Stanley Cup Finals and the Maker of Champions by Kevin Dwinnell

The Breakfast of Champions is the well known slogan of Wheaties, or a Kurt Vonnegut novel, depending on the circles you swing in. Brand Thunder is laying its claim as “the Maker of Champions.” It’s an easy claim when you create your own moniker, and sounds better than reality – “the official new media, affinity marketing tool of the team that wins out.”

Last year, the Stanley Cup Finals pitted the toolbar offering Detroit Redwings with the browser theme supporting Pittsburgh Penguins — and the Penguins prevailed. One W for the browser theme contingent. This year, the technology drama has been left behind as both teams, the Chicago Blackhawks and Philadelphia Flyers, are Brand Thunder clients and their fans are avid users of each team’s interactive browser theme. For two consecutive years, Brand Thunder will be a proud partner of the Stanley Cup Champions.

Sure, you can point and say, “well, you’ve not won it all in every sport.” True, but I like our odds. Just look at the past year in sports. One hundred percent of our clients from BCS schools wound up in a BCS Bowl Game (things are looking up for the Duke football team this season!). Brand Thunder clients made it to the NBA finals last year (Orlando Magic) and are contending again this year (Magic and Phoenix Suns). The Superbowl featured a Brand Thunder client (Indianapolis Colts) and the Major League Soccer Champions (Real Salt Lake) are clients as well.

I love pointing out how well our clients are doing. I think it’s great that we’re in such good company. Do I think there’s truth to the claim a Brand Thunder browser theme can make a sports team perform better? To borrow from Bull Durham: “A player on a streak has to respect the streak. If you believe you’re playing well because you’re getting laid, or because you’re not getting laid, or because you wear women’s underwear, then you are!”

Help us respect the streak. If you want to see how Brand Thunder and an interactive browser theme can keep you at the top of your game, give us a shout.

Posted in Commentary, News | Tags: affinity marketing, Breakfast of Champions, browser theme, Chicago Blackhawks, List of Stanley Cup champions, New Media, orlando magic, Philadelphia Flyers, Phoenix Suns, Pittsburgh Penguins | 2 Comments »

Web Apps – 5 Ways to Convert and Keep Your Fans by Kevin Dwinnell

Do you feel safe downloading a program from the Internet? Do you give more thought to visiting a web site or installing a piece of software? It’s questions like these that create challenges for web applications. If you’re offering a software download, you’re already operating at a disadvantage in the mind of the consumer — whether it’s conscious or not.

It’s an act of trust when a consumer downloads and installs your product. You’ve been invited into their life. That invitation is a powerful opportunity to connect with that user over a potentially long period of time. Don’t blow it. Here are some of the things we do and have learned to encourage adoption of our interactive browser themes.

1. Full Frontal Disclosure

In the connected world, it doesn’t pay to try to hide information. You will be found out. Just ask John Edwards. That’s why we put our disclosures upfront and prior to install. We include a default search engine with our product. Even though users can change it any time they like, we tell them up front that it’s coming.

It’s the proper protocol for software distribution on the web. Your user can then make an informed decision about everything they are receiving. It won’t protect you from negative comments, there are always dissenters. At least you’ve been open and can avoid greater negative fallout.

2. If You Love It, Let It Go

The best move we made was to change our product and allow consumers to switch between any theme they want. In the web 1.0 world, you got your hooks into the consumer and you didn’t let go. That doesn’t cut it anymore. Your fans are going to go wherever they want, whenever they want. If you’re doing right by them, they’ll be back.

Our themes help create return visits to our client site, and it’s powerful. Having messaging capability in the browser means you can reach them whenever they’re online. So, making it easy for your fans to change the theme and step away from a client’s experience can be a hard thing for clients to favor. It’s shown to be the right thing.

Our sports teams have a steady core of users that stay with the theme throughout the year. There’s also a large number that return each pre-season or join as the season rolls along. Recognizing your fans may have other interests and welcoming them back each season makes for a much stronger relationship. Giving the ability to switch between themes means you keep a foot in the door instead of creating a complete uninstall scenario.

3. Ain’t No Mountain High Enough

We all wish we could remove the barriers to entry. We try to minimize them by making the call to action clearly visible to the user, reduce clutter on the page, sell the sizzle and so on. Showing the graphics included in our themes is a big boost for us.

With Firefox at roughly 25% of the browser market, offering a Firefox-only theme would generally be perceived as a huge barrier to entry. Fortunately, the visual strength of our product and the affinity to the brands we work with has greatly reduced this obstacle. We’ve had clients double their Firefox penetration – outpacing Firefox’s own overall market share. We’ve also had clients get 30% of their total audience using their custom theme. Quite astounding numbers.

4. You Don’t Have to Shout

Our browser themes are an affinity marketing tool. We build them to help brands connect to their fans. And let’s face it, brands and the companies behind them are out to make money. If you’re sending stuff out into the market, it’s eventually got to make you some money or you’re out of luck.

As much as our product offers new sponsor and ad inventory, and there’s a persistent communication channel available to them, I think it’s great that the product owners tread lightly in this area. This is not the place for the hard sell. To coin the phrase of social media, this is for joining the conversation – you’ve got to be a part of the dialogue. Ongoing, timely and useful information will make the long-term connection where the marketing appeals are accepted. We’ve seen this respect around communication rewarded with an average of 10% click through to commerce offers from within our themes.

5. We Interrupt This Program

As mentioned above, timely and useful information is vital. The power of putting a message up front and visible to the user has resulted in phenomenal return visits to our partner sites. Most sites have feeds that are great tools to reach your fans when they’re not on your site. The question is “Are you offering enticing news?”

There are two items to consider. One, a killer headline gets attention. The Huffington Post is a master at this. You can also look to leaders in your industry to find out how they write to engage their readers. Two, inside information is a powerful way to build a relationship. Relationships get tighter when you share personal information about yourself. This can apply to businesses as well. You can get a good feel of this if you look at how Toyota mishandled their PR crisis. Take a page from the Tylenol scare years ago – open and immediate information sharing goes a long way to shoring up your consumer’s trust.

These are some of the things that are working for us, and why. What would you add to the list?

Posted in Commentary | Tags: brand thunder, browser theme, Browsers, Clients, firefox, Huffington Post, New Media, web app, Web search engine | No Comments »

Your Web Content is Done, But is it Available? by Kevin Dwinnell

A lot of time and money is spent on developing a company website. Even more is spent attracting users to that site. Yet, we find a surprising number of sites that missed the critical questions of “Is my content accessible and is it distributable?”

Make it Accessible

There are too many options available today from a PC to a Mac, from an iPhone to a Pre, from Windows to Linux to limit your content to being usable in a single application or platform. The World Wide Web Consortium has been fighting for web standards for years. Their key objectives are accessibility, internationalization, device independence and mobile. Go to their site, www.w3.org, for a starting point. It’s more than a step toward open standards; it’s a move toward best practices.

Putting their guidance into practice eliminates concerns over how your audience is trying to view your content. Your content will be ready for consumption regardless of the user’s tools, and it’ll be working for the benefit of your business.

Make it Reusable

Now that you’re sure your content is accessible, you can even take your site out of the equation. The market hasn’t just changed around how users are accessing your site, the rules have changed about where they are wanting your content. They want the content at Google Reader, or Feedly or SpreedNews or any number of sites that help them digest the volumes of information that interests them. If you’re forcing them to come to your site, you’re pushing them somewhere else.

Making your content available via RSS helps you get it and keep it in the hands of your audience. And RSS is back in the headlines with instantaneous updates. You can find out more at www.rsscloud.org or read a quick RSS overview on Kathryn Corrick’s blog.

Your efforts with RSS won’t just make your users happy. It’ll also please your new media marketing team who will have content available for desktop widgets, Facebook apps, browser sidebars, news tickers and more.

Make it Digestible

We know attention spans are short. Keep your content and efforts to the point, and keep that in mind when you look at your RSS feeds and the information you’re pushing out. You should be limiting the feed to the most recent information or the last dozen or so items. Forgetting about this point can leave some readers trying to pull a massive amount of data that your user will never wait for.

If you want some other brainstorming ideas, check out this list of 100 Resources compiled by WebDesignDev. It’ll get you thinking in a 100 good ways.

Posted in Commentary | Tags: brand thunder, Branded Browser, custom browser, feedreader, GoogleReader, marketing, New Media | No Comments »

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

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 »