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It is a common axiom of branding that the customer owns the brand. No matter what we try to do as marketers, strategists or designers, we cannot directly control what people think about our brands. The only things we can control are (some of) the various touchpoints they have with our brand.

A brand touchpoint is any facet of how a person interacts with a company, product or service – from an advertising headline to a conversation with a customer service rep to the subtle interaction of a single button on a web site. If we are thoughtful, skillful and lucky, we can orchestrate and align enough of those touchpoints – an experiential tipping point – to create a coherent and meaningful experience for our customers. This is underlying principal of what I like to call “touchpoint branding” (more on this in a future blog post).

So that’s the theory of how it’s supposed to work: brand strategy manifests as touchpoints which create experiences which form perceptions. But in practice, of course, it’s rarely so tidy. Customers are exposed to many touchpoints that are outside the company’s control (word-of-mouth being one of the most potent), and these often form lasting brand associations that marketers have to deal with.

So how does the public define your brand? There’s no substitute for good customer research, but there is a fun little site called Brand Tags that offers a “quick and dirty” approximation of how a given brand is perceived (or at least how it’s perceived by the users of Brand Tags). The site lets people “tag” brands with attributes the same way they would tag web content with keywords. What’s the first word that comes to mind when you think of Volvo? OK, that was an easy one, but things get more interesting as you dig a little deeper.

For example, we’re big fans of Chipotle Mexican Grill – they’re a long-standing client of ours with a great brand. They’re well known as a cool, fun place to get gourmet burritos, and if you ask them how they define their brand, they have a nice short list of inspiring and desirable brand attributes (the kind most companies should have). But on Brand Tags, the three most common tags are “Burrito” (good), “Mexican” (yup), and “McDonalds” (huh?).

What do the Golden Arches have to do with Chipotle? The truth is that McDonalds was once an investor in Chipotle, and even though they have since divested their shares and have nothing to do with each other, it seems the association has stuck. Chipotle’s corporate vision is a sort of manifesto against fast food (to their credit, they are genuinely committed to and passionate about this). Yet there it is, in plain view – the third most common association with the Chipotle brand name is the world’s biggest fast food chain. It’s a reality of their current brand perception and simply wishing it away (or even explaining it as untrue) won’t change it. Because the brand isn’t what you say it is, it’s what they think it is. And changing an entrenched perception (even if it’s a misperception) is even harder than getting them to pay attention in the first place.

Again, the Brand Tags site is no substitute for true brand research, but we’ve found it to be an interesting and often useful first stop on the path to understanding what “they” think you’re all about.

Last weekend I went to see “Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury” at the Oakland Museum of California. The exhibition “captures an era in post-war Southern California when exploration in architecture, art, music and design coalesced to form a modern sensibility based on living well.” Good show. Here’s a few related links:

Architectural photographer Julius Shulman (+)

Designer Alvin Lustig

Jazz photographer William Claxton

Painter Karl Benjamin

Designers Charles and Ray Eames (+)

BOTC on Flickr

BOTC on YouTube

BOTC on Amazon

Take Bart. They even made a playlist for you

If you read my post yesterday about Google now indexing flash, (or the previous post about the SEO thinking behind the SearchMe gallery site) I’d like to follow up with some examples of why it is extremely important for web pages to be readable to the Google bot.

When you do a search on Google for the following terms, you will see that posts from our blog show up in the results with decent placement. 80% of clicks on a Google or Yahoo results page go to the top 3 results, so that’s where you want to be.

Google query: now indexing flash movies (3rd result)

Google query: evolution of online graphic designers (1st result)

However, for more generic search phrases these pages don’t rank high enough to matter. And as a result we don’t yet get much traffic from these posts. If you conduct a search for Google indexing flash – a much more frequent search phrase on Google right now, our post doesn’t appear above result 200 (and it may appear much lower, I gave up after looking through the no-mans land of page 22 of the Google results).

Filling the page with lots of fresh, interesting and relevant content then making the page readable to Google is only one part of the process of “Search Engine Optimize” or “SEO”. We know we’ve accomplished this because the blog posts ranks high for specific phrases on the page.

To further improve our rankings in the results and reap the traffic rewards, we need to convince Google that our article is better or more authoritative than the 200 or more articles that rank higher in the results. Google’s measure of page and site authority or reputation is called PageRank, and it’s based on HTML links.

Every link on the web is a vote of confidence from the linker to the linkee. The more links pointing at your site or page, the higher your page rank. Ergo, to get our blog post ranked higher in Google, we need more pages on the internet to link to our post. I’ll discuss link-building strategies in a follow up post.

Last night, Google posted an announcement on it’s blog that its search bots can now read Flash.  This is a very big deal. Text or links embedded in a flash movie can now be indexed and contribute to the search ranking of the page.

Until today, Google and Yahoo’s web crawling robots couldn’t see or read Flash files so any words written in flash were essentially invisible. If Google’s bots can’t see your page content your chances of being found in a Google search are greatly diminished. One of the most obvious manifestations is that Google has no text to show as a snippet in its search result listings. Given how Google has effectively become the front page of any web experience, not ranking on Google isn’t an option.

So, while the rich user experience afforded by Flash is useful and sometimes necessary to define an brand, designers and product developers have used it very cautiously. “After all, it doesn’t matter how pretty your Website is if nobody can find it,” says Erick Schonfeld of TechCunch.

Google’s announcement last night is the first step towards Flash being a viable technology for serving both user experience and search engine optimization. As explained on Google Webmaster Central:

“[We now index] all of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.

In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we’re also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.”

Unfortunately, Google still won’t be able to index or extract meaning from images or videos.

The next step for Google and Adobe is to work out how designers and developers should indicate to Google the relative importance of words within the Flash file. With HTML, the method is well understood: the Google bot weighs the content based on how it has been semantically coded for human consumption. For example, words on an HTML page tagged ‘header’ are more significant than body content tagged ‘paragraph’. At the moment, there is no such equivalent in Flash. Ideally, Adobe and Google would further clarify how to optimize semantics of Flash movies.

In the meantime we are running some experiments on Flash indexability and we’ll share with you anything we find. If you have any evidence of how your Flash files are being indexed, we’d love to hear about it.

We find that many of our clients are looking for rich brand and user experiences typcially afforded by Flash - but also absolutely require text-based search engine optimized pages.

Until search engines can reliably read and extract the semantic meaning from images and flash movies this will always be a conflict. But with some skill, we find that you can have both.

We recently worked with SearchMe Co-Founder and Chief Experience Officer  John Holland to quickly design and code their Stacks mini gallery site. (I covered the launch of SearchMe’s Stacks and their other features in a previous post visual browsing with SearchMe and PicLens.)

While most (all) of SearchMe is Flash-based, we produced this site in HTML to allow for better web indexation and SEO. We wanted to make sure that stacks get good visibility in web search results.

At the same time, it was very important to maintain the interaction model established in the flash app, where users are provided engaging, rewarding  feedback for mousing over objects on the page.

Using the mootools javascript framework, we engineered the page so that a mousover on the spotlighted stacks triggered a smooth reveal of additional information that feels rich and rewarding. The information itself is pure HTML text - the kind search engine web crawlers find rich and rewarding.

UPDATE:

A few searches on Google show how our work is paying off: a search for Best of 80s stack returns the stack details page we created as the 1st result! The same goes for:

• world headlines stack
• homework helpers stack
• any of the 15 stacks showcased in the gallery