Christmas kicked off what’s been a full year of capturing the major holidays in our Booms! and they’ve been exceptionally popular. If you’ve not seen the Thanksgiving Boom!, check out our Gallery and click the Holiday link. It’s festive and fun, and it’ll be a nice placeholder until you download our upcoming Christmas Boom!.

From a business growth standpoint, Christmas provided a whole new avenue to explore outside of our focus on branded browsers. Great brands have solid followings and a lot of affinity marketing products are built on those relationships. But if you’re that business in the middle providing a service to the brand and to their end user, it makes sense for you to look at other outlets for your creativity and potential markets that are under served.

Our holiday efforts got our custom browser experiences into a lot of new hands. It’s been an effective and simple method to expand our product and help our business. So, in a few weeks, I know one additional thing I’ll be thankful for.

While I love to see others endorse the marketplace where Brand Thunder plays, however, it’s not been the value proposition that’s been the most consistent objection. It’s the perceived limitations of how much a company can do and can offer their customers at one time. The most consistent objection we hear is “I’m already doing this. Why would we need that as well?” Because when you can meet your consumer where they want with little expense and time, you should do it. Doing only one thing this year is leaving too much opportunity on the table.

I’m wagering that most companies and customers can handle more than one digital media initiative a year. I understand the issue of resource constraints (believe me! I understand) but there are a lot of low cost options for you to release a bonanza of new media programs without a significant drain on your time or resources. In most cases, if you have your logo digitized and have initiated a handful of common practices, like RSS feeds for your news, you can launch a number of these programs within weeks — and that’s whether you use one of the self-serve wizards available for a number of digital media tools, or a low-cost, low-touch option like Brand Thunder brings. You can bring several tools to your audience in a reasonable amount of time.

If you’re launching one, you may as well launch more. The promotional and hosting commitment is going to be the same. This is where I see potential upside for companies. With the influx of advertising networks, it’s easier to be in a “sold out” position for promotional real estate and house promotions are the general casualty. Leveraging promotions to drive users to a single download destination on your site will make better use of the limited inventory and you can offer them a robust range of applications.

So, as you look at your digital marketing road map, I encourage you to reshape the questions being asked. Instead of why your customer would want it. Ask why you wouldn’t give them what they want. The difference can mean a lot in terms of how often you’re connecting with your audience.

“Not invented here” has long held a negative connotation. I’ve been involved in my share of corporate development efforts that ignore marketplace solutions and pursue an internal one only to see the project stagger and fall. I’ve also used it as an excuse for obstacles encountered when dealing with other companies. In those respects, it’s alive and well.

When you’re a lean startup, however, you can’t afford to ignore something because it wasn’t developed from within. You’re trying to serve your clients and end users in the best way possible as fast as possible in the run toward sustainability.

Fortunately, there are many examples on the web where “not invented here” has produced beautiful results. Think of all the mashups where content and functionality from multiple sites are combined (you can find fun examples at Mashup Awards).

For the web, it’s morphed into the “I want some of what’s over there” syndrome, and that’s often all it takes to start pulling it into your product. Looking at Brand Thunder’s own efforts, we did that with Surf Canyon (who was just recognized by Search Engine Journal). We don’t view ourselves as just creating a more personal and customized browser experience; we’re trying to create a better one. Regardless of how badly we want to do something, we simply don’t have the time nor resources to do it all. And, it doesn’t make sense to reinvent a good product when it’s sitting “over there.”

When your resources are fully tapped out developing your core offering, finding something of value that was not invented here is a gift. We’ll continue to look for relationships that can help us improve our product at a rapid rate. And hopefully we won’t lock ourselves into mindsets that limit us.

We’ve wrestled with this considerably. Our current business model is based on a browser with 20% market share. Sure, we can exceed that for our partners (request our Case Study here), but that’s still a question mark for some prospects. Here are a series of questions we ask ourselves in an effort to improve the ease with which people get our product.

1. Have you identified any immediate barriers?
For us, our users need to have the Firefox browser. If they don’t have it, we give them a link to get it for free – but there’s a cost to sending that user away before they can get what they want.

2. Do you understand the waterfall of user adoption?
If you’re in the software business, you know it’s not unusual to see a 30% drop off at each step of a software download (yes, that’s a 30% drop each time you present a screen where a user must click “next”). That’s why companies work so hard at keeping the installation process simple and streamlined, and why it’s important to know the number of people who start one step and the number who start the next.

3. Have you identified how to minimize the entire number of steps for a user to get your product?
When we launched our Huffington Post branded browser, we offered both the Firefox customizations as well as a “full build” of the browser plus customizations – removing the obstacle of sending a user to get Firefox first. (The hidden cost here was we couldn’t call the browser Firefox, even though it was the same code base. Officially, it’s the Mozilla browser. So, no free lunch here.)

4. Have you listened to your clients, prospects and end users?
If you’re listening to sales objections, noting casual observations and reading user comments – you’ll get invaluable information. As a result, we’ve included a Lite version of each branded browser shipped, changed our Privacy Policy to more accurately reflect the data captured (we were over reaching with what rights we were reserving, but not using – and turning away users), launched our BOOMS to allow users to move seamlessly between our customizations and we’re continuing with some significant development efforts (more to come on this point).

Now, what are we still missing?

COLUMBUS OH (July 29, 2008) — Brand Thunder LLC, the browser customization specialists, announced today that Coolfire Media will offer Brand Thunder custom browsers as a part of its Interactive services. The browser customizations will include the capability to offer functionality developed exclusively by Coolfire Media. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The customizations allow a visual takeover of the look and feel of the browser creating a totally branded experience that is persistent regardless of the web site being viewed. Additionally, functionality can be enhanced including embedded media players, RSS feeds incorporating images and text, and content widgets.

“We’ve made it simple to enhance multiple elements within the browser,” says founder Patrick Murphy. “We can offer that core capability to Coolfire Media, who in turn has extensive experience in providing new media solutions to brand marketers and they can add their own functionality tweaks to our current portfolio of offerings.”

“Brand Thunder has built a complete end-to-end process for a very compelling niche product,” said Eric Stanley, of Coolfire Media. “We think it leverages our interactive capabilities, gives us the flexibility to make unique offerings and will be in demand by our partners.”

About Brand Thunder

Formed in April, 2007, Brand Thunder creates a more persistent presence between corporate brands and their internet consumer through its browser customization which leads to increased web site visits and revenue. Through a software installation, end users change the look and feel of their internet browser into an immersive experience from their favorite sports team, entertainment franchise or internet site. The customized browsers feature official logos, colors, content and functionality, but can also extend capabilities including video, music players or other internet widgets. Current business partners and clients include the The Huffington Post, NCAA, NHL, Starpulse.com, Universal Music and Yahoo!. Samples found at http://brandthunder.com/gallery/.

Contact

Patrick Murphy, CEO
Brand Thunder, LLC
614-408-8202

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