Change This is passing the 100k mark for manifesto downloads from their site, and reckons that if you add in pass alongs enabled by the "smoothness" features built in to those manifestos, the total number is more like 250k.  Since August.

Wow.

This is proof that, at least in the case of fostering word of mouth on the internet, if you’re smart about building in smoothness and pass along functionality, people will spread your stuff.  In addition to designing the tools correctly, Change This set up the human incentives right, too — they enlisted blogging mavens and connectors (including yrs trly) to host manifestos, and rewarded those uber bloggers with increased traffic and prestige.

The folks at Firefox are helping their passionate user base take out an ad in the New York Times so that the world can hear about the Firefox experience.

It’s a cool marketing idea; not quite open source, but something close. No doubt the imitators will dive in, but Firefox has filled the idea vacuum with this one. Brilliant.

Thanks for being part of metacool.

If you can spare 5 minutes, give me some feedback on my blogging by answering any of the following:

1) What do you like so far?

2) What could be better?

3) What topic areas would be cool to explore?

Mahalo.

Tenacious D may be able to rock 24x7x365, but I can’t. I found this out last week with the public launch of a weblog for the product I market. All my creative energy was consumed in a tremendous endothermic blogging reaction, hence the content drought at metacool.

The blog is getting good reviews from highly connected blogging mavens like Anil Dash and Robert Scoble, but most importantly, customers love it. And I love doing innovative marketing.

This week’s New York Times talks about how wet suit makers are moving beyond addressing only the Behavioral elements of their products to embrace the Visceral and Reflective aspects as well.  Instead of cranking out old-style suits that make a surfer’s bottom look like a tube of dried chorizo, manufacturers like O’Neill are making sexy new products out of new materials and shapes designed to flatter the body.

John Hunter, designer at O’Neill, says it best in this quote from the article:

When offerings in your industry start to deliver more functionality than users need, it’s time to take a deliberate approach to differentiating your product by paying attention to its Visceral and Reflective components.  You need to design the whole burrito and put some love into it.

Porsche’s management is planning to add a four-door, front-engine sedan to their lineup.  I find this rather painful, as Porsche is all about – and only about – two doors and rear engines.  To be clear, it’s not about having just two seats, as the 911, and the 356 before it, proved that four-seat cars can be real sports cars.

So why roll out a four-door sedan?  Well, automakers like multiples of ten, and some MBA-type at Porsche wants to be able to grow sales to the 100k mark, something not likely with only a lineup of pure sports cars.   Porsche Chief Executive Wendelin recently stated in BusinessWeek that the key to creating shareholder value “… is to avoid a quarterly [earnings] orientation,” but it seems to me that by floating this four-door concept, Dr. Wendelin isn’t practicing what he preaches.  Shareholder value is defined as the present value of all future cash flows; if you believe, as I do, that creating a four-door Porsche will erode the brand’s hard-won equity, then it’s bound to erode long-term cash flow as well, for in an automotive landscape where a $30,000 Subaru can run with any Porsche 911, what else is there besides brand image?  No, a four-door Porsche is just a play for short-term earnings.

If they were really serious about long-term growth, Porsche the company would keep the Porsche the brand focused on making tasty sports cars, and then find another brand whose name could be used to rollout sedans without dilluting Porsche’s heritage, much as Ferrari is doing with Maserati.

Next thing you know they’ll be talking about introducing a SUV. 

Oh.

The stock is down 45%, the financial clock is ticking faster… it’s time for practicing the brand management of desperation!  How about a 20 oz, 740 calorie frozen blended "beverage" that packs a 114 gram carbo wallop and tastes vaguely like a stale floor scrap off our signature donut line?  Sure, it’ll ruin our laser focus on making great donuts and great donuts alone, and turns us into something more like a Starbucks with better pastries and worse coffee, or a Dunkin’ Donuts with better donuts and just-as-mediocre coffee, but we’ll keep our jobs for at least a few more months, and besides, as brandroids we’re all about line extensions and "tremendous" growth opporunities and what was De Niro talking about anyway with all that "this is this" mumbo jumbo?… I think he was babbling about something like "fundamental goo", which is what this drink is all about and pretty much sums up what Krispy Kreme will be with just, oh, three more years of this kind of inane marketing behavior.