Lee Lefever posted a rave review of Moo the other day, and as a Flickr fan I was immediately interested. I love Flickr. I had noticed Moo in the past, and frankly, I tuned it out, because its promo on Flickr just felt like advertising for yet another printing service. I don't need my vacation photo on a coffee mug, thank you anyway.
Lee's post makes a great point about the actual genius of the Moo idea: Moo cards are a great conversation starter, and they're a great way to tell a story. Yep, photos and business cards actually do extend each others' value, unlike Rocky Mountain National Park and Starbuck's breakfast blend.
Jay Feinberg adds his typically insightful take:
It’s become more common for websites to strive towards a user experience in itself, rather than being merely an advertisement for some other experience offline. And, given the social basis of the success of the web, it’s becoming common that our experience of products, etc., is itself web-ified across many websites created by many individuals.
So, the conversation surrounding brands is distributed, partly because anyone can publish something about the brand. But what about portable content, like Flickr photos? On the one hand, portable media related to a product can be attached to an artifact like a business card, where it makes sense. On the other hand, the artifact itself is productized.
One of our clients recently hired us to develop a web site using Flash videos to showcase new features in an upcoming product release. The client wants to engage influential bloggers, so we recommended making the videos portable, so bloggers could embed them in their posts. That's a value offering in and of itself for bloggers, who often prefer embedding video rather than linking to it, but I now wonder what else we can add. How can we remix the portable media offering, or enable others to remix it, so it can become more interesting? Perhaps something like the Colbert light saber challenge? Oops, it's gone...
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