I just started a new project in the digital landscape the problem is I still don´t know what to do with it, should I focus on Online Personal Branding, or maybe I could try to get my life easier and get all my online stuff together, a place to find my mail, contacts, social networks, photos, post, Micro blogging, share files, companies I have work with, portfolio?

I will take it personal, as the URL says, I will try to develop a project based on online free tools and applications, I’m going to start designing the home with some of the 100 inspiration tools for designer I found recently, I hope to get a nice site out of it, will keep you updated.

I was surfing the web for automotive brand sites best practices un my country Colombia, unfortunately, I found the Nissan website, that shows the most horrible sites ever, and is not a design based argument, is a functional argument, there is no one button working properly, no images are displayed correct, everything you try to do doesn´t work. After spending like 5 minutos trying to make it work I Gave up, I gave up a little upset because there is no excuse for a brand at this moment of life to have such a horrible and stupid site, I can imagine marketing team trying to get their website done for 5 dolares saying that the moeny spent on it won´t be efficient. I can´t imagine myself having a conversation with some of them.

NISSAN, please get serious, we are talking about your site, don´t make users lost their time in your crapy URL, respect consumer!! respect your brand!!

take a look, is amazing.

www.nissan.com.co On the other side I have to thanks Nissan for give me strength to blog again, that was really a reason.

Have you seen how many emails are we getting around Carlos Slim advice to deal the upcoming economic crisis? I´ve got almost 25 emails with exactly the same information, an email that Mr Slim sent to all his employees explaining the crisis and giving some advice. Just go Google Carlos Slim Advice, and you will get top 20 results getting to the same direction.

Just wanted to post it because I believe that´s a perfect example of how we need to manage and deal with Biological Users, move with them, be relevant, be accurate, and get to users on time, that´s all you will need to get all their attention.

So, we need to learn from him, his not only on e of the richest guys in the world, he is also a great Viral Marketing expert.

I´ve been around the digital business for almost 8 years, and in the last 2 I have found how agencies are working on the digital world and how they are trying to spread the word around their work. Some of that work can be Facebook applications, groups, Websites, Hotsites, downloads, or any other type of digital content, the point here is that when a agency deploys a campaign they try to spread it out using their Msft Messenger personal message as well as online status in any of the tools we use today, I think that works, don´t know how fair it is having in mind some agencies can have more than 300 employees that non of them is the target audience of the brand, but that´s not the point, if you want you can have your employees boost your online results, anyone is free to show their work to the world, but please stop them for doing great comments on the job, telling the users thats the best site ever.

I´ve been looking around for APPLE applications since I got my new IBook @ office. I started looking for cool apps, nice wallpapers, awesome icons, all that great stuff that makes Windows lovers feel ugly.

I browsed something more then 20 sites looking for wallpapers, and it worth it, I found a great one that says Look Left over a cross walk, I believe is from a street in anywhere or any country where pedestrian are having problems with car bumpers.  When I looked at it I realized how connected it was with my Betamode concept, you always visit a site the same way, you always look at problems from one point of view, you always do all that you do in a mechanic way ending up in loosing the most important information that something or someone is trying to send you. So I realized, we do need to start Looking Left before crossing the street, doesn´t matter if cars are coming from the right, always look left!

And that´s how I´m facing all the new challenges coming to my life, try to always look from a different perspective, try to stand out of your pivot point of view, try to change the way you learn, close your eyes and look, look left.

So after almost two months looking left before crossing the street, and not been hited by any car, I decided to take the Look Left initiative to how I browse Internet, how I Google, how I buy online, How I register in any site offering any prize, and the result was a little weird, sometimes it was easier to browse some site “looking left” thank looking the way I normally use to, so I started all over again and realize that we have been designing sites for people looking left, we don´t care about users looking for data, meaning with data any type of interaction a user wants to establish,  we just care about what we want users to look at, and there is the problem, designers, developers, some architects and people around our discipline are looking just in front of them, they need to start looking left, as the consumer does.

I loved it, I loved the way Looking Left impact the Betamode, maybe I should start looking to Betamode from a different perspective.

What a great site I found browsing yesterday at night, it helps people solving one of the first problems or desitions they have in the morning every day, its not about a complex weather channel, with maps, clouds, symbols that people needs to understand, its all about simplicity, take things to what users exactly want, and they did it.

What´s your main concern when you look at the weather report for the next day? more rain obviously means more chances to get wet, and here we go, www.umbrellatoday.com is just that, a weather report expressed   in the most simplest way, take or leave your umbrella?

Nice site, nice way to look at consumer needs.

Its being a long time since my last post, When I started this project I got some comments of friends telling me that this will happen, your blog initiative will last 2 months, and it happened.

Now I know that I need to get back to it, and I will, I`m getting inside my new job as Managing Director for Tribal DDB, trying to get into my head the whole company, meeting new people, a new way of thinking, so I will take advantage of the change that surrounds my life today and I will try start posting often that the last month.

JSB

Here is what the latest stats from Nielsen report . Facebook traffic fell to 22.4M uniques, down from the 24.9M reported in March, someone out there said it was due to seasonality, but if we look at other young target communities we could say that´s not true, Buzznet keeps pushing up an if we look at the amazing LinkedIn we could notice the 361% growth YOY.

Facebook is struggling with the Profile redesign to simplify user interface and gain back their attention, I think they will need to do an awsome job to accomplish the objective, a recently poll by Mashable returned that facebook users are not as engaged as they were a few months ago , so is that it for FB? how can a community site overpass this phenomenon, how can they engage user for real? what really user want? Communities developers should start thinking in a Biological way and learn to be Betamodeling every second.

Im a loyal LinkedIn fan since it was launched on July 17 2007, the amazing functionality it has is not offered by any other, at least as far as I know. So why LinkedIn users are not getting tired with it? because it gives users something more than just Gossip and a little entertainment, it gives users the chance to show everyone how succesfull they are, interchange points of view, being recommended and of course, getting new jobs.

So, some years ago the Bubble was created by site owners and developers, that wont happen anymore, users have the power, users decide when to hit the Bubble, they are in control… a long time ago…

I´ve been doing some research about the industries that will must focus their strategies on Beta Models, and one of the most nominated is the Telcos industry, a few years ago they were focused on acquistion, just that, get as much as clients as you can before your competitors. Then some SMS and thousand of contest driving people to send SMS were done per week, and it worked, so they keep doing the same for some years, and users continue sending SMS because they were told they could win some prizes. Its happening the same that happend to Motorola, they got the RAZOR, it worked and they deploy Razor 1, Razor 2, Razor the third, Razor Fish, any modification of the razor was in the market, why? because the first version worked, but that drives Motorola to the point it is at this moment, losing Market Share against competitors like Nokia and Sony Ericsson that push innovation a little harder to surprise users even if they are happy with the last launched phone. So Telcos could innovate in the same way, users are opened to new alternatives, don´t keep them looking at the same picture for long periods of time, try to move forward and give user more alternatives.

Why is so hard to do it? Why Telco´s still doing SMS and ringtones downloads? because that´s the simplest profit source they found, they have no time to rethink a new way to bring profit, they reload as many times as necessary a methodology until it will stop working.

Telcos need to find user oriented services, those ones that make their lives easier, and I know they are psuhing hard on it, just need a little time…..

Just try to deploy some service different that “ringtone downloads”, think on your users, there are other ways to achieve it, but Telco are not moving fast enough, they need to adpot the Beta Model ASAP.

Does your telco gives what you want? or knows what you need?

Recently I got a link from a coworker about sign up forms, admit it, we are in the data era, we want to ask our user everything, phone, email, address, gender, age, select a password, your location, verify this strange word, agree to our terms of service, some other questions related to what Im trying to sell them and finally, you will get what’s behind the form . We deployed campigns, acquire optins, and after that we just sat on the data and wait for years until the database gets obsolete, we focus on getting data but sometimes we have no idea what to do with it.

Well, after reading the article I got, that has nothing to do with using the data you got in past campaigns, its rather focused on how to ask for inormation , there could be 2 general ways to ask for information, some sites drop me a banner in some site, after I got to the site the first thing is see is a huge form, I have to go through it, otherwise I wont be able to get inside the content, in my experience with campaigns, near 45% people drop off at this moment.

And why do we need to ask information in such way? It should be a better one, don´t you think? users visit your site for content, information, entertainment, you name it, but they don´t visit you to leave their entire history behind in a Sign Up Form. We need to give user reasons to give us data, relevant data.

The idea around the sign up forms is that we should “gradually engage” the users to give us information, show them how your app will be usefull to him and then ask a piece of information, after that if he wnats to get a more personalized service he will need to give us more information, but please, rethink the way you plan your Sites, try to move the Sign Up form from the homepage, and try to get user information without asking.

Betamode, betamode it, the way you ask information is not working.