COLUMBUS (August 25, 2010) — Brand Thunder LLC (http://www.brandthunder.com), the browser customization specialists, and CBSSports.com College Network, a leading provider of web sites for college athletics programs, announced an agreement to bring interactive browser themes for Firefox and Internet Explorer to approximately 60 colleges, universities and conferences.

Alumni, students and sports fans alike can now theme their Internet experience with their favorite school or conference. Each browser theme offers a multimedia sidebar of the latest athletics news, a toolbar for accessing content like videos and commerce for school apparel or event tickets.  There are also connections to the Facebook and Twitter pages of schools.  CBSSports.com College Network will provide the school branding, athletic content and previews ensuring an experience fans will love.

“The fan appeal of college athletics was the starting point of affinity-marketing products back when MBNA offered its first Georgetown University credit card,” says Patrick Murphy, founder and CEO of Brand Thunder.  “It’s a natural fit for our interactive browser themes and CBSSports.com College Network is the premiere provider in this space.  This will be an amazing browser experience for each participating school and their fans.”

Brand Thunder’s interactive themes provide an extreme makeover of the Internet browser.  They are free, lightweight active customizations that can include themes, toolbars, sidebars and other content or functionality.

About Brand Thunder:
Formed in April 2007, Brand Thunder creates extreme makeovers for the Internet browser.  Brands enjoy a persistent connection to their Internet consumer driving more website visits and increased revenue.  Through a software installation, end users change the drab Internet browser into an immersive experience from their favorite sports team, entertainment franchise or Internet site.  The interactive browser themes feature official logos, colors, content and functionality, and can also extend capabilities including video, music players or other Internet widgets. Current business partners and clients include Bing, The Daily Beast, Huffington Post, Major League Soccer, NASCAR, NBA, NCAA, NFL, NHL and Universal Music. Samples found at http://brandthunder.com/gallery/.

Contact:
Patrick Murphy, CEO
Brand Thunder, LLC
614-304-1316

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Still, it’s a great topic, because so much attention is on social media and the encouragement of brands to join the conversation with their consumers. The idea of online community goes back to the earliest days of the Internet, and the foundations of what works are not that different from what works in offline relationships.  Community is a powerful and persuasive communication channel and there’s no doubt companies need to have this as a part of their overall go-to-market strategy.  Yet, how, where and when you participate are all up for debate.

A small business is often resource constrained and the time commitment to building a community can be overwhelming.  There are better places to start and work toward the benefits without over committing. We go into those details in my discussion with Owen.

As much as I’m a believer in Brand Thunder’s interactive browser themes, it’s not the place I’d start – in fact, you still don’t see a Brand Thunder browser theme available (though you may notice www.ThunderThemes.com is a working URL and pointing to our gallery for an indicator of other efforts, but I digress).  While the browser theme is a powerful communication channel, it does well as an affinity marketing tool allowing brands to leverage the audience they’ve aggregated and deepen those relationships.  Small businesses need to be focused on creating those relationships and leveraging the platforms that can help with that, but in a manner that allows those community-building efforts to be inserted amongst the thousands of other necessary tasks for survival.

There are a lot a small steps a small business can take to make community building a part of their business building. Check out the discussion with Owen for those details, and there is a written outline if you don’t have time to watch the video.

Where do you think community falls in the priority of a small business and what are the best ways to leverage its power?

The top trending Twitter term, as I write this, is “meteor shower tonight.”  It’s a wonderful event to enjoy on a summer’s evening, and the timing this year is perfect for those of us on in the Eastern time zone.  A great memory from several years back was having a pre-dawn jog in an very open park during the Leonid meteor shower and being awed as meteors fell all around me.  It was truly stunning.

Thinking of space lends itself to that sense of awe.  When you get the bonus of the rare and infrequent events like a meteor shower or eclipse, it brings that mystique to you in a very close and personal way.  In a sense, we’ve tried to capture a bit of this with our latest NASA interactive browser theme.

Each week, we personally select a new background for the browser theme from NASA’s Image of Day and update the browser theme.  It’s an automatic change for you, giving you a fresh and exciting new browser experience every week.  Our goal is to deliver something beautiful and continually fresh without being too fleeting.

This coming week, while it’s not guaranteed, I would expect a stellar image of the Perseid meteor shower.  Unlike the real event, this one can’t be spoiled by clouds and you don’t have to get up in the middle of the night to enjoy it.  Try it out.

Enough with the endless coverage of the Old Spice viral videos.  Marketing is a simple game – you break through the clutter, you build awareness, you make a sale.  Just like baseball is a simple game – you hit the ball, you catch the ball, you throw the ball.

There’s been so much attention given to the success of the campaign, it seems like nobody believed this Internet marketing thing really works.  It does and it’s a solid part of the overall marketing plan.  Just as the description of marketing and baseball above grossly simplify the games, credit should be given to P&G for the overall execution of the Old Spice campaign.  It’s been hard to miss Old Spice lately, whether its online videos, coupons or in-store promotions.  They had an abundance of presence, not a single good tool.  That presence helped break through the clutter and ultimately drive sales.

This is just another example of a well executed marketing plan.  We’re in the midst of relaunching the Huffington Post browser themes.  HuffPost isn’t successful because it rolls out one cool tool for their community.  HuffPost is aggressively building its content, Arianna is everywhere, and they continue to offer community tools like their interactive browser theme.  It’s an ongoing promotional and growth campaign that keeps gathering attention for them.

The same can be seen with The Daily Beast.  It’s another good news site with their own interactive browser theme.  Yet, you’ll also find Tina Brown across the media, whether it’s on Good Morning America or NPR, representing the Daily Beast and its excellent editorial staff.  You can find an example of her brand building for The Daily Beast as well as a list of excellent reads at her Must Reads at NPR.

It’s this hustle on multiple fronts that pays off.  Kudos to the Old Spice marketing team for a big hit.  A nice work across the board to build that success.

COLUMBUS (July 22, 2010) — Brand Thunder LLC (http://www.brandthunder.com), the browser customization specialists, announced its first entry into the video game market with the launch of the IGN interactive browser themes for Firefox and Internet Explorer.  IGN, the premiere online media outlet for videogame reviews, news, trailers and videos, will provide content previews, links to its site and its visual style through the browser themes.  The free downloads are available at http://pages.brandthunder.com/ign/download?ref=anc.

The browser theme tightly integrates with IGN’s web presence.  Users will find full navigation to the gaming platform of their choice, like PS3 and Xbox, or to other IGN site categories including movies, TV, comics and video.  The themes also feature quick links to IGN’s pages and channels on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

In addition, both Firefox and Internet Explorer 8 users will have information previews at their fingertips.  Firefox includes a sidebar with Top Stories and Reviews, making it easy to scan the latest features while visiting other web sites.  Internet Explorer 8 theme users will get some of their content delivered in web slices, the new preview feature in the latest version of Internet Explorer.

“The IGN community is constantly looking for the latest news and information on upcoming game releases and the games they’re playing,” said Scott Moe, Director of Online Marketing.  “Brand Thunder’s browser themes deliver that news quickly and conveniently, so we know we’re meeting those needs even better.”

“We’re proud to launch the IGN browser themes simultaneously on Firefox and Internet Explorer,” says founder Patrick Murphy.  “Each browser offers unique capabilities to showcase IGN’s premiere content and we think the IGN community will love it.”

Brand Thunder’s interactive themes provide an extreme makeover of the Internet browser.  They are free, lightweight active customizations that can include themes, toolbars, sidebars and other content or functionality. Users can switch real-time between any installed Brand Thunder themes.

About Brand Thunder
Formed in April 2007, Brand Thunder creates extreme makeovers for the Internet browser.  Brands enjoy a persistent connection to their Internet consumer driving more website visits and increased revenue.  Through a software installation, end users change the drab Internet browser into an immersive experience from their favorite sports team, entertainment franchise or Internet site.  The interactive browser themes feature official logos, colors, content and functionality, and can also extend capabilities including video, music players or other Internet widgets. Current business partners and clients include Bing, The Daily Beast, Huffington Post, Major League Soccer, NASCAR, NBA, NCAA, NFL, NHL and Universal Music. Samples found at http://brandthunder.com/gallery/.
Contact:
Patrick Murphy, CEO
Brand Thunder, LLC
614-408-8202

About IGN Entertainment
IGN Entertainment, a unit of News Corporation, is the leading Internet media and services provider focused on the video game and entertainment enthusiast markets. Collectively, IGN’s properties reached more than 36.6 million unique users worldwide May 2010, according to Internet audience measurement firm comScore Media Metrix. IGN’s network of video game-related properties (IGN.com, GameSpy, FilePlanet, TeamXbox, Direct2Drive and others) is one of the Web’s leading video game information destinations.  IGN also owns the leading men’s lifestyle website AskMen.com, and provides technology for online game play in video games.  IGN is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, with offices across North America, Europe and Australia.

CONTACT:

Kris Sharbaugh
IGN Entertainment
415.519.6526 (cell)
ksharbaugh@ign.com

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Reposted from Mike’s Musings

So you may wonder why we called it Personas Interactive.

If you were go to the Brand Thunder Gallery, you would see what we specialize in – creating customized browser experiences for different sports teams, websites, musicians and more.

These browser experiences have evolved over the years in their design, their technology and even their name. But regardless of the technology change, these browser experiences always required the installation of a Firefox add-on and the restart of the browser for every one that you wanted to install.

One of the reasons we created Personas Interactive was to address this issue. With the advent of Personas in Firefox 3.6, we saw the opportunity to take our browser experience to the next level. So one of the core features of Personas Interactive is Interactive Themes.

Interactives Themes take the Enhanced Personas we talked about last time and add interactivity like clickable logos, sidebars, toolbars, feedreaders and more. So instead of just providing people with a picture of your website or brand, you can provide a way for them to connect with you in the browser.

Before we continue, I have to make a disclaimer. Up to this point, we’ve talked about things that anyone can do (set up their own Personas gallery, create Enhanced Personas) but at this point in time, an Interactive Theme can only be created by Brand Thunder. We’re working on expanding the technology so it is available to anyone. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have an Interactive Theme, though. Brand Thunder would love to work with your band, sports team, website or company to create an Interactive Theme. Just send an email to info@brandthunder.com.

So let’s look at a diagram that shows the differences between Personas, Enhanced Personas and Interactive Themes.

So what does this mean in practice?

If you were to go to the Personas Interactive page with Personas Interactive installed, you would see some of our Interactive Themes in action.

Are you a fan of the Goblins Web Comic? There’s an Interactive theme that keeps your favorite web comic close at hand. If you need your daily fix of The Daily Beast, you can install an Interactive Theme that gives you links and news from The Daily Beast as well as the top story of the day updated in your browser. Is your team the Indianapolis Colts? You can connect with them right in your browser. Or maybe you like movies? The Movie Premiere Interactive Theme is updated with a new movie poster every 15 minutes. Can’t get enough of CollegeHumor? Install the Interactive Theme and your favorite links will be one click away.

And we’ve got over a hundred more Interactive Themes coming in the next few months. Besides porting our existing themes over to Personas Interactive, we’re working with great brands like the CBS Sports College Network to bring your favorite college sports teams to the browser.

So what should you do? Install Personas Interactive. Setup your own Personas gallery. Create an Enhanced Persona. And stay tuned, because we’ve got some great stuff coming your way.

Reposted from Mike’s Musings

In explaining exactly what a Persona was in my last post, I mentioned that a Persona contains two images – a header and a footer. I also indicated that these images are very large – 3000 pixels wide. You may wonder why that is. Personas is designed to do one thing; take an image and put it in the upper right corner of the browser. It doesn’t resize or scale the image. If you resize your browser very wide, you just see more of the image on the left hand side. That 3000 pixels number is a completely arbitrary number that is designed to be the maximum you will resize your browser.

This architecture creates problems.

• The file sizes of the images can be very large.
• If you have a repetitive image, you have to cut and paste it to make it 3000 pixels wide.
• If you want to use an existing image, you’ll have to do something to convert it to 3000 pixels wide.
• You can’t guarantee that anything appears in the upper left corner.
• You can’t have more than one background image.

All of these problems have already been solved by CSS, but none of the CSS to do anything to background images is available in Personas. That’s where the Enhanced Personas feature of Personas Interactive comes in.

Enhanced Personas adds additional attributes to the Personas JSON that gives you all the things that CSS backgrounds have to offer. This includes multiple background images! Here are the attributes we’ve added:

backgroundImage

Specifies the URL of an image or multiple images that will be used for the background. Multiple images are separated by a comma. The images are drawn from right to left, so the left most image appears on top. We aren’t using the actual CSS syntax here, so don’t put url(‘…’) around the images.

backgroundPosition

Specifies the position of the images in backgroundImage using standard CSS rules. These rules are separated by a comma.

backgroundSize

Dpecifies the size of the images in backgroundImage using standard CSS rules. These rules are separated by a comma.

backgroundColor

Whereas accentcolor in the original Personas specification is used for both the titlebar and the background of the browser, we allow you to specify just the background color. It is never used for the titlebar. If you specify both a backgroundColor and an accentcolor, accentcolor is used for the titlebar, and backgroundColor is used for the background of the browser.

textShadow

One of the other areas that causes problems with Personas is the area of text shadows. We’ve provided an additional attribute to let you control the text shadow. Personas determines the color of the text shadow to use for your Persona by computing the luminance of the textcolor specified in your Persona.

let luminance = 0.2126 * r + 0.7152 * g + 0.0722 * b;

If the luminance is less than or equal to 110, it makes your text shadow light, otherwise it makes your text shadow dark. We’ve made textShadow an attribute that you can specify, and you can give it three values: dark, bright or none. You can experiment with these three values to see which one makes your text look good on your Persona.

Summing it all up

So what does all this give us? The ability to create a Persona that takes full advantage of CSS. If you hover over the preview images below with Personas Interactive installed, you’ll see examples of Enhanced Personas in action. Each of these Enhanced Personas has an image on the left, an image on the right and a repeating image for the background. If you install them, you can resize the browser and see that the images stay in both corners of the browser. I’ve deliberately placed breaks in the background image so you can see the repeat. You’ll also notice that I’ve used a different text shadow option for each of the Personas. See if you can figure out which value I used.  (NOTE: Visit the original post to see the samples in action: http://kaply.com/weblog/2010/07/09/enhanced-personas/)

Here are some other things to keep in mind with Enhanced Personas.

backgroundImage is a required attribute. This means that even if you use the other attributes, if backgroundImage isn’t specified, they won’t be honored. The only exception to this is textShadow.

You can create an Enhanced Persona that works with Firefox out of the box. Just specify both a headerURL and a backgroundImage. Personas Interactive users will get the Enhanced Persona.

For our next installment, we’re going to talk about the hallmark of Personas Interactive, Interactive Themes and Interactive Personas.

This is part three in my series about Personas Interactive from Brand Thunder. If you missed the first two, they are Introduction to Personas Interactive and What is a Persona?

Reposted from Mike’s Musings

After I introduced Personas Interactive, I indicated that my next topic was going to be Enhanced Personas. As I was writing that post, though, I realized that I was putting the cart before the horse. Before I explain how we’ve enhanced Personas, I need to give more detail as to how you can put Personas on your website. Then we can talk about the enhancements we’ve made and how you can use them in your Personas. Remember that to really see these things in action, you need Personas Interactive. You can download it from here.

So what exactly is a Persona? You probably think of a Persona as just an image that goes in the background of your web browser. But Personas are not just the images. They are also a JSON file that gives a little bit of information. Here’s what a bare bones Persona looks like:

{"id":"mypersona@kaply.com",
 "name": "My Persona",
 "headerURL": "http://kaply.com/images/mypersona.png"
}

To use this Persona in a web page, Firefox introduced an attribute called data-browsertheme. To designate that an element on a web page defines a persona, you add that attribute to any element (usually an image):

<img alt="My Persona"
     data-browsertheme='{"id":"mypersona@kaply.com",
                         "name": "My Persona",
                         "headerURL": "http://kaply.com/mypersona.png",
                        }'
     src="mypersona.png"
     id="mypersona-preview">

Having the data as an attribute on the image isn’t enough, though. We need to have some JavaScript that hooks everything together. Personas works by using custom DOM events to indicate when an image is previewed, installed and reset. Here’s what preview looks like:

var event = document.createEvent("Events");,
event.initEvent("PreviewBrowserTheme", true, false);
document.getElementById('mypersona-preview').dispatchEvent(event);

Writing this code every time would be tedious, so I’ve created helper functions that do this for you. You can download them here. Attaching all the appropriate Persona events to a node is matter of calling attachPersona and passing it the node that you want to use for your Persona preview.

Now you may be thinking that it would be difficult to maintain JSON embedded in a web page, and you would be correct. What we need is an automated process to generate a Personas gallery. At the beginning of this article, I mentioned that Personas are described in a JSON file. What we want to do is store JSON files directly on our server and generate web pages that use the data contained in those JSON files. The reason for this is three fold. First, because it makes it easier to maintain, second because Personas can be updated by pointing to the JSON file directly, and third because we will use those JSON files for site specific Personas which we talked about in the previous post.

I’m a PHP developer, so the example I am going to provide is how to generate a Personas gallery using PHP. For my basic example, I’m using a top level directory with an index.php that will be my gallery and subdirectories that represent each Persona. Those directories are named for the Persona and contains a persona.json file, a PNG file used for preview that is named the same as the directory, and any other supporting images, like the background or icon. To generate a gallery item, you call the function generateGalleryItem passing it the name of the directory. Here’s some PHP code that does this:

<?php
function generateGalleryItem($name) {
  $handle = fopen("$name/persona.json", "rb");
  $contents = stream_get_contents($handle);
  fclose($handle);
  $persona = json_decode($contents);
?>
 <img alt='<?php echo $persona->name; ?>'
      data-browsertheme='<?php echo $contents; ?>'
      src='<?php echo $name; ?>/<?php echo $name; ?>.png'
      id='<?php echo $name; ?>-preview'>
<script type="text/javascript">
  attachPersona(document.getElementById("<?php echo $name; ?>-preview"));
</script>

With these code examples, you should be able to get a Personas gallery working on your website.

Earlier I talked about the fact that I was giving an example of a bare bones Persona. Now would probably be a good time to talk about what else you can specify in a Persona JSON file. Personas support the following attributes which are all strings:

Site Specific Personas

I mentioned site specific Personas, so I might as well give you that information as well. To enable a site specific Persona, add the following code to the header of your website:

<link rel="persona" type="application/json" href="https://mydomain.com/mypersona/persona.json" />

The href points to the JSON file that describes your Persona. If you want to use a Persona from getpersonas.com, navigate to the Persona and then look at the URL. You’ll see a number at the end of the URL. The format for Persona update URLs is https://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/update_check/%ID%. Just replace %ID% with the number at the end of the URL.

One other thing before I close this out. I find the site JSONLint.com invaluable for debugging my JSON. Not only can you paste JSON there, but if you put a URL to your JSON file, it will read it and check it. I can’t recommend it enough.

I hope this has helped you get started adding Personas to your site. Next post – Enhanced Personas. I promise.

Reposted from Mike’s Musings

If you’re a startup or a small business, celebrate your own independence along with that of the U.S.A.’s.  If it helps, do like me and run Brand Thunder’s Independence Day browser theme to help get you in the spirit.

I’ve had a diverse career with a range of companies from big to small.  None of them gave the sense of independence that working for Brand Thunder does.  The difference this time, I think, is that I’m all in.  That doesn’t mean I wasn’t committed or dedicated to my previous jobs, it’s just there’s more riding on this venture from the standpoint of what I can contribute and affect.

Because my efforts can have that direct affect, that leads to the potential of making Brand Thunder work all encompassing as well.  It may be pretty close to that.  There are steady worries and a lot of time trying to work out the current puzzle.  “If I can just solve for this…” is usually how the internal conversation goes.

Yet, there’s never enough time and always more to do.  So, we’re forced to look through a lens that focuses on what’s important and most material.  That lens, however, isn’t just applied to the business.  It’s applied to the personal life as well.  When so much is this important, then all the important things must be considered.  The result has been more and better time spent with the family.

Knowing that the things needing attention the most are getting it is tremendously liberating.  I don’t know if this makes much sense to you, but it does for me.  With the three days this weekend, my time will be split between family, friends, celebrations and Brand Thunder, and I couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate independence.  Hope you find your own independence as well.