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Design

6 Ways To Improve The Jung von Matt Agency Site SEO-Wise

by Walter Naeslund on October 19, 2009

I got an email this morning from Jung Von Matt Stockholm asking me to check out their new “optimized” site in the wake of the Lowe Brindfors debacle a couple of weeks back. I really don’t intend to take on the role of advertising agency website critic, but since they asked, and since I like the guys at JvM, why not give it a go.

The site is another in the long line of Wordpress installations showing up lately in the advertising world, like Farfar and Great Works for instance. And really – why do anything else? WP has become a kick ass back end. This one is also a very pretty WP-installation design-wise. I’m not absolutely sure about the usability flow for this particular design, but that could be just me.

The reason (i figure) that I got the email however is to check it out SEO-wise. Now – first off, I want to be clear that I am by no means an SEO expert. I am interested, and I do have a solid technical background, but let’s be humble and bring in the real Michael Jordan’s of SEO, because I do pride myself in understanding how to bring in the right people. After consulting one of my favorite SEO-experts Simon Sundén, these are some of the quick pointers one would like to fix, even though this site is playing in a completely different league than the all-Flash agency sites we have discussed here earlier. The following are just examples that popped up after five minutes of analysis and discussion during lunch, but feel free to continue in the comments or hire us for a complete audit.

Just-Fix-It-List for JvM

No H1’s or H2’s. Only H3’s here and there.
Non-optimal URL-structure.
Missing desriptions on many pages.
Titel on the following pages shouldn’t be “Work”: http://www.jungvonmatt.se/work/?id=69
There is a sitemap, but the case-pages are missing: http://www.jungvonmatt.se/sitemap.xml
Lots of old pages 404′d and not redirected: http://www.google.se/search?hl=sv&q=site%3Ajvm.se (Example: http://www.jvm.se/projects/unicef)

That said, it’s still a good effort! Congratulations on your WP-site!

By the way – for those of you who think I hate Flash per se, here is one site which uses Flash very well, and where it is motivated to use Flash (it’s a design hotel). Simon also wrote a great post about this today.

Do Dictatorships Use Social Media More Effectively Than Corporations?

by Walter Naeslund on September 24, 2009

I‘ve done quite a bit of thinking about how the social web will make the world a better place. I’ve written about it, and also lectured about the social web, good, and evil.

So when a talk by Evgeny Morozov popped on TED on the topic of how the net aids dictatorships, I was naturally interested. Was somebody going to put up a good argument against my theories?

The answer is yes. And no. Evgeny argues beautifully for the ideas, but simultaneously shows how the dictatorships actually start using the web to reach out and communicate, much like I think companies should. They are proactive, the contribute, they engage, and they are present. They DON’T try to cencor stuff, because they have realized that participation is more effective. And I tell you – if dictatorships do this successfully, companies should too!

Then, of course, these dictatorships abuse their power to flood the system with government biased comments and spam, and commit evil acts, but I’m not as sure as Evgeny is about how effective this is. Compare it for example to this example from the very well designed guidelines at Intel for how to effectively use the social web:

Be transparent. Your honesty—or dishonesty—will be quickly noticed in the social media environment. If you are blogging about your work at Intel, use your real name, identify that you work for Intel, and be clear about your role. If you have a vested interest in something you are discussing, be the first to point it out.

This is not a guideline that the dictatorships exactly follow. On the other hand, perhaps other commenters don’t dare use their real name either for fear of physical abuse, so this way It may actually work for government agents to blend into the anonymous crowd. Again – we see an example of how anonymity leads to evil and abuse.

Incidently, the campaign led by The Cartel to hunt down file sharers also leads to anonymization of the web, making laws like HADOPI and IPRED all the more troublesome – and also promoters of more serious evil.

Lowe Brindfors Copy the Forsman & Bodenfors SEO Mistakes

by Walter Naeslund on September 15, 2009

Last week I wrote about how Forsman & Bodenfors don’t understand how the internet works. In absolute terms, the description was fair, but in relative terms, they are not worse than most of the advertising business. Yesterday we got another painfull piece of evidence to that effect.

I’m talking about the brand new website of Lowe Brindfors. But to discuss the site we need to separate two things: Design and communications efficiency.

Design

It’s a matter of taste of course, but I think this page is very well designed from a print designers point of view. It’s excellent print design, but awful interactive design. Because it is not interactive. It’s like designing a very pretty car with only passenger seats. And just like such a beautiful but useless car, this site belongs in a museum. Which leads me into point 2:

Communications Efficiency

This thing is a very pretty printed catalogue in digital format. It’s what websites were in the late 90’s. The entire thing is a big Flash-page, with text that you cannot copy, films you cannot share, posters that you can download as PDFs (!) but not share with anyone, and invisible coworkers that you can only reach via email or telephone. No wonder they have this disclaimer on the site:

Apparently they think that the elusive internet out there is about technology and gadgets, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Because really, these new technologies are VEHICLES of ideas. Nothing else. But the ideas have to be made for a world of transparency, not to fill expensive media plans. And for you to come up with such ideas, you have to know how this transparent world functions.

Search and SEO is ONE important aspect to understand in order to get people “to spend time with the brand” (to use Lowe Brindfors’ own terminology), and this is what the brand new Lowe Brindfors site looks like to Google:

According to Google, what’s most interesting about the new Lowe Brindfors site seems to be their webmail (!), followed by pages from their old site, and a PDF press-release from August 2008.

Disclaiming your way out of obvious lack of knowledge about the psychology and behavior on the internet with something general like a “Hey, boy slow it down”-disclaimer becomes embarrassing when confronted with clients who know the internet – something that becomes more and more common every day thanks to knowledgeable rebels and speakers on the topic like Johan Ronnestam, Simon Sundén, and Björn Alberts, just to name a few. [Edit: + Jesper Åström]

Things don’t improve when I read what Peter Willebrand our Swedish ad-business press Resumé has to say about the new site:

“Resume.se thankfully notes that the trend is the same as in other digital communication: simpler, faster, and more head on”.

This statement is very general, and also wrong. The site isn’t fast. It’s a heavy Flash film with a loader from hell. The trend of the internet is not “simpler, faster, and more head on”. The trend, or rather the permanent shift, is to social participation in dynamically coordinated institution-less groups, which means that a site needs to support that behavior. You need to love people, not just say you love them. The new thing about the internet is not that people can now talk back to you, it is that everybody can talk to everybody and coordinate discussions and topics without necessarily involving you. If anything, this is more complex, not simpler. Grasping the entire strategy for this more complex system requires a more diverse skill set ranging from behavioral psychology to technology.

The bottom line is that you can have the prettiest house in the world, but to make friends, you have to meet them. Or else you’ll end up being very lonely.

5 Questions and 9 Answers About The Future of The Internet – My Hyper Island Interview

by Walter Naeslund on August 27, 2009

A couple of days ago I was contacted by students at Hyper Island for an interview about the future of digital communication. Here are their questions and my answers:

1. What do you think will happen in the future regarding digital media? For example real time applications, Flash, Adobe Scene 7, Motion Graphics, Mashups?

Innovation Will Gravitate Towards the Efficient
It is always difficult to say anything about the future. Even the inventors themselves can rarely tell how their inventions will be used. Remember for example that Twitter was created as a way to let people know via SMS where the party was. Their invention then took on a life of its own in the hands of the users. On the other hand, this kind of “Darwinistic” innovation is a key feature of the digital technologies. Especially when it comes to innovation in the realm of open source and open APIs.

What we can say is that innovations will gravitate towards increased efficiency in different fields. And this realization is useful. Whenever you come up with an innovation or a campaign, ask yourself: will this make things more efficient? If the answer is yes, the innovation will stand a chance of succeeding, if not, it may at best become a short lived hype. In particular, innovations making collaboration and coordination more efficient are interesting when it comes to the internet since they promote themselves.

Good Bye Flash, Micro Sites & Poor Indexing
Real time applications will be important because they’ll make things more efficient. “Awesomely cool” but utterly useless Flash-based micro sites have always been a bluff and will increasingly be called as such by clients with a deeper understanding of the internet. Such sites make nothing efficient. Perhaps some people will disagree with me here and start arguing that I’m way too rational and that people buy with their emotions, but my bet is that these critics don’t understand the social web. What is often inefficient about these Flash-porn sites is that they are SOCIALLY inefficient. There is no way for me to efficiently share and discuss the content with my friends.

Recently we have started seeing “share”-buttons thrown into the mix, but these usually don’t tap into the actual behavior of people, and are just there because “social-media-is-the-new-hip-thing-and-therefore-we-need-share-on-Facebook-button“. Again, ask the question – will this make things more efficient in some dimension? They are also often inefficient in that they’re not indexed properly by search engines. The question then is, what are they good for? For inspiration? As some sort of interactive film? Very recently (like, right now) I saw one such campaign where they were actually showing commercials for the campaign on television! Making advertising for advertising must be the ultimate proof of failure and inefficiency.

Flash in general will get fierce competition as we will want sites to be more application-like, fast, optimized and useful. HTML5 will be a primary technology and may well put Flash and Silverlight in the shade.

Mashups & Commoditization
Mashups will continue to be super important because the idea of mashups resonates with the basic idea of innovation: take the best of what’s around and make it better. Since the costs of interacting with other open API innovations are so low, the total value of all parties in a mash up interaction will increase. We all benefit from mashups. If somebody has made the best map, like Google Maps for instance, there is not much point in using energy making a copy of that, but rather put our energy into innovating a new service and use their map. They win, and we win. More than anything, users win.

A lot of what required coding before are now commodities that you can pick up and just connect to something else through an open API. Smart people can thus create quite cool innovations by just putting pieces together. An internet-innovator friend of mine said that he’s very reluctant to try anything that he can’t build a first prototype of within an hour. He’s one of the most interesting and successful innovators of the new web in Sweden.

Real Time & Concurrent Editing
Technically, real time and concurrent editing will be important. I don’t know exactly which implementations of this will be the killer apps yet, but true real time collaboration is efficient and will become very popular. Not least by means of Google Wave. But we may well see other applications than these. For example live use of scripts for different purposes. There are a gazillion imaginable uses for such live scripts, but to get an idea, imagine a script being uploaded and run on a users iPhone returning different data depending on conditions such as position, battery status, orientation, in call status, who else is around, etc…

Real time and social search is very interesting and is an area where Google is lagging hopelessly behind. Here, Facebook and Twitter rule.

Mobile
And of course, mobile will be important, but there will be less difference between mobile and non-mobile. What is non-mobile today anyway? The iPhone is not a mobile phone with computer capabilities, it’s a computer that you can make calls on. And it has very comprehensive sensory systems like camera, video, positioning, integrated internet connection, gyro, accelerometer, compass, etc… Laptops have most of these too, but are lacking a few things like positioning and true mobile internet. The next generation of MacBooks will have a SIM-card slot and positioning. Mark my words.

Short answer: Real time. Mash ups. HTML5. Mobile.

2. What is the next big thing? (The new Facebook/Twitter for example)
The next big thing is Google Wave and all the amazing applications that will be built on top of it. Twitter will probably tip over and become mainstream in Sweden, but I’m not sure of it. Facebook with their aquisition of Friendfeed and their new search functionality is becoming very powerful as well.

3. Which trends do you see in digital media?
See question 1.

4. What qualifications will the media industry require?
Great rebels. Great thinkers. Great designers. Great writers. Great system designers/programmers. Great digital networkers. Great storytellers. Amazingly great leaders who can make all these other people love to work together. People who are not afraid to fail. People who can make the current Swedish labor legislation go away. Howard Roark.

5. What is the biggest challenge for the future in the media industry?
There are a lot of people today with power, who’s power relies on a monopoly of information and information distribution. These people will fight hard to stop anything that will remove their power. It’s very natural. They will eventually loose, but they will destroy a lot of value as they fight in increasing desperation. The music industry is the obvious example of this. It will be a perfect rerun of what happened when free-to-air radio was introduced.

Another challenge is our labor laws. Many agencies today have to fire people, but the law forces them to fire the newcomers, and the newcomers, on average, know more about digital communication. Also, for the same reason, they won’t be able to recruit the people their clients demand. This will create a downward death spiral. In nature, those who are able to change in accordance with the changes in nature survive. We are no different.

For me and for Honesty, this is good news of course, since we will be able to recruit the right people from the start.

Google’s New Move to Kill Facebook

by Walter Naeslund on April 22, 2009

Like Picasso, I paint in periods. While he had his periods like blue and pink, I have periods like the recent one on copyright policy, certain internet technologies, and psychology. If you are a long time reader of this blog, you might remember my Open Social and my Friend Connect periods. These are very exciting technologies that I predicted (and still do) will pose a serious threat to Facebook.

If I were to attack Facebook, I would do it by being open and transparent. Sure, Facebook has an excellent community for human interaction, but they are quite closed. Google, on the other hand, are suggesting an open system (Open Social + Friend Connect) for interaction between different services using you social graph and are thus moving in for the kill using the strategy I suggested in my earlier posts. Meanwhile, Facebook has responded with their own “Facebook Connect”, acknowledging the attack openly by using such a similar name for their technology. Very interesting.

Yesterday the next move from Google was unveiled in the US. “Profile search” is Google’s answer to what has been Facebook’s forte – people search. By typing “me” into the Google search engine, people in the US get a full profile search on themselves. Having set it up correctly, this will be a great way to profile yourself on the web. I’m sure many of you have Googled yourselves before, and seen the often scattered an less than logical results. My prediction is that this Google identity design will be second nature to us before long, and here Google has the information muscle to beat Facebook hands down. And much of their power comes from their openness. Now, stitching together Google Profile, Google Open Social, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Friend Feed, you really have a quite potent threat to Facebook. I’m looking forward to seeing Facebook’s response to this.

Will The Workspace of The Future Be Designed By Nintendo?

by Walter Naeslund on March 9, 2009

I think the Siftables demo at Ted is just incredibly cool. As much as I love computers, I’ve never really come to terms with the user interface. It’s just not physical enough for me. Sure, I’ve tried Wacom tablets and what have you, but it’s just not enough.

The same way we saw Nintendo turn gaming into a physical actitivity, we’ll see computer based work take the same path. It has to move in that direction. People are not designed to move around a little mouse with one hand and type on little keys all day.

Siftables is one step in this direction. I’m not sure yet exactly which jobs would be the right ones for this particular solution, but instantly I can se music sequencers and other music software like Reason or Logic using this (part of the demo touches upon this). Programming drum machines using Siftables could probably be very intuitive.

I’m surprised that not more research is being done in this area. It’s an absolutely huge market. And then we haven’t even started talking about the health benefits of actually being physically active at work.

Will Nintendo design our future workspace? If they do, I’ll be first in line to buy stock.

Give Hope for The Childhood Cancer Foundation Launched

by Walter Naeslund on November 19, 2008

Yesterday, my last campaign before leaving Identity Works was launched. The Give Hope-campaign for the Childhood Cancer Foundation (Barncancerfonden) was a collaboration between us and the Superstrikers digital agency. I was in charge of concept development and strategy together with the brilliant design strategist Jonas Rutegård and Superstrikers – a match made in heaven to be sure.

In short, the campaign is about giving while giving. We created Give Hope gift boxes so that each time you give to a friend, you also give to the Childhood Cancer Foundation, you show your support for the cause to your friend, and you encourage him or her to do the same when giving to somebody else. A pay it forward strategy if you will.

For the digital solution we worked with badges for your site, Facebook-profile, blog, or any other digital home you or your company may have. From that badge, your friends or clients can pick up their own badge, and this entire web of support can be tracked from givehope.se so that you can see what other participation that your participation has spawned.

We’ll see how it grows. Pick up your own badge here on the right.

Other blogs about Give Hope:
Cap&Design

MySpace 2.0 Launched

by Walter Naeslund on November 10, 2008

A while back I wrote about MySpace on my other blog (which has been asleep for some time now while I’ve been busy with this one). Last night MySpace launched it’s 2.0 version, and that is of course big news for the world of social media.

I haven’t played around with it much yet, but a quick look reveals big improvements in speed, modularity and smartness. This redesign will probably play a key role in MySpace’s comeback, though I’m still a bit sceptical to exactly how modular it really is. We’ll see.

In any event, I think that the combination of music and a social platform is lethal. We’ll see what this will amount to, but if I were Spotify for example, I’d be a bit worried. (Quick tip Spotify: Sell yourselves as a music communications tool, intergrate better with existing social networks, and figure out a smarter business model than super annoying ads).

Oh, and by the way, I’m thinking of changing my other blog (the Walter Naeslund-blog) into a Swedish language advertising, technology, and social media blog to complement this one. What do you think of that?

Design

6 Ways To Improve The Jung von Matt Agency Site SEO-Wise

Just-Fix-It-List for JvM

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