I’m writing an extended essay on the subject of "How far?  How?".  I’m building off the Saturn story from my earlier blog post, but would love to hear about other remarkable ways that companies express their brands.

Please send me an email if you’ve got a good story.

Mahalo!

When I first began this blog my day job was marketing web software, and I was obsessed with figuring out how to make ideas more likely to spread across the web.  Though part of the reason for blogging was long tail self-expression, much of it was about building my professional chops.  I’m a big fan of knowing by doing.

I’m no longer making my dough as a web marketer, but I’m still fascinated by the mechanisms of thought contagion on the web and elsewhere.  I love sifting through web logs to see who is visiting and linking to metacool.

Imagine my delight earlier this week when PubSub indicated that metacool was the 14th strongest website out there (out of 16 million sites tracked!!) in terms of link strength and buzz.  Sure, I’m happy to be up in the quantitative ranking, but really turns me on is the prospect of figuring out what makes PubSub tick as a measure of contagion.  To that end, I need your help:

1. If you have any sense of how PubSub derives its rankings, leave a comment or drop me a line.
2. If you know of any other online measures of contagion (besides Google page rank), please tell me about them.

Thought contagion is so cool, eh?

The whole "nano-as-the-ultimate-modifier" marketing thing tipped last week with the release of the iPod nano.  While I don’t (yet) own one of these iPods, I do own several shirts which supposedly feature a nanotechnology fabric treatment.  I believe we’re now going to see "nano" applied to everything from cigars to Civics.  Which is fine, except that in few cases will the product actually contain, or be about, nanotechnology. 

Such is the case with the iPod nano, and that is why I believe that nano is the new turbo, another technical term appropriated by marketing people and applied in so many ways as to make it meaningless.

Nothing wrong with this, of course, for the truth is all marketers are liars.  But it really rankles the engineer in me.  And delights the marketer in me.

A few weeks ago I lamented the fact that I couldn’t order a Freitag Murse online.  Of course, many of you are lamenting the fact that I want a murse, but for me the lamentation stems only from my continuing state of murselessness.  Each morning as I try and squeeze my gadget-stuffed pockets into the seat of my car, I remind myself to find a way to get out to the Freitag store in Davos.

Salvation came in the form of an email from a nice person at Freitag called Manuela, who told me that, while the object of my murse lust won’t be available online until late September, it is possible to purchase one today without jetting off to Davos.  How?  Well, if you consider the designed-as-a-one-of-a-kind-object premise which forms the essence of the Freitag brand, then the solution is obvious:  log into a web cam in the Davos store and have a living Freitag salesperson show you each bag until you find one you like.

Seriously.  You must see it to believe it. 

It’s kind of cool and brand-enhancing, eh?  But I still don’t have my murse.  The tyranny of the wallet has yet to cease.