Life is good Transforms Digital Presence

Speaking from my vast expertise within the world of online shopping, I can say with confidence that it is incredibly rare to have a memorable experience.  In fact, I usually end up feeling pretty guilty about my behavior. I've found that most e-tailers offer the same streamlined process that quickly pushes the user from browsing to the shopping cart to check-out, with no attempt to reinforce what they stand for as a company or provide a chance to engage with the brand. And while I understand that the main goal is to drive sales and it's hard to differentiate from other e-commerce platforms, Life is good has managed to create a premium online experience that merges content, commerce, community and charity into one branded digital ecosystem.

Life is good recently partnered with digital agency Fluid Inc., a digital commerce innovator who has also worked with major outdoor brands such as The North Face in past years. Life is good tasked Fluid with the challenge of elevating the brand's message of optimism within each element of the site, in everything from user interface to product photography. 

The new website, which is now divided into four core modules, is an absolute reflection of the brand's commitment to to spreading the power of optimism and helping children at risk of violence, illness, and poverty. The site structure makes sharing, donating, and volunteering to Life is good's charitable arm incredibly easy for the user by integrating tools into each vertical of the site. For example, it's incredible simple for the user to add a donation to a clothing order during the shopping process, without traveling to a new hub within the site. Curated social media feeds built into the interface also allow visitors to browse and share user-generated content to create an ongoing cycle of brand engagement.

Life is good is ultimately working to create a model in which optimistic content and product are invariably connected, and so too are the experiences of online shopping and brand engagement. Moving forward, both content and products on the site will be tagged, so keywords searches will returns results for content and product that share those tags.

  

NBA Embraces Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest during Playoffs

It's nearly impossible to find a group as impassioned and knowledgeable as die-hard sports fans. Not only are these individuals religiously tuning in to catch the game, they're also seeking to engage with the program on a heightened level by unlocking premium content through social media channels.  According to a recent Mashable infographic, 80% of sports fans monitor social media sites while watching the game on TV, and even 60% of fans do so while attending live events. With buzzer-beating baskets and game-changing fouls happening at rapid fire speed, there's a beautiful marriage that exists between sports and social media, an entity known for its immediacy.     

Cognizant of this harmonious relationship and the extensive presence of their fans on each network, the NBA is leveraging the power of Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest to unite basketball fanatics around the excitement of the NBA playoffs. The NBA will launch its community-rooted "Hoops around the World" program, and encourage fans to tweet photos of their neighborhood courts using the hashtag #hoops. The @nba Twitter account will retweet its favorite shots, and the stunt will culminate in an interactive world map illustration of all submissions before the finals begin.

The NBA will expand to greater audiences with Tumblr and Pinterest, two platforms not typically exploited by the association. The NBA will devote its Tumblr page, launching next Wednesday, to photos from professional basketball history, including shots from classic match-ups and iconic moments from the game's greatest players (pictured above). The NBA's Pinterest page, expected to launch late next week, has a two-tiered strategy. It will drive fans to the NBA's e-commerce site to browse throwback apparel, and feature funny moments in NBA history, quirky characters, and other storylines that reinforce to fans why the NBA is so fun to follow off the court.  

With TV ratings for the impending NBA playoffs expected to shatter those of previous years, the NBA is rightly vamping up its social media outreach. I'm particularly intrigued by the use of Pinterest to interact with fans because of the site's heavily-skewed female audience. It will be interesting to track engagement on each platform throughout the playoffs and see where the league is seeing the greatest success.

Under Armour Launches Competition for Female Athletes

On April 23, Under Armour will kick off their "What's Beautiful" competition, a quest to redefine and empower the female athlete. Participants will vie to become the new face of Under Amour throughout a grueling nine week journey, during which they'll be required to declare a goal and complete 19 challenges along the way.

The journey will live in an UnderArmour.com microsite, on which competitors will have their own profile page. Through the microsite, Under Armour will help participating women along with gear giveaways, tips from trainers, and motivational content.

Participants will also be asked to upload videos, photos, and powerful vignettes throughout the duration of the competition that illustrate their drive, competitive spirit and ability to influence their communities. Thus, the competition will be as much about compelling story-telling as it as about athletic pursuit. Winners will be selected based on who can depict the most impressive, impassioned, and monumental journey, so it's a given that we'll see some truly interesting, inspirational content. Competitors can access an on-going activity feed on the microsite to track the progress and content of their adversaries, and fans can follow along with the competition on Facebook and Twitter.


Two winners will be selected by Under Armour and the third will be chosen by the public, which imbues the competition with a broader social element. The winners will earn a year-long sponsorship from Under Armour that will include free training with UA celebrities, nutritionist consultation, access to special events and much more.

The nature of the competition speaks to the burgeoning population of hard-core female athletes, and the growing opportunity for activewear brands to engage with these individuals. No longer is athletic challenge the exclusive domain of a male audience, and sportswear brands need to find ways to speak to women about athletics in a meaningful and relevant way. With the presence of dedicated athletes, healthy competition, and a social community, What's Beautiful undoubtedly achieves this.

Check out the video below for more competition details.

Tumblr Introduces New Tools for Brands

Internet memes rarely amount to more than a fleeting laugh or two, but last week a Tumblr-based meme reached both the press and the highest levels of government. "Texts from Hillary," a Tumblr that began as a joke between two friends at a bar, became a national conversation about Secretary Clinton and even garnered a response from the ex-first lady herself.


And though every Tumblr creator may not gain enough exposure to earn an invitation to the State Department from Hill, there's still plenty of room for optimism. The numbers are staggering. Brands take note: with over 120 million users, 50 million blogs, 20 billion posts and 4.5 billion weekly impressions, Tumblr has reach and relevance. And while CEO David Karp initially cringed at the thought of advertising on Tumblr, numbers like that are hard to ignore.

Karp contends that while Tumblr was designed without brands in mind, they began showing up about a year and a half ago on the blog platform, particularly in the fashion and publishing categories. Since then, he and his team have been digging to find out what exactly these companies find valuable and how Tumblr can become more brand-friendly.

Karp announced today at the Ad Age Digital Conference that Tumblr will begin rolling out a new package of features for advertisers, starting with a tool for planting branded Tumblr posts into the blog's Radar feature. Radar, which gets 120 million impressions per day, highlights editorially selected posts in Tumblr's dashboard and exists as a space for brands to advertise both on the site and in Tumblr's mobile app.

The Radar ads will augment two already existing brand-friendly features. In February, Tumblr launched "highlighted posts," allowing Tumblr users to pay $1 per post and gain greater visibility for their work. Tumblr has also experimented with promoted directories, which enables users to achieve a top listing in Tumblr's blog directory. Brands like Huggies, J.Crew, Ann Taylor, and GQ are already finding ways to effectively reach consumers on the platform.


The Radar ad units will launch on May 2, but Karp's core goal for Tumblr is still all about empowering creativity for users. He has mentioned repeatedly that he has no interest in running traditional display ads, so brands will need to work on creating engaging content that is still organic to the Tumblr environment.

Patagonia Extends Partnerships to Support Common Threads Initiative

Patagonia announced last week that consumers can now recycle their old jackets by turning them into fuzzy, durable Kindle covers and iPad cases. The company has partnered with ReFleece, who strips pieces of outerwear products, converts the fleece into a felt tablet case and sends it back to the original owner of the jacket. With customizable covers for iPhones, iPads, and other electronics all the rage these days, Patagonia strikes a chord with tech savvy consumers while simultaneously encouraging sustainability. Plus, Patagonia becomes top-of-mind for the customer whenever they reach for a good book or browse the net.

And if jacket owners aren't quite ready to see their products torn apart, they can travel to Patagonia's Ebay storefront, which was launched in conjunction with the Common Threads Initiative in September 2011 in another strategic move. After all, if a company's goal is to encourage reuse and rewear of their products, why not seek the help of Ebay, the world's largest marketplace for used and refurbished goods?

The branded Ebay platform extends the useful life of Patagonia products by providing a simple marketplace for users to buy and sell items. If customers would prefer to donate rather than sell, they can travel to the Common Threads hub on Patagonia.com. The partnerships are part of a larger effort to create a new standard of sustainability within the retail industry, which is plagued by over-consumption.

The Ebay platform makes it incredibly easy for consumers to take the pledge to reduce America's widening environmental footprint. This is key because today's consumers, particularly outdoor enthusiasts, lead incredibly busy lives. Even the strongest proponent of environment sustainability can be turned off by a complex system, so any effort to simplify the process will contribute to long-term success for these initiatives.

Time Magazine Enters Sports Arena

With March Madness in full swing and 16 teams on the road to the Elite Eight, sports are at the forefront of American culture right now. In fact, they pretty much always are. So whether you roll your eyes and storm out of the room whenever someone puts on the game, or arrive two hours early to get the best seat on the couch, you might as well accept the role that sports have come to play in our society.

Time Magazine, known traditionally for their grasp on political, world, health, and entertainment news, has taken strides to make inroads with a wider group of consumers with the advent of Keeping Score, a sports blog.


The blog, housed in the Entertainment hub the magazine's online site, covers sports-related topics from around the world. But rather than covering the tireless flow of stats, trade agreements, contracts, salary caps, and lawsuits that plague the sporting world, Keeping Score takes a step back and evaluates the larger cultural, economic, and political implications of developments in sports.

As Time.com managing editor Catherine Sharick wrote in an internal memo, "Keeping score will be much more than a chronicle of games and statistics. It will explore the key issues and personalities, controversies and trends, driving the daily conversation about sports" (Adweek).

I think this is a great idea. I consider myself a huge sports fan, though I try not to occupy myself with the petty details that some sports fanatics can recite in their sleep. I will undoubtedly keep up with the blog, which provides a refreshing outlook on sports in general and at the issues of politics, health, economics, business and religion that surely come into play when dealing with sports. I also find the global scope of the blog fascinating, and it's interesting to see the different sports perspectives around the world.

This is a great example of looking at the bigger picture in order to better meet the needs of consumers, which I feel many companies so often forget to do. Sports, fitness, and outdoor activity can mean so many things to many different people, and it's important to take into account that these enthusiasts may have other areas of interest that influence their extracurricular activities.

Thanks to Keeping Score, I can now keep up with this month's excitement in college basketball while gaining a deeper understanding of other significant issues that may be at play here. (Go Syracuse!)