Introducing “BOOM”, Brand Thunder’s Startling Easy Browser Enhancements

Today we’re releasing a dramatic improvement to our branded browser themes – which were already industry leading in their ease of use.

Holidays are usually down times for many companies. Start-ups are not usual companies, so we used the seasonal slow-down to significantly improve the user experience for our product.

Here’s the quick summary of the BOOM:

1. BOOMS are lightweight active customizations including theming, toolbars, sidebars and more
2. Users can dynamically switch between BOOMS without restarting their browser
3. Integration of multiple Brand Thunder BOOMS into a single BOOM Pack for a single location for managing all BOOMS

Now, here’s the long version:

It has always been easy to get a user into a Brand Thunder custom browser theme. We combine multiple elements for customizing the Firefox browser into a single download. Once a user installed one of our themes, however, to change or move between different themes was difficult.

The difficulty arose from the default placement within the Firefox browser for each custom element. Functionality is under Extensions, the visual look and feel is under Themes, both of these are under the drop-down menu for Tools, and then under Add-ons. Individual preferences for each are in a profile that really can’t be seen or modified easily. There just wasn’t an elegant way to handle all of this capability … until BOOM. The Brand Thunder menu, included with every branded browser theme, will be the central home for managing BOOMS.

Users can now switch between BOOMS without modifying multiple settings and without restarting their browser – a big step forward for any Firefox user. It’s like Firefox Personas on steroids. (Please note: No performance enhancing drugs were used in the development of BOOM. Not counting coffee and Mountain Dew.)

Currently, BOOMS are available for the Holiday and Inauguration BOOMS. As the functionality rolls out across all products, the user experience will be like this: a fan of NASCAR who wants a different look during the off-season can easily move to their favorite hockey team, like the Canadiens, then jump over to Inauguration for the celebration, back to the Canadiens and then back to NASCAR as the season starts. New BOOMS can be added, old ones removed and changing from BOOM to BOOM and each change is achieved with a single action. Any new BOOMS installed will become the default experience but the user can gracefully switch to any of their other BOOMS.

Now that the work is done, we’re optimistic a big usability issue is solved. It’s like we got our Christmas gift and we’ll use it to enter the New Year with a bang… or rather a BOOM!

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Passing the 500,000 Mark and Important Steps to Reach Goal

From day one, we’ve felt like Brand Thunder was approaching a million downloads of our branded browsers. It’s just at day one; you’re still a million away. Now, we’ve passed the 500,000 mark. It feels good.

We’re not at our goal, but well on our way. And, I think once you take out hard work, good fortune and sheer luck – a lot of the credit has to do with goal setting. It’s one of those every day bits of advice you get and it’s amazing how often it rings true.

Thinking along those lines, here are some ideas around goal setting that we find useful. These should feel familiar, and hopefully this is a good reminder:

1. Write it down.

That simple action alone increases your odds of reaching the goal. If you add the SMART elements (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time), you increase your odds even further.

2. Begin with the end in mind.

I’m sure most of use have read or heard of Covey’s “Seven Habits.” Habit 2 is a great line to remember, and it’s useful in so many ways – from creating company direction, to executing a project. When you think about where you want to be, it’s easier to work backward and determine the necessary steps to get there. For us, that boils down to a combination of solid design, easy-to-use product and a quantity of business partners.

3. Take action.

I think part of the value in writing down goals is that’s an early action that builds momentum, and once you’ve got movement it’s easier to sustain. With the goal written down, and the steps to reaching it defined, it’s a whole lot easier to move from step to step.

4. Celebrate the little victories.

This is easy to overlook or forget, but it’s quite important, whether you’re a solo-entrepreneur or working with a team. We all do better with a little reward or acknowledgment. We’re trying to get better at this and an example was issuing a press release for being nominated for an award. We didn’t want to miss out in a case we didn’t win (which we did!). I try to acknowledge the team’s value, and this was a way to shout it externally for a change.

5. Review.

This is especially true for a start up, where the business you start creating is seldom the business you finish with. Reviewing along the way helps you see what adjustments need to be made, rather than finding yourself too far down a wrong path. So, along with the New Year’s resolutions, I’m working on the Year End Review.

6. Repeat.

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Brand Thunder Expands its Business Development Team

Despite every VC and investor crying “preserve your cash!” to their start ups, being frugal doesn’t mean you can’t spend – especially if the expenditure will help ensure your survival. While we keep Brand Thunder pretty lean, we needed to hire and are thrilled to say that Ryan D. Miller has joined our company as Business Development Manager (official release here).

There is simply too much opportunity and not enough bandwidth for the current team alone. Ryan comes with a great skill set that spans technology, marketing and business development. In the end, bringing in quality and necessary talent was a required expense.

That doesn’t change the way we manage the rest of our spending. We continue to be very cost conscious and are pushing to be cash-flow positive in the near term. The current economic environment hasn’t changed that. It’s just reaffirmed the importance.

If you’ve missed the discussion of what the economic environment means to start ups, there’s a good review of Sequoia Capital’s warning to its companies here. But, we also feel that if you have the need, and you find the talent – you hire it. We did. Welcome aboard Ryan.

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Holiday Weekend and Start Up Fears

We’re hoping to clear the long holiday weekend without incident. We’ve had a good run of luck with a growing client list, awards and industry recognition. Good momentum for our branded browsers. And our blog posts, while we hope are substantive and useful, tend to be rosy.

Well, last week we hit our first real hiccup. In the midst of a bunch of great news, and a time when we hoped to be seeing a good influx of new traffic, our site went down. The impact potential isn’t just our site and company. Given that our product represents other brands – the problem could be more wide spread.

Our recent successes revealed a bug in the open-source code behind our site. An influx of traffic and events were triggering an infinite loop that ultimately led to server overload (hope that made sense). We diverted server resources to the more critical components of our company, and let our corporate website take the brunt of the downtime. Not necessarily the face you want to show interested prospects, but the right choice nonetheless.

We feel fortunate our server guy is a staunch believer in open-source code. While we run a lean organization, the ability to rely on the shared intelligence of the open-source community greatly expands his knowledge. In a way, it’s like a virtual team and that team offered the information he needed to resolve the issue. Naturally, we’ll share back as we continue to tweak and improve.

Now that we’re heading into a long weekend, we’ll be a little more attuned to the business than we otherwise might have been. And a stable server will certainly make us thankful.

Lessons Learned/Good Habits:
• Track your site status. We’re using Monit on the server and an external monitoring site to send alerts.
• Have a support escalation plan in place – who to call, where to reach them, both internal and external.
• Avoid a single point of failure – whether it’s the password to get support from your web host, or an on-call contractor to backfill key knowledge positions.

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So what is that B/T button ?

If you have downloaded one of more recent theme bundles you may have noticed a new image on the far right of your browser. This new B/T button allows for quick access to personalization, FAQs and support as well as special theme features. Be sure to check it out!

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Two Key Reasons an Award Matters to a Start Up – Branded Browser Wins for New Media Communication

We were thrilled to be listed as a finalist for Excellence in New Communications in the 3rd Annual Society of New Communications Research (SNCR) Awards. Now that we’ve actually won, we’re ecstatic. The release issued by SNCR is here and all the winning case studies are at SNCR’s publication site – New Communications Review. You can also read our release or see the winning Washington Capitals browser theme.

1. Reaching Evangelists and Influencers – For young companies with a limited budget, getting the word out can be challenging. Reaching a solid base of the evangelists and influencers in a given market can help that organic growth of promotion overnight. Looking at the people and organizations behind SNCR, who are among the top in the communications field, this was an important audience to reach. Pursuing awards can be expensive and time consuming, but going after those with additional upside can be vital to your growth.

2. Team Morale – So much effort is given toward inward focused efforts. Starting out you have process improvement, product improvement, development, infrastructure, scalability – all the steps necessary to keep pace with a growing company. For this moment, you can raise your head and see that your peers and industry are acknowledging that intense effort. It’s a real boost.

All around, this is an important event for our company and we’re honored.

Posted in Commentary | Tags: Branded Browser, New Media, SNCR, Washington Capitals | No Comments »

Five More NHL Browser Themes – Leveraging Success in Vertical Markets

Five new hockey teams have inked agreements with Brand Thunder for browser themes for their fans – the Calgary Flames, Columbus Blue Jackets, Montreal Canadiens, St. Louis Blues and the Vancouver Canucks. We’re thrilled to see more hockey teams join us, but it’s made us reflect – why these bursts of success in verticals?

It may look like a matter of a leader and followers – one team takes advantage of the latest new media application and then the others in the league get on board. We think it’s more than that.
Our product has strong appeal for brand managers. It’s persistent when the user is online keeping the brand and content in front of the consumer in a visually compelling way. Despite this value proposition, it still takes a considerable amount of selling. That’s because it has to be put in terms of “what’s in it for me?”

We all have limited resources, so given the abundance of opportunity (or at least abundance of work) what incremental opportunities do you pursue? Once we launch browser theme in a given industry, we have data on that industry. We can start to talk in specifics about what this means to our customer and their end user, and show why this is worth the investment of their time. Relating directly to the needs of our client is vital because comparing a similar industry is simply not as powerful as telling them about their industry.

Are you tracking the data you need to answer the question “what’s in it for me” (with “me” being your customer)? It’s proving valuable to us and you can see the results of that success by checking out the browser themes for these teams here: Blues, Blue Jackets, Canucks, Canadiens (our first bilingual browser!) and The Flames.

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Interview with Sports Networker

I recently sat down with Lewis Howes to discuss the ongoing challenges sports marketers face engaging the elusive sports fans. Topics we cover include how we started Brand Thunder, finding and signing clients as a start-up and uncovering funding opportunities. Read the full interview here.

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The Personalized Web – Don’t Forget What You Do

Sometimes you forget what you know. In reading a blog entry called Proof of the Power of Personalization, it occurred to me that this is one of the key points we talk to our clients about but don’t recall mentioning here.

We usually reference how we build custom browser themes to allow brands to connect with their end users, but critical in this whole scenario is the desire of the consumer to personalize their lives. We all buy things that we enjoy and identify with and a lot of times it includes a brand. That can be in the form of the jersey I wear of my favorite team, the cartoon character in my AIM icon or the cause I support via the magnet on my car. It makes me feel good and it helps me connect with like-minded people.

Yes, as a company, we sell new media to brand marketers. What we deliver is a personalized experience on the Internet. That is the end result, and that is whom we are serving. Now, if we can make that end user feel special and connected, then we have done both the user and the brand a great service. I truly hope we don’t forget that.

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Is Timing Everything or Just One Thing for a Startup?

In a historic political season with financial crises and world events keeping people attuned to their favorite news sources, Brand Thunder is releasing a custom browser theme for the Huffington Post (you can read the press release here). Pretty good timing.

The Huffington Post ranks as the most visited news blog. With the desire for breaking news running high and the powerful draw of the Huffington Post bloggers – this feels like a marketer’s dream of strong name recognition, a sense of urgency to “act now” and a legitimate need for the consumer.

While timing is good – it’s a single element in our effort for continuous improvement. And continuous improvement is likely the more important item for the startup. So, while this release provides good timing, it also provides a more streamlined user experience and a better awareness campaign.

• A streamlined user experience – by including a full browser bundle in addition to the custom theme for Firefox. Any user, whether Firefox or not, can get the custom Huffington Post experience with a simple, single download and installation.

• Better awareness campaign – by providing the Huffington Post with banner assets to promote the custom browser on their site (you’ll find a permanent banner ad for the custom browser theme on this page). We deal with our product every day, we know how to talk about it and we did that on behalf of our client.

Each improvement, from product to promotion, resulted from the review of past product launches where we listened to the wishes and desires of our partners, and assessed the difficulties of the end user. These little post-mortems don’t take long, but they occur with our team and our clients by simply asking “what could have been better?” And it’s always good timing to learn that.

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