Keith Instone

The beta version of assets for the Toledo Region Brand Platform were distributed back in June. I took a peek back then, have re-read them a few times since, but thought I had better try to write up something to help me make sense of it. This blog posting is just "what it is" - without any commentary on what I think about it (which will come later).

But wait: what the heck is this initiative and why do I care about it? It is part of a long-term effort to take the best of corporate branding techniques and apply it to where I live, with a focus on improving economic develop efforts. Place branding is one term for it. So far, I have gone to several of the community forums & one of the working sessions, and pestered the guys at Applied Storytelling (who are helping lead this) with my feedback and user experience point of view. I probably only know enough to be dangerous.

I am interested for several reasons. I see some similarities to what I do for IBM (help translate corporate branding goals into digital experiences) and taking this "public sector" view might give me insights to help me do my IBM job better. I think I can contribute to these regional efforts: designing digital experiences will be an important part of the Toledo branding efforts. And anything I can do to help the Toledo-area economy grow might help my kids later.

(If you want to learn more about these effort, start at toledoregionstory.com. You can also do some searches for "toledo region brand" to find some local media coverage.)

On with my recap of the 3 documents from June 16th, the beta version of the Toledo Region Brand Platform:

• Executive Summary (AS_ToledoRegion_BrandExec_062110.pdf). About the initiative/current status (pages 1-10), followed by the story (11-24), then an overview of the platform for the brand (25-58).
• Brand Story (AS_ToledoRegion_BrandStory_061610.pdf). Just the "Heart of the New Manufacturing Economy" piece, the story that we will be telling to help brand the region for economic development. To help me get the story, I made my own copy of it.
• Brand Platform (AS_ToledoRegion_BrandIntro_061610b.pdf). This has the most meat to it - 134 slides - so I will focus on this document the rest of the way.

About the initiative, so far (pages 3-22)

• Why? Competing for jobs, talent, investment money. Milwaukee, Pittsburgh examples.
• Bring together messages for key audiences. Tell a good story of what makes us unique, clear promises.
• Lots of existing background research (including IBM study). Community work sessions, interviews with business leaders.
• Brand: unique & valuable, what NOT to be, fit with reality, some industries lead, others follow.
• Jobs, jobs, jobs. Universities. Smart manufacturing. "Toledo" in the name. Downtown. Water. Infrastructure. "World-class assets in a mid-sized package".

The brand platform (pages 23-74)

• Essence --> (Promise | Positioning | Personality) --> (Logo | Visual system | Messaging/Backstory | Tagline | Name | Descriptor) --> (Brand Visual Guidelines | Brand Voice Guidelines) --> (Digital Media | Event Environments | Packaging | Print Communications | Advertising).
• Essence: Toledo Region, appealing region in the State of Ohio.
• Brand drivers: Access, Affordability.
• Positioning: Economic Development. Secondary: Learn, Quality of Life, Play.
• New manufacturing. Computing. Deploy technology. Sustainability. Product customization. Across industries.
• Position #1: "The Toledo Region is the destination of choice for tomorrow's entrepreneurs and leaders in the New Manufacturing Economy." Yes, it is Credible, Ownable, Defensible, Relevant.
• Position #2: "The Toledo Region offers the highest quality of life at the most reasonable cost of virtually any other place in the nation." C-O-D-R.
• Position #3: "The Toledo Region is the water recreation capital of the Midwest." C-O-D-R.
• Promise: Find everything you need to accelerate your opportunity -- in the heart of the New Manufacturing Economy.
• Descriptors: Plug and play. (Plug in and learn.) (Live the best for the least.) (More scenic. More shoreline. More fun.)
• Personality: warm (interested in people), worldly (well-informed), enterprising (decisions, motion). (Often under-utilized. Emotional aspect of the brand.)

Messaging (pages 75-95)

• Relevant/resonate, Clear/organized, Well-integrated, Different ways to communicate with audiences. Based on the brand promise.
• Audience #1 (Economic development): Toledo Region-Based Entrepreneur. Wants: infrastructure, talent, peer support, low COB, business success. Promise: Existing activity, efficient business operations, academic & peer support.
• Audience #2 (Quality of life): Talent. Wants: quality/affordable housing, cultural activities, schools, medical; professional and personal fulfillment. Promise: Low cost-of-living, world-class but more intimate amenities, "big small town".
• Audience #3 (Education): Prospective College Student. Wants: Options, top programs, career, affordable. Promise: academic options, business connections, job in the new manufacturing economy.
• Audience #4 (Tourism): Leisure Tourist. Wants: character, experiences, nice people, easy to get to. Promise: water, recreation, sports.

The story for ED (pages 96-109)

• New Manufacturing Economy. Manufacturing mindset. No more centralized command and control.
• Research, design, manufacturing, logistics. Talent, capital, networks.
• Shorelines, islands, riverbanks (not concrete). Deep, lasting roots.

Channels, touch points and integration (pages 110-131)

• All channels, every channel.
• You have no choice but to build a brand online. Web site as hub, fed by social media. Web experiences.
• Web site mock-ups. Living-Working-Visiting-Learning. Banner ad, mall sign, mobile.
• Integration into local company marketing efforts: Mud Hens example.
• Transparent participation in social media. YouTube instead of TV.

Implementation (pages 132-133)

• Obviously, there is a lot more detail to the plan than is shown here. Is looks like a local agency (or several of them) is set to be hired soon. Then developing something by the end of the year and launching it in January.

Again, this posting is really just a way to force me to comb through the material to help me understand it better. If you found it useful or interesting, great! Now to find some time to figure out what it all means.

I am doing some prep for this year's Internet User Experience conference. (6th year? This "regional" conference has stood the test of time and only gets better.) I plan on being there Monday-Wednesday, July 26-28. Exactly which sessions I will attend, when I arrive/drive home, and which sessions I skip to do some IBM work while I am there is TBD, but there are 2 things I am doing for sure (panels that I am on):

• What's Next for You in UX? Paths and Detours to Explore as Your Career Matures
• Research and Practice Interaction

The research-practice interaction panel is good because it is forcing me to go back to the CHI and IAS work from this spring, and add in newer things like Don Norman's interactions article (that just arrived in paper form).

I will also try hard to get to these sessions:

• Search Patterns: Design for Discovery by Peter Morville. I have probably heard parts of this already, still worth it.
• Rethinking User Experience. Who doesn't like talking about the changing landscape of the UX profession?
• The Top Ten Attributes of a Usable and Persuasive Web Site. I missed most of Susan Weinschenk's talk last year at IUE, want to make this one.
• How do we know when its good? A language of criticism for Information Architecture. Might be able to apply this right away to my IBM work.
• The Nature of Information Architecture. And who does not enjoy drawing lines between IA and its neighboring fields? Dan Klyn will be great here.

The content strategy and agile UX sessions look good. I do not know a lot about eye-tracking, so I might hit one of those sessions. Many other sessions are interesting, but it will depend on my work schedule, or if I am in the middle of a good conversation in the hallway, etc. (One more: UPA's Usability Body of Knowledge (BoK) project, if I can stay that late on Wednesday.)

I hope you can make it to the conference as well! If you are a user experience professional in the Toledo/Detroit/Ann Arbor area, there is no excuse for missing this great event.

This week is the 2010 Jamie Farr Owens Corning Classic presented by Kroger here in the Toledo region. (I will be there Thursday, Saturday and Sunday mornings as a volunteer.) Last year, I followed some of the LPGA players who were in the field on Twitter: added to the tournament experience. So I decided to again see who was on Twitter.

Working from the Tournament Field List (on LPGA.com and as a PDF), I used the LPGA Players on the Web page, @LPGA's Tour Players list and some Twitter/Google searching to get a list of 44 Twitter accounts for the 148 players (see the table below).

I made my own Twitter list (jfocc-2010-players), in case you want to follow what the players are talking about during their week in the Toledo region.

(Updates to the field made at 7pm, June 28. Again at 8am on July 2. Again at 2pm in July 3.)

I bet I missed some players in the field who have Twitter accounts, but since I found 9 players that were not on the LPGA lists, I thought I did pretty good. If you happen to know of anyone I missed, let me know.

Also, if you are tweeting about the tournament, I suggest you use the hashtag #JFOCC to give fans a single place to go for news and updates for the week.

I will have a focus on the gaps between research and practice in user experience during my April conference run.

From April 7-10, I will be in Phoenix at the 2010 IA Summit. On Saturday the 10th, I am hosting a discussion on Bridging IA Research and Practice with Andrea Resmini.

We tried to get a pre-conference consortium organized, but will settle for this meeting to hopefully get a head start on 2011. The "research track" at the IA Summit has been a slowly traveled, winding road. One bend was a panel in 2006 and I wondered then if we had turned a corner. Still looking.

From Phoenix, I fly directly to Atlanta for CHI 2010. I am part of a great team that organized a Sunday workshop on Researcher-Practitioner Interaction (the call for participation has passed, but it has a good overview).

I am looking forward to the workshop because I get to spend the day with people who know a lot more than me about the challenges facing the HCI research and practitioner communities. There are a lot of great ideas for closing the gap which have surfaced in their position papers; but there are no easy answers.

If the topic interests you but you are not already part of the workshop, then you can attend our special interest group meeting at 9am on Wednesday, April 14th: How to bring HCI Research and Practice Closer Together. We will recap the workshop and engage more people in the conversation. After it is all done, I hope we will have something substantial to back to the community.

So far, I only know of 1 other person crazy enough to hit the overlapping IA Summit and CHI conference. If you are also one of these crazies, contact me. If you are just a "normal crazy" who is attending only one of these 2 awesome conferences, then be sure to track me down and say hello.

A recent Biznology article by Frank Reed talks about the impact of a Google search results change on search engine optimization efforts. Google recently announced two changes in the way it helps users understand how an item in its result set fits into the context of the destination site:

• Replacing the URL (that appeared after the abstract) with a breadcrumb. The breadcrumb is a combination of domain name and the site hierarchy that Google has extracted from the site.
• Having each element of the breadcrumb go to the appropriate high level section of the site. What was once a single URL (was it a link or just a URL?) to the page could now be several links to higher-level pages on the destination site.

Frank worries about how this affects SEO activities: you work hard to get a specific page listed for a specific search term, and then Google lets the user go to a different page on your site. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out.

Of course, I am more interested in the breadcrumb aspect. These are what I call "attribute breadcrumbs" because they help describe the nature of the object. (The debate about the value of location breadcrumbs on pages continues.)

I wonder if anyone on the Google team remembers back around 2002 when their results also had breadcrumbs? In those days, the breadcrumb was a "category" from the Open directory project. Here is an example I grabbed back then, for a search on "monty python and the holy grail":

Look for the "Category" links after the abstracts and before the green URL. They give you a clue to what the link is about. Notice the first result, for PythOnline: the title and abstract are not clear but the Category says it is about a video game. The 3rd result is actually about Flying Circus; the 4th result is indeed about the movie; the 5th, trading cards. The category, presented as a breadcrumb, might help you find your holy grail...

Back then, the "category" was a single link to ODP, not a list of links to the destination site. For example, the 4th result would be Arts > Movies > Titles > M > Monty Python and the Holy Grail where you can find more links about the movie.

Will this version of breadcrumbs survive longer? Does it fix some key problem the previous version of breadcrumbs had? Perhaps users are more familiar with presenting a hierarchy in this format now? Will users understand the "..." in the middle? What user research is driving this change? The Google blog posting says this will both improve the way it represents web sites and help users explore content. I guess time will tell.

And what will the ripple effect be of Google using attribute breadcrumbs on its search engine results page (SERP)? Will more sites start doing breadcrumbs as a result ("Google told us to add breadcrumbs to our site")? What about multi-faceted web sites that do not have a single hierarchy for their pages: will they be penalized by Google? Will users start to pick up on them on SERPs and expect them on the rest of the web? When user experience teams do evaluations of their web sites, will they notice more users making comments about breadcrumbs? Will sites built on platforms like Drupal that do breadcrumbs well see a boost in traffic? Will there be a backlash against bothering with carefully-crafted URLs if they do not show up on SERPs any more?

This new feature has not appeared on any normal Google searches I have done since the announcement, so obviously, it is still too early to tell. According to This week in search, 11/20, there are some queries where the attribute breadcrumbs are showing up. My favorite is Venn diagram (too funny given the number of 3 circle diagrams generated by the user experience community). What I notice:

• Only a few items have breadcrumbs instead of URLs.
• When the green URL is shown, it is never clickable (was it before?). When an attribute breadcrumb is shown, the domain name is not a link either.
• The most interesting example is Wolfram MathWorld where the site has three location breadcrumbs at the top and Google used the first. Exactly how Google extracts breadcrumbs from pages could drive some "interesting" changes to sites.