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.
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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.
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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.
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by Walter Naeslund on September 4, 2009
Yesterday, BBH Labs wrote an interesting post commenting on some of my thoughts on internet transparency and gossip. The post itself, as well as the comments, are well worth a read. Since it’s one of my favorite topics, I naturally wanted in on the discussion myself, but as I started writing a comment on their blog, I realized it would probably be a bit long for a comment, and instead decided to make it a follow up post here.
Q: Is there any evidence of better behavior and less cheating?
A: I think we can see plenty of evidence to support the fact that the breakdown of brand privacy forces brands to behave better. User comments and ratings are in fact the backbone of much of e-commerce, and are really a form of digital gossip. Companies behaving badly are exposed all over the place. Companies behaving well are to some extent rewarded, even though gossip gravitates towards the negative for natural reasons (it’s often more expensive in nature to make the wrong decision than valuable to make the right one). On the individual level, Googling is a standard part of hiring these days, and cheating husbands and wives are exposed all over the internet every day. Just to mention a couple of examples.
Before language evolved, cheaters were easy to spot in small tribes, but not in larger societies. When language evolved, efficiency of gossip increased and we could now crack down on cheaters and reward contributers in bigger groups. Now, with the social web, gossip is made even more efficient, thus making it possible to spot cheaters and reward contributers in very large groups, spread out all over the globe. It’s the same basic psychology and the same economics behind it, but more efficient means of communication enable us to increase scale. The economics of gossip are very much the same as internet economics, or information economics in general: Providing gossip is virtually free, while receiving it can be very valuable. This creates growth. As a fun excercise, you can try applying these economics to the “piracy”-debate.
“Q”: On one hand it all sounds a little Utopian (and some might argue, less fun). On the other, it does sound rather attractive.
A: It may sound utopian, but it’s really not. I’m not talking about perfect transparency with zero transaction and coordination costs (which would be utopian and impossible). Instead, I’m talking about an increase in efficiency, which leads to a more precise control system that is harder to cheat. Harder, but not impossible.
And I really don’t think that it’s a question of attractive or less fun, but rather of us increasing our ability to coordinate as a species. An increase in ability to coordinate enables us to coordinate more quickly, thus becoming more adaptive to changes in our environment. Those who adapt the quickest to change will be the most fit for their environment, and the fittest will survive. If we let this continue without destroying the efficiency with legislation, this is where we will gravitate towards by Darwinistic law. It’s somewhat like asking if life became less fun or more attractive when language was introduced. I can’t answer that, and I don’t know if it’s a relevant question. I do think that it made us more civilized, and I think that the web will have the same effect.
Q: For other societal constructs, such as a nation/regime, hard to say. The world had pretty honest information on the Iran situation, but that didn’t make the regime behave more honestly. On the other hand if
victims in genocidal warfare in Africa had means of disseminating real time information would the world be more inclined to intervene and act more honestly by upholding basic human rights?
A: There are a few different questions involved here, and I won’t go into the specific situation for each country, but on the structural level you can say this: There is a huge shift in power going on all over the world. The monopolies of information distribution previously (and sometimes currently) held by institutions by economic neccesity, are falling apart. And this makes those depending on such monopolies less powerful. For these institutions, the social web poses a threat, and the only way to stop the threat is to stop entire services, and indeed this is what we are seeing in some of these regimes.
Unfortunately for them, this is also very costly in terms of not tapping into the growth engine of gossip and digital gossip that we spoke about earlier, and will leave them with the choice of handing over power by unblocking internet services or loosing out in the competition with free countries. Ultimately, I think and hope that fighting internet freedom is a loosing battle.
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by Walter Naeslund on August 29, 2009
I just got an email from Slideshare.com stating the following:
Hey walternaeslund!
Your presentation is currently being featured on the SlideShare homepage by our editorial team.
We thank you for this terrific presentation, that has been chosen
from amongst the thousands that are uploaded to SlideShare everday.
Congratulations! Have a Great Day!,
- the SlideShare team
Cool! I wasn’t even planning on posting this presentation on the blog, but since it seems popular, here it is:
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by Walter Naeslund on May 28, 2009
When I lectured at Stockholm School of Economics about the future of music and video I remember receiving a few critical questions about mobility: “What about when you’re mobile?”, “What about when you’re on a plane?”, “What about when you don’t have an internet connection?”. Ladies and gentlemen, here is your answer:
And by the way, here’s a little hint to Antipiratbyrån, Ifpi, Sami – Svenska Artisters och Musikers intresseorganisation,SOM (Svenska Oberoende Musikproducenter), Stim, Sveriges Författarförbund, Svenska Förläggareföreningens, Sveriges Filmproducenter och Film i Väst, Svenska Filminstitutet, Dotshop.se, and all you others who think that IPRED is a good idea: INNOVATE don’t LEGISLATE! Without filesharing there would be no such thing as Spotify. Trust me.
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by Walter Naeslund on April 17, 2009
Henrik Pontén of Antipiratbyrån (The Anti Pirate Agency) is quoted saying the following in SvD:
“Naturally this [the verdict in the Pirate Bay trial] is a success for all rights owners and creatives…”
This quote makes me think of the one where Ines Uusman said (in 1996) that “the Internet is a fad that will blow over” – one of the most embarrassing quotes ever. And since Ines didn’t actually say that, Henrik is now a good candidate for the most embarrassing quote ever.
You’ve got it all backwards I believe. The big losers today are the creatives. And the innovators. And all of us who want to create a better and richer cultural future.
Anyway. Now, Henrik, that you have your sugar rush moment, why don’t you comment on this post and explain it to me?
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