Best Browser Theme Design:

Dramatic Lilies

This beautiful theme was created by one of the top Firefox persona designers on the Internet, MaDonna. This theme previews the beauty of spring and summer with a stunning display of orange and pink lilies in full bloom with a butterfly fluttering in the wind. One of the best designs we’ve seen in our gallery in quite some time. Nice work MaDonna.

Best Celebrity Browser Theme:

Charlize Theron

There were a number of celebrity browser themes that were created during our contest. It was very difficult to just pick one winner but this theme dedicated to actress Charlize Theron takes the cake this week. A stunning image of the actress laying on a chair with a pattered dark blue background makes this theme our Celebrity theme of the week. Congrats to “Baby Gaga” for creating this beautiful theme.

Theme “Runner-Ups”

Taylor Swift

Lady Gaga

Heart Aches for You Theme

Shoe Love Theme

Golden Heart Explosion Theme

Congrats to our winners and browser theme designers! Which theme is your favorite?

Create The Theme of the Week

If you would like to submit your theme to be considered for “Theme of the Week”, simply create a theme using our browser theme tool and share the theme with your friends and fans on Facebook and/or Twitter. Full details on the contest are here.

Image via Wikipedia

Wow! What a competition for Best Holiday Browser Theme of 2011. While all five finalists had merit and style, two quickly emerged as contenders for first place: Christmas Ornament and Perfect Christmas Eve. Voting was fast and furious at the end, with the lead changing several times. As in any competition, however, there can only be one winner and for this year, it turned out to be…

 And the Winner is…

Christmas Ornament(:

The winner of Apple’s iPad 2 and first prize in Brand Thunder’s Best Holiday Browser Theme of 2011 is Christmas Ornament(:  In the end, user’s seemed to favor the abstract and contemporary feel captured in this holiday browser theme.

The Runner’s Up are…

Perfect Christmas Eve

Despite the idyllic snowy winter’s night, as we discovered in the movie “Elf,” Christmas spirit is running a little low for Santa. Hopefully, this doesn’t affect what appears under our Christmas tree in a couple days.

Xanapus` Lair Christmas Theme

Holiday Snow

A Year to Celebrate

Thanks to all who participated in the holiday theme contest. It was a ton of fun for us and we hope you enjoyed it as well. And while these themes are great and can bring you months of joy to your daily Internet use, don’t forget to visit the Brand Thunder Theme Gallery the next time you want a fresh look for your browser. There’s a world-class selection of Chrome themes, Firefox themes and Internet Explorer themes with new ones being added all the time.

Image by zhouxuan12345678 via Flickr

We should have known how popular BT:Engage would be with the gamer community based on our official browser themes for IGN and Major League Gaming.

Especially for Gamers

The IGN and MLG browser themes are among our most popular, and just like many of our browser themes from our professional clients – they’re available for Google Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Launching our DIY browser theme creator, BT:Engage, we’re starting to see the range of offerings from game fans and the supporting community. Here’s a quick look at what some of the game forums and fans of a game are building for their browser themes.

Game Forum Browser Themes

GoW Nation

Gears of War sold over 5 million copies and currently stands as the 5th best selling XBOX 360 game of all time. So, why shouldn’t it have it’s own browser theme? It does. It’s sleek, dark and gets you quickly to the best of GearsNation. Check out the GoW Nation browser theme.

Halo 3 Clan – Dropshock Brigade

If I’m spilling military secrets here, I think my posting days may be limited. The Brigade might claim to be the best trained, best equipped, and craziest outfit in the collection of colonies called the UNSC. I can attest that the DSB browser theme is the only theme that’ll take you “Feet First Into Hell!”

Game Dragoon

Game Dragoon is a place for all kinds of gamers to come and have a banter and relax. It’s a growing community and is sparking engagement across different games and genres. If you like to help create the personality of a site, it’d be a good place to frequent and the Game Dragoon browser theme is the point of entry to your participation.

Browser Theme for a Game

Aleris RPG

Aleris RPG, a Medieval fantasy-themed RPG, explores the ancient line of Kings who ruled the land of Aleris and the great sacrifice through which the Kings obtained their immortality. The Aleris RPG browser theme is optimized for Internet Explorer. So, while you may encounter a dragon in this realm, you won’t likely find a Firefox.

How are you using browser themes to meet the needs of your community? Let us know in the comments.

Image via CrunchBase

Patrick Murphy recently did a Brand Thunder interview with Shoestring Ventures, The Startup Bible Blog. One of their questions was “What other web-based products would you recommend to entrepreneurs, business owners or freelancers?” I realized the recommendations fell into categories discussed in our blog post about Sales Strategy: Browser Theme – Hunter vs. Farmer.

Given that start, here’s a short list of tools useful to that category of startup, small or medium business or freelancers. Tools to help you and your clients. Add your favorites in the comments.

Tools for Business Development

FREE LinkedIn.  Using LinkedIn has been a great tool to farm for contacts and actual names with targeted prospects

FREE Jigsaw for sure.  Jigsaw has been a great source for getting the contact information after you’ve identified who to contact, and sometimes even to identify who to contact.

CHEAP Less Annoying Software.  A great CRM to manage contacts and sales process.  Very simple, not overwhelming, and easy to use. Less Annoying is tailored for smaller businesses.

FREE Follow Up Then.  This is a unique email-reminder service.  When sending out emails, Bcc @followupthen.com and get an email reminder to follow up with that recipient.  Example, 2weeks@followupthen.com will send a reminder email two weeks after the original email.

VARIES Smart Phone.  This sounds silly, but making yourself available and reachable at all times throughout the day has been key.  Responsiveness to emails has been very beneficial as well.  When a desired brand emails me, I want to email them back within minutes while I have their attention.  If I am targeting West Coast and they want to chat at 4pm pacific, making the call at 7pm my time is essential.  I could be out of the office, some emails me back a day after I emailed them, they say they have a few minutes to chat now, you want to do it.  Having a smart phone makes all of that possible.

Tools for Relationship Management

FREE Facebook. Sure, this is an obvious choice, but ignore it at your own peril. This is where the time online is spent and the more easily and seamless your customers can interact here with you, the more they will.

FREE Hootsuite. This is a great tool for managing your social presence, especially for Twitter. The free product has served my needs well, having tried the Pro version it seemed to have enough inconsistencies and not enough value for me to stick with it.

FREE Google Alerts. An easy way to keep aware of discussions about you and your brand across the Interwebs. Set up your account to track your company name, your name, Twitter handles, top keywords and refine as you see what works for your business. You can also set up different time frames based on urgency of information, which can help manage information overload.

FREE Conduit. I went into this some in my last post. It’s incredibly valuable to extend your content beyond your web site and engage audiences where they are. Conduit does an excellent job at this by allowing you to easily drop your most compelling content or functionality into apps that you can extend across their ecosystem of mobile, browser add-ons and more.

FREE BT:Engage. The browser remains king of meaningful Internet engagement and an interactive browser theme provides a huge advantage of maintaining awareness and sparking engagement with your audience.

That’s the quick tour of my list. What’s on yours?

Here’s an overview of toolbars, browser themes and what each can do for your web site, business or community.

One point I’d emphasize, these products are not mutually exclusive. It’s never a question of which one to implement, but what each brins when you offer them to your audience.

Conduit.com Community Toolbars

Conduit.com is the leader in the community toolbar space, and they have an amazing product. In a matter of minutes, anyone can register at their site, upload a logo and start building a custom community toolbar that they can share with their online community. Additionally, the web publisher can choose from a host of web apps and tools to make the toolbar serve the wider needs of their audience.

The toolbar gives the web publisher a toehold into the online experience of the user by placing a small piece of branding, some icons and feeds for your site. Then it strives for retention (continued use) of the toolbar by adding icons to other products like email, Facebook, YouTube videos, MochiGames or whatever that publisher feels is best for their user.

It’s a proven strategy of rolling the attraction of brand affinity with personalization that gives the user the elements of the Internet they use on a daily basis. Conduit offers thousands of ways to personalize the toolbar experience. The web publisher defines the default experience for their community, but the user can adjust the toolbar to their own liking over time.

Browser Themes

Brand Thunder, long the leader in the interactive browser theme space, offers similar capability with its BT:Engage DIY browser theme creator. In a matter of minutes, a web publisher can build a unique browser theme full of visuals and interactive content.

Where the Conduit community toolbar goes wide, the Brand Thunder browser themes go deep. The brand and theme provide a visual immersion complemented by integrated content and functionality. It’s a rich experience between the web publisher and their online community. A suite of personalization features have been added like Facebook and Weatherbug, but not to the full extent offered by Conduit.

Core Value Proposition of Toolbars and Browser Themes

The basic promise of both the toolbar and the browser theme is a persistent connection to your online user, which has huge value. Think about the expense that goes into building and maintaining a web site, then add in cost of getting people there. Then consider that while people spend hours online, they spend seconds on a web page. And, unless you’re Facebook, you’re not likely getting a large percentage of that time.

With persistent placement in the browser, you capture awareness and interaction the entire time your user is online. That drives up exposure, engagement and return visits. Without that exposure, at best you’re one stop among many. At worst, you’re an afterthought.

Affinity Marketing – Visual Identity

Both toolbars and browser themes fall under the concept of affinity marketing tools. Visual identity plays a large role with affinity groups and both toolbar and theme play to that connection to varying degrees. Also, each of your users will have a level of comfort as to what they like.

You can put a toolbar on your computer, and like a bumper sticker, you eventually look past it. It’s present but doesn’t always capture your attention. If you trick out your car, you’re not going to miss it. I can no longer find the traffic increase data point for toolbars, but if my memory is correct, the contribution difference is similar to the difference in visual impact of these two images. And while I don’t have any data to compare, my gut tells me the toolbar has the edge in terms of lifespan of usage. I’ve seen the dips when our sports teams lose.

vs.

Pros & Cons – Shared

There are pros and cons to both approaches, and there are those shared by both.

Pros

• Free and easy to set up.
• Free tools for promoting and sharing.
• Increase site visits, commerce and engagement.
• Great for mainstream and passionate audiences.

Cons

• Web development community tends to avoid products like these. If that’s your audience, may not be the best fit.
• Require ongoing promotion to grow audience – like most products.

Pros & Cons of Toolbars

Pros

• Toolbar apps for every conceivable use.
• Revenue sharing.
• Available for four major browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari

Cons

• Limited visual presence.
• Added to bottom of browser chrome.

Pros & Cons of Browser Themes

Pros

• Entire browser chrome part of experience .
• New ad inventory including sponsorships within the browser chrome and sidebar ad inventory.
• Available for three major browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer.

Cons

•  Apps limited to most popular.
• DIY product has limited feature set in its early stage of release.

Related articles

• Browser Toolbars & the Added Power of Branded Themes (brandthunder.com)
• BT:Engage How To: Make Money Online with Your Browser Theme (brandthunder.com)
• 4 Ways to Unlock the Traffic Driving Power of the Web Browser (kissmetrics.com)

Image by TerryJohnston via Flickr

Brand loyalty is nothing new, but we usually think of Coca-Cola or Nike. Huge global behemoths that consumers ask for by name and wear proudly on their heads, lips, body and feet.

But online marketing has changed the way brand loyalty is acquired and earned.  With the explosion of social media, businesses are making a solid attempt to be honest and open in their marketing communications. This plays to the strength of the small or medium business (SMB) since SMBs don’t have the deep pockets for huge marketing spends and agencies leading the social media charge. We do it ourselves and we’re the most knowledgeable and open about our products and companies.

When you’re open and honest with your consumer, the side effect can be the creation of trust, brand loyalty and even brand advocacy. And these non-transactional communication efforts are highly linked to purchase behaviors. So, whatever your business metrics, time spent on brand loyalty is time well spent.

Is Brand Loyalty Achievable?

If you abide by the American Marketing Association, brand loyalty is the situation in which a consumer generally buys the same manufacturer-originated product or service repeatedly over time rather than buying from multiple suppliers within the category. To me, if you’ve got people tattooing your logo on their backside, you’ve got brand loyalty.

While you might think large companies own the domain of brand loyalty, it’s not true. This has been studied on a global level where multinational companies don’t necessarily rule in every market. There’s strength for the local brands – the home-field advantage. And local brands that market themselves successfully remain formidable adversaries in those markets. (For extra credit, read: The Myth of the Invincible Global Brand)

The Internet is like having that home-field advantage. As an SMB, you are an expert in your category. When it comes to your web site, your industry and your community – you have a powerful starting point to build your brand loyalty.

Trust as a Part of Brand Loyalty

Robert Passikoff, President, Brand Keys, Inc, makes a pitch that brand trust makes a high contribution to category engagement, loyalty, and profitability – even more than how good the product is. If a brand doesn’t really stand for anything beyond category efficacy, then the consumer is going to find alternatives.

Building trust is important, but once you’ve earned it, you need to make sure you keep it. The open communication you start, the transparency you exhibit and the trust you build are not a one-time thing. They’re an ongoing effort.

Browser Themes Build Loyalty and Trust Through Engagement

Consistent and open communication is a great target, but in the world offering torrents of information from social news feeds, mobile apps, TV, radio and more, what do you do? Engagement with the brand is your ultimate goal. It will ensure your brands survival and outreach of all kinds — conversations, experiences, advertising, and every touch point possible and imagined are required.

Among these channels, the browser theme ranks high in terms of presence, impact and length of exposure. Every hour spent on the Internet builds that connection between you and your consumer. It’s not seconds on a web page, or moments in an app that is soon forgotten and buried several menus deep on a three-inch screen. You gain a real footprint into daily activity and enjoy the benefits of that engagement.

With the growth of web-based social networks and a desire for transparency, trust and peace-of-mind messages, it shouldn’t be surprising that relationships now form a cornerstone of marketing efforts. When you leverage the browser theme to build relationships with consumers, you’re creating brand loyalists that drive word-of-mouth marketing, brand advocacy and brand guardianship.

Brand Thunder’s BT:Engage, a build your own browser theme wizard, will ensure your business has an easy to use tool for your ongoing brand loyalty efforts.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Think of widgets as little single-serving pieces of your web content – easy to pull from your web site and put them wherever they can best boost traffic to your web site.  When you first go to create your own browser theme at BT:Engage, you’ll discover a features tab called Widgets.  You’ll also uncover how powerful a browser theme can be at increasing traffic and visits to your web site.

Here’s what you need to know.In this early stage of BT:Engage, you’ll find only a couple options under the Widgets tab, but think of this as the 20% of features that result in 80% of the value to you and the users of your browser theme. More is on the way to get you the full 100% of value.

Widgets

The term “widget” had its heyday a few years back when Clearspring, Widgetbox and Konfabulator (acquired by Yahoo!) were all the rage. “Apps” is the current hot phrase, but the two are essentially the same thing – an application, or a component of an interface, that enables a user to perform a function or access a service.

What a widget or app forces you to do is compartmentalize the value of your web site. Most web sites are a broad stroke trying to address a lot of business objectives. They try to interest, inform and sell. With the singular focus of a widget, you drill down to a individual value proposition and deliver it to your audience. These are the elements of content your users can’t resist, and by encapsulating them and extending that content beyond your web site, you help drive traffic back to your web site.

Increase Your Web Traffic

You’ve probably already started to think about your content in high-level categories that are important to your users. It’s your site navigation. You probably have sections of news, galleries, community, blogs and more. These are the natural breakdown of toolbar buttons to include in your theme. As you do this, keep a few things in mind:

• Limit yourself to no more than five buttons.
• Keep the names short, example: Gallery, News, Shop.
• If you have a lot of categories, pick the five most popular or most important and skip the “one-time reads” like your About page.
• Don’t forget to include a link to your affiliate shop or one of your e-commerce destinations.

You also need a news feed. You can easily find a ton of discussion on why Content is King. This is a mixture of keeping your audience interested and coming back to your site, and the search engines seeing you as an active and vibrant web site worthy of pointing searchers to. The more new information you create or offer, the more reason your audience has to return to your web site.

Your news feed can easily be added to your browser theme and will quickly become a large driver of traffic back to your site. Think of it as a persistent invitation and compelling reason for your users to return.

Facebook and Twitter

The next feature we’ll be adding are Facebook and Twitter icons you can add to your browser theme toolbar. We’ve seen our partner themes drive a lot of traffic to their social media presence on Facebook and Twitter using the same method. It’s an easy win for your browser theme and one we’ll turn on soon.

From the user experience, the themes offer the ability to customize the exact pages those icons point to. For example, as the default URL, point to your  Facebook icon to your site’s Facebook page (like http://facebook.com/brandthunder). Many users will be fine with this experience. Others will want to go straight to their homepage and they can change their browser theme preferences to point to Facebook.com instead. The flexibility boosts retention of your theme by giving the experience each user wants, whether its the theme as you designed it or a more personalized one that they fit to their unique needs.

Your Most Desired Widget

What follows the Facebook and Twitter additions is up to you. Post your comments to let us know the widgets you need most to increase traffic to your web site and we’ll get those added to BT:Engage as well.

Image via Wikipedia

A browser theme is more than a pretty picture, or it should be. That’s why we call ours “interactive browser themes” and we’ve seen browser themes deliver 6 – 12x more clicks than the average visits to our partner sites. You get this return traffic by utilizing the content you’ve already created for your web site. It’s a simple matter of exposing it and directing users back to your site through the browser theme.

Here are some tips to help you get started.

RSS Feeds in Your Browser Theme

If you have a web site, blog, audio/video content, or even photos, you can offer a feed of your content. You can see an example of almost all of these at work in our NASA browser theme. NASA generates news, videos and photos constantly and have feeds for virtually all their content. Explore the NASA Multimedia site, then compare how you can utilize the feeds differently in your browser theme.

The news feed in the toolbar ticker is a highly engaging element. That’s why in the early stages of our BT:Engage browser theme creator, it was one of the essential features to include for what is still a limited feature set product. You’ll find an option to add an RSS/Atom Feed under the Widgets tab when you’re building a theme.

The great news is, if you are using a popular blogging platform or publishing tool like TypePad, WordPress, or Blogger, you have a feed automatically. Even other non-blogging sites like social photo-sharing service Flickr offer feeds of your content. As an added bonus, you can use products like Feedburner to get additional analytics and reports about your feed usage. You can run your feed through their system before putting the link into your browser theme.

Hotlink Your Logo

The RSS feed delivers dynamic, breaking news to your audience and goes a long to deepening your relationship with your audience. That doesn’t diminish the fact that they have an affinity for your brand and many users simply want to start at the top of your site. Adding your web URL to your logo right in the BT:Engage browser theme creator turns a flat image into a clickable one, and that gets users back to your site a lot. It’s a simple addition and not one to forget if you’re looking to optimize your user engagement.

Browser Theme Toolbar Buttons

These are the work horses of your browser theme. They’re not pretty and not sexy, but they get the job done – just don’t get too much of a good thing.

You should include 3-5 buttons in your browser theme that link back to the key areas of your site where your community visits or interacts the most. These could point to your photo or video galleries, your community forums or your news page. If you have a commerce area, don’t ignore those. The people using your browser theme are your Super Fans, or soon will be. Help them support you.

The sports teams that use browser themes often have two commerce links in their browser themes. One button will point to the team store, the other to get tickets. The dual commerce connection isn’t limited to teams, though. What we see is more than a doubling of clicks to commerce when the two button approach is used. Just make sure your giving enough content around those commerce links to your audience knows it’s not all about the money.

These are the basics. They are core to every product Brand Thunder has built and why we made this the starting point for our BT:Engage browser theme creator. We’ll add more functionality over time and give you more options, but if you get the fundamentals right – the rest comes easy.

Image via CrunchBase

Browser themes are great engagement tools and a strong reason they’re popular with online communities. Keeping in touch and driving up visits to your site deepens your relationship with your community. Plus, advertisers love an engaged audience, so you’re already doing yourself and your profitability a favor.

There’s even more opportunity and it’s easy to take advantage of. Engagement in the browser theme leads to commerce as well as increase visits to your site.

Does Commerce Work In a Theme?

Your browser theme can also help with direct sales by guiding your users into the commerce of your site. With clients using five toolbar buttons, we’ve seen better commerce with two browser theme buttons devoted to shopping. Typically, 4% of browser clicks will go to a single commerce button but 10% of browser clicks go to two commerce buttons. That’s a 25% lift by leveraging the two together. Wow!

I’m not advocating overdoing commerce. You never want to turn your audience away because you’re trying to make a buck, but there’s no harm in it either when its contextual and relevant.

Affiliate Tip for Small Business

For smaller businesses, its easier to work with Affiliate Programs and take advantage of the selling expertise of others while you just put the right product in front of your users at the right time. But a toolbar button is a little different than a web page. Most affiliate sites are set up to help you run ad banners or text links on your site. This will take a few steps on your part.

This method seems to work. I haven’t officially asked for comment, but the technique has been applied to links from Amazon’s Affiliate Program, Commission Junction, LinkShare and Pepperjam Network.

Using Amazon, as an example, if you’re logged into your affiliate account and enable their toolbar, you can quickly build a link to any product on their site. In this case, they have a sale on life-size skulls and as Halloween is approaching – this could be useful to have around. Just click the “Link to this page” in the top of the toolbar.

When you click that link, you’ll be taken to a window to get your affiliate tracking code. Click “Text Only” since you’re only after one bit of information – the URL with your affiliate code embedded.

Once you click Text Only, you’ll see a screen with a bunch of HTML code like that shown in the second image.

Finally, find the URL. It’s underlined in green in the third image for reference. You want everything between the quotation marks. Yes, it’s really long, but that’s how Amazon knows its you, plus other information I’m sure. Look for the <a href=” and then start copying. You’ll finish at “>. The URL is basically in the same kind of position across affiliate sites. You just need to find it, then copy and paste.

This is the URL you put as a button. In this example, I’d go into the theme in BT:Engage and Modify my Halloween theme. I can go to the Widgets tab, add another button to my toolbar, call it Skulls! and link to the URL. Clicking Finish makes this change live. The next time anyone using that theme launches their browser, the new button will appear in the themes toolbar. When I want to remove it, I Modify the theme again, delete the button and Finish. Voila, no more button!

Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Related articles

• BT:Engage – Example of Fansite Browser Theme Using Delta Daily (brandthunder.com)

Image via Wikipedia

I talk a lot about using BT:Engage for helping sites and communities deepen their engagement with their online audience. It’s also extremely easy (and fun!) to create browser themes for your own use and pleasure.

In the following post and accompanying video tutorial, I’m going to show you how to spin a browser theme that includes news from your favorite news site.This occurred to me recently as I looked at the Huffington Post browser theme my wife’s been using for years. She would not part with the news ticker in the browser theme’s toolbar. I’m just happy she’s using a Brand Thunder theme. But, I realized I could give her a fresh look grabbing the RSS feed link from the HuffPo site and inserting it into the RSS/Atom reader under the Widgets tab.

This 90 second video tutorial will show you how I did it. The typed out steps follow.

Here are the quick steps to take to build your own news browser theme:

• Go to Brand Thunder’s web site and click the Try it Now button for the Design, Build and Share your own browser themes promotion. When you’re in BT:Engage, click Get Started.
• Design the theme any way you want, using the background and logo library of images or upload your own under My Images.
• To add the news feed, click the Widgets tab. Then drag the RSS/Atom reader button up to the toolbar.
• The properties box will have a place to type or paste an RSS Feed URL. Click Validate, and then Save.
• Click Finish to publish your browser theme and go to your sharing page Preview, where you can download your new theme.

How to find the news feed for a site:

• Most of your main stream news sites like CNN, Fox News, The Huffington Post, MSNBC or NPR offer RSS feeds. You’ll usually find the link in the footer, or near the very bottom, of their web page.
• Otherwise look for the RSS icon, pictured at the top of the blog. This is the universal identifier of RSS feeds and you can often find it in the left or right hand sides of web sites.

I hope this helps and I hope you discover a new way to enjoy your browser theme.