it would look if I wore a pair of cord overalls with a blue jean jacket.”
Bastholm: Yeah, create a little viral engine called You Need Overalls, where you can take current events and just drag a pair of overalls onto whoever’s in the news.
Rasmussen: We could also create a small card — like a business card — with your overalls and a logo and a URL on it. The overalls are perforated and can be punched out of the card. People can then hold the cutout in front of somebody cool and take a picture with their digital camera: there’s Barack Obama wearing his jacket and a pair of overalls, giving a speech. Click, I send it in to your Web page. Maybe you have samples of these user-generated images playing on digital screens in stores, on television screens in cabs and on digital billboards.
Bastholm: My company developed this mobile application called Nike Photo ID, where you take a picture with your cellphone of anything and it sends you back a pair of sneakers in the two dominant colors in that picture. So maybe we create a site called Overall This. Send in a picture of somebody and get them back in overalls.
Rasmussen: Then you can post the images on your Web site. Create a gallery that shows how overalls can mesh with many styles, from metro to hip-hop to blue collar. People can comment and vote on their favorites.

Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet [Amazon]
The Screens Issue: Multiscreen Mad Men [NY Times Magazine]

I recently worked for a company that was in the unfortunate position of promoting the merits of the banner ad. They specialized in rich media and would make flashy banner ads that chewed up computer processors. One of our arguments was that while standard banners get less than 1 percent click through rates rich media ads can get up to 3.5 percent. Since rich media come in formats that sometimes demand you click them away I was dubious of this statistic. But well done, rich media banners do offer opportunities for engagement. Remember the Subservient Chicken. Six years old and still what brands aspire to accomplish. That’s where the real opportunities lie.

The problem may be the standardization of formats. It makes for hackneyed executions and always the need to serve the lowest common denominator. It’s not as easy as giving away a few minutes of airtime or full pages in a magazine. There has to be an integration of site content and advertising to get any sort of attention. Something that demands attention and has something worthwhile to offer. Easier said then done.

Behind the Race to Build a Better Banner Ad [Mashable]

This is a savvy move and so completely obvious even if Facebook users can even still pretend to be outraged by these kinds of tactics. The author of this Business Insider article respects the concept too but I think demonstrates a bad example with Starbucks. I see this doing well with products and services people might not be aware of, and instead of large brands, being effective for smaller products and more unknown companies. A quick example, I like Headline Shirts. Great website and really fun t-shirts. I’m not sure how much influence my like has but the fact that I indicated my like that can be shared via an ad with my FB friends constitutes a passive word-of-mouth endorsement. I don’t even need to be bothered to tweet or post about. Just hit the like button and away they go.

But as always when I find myself in thrall of such clever marketing tactics, my mind shudders back to this bit from Bill Hicks.

Facebook Launching Whole New Ad Format — Will Turn Your “Likes” Into Ads And Spam Your Friends With “Sponsored Stories” [Business Insider]

1. The Importance of Micro-copy – Makes the outstanding point that it’s often the routine copy required for your website (404 pages, follow up thank you email, title and labels on forms, etc.) that provides the best opportunity to convey brand voice and attitude. (Here’s an awesome example from the Geek Squad website of what you can do with a 404 page.)

2. 5 Key Tips for a Successful Social Media Content Strategy – Frank Marquardt, Director of Content Strategy at The Barbarian Group via Mashable, provides five key tips on social media content strategy that could also apply to pretty much anything you do as a person or artist.

The Importance of Micro-copy [Jeff Sexton Writes]
5 Key Tips for Successful Social Media Content Strategy [Mashable]

What Will Be Hot in Content Strategy (according to CMS Wire)

Mobile – Specifically how to create valuable, shareable and engaging content for mobile.

Semantic Web - Categorize all of the Web’s metadata in an uniform language and tagging (to be called the Semantic Web), so that all the information can be filed into one giant database to be accessed and easily delivered on demand to multiple devices.

Trackable Content – Tag content so that it becomes trackable from the source. This will be critical to figuring out how best to maximize content’s viralbility.

Social Media Content Strategy – Using social media and the content you push out to social networks to accomplish larger strategic goals.

Technical Content Strategy vs. Content Marketing - Two main types of content strategists will emerge: “Technical content strategists” will be the group thinking about meta-data, Content Management Systems, character limits, XML and RDFs. The “marketing content strategists” will focus on creating relevant content to reinforce and promote branding.

Content Strategy: What Will Be Hot in 2011 [CMS Wire]
Top 11 Ad Agency Predictions for 2011 [Blue Focus Marketing]
5 Content Strategy Trends for 2011 [Content Reveler]
100 Things to Watch in 2001 [JWT]
7 Technologies That Will Rock 2011 [TechCrunch]

In the past I have been an AT&T apologist. It’s worked pretty much everywhere I’ve needed it although it is notoriously unreliable in midtown Manhattan. But last Friday I was in a hospital and needed to send an important text and it could not pick up any network for fifteen minutes. That’s where they lost me.

AT&T is the worst carrier in the U.S. according to Consumer Reports [Boy Genius Reports]

I think the rise of mobile also makes it that much more important to focus on the essential messages and content. Along with this goes the must that digital must have utility.

The Inevitable Decline Due to Clutter [Seth Godin]

FSN IN DEPTH: ERIC JANSZEN, THE POSTCATASTROPHE ECONOMY [Financial Sense]
The Postcatastrophe Economy: Rebuilding America and Avoiding the Next Bubble [Amazon]

Inside Jay-Z’s Launch of “Decoded” With Droga5, Bing [Fast Company]
Jay-Z “Decoded”: 32 Pages Revealed [Fast Company]