Web Strategy by Jeremiah

Turning over the logo creation to your community
For a few years now, we’ve been saying that the brand is really owned by your customers, not your MarCom brand police team. Today, we’re seeing this actually play out in a very interesting twist.

The Data Portability Workgroup launches
The Data Portability group is a workgroup focused on building industry-wide standards for information to safely and freely pass from one site to another –all at the control of an individual user. Yes, I know we’re all sick of seeing yet another working group with little or no results, but this group appears to be making progress, I’m reviewing their status reports, and will probably be briefed by Chris at major milestones.

Logo infringement a cause for redesign
Recently, they launched and announced themselves, including the easy to remember figure 8/infinity sign. Apparently, this was too similar to the logo of Fedora, While copyright infringement is never a fun thing, what’s interesting is that the DataPortability group is crowd sourcing their logo design to the community.

The community designs, votes, and is rewarded
There are hundreds of dollar worth of prizes, ad exposure on Techcrunch and CenterNetworks, and iPhone and other goodies, read the full guidelines on Chris’s site.

The logos will be submitted on spec to the team and a ‘representative election’ will occur:

“The co-founders of the DataPortability project, along with the steering group, will make a short list. We will then provide a web-based voting system for the community to make the final choice.”

Letting go to gain more
This is really an interesting way to let the community create, decide, and take ownership over your own brand and logo. Let’s see how this turns up. To add to the reward, I’ll point to the winning designer, granting even additional exposure. Great job Chris and team, turning a potential lawsuit into a community involving event, I look forward to seeing the results.

Seems like everything is picking up, there are more conferences, workshops, and webinars appearing at –the space is booming. Everyone has questions about social networks, and there’s a lot of interest around widgets and the promise of OpenSocial.

Here’s where you can find me in the month of March

Online Community Keynote, The Knight Journalism School | UC Berkeley, March 27, 2008 Last time I visited the journalism school, we had a great roundtable, looking to expand on this

Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives | Mountain View, March 25th To date, I’m really proud to be invited, I’m the only male speaker at this point.

SNAP Summit | San Francisco, March 25th If you’re in the social networking space, you should be here.

Webinar with Awareness Networks| Austin, March 13th More details to come

SXSW | Austin, March 7-11th I’m really looking forward to this event, lots of parties. Dell and the Conversation Group are hosting a lounge on Monday night, and I’m looking forward to seeing my Singapore friends

Supernova 2008| San Francisco, March 6 Kevin Warbach just asked me to moderate a panel on opensocial, interop, and I’ll post more details when I get them.

Graphing Social Patterns by O’Reilly | San Diego, March 3-4 That’s just next week, I can’t wait to get some San Diego sun!

I’ll be at various other local events, stay tuned.

I considered creating a public calendar, like Scoble does, but I decided to just centralize on this blog for now. I also keep a tally of all my future and past speaking gigs on my profile page.

If you’re going to be at any of these events, leave a comment below, and let the community know of any get together, blogger dinners, or if you just want to meet. Looking forward to meeting you!

I really appreciate all the briefing requests that are coming in from the many companies in the social media industry. It feel as if the frequency of requests are increasing. Unfortunately, as much as I would want to, I can only be briefed by companies that I’m covering for my reports –any more, is just not feasible for my schedule.

My main coverage area is Social Networks (organic like Facebook, Bebo or the White label versions), Widgets, and companies that have deployed marketing campaigns. These should be external or public versions, not one for intranets/extranets (enterprise web).

The role I serve is the Interactive Marketer, and it’s my job to help them make great decisions, and brush off the hype. Successful briefings tend to be with companies that have a story to tell, have several successes under their belt (often a few large clients) and are really past the ’seed’ stage. I appreciate your self-filtering as the industry advances.