In a nutshell, Brew Day is about innovation.

Yes, it’s a play on our agency’s name, Bottlecap, but the “brew” really has more to do with new ideas, refinements and experimentation with all things that relate to our business. It might be sexy (augmented reality) or subtle (internal process revisions), but at the end of each Brew Day it’s our goal to have our entire team inspired about what it is we do for a living.

As of now, our typical Brew Day looks something like this:

Brew Day at Bottlecap: Innovation on Tap

• 9:30a | Team members pitch their Brew Day ideas to the office and project teams begin to form
• 10a – 1p | Teams work on their projects, defining roles, responsibilities, requirements and more on the fly
• 1 – 2p | Lunch. We may try to bring in people from other local shops to educate and inspire the team during an interactive lunch-and-learn. In August we talked about the potential of Microsoft Kinect with the awesome team from The SuperGroup.
• 2 – 4p | People re-form their teams and wrap up their projects
• 4 – 4:30p | Show & Tell. Project teams reveal what they’ve been working on all day

And that’s it; one day dedicated to investigating things, revisiting things, and trying a bunch of new things in between.

Not all of these projects will stick – but that’s not the point. We’re in an industry that requires us to think strategically and creatively every day. It’s our job to keep testing our digital mettle to ensure we’re ready when our clients come calling.

And if we end each of these innovative sessions at a location that lives up to the Brew Day name, well, that’s OK, too.

Now that we’re almost three months into the Google+ era, we should have permission to evaluate with a critical eye. Welcome to the third and final entry for our Google+ 101 series as we look at the new social network by the numbers and draw our own conclusions.

Part 3 of 3: Our Conclusion

Launched on June 27, Google+ already is home to over 25M registered users. A far cry from Facebook’s 750M members, but a solid adoption rate in just a few months since rollout. Below is a comparison of the Google+ member base to that of other popular social media properties:

• Facebook: 750M
• Twitter: 200M
• LinkedIn: 100M+
• Google+: 25M
• Foursquare: 10M+

During the first few weeks of Google+’s existence, two tracking websites, SocialStatistics.com and FindPeopleOnPlus.com, had men accounting for 88 and 74 per cent of the website’s users, respectively. Although these rates have since declined, SocialStatistics.com still claims that 66% of the Google+ universe is male. For Comparison:

• ESPN viewers – 72% male
• Readers of Esquire magazine – 74% male
• U.S. Senate – 83% male
• Facebook – 45% male

Interestingly enough, an inactive Mark Zuckerberg is the most popular Google+ member with over 500k followers. Here are the top five Google+ users according to follower count (as of 9.14):

• Mark Zuckerberg (502k)
• Larry Page (301k)
• Sergey Brin (208k)
• Pete Cashmore (179k)
• Vic Gundotra (138k)

Given its initial adoption rates, with daily new member registration peaking at 2M in the first few weeks, Google+ had the attention of digital enthusiasts and online marketers across the US soon after its launch. Adoption and overall engagement, however, have since begun to wane and many pundits are debating its staying power and purpose. There’s no denying that the Google platform provides the reach and firepower necessary to catapult a social network into the same category as Facebook; however, the biggest question remains, “will the average social media user see enough value in the usability of the network and its’ targeted content sharing capabilities to adopt the tool and eventually replace other social networks with Google+?”

For marketers there is little to do with Google+ at this point and more to observe. Until the rollout of company/brand pages within Google+, brands will not be able to establish a presence. Instead, now is an opportunity to learn the tool, its capabilities (especially features like Hangouts and Sparks), and begin preparing to put these into action.

When it’s all said and done a social network is about its users, and Google+ is playing on the same court as Facebook and Twitter. Google will surely continue to invest heavily into Google+ with new features and integration points, but the network must find its identity and role in the lives of consumers in order to stick. And until it does so, Google+ will keep playing third fiddle to its’ social network brethren Facebook and Twitter.

This concludes our three-part Google+ series but please stay tuned for future digital trends entries as the Bottlecap team continues to unpack the latest and greatest in the digital world.

The goal of every Brew Day is simple: spend eight hours or so working on those little things that will help us learn and grow – either as individuals or as a company.

Gabe (left) and Elliott from The SuperGroup talk about Microsoft's Kinect platform.

Easier said than done.

Most of us made it until about 2p when the demands of our clients pulled us away from our pursuit of innovation. Some folks never even got started. And that’s something we’ll continue to work on each month, allowing each member of the team the freedom to step away from the day-to-day demands of agency life in order to work on projects that draw from each individual’s professional passion.

Still, we were able to accomplish some exciting things in a somewhat limited timeframe:

• One of our developers worked on an automated deployment feature that would allow us to automatically launch websites at a certain date and time. It may not sound like much to you, but when’s the last time you had to leave a family picnic because you had to push a website to a production environment?
• Another developer worked on a proprietary bug-tracking tool that will allow us to keep our QA efforts separate from our project management system. Clear paths of communication + better issue resolution tracking = win.
• Our Traffic Manager collaborated with our Creative Manager to talk through our existing traffic process and see if we could streamline how information is passed from resource to resource.
• We brought in our friends from The SuperGroup to discuss cutting-edge technologies, like Microsoft’s Kinect platform, and how they could be used in practical marketing applications today.
• We researched solutions that would allow for automatic browser caching, as well as cross-site performance reporting … but not at the same time.
• Our senior designer created an app that will allow our designers to turn a series of screenshots into an interactive, online proof that will eventually be enhanced to track comments/notes.

And we attempted to document the whole thing on Twitter, too. It’s our goal to make Brew Day an inclusive experience, one which inspires not just the people participating at Bottlecap, but others who catch a glimpse of what’s going on via blog entries, tweets, and Facebook posts.

And what should only be seen as a harbinger of things to come, Team Bottlecap easily handled the mustachioed men from Team Scoutmob in some post-Brew Day bocce at our favorite after-work establishment.

It’s still early, but we’re getting there. And we’re going to enjoy every second of the ride.

The most common question we get from people is, “What’s the difference between Google+ and Facebook or Twitter?” Welcome to the second part of our Google+ 101 series as we break down the precise differences of Google+.

Part 2 of 3: What’s the Difference?

Unlike Facebook (but similar to Twitter), a friend you’re attempting to connect with via Google+ is not required to reciprocate that action. Google+ users are able to follow anyone they so choose (creating asymmetric sharing), and cluster these ‘followers’ into custom circles. These circles allow for more personal updates so that relevant messages are sent to the right audience(s) instead of one Facebook post or Tweet sent to hundreds of friends, co-workers and acquaintances at once.

Circles also enable its’ audience to include a single person in as many different circles as an individual desires. For instance – say I have a colleague who is a UGA grad (like me) and plays golf. Since I have circles created for “Co-Workers,” “UGA Grads” and “Golfers” I’m able to add this person to all three. And, when Friday rolls around and I’m looking for a fourth golfer to join my group for the weekend I’m able to send a message only to the group of golfer friends I’ve identified – instead of the same message going to my entire Facebook network.

The Google+ Circles concept represents the largest difference between Google’s approach to social networking and Facebook’s. If this new model for social connectivity gains steam, Facebook could be left scrambling and faced with a difficult decision either to replicate or continue with the “all likes created equal” mindset.

Not to mention, Google+ provides a much more private means for communication: an issue that has presented nothing but concerns and frustrations amongst Facebook users for years. With Google+ we get our privacy back. We can share an update with a single person if we like. We can share it with any arbitrary circle of friends that we designate. We can even share an update with anyone in the world and make it searchable across the web, simply by marking it “public”. We have been liberated to share our digital lives with the same granularity of privacy we experience in the real world.

Even with the micro-targeting of communication and newfound privacy, there are a few Facebook features that are still glaringly missing in Google+. First and foremost, Google+ has yet to offer corporations, interest groups, and other entities the ability to create dedicated landing pages (although it’s on the way). Also, 53% of all Facebook users play in-network games. Google+ currently offers its users no games or digital currency (ie: Facebook credits). In fact, Google+ doesn’t even support a platform for third-party developers – an area where Facebook thrives. It may be only a matter of time before Google is supporting brand pages, games, a third-party development environment and many other features already present in Facebook; however, this is the realm where Facebook currently separates itself from its silicon valley brethren.

Stay tuned next week for part 3 of 3 where we take a deeper dive into usage metrics and our conclusion on Google+ as it pertains to both users and brands.

Over the next week, we’ll be providing our take on Google+ in a 3-part series. First, we cover the basics by providing a brief background of the new Google+ social network and quick introduction to the most prominent features that set Google+ apart from other social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Part 1 of 3: THE BASICS

Google+ was developed to make connecting with people on the web more like connecting with them in the real world. Instead of treating all of your friends as equals, Google lets you put them into different groups, called circles. For instance, you can create separate circles for friends, family, acquaintances and colleagues to send more personal updates to people who have things in common. Circles also provides the ability to segment the incoming news stream based on what circle the news is coming from, so that users can focus on updates from a specific group – like family members or co-workers.

Similar to Facebook, as a Google+ user you’re able to:

• “Like” an item via the “+1” button (within Google+ and the web at-large via Google+’s social plugin
• Share a post via other Social Networks (Twitter and Facebook)
• Use permanent links
• Include photos/videos (and edit these photos as well)
• Send a “direct message” or private message
• Tag friends in posts
• Install a Google+ mobile app on the Android and iOS platforms

Recently Adobe released the latest version of their Creative Suite software, CS5. There were a ton of upgrades and enhancements, but the one that is absolutely mind-boggling is the “Content-Aware Fill”.

It took 8 years to put a man on the moon after President Kennedy challenged the nation to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. But with CS5 it took less than 2 minutes to take the man off the moon.

For other videos of the “Content-Aware Fill” and some of the other new enhancements to CS5 check out this article.

Well, for the past week the web development community has been buzzing about the new, viable solution to this problem. Google has started a directory of open-source fonts that can be embedded on any page. This library of fonts is likely to grow with time, as font designers continue to donate fonts to the cause. Not only does this solution work well with browsers dating back to IE 6, but having the font hosted by Google’s servers increases overall site performance. Not to mention how easy it is to include on a web page.

If you’d like to browse the font directory, you can find it here.

One of the most exciting things coming out of HTML 5 is the new video element.  Just this past week at the Google I/O Conference, Google introduced a new open-source video format, now called WebM.   This new format is under an open-source license as well as optimized for the web, and it seems like it will help guide the direction of embeddable media on the Web.

There aren’t many projects that come through the door that don’t want to utilize some form of video, so we’re definitely excited to see some standardized rules come through in this next iteration.

Of course Steve Jobs isn’t a fan of the new format (read here), and he appears to have some viable points.  But regardless of that, it doesn’t really matter how the video codec turns out, HTML 5 is going to make the web a better place and I can’t wait to see how we can use it to take all of our projects to the next level.

Well, it all begins with options. In the user experience field it is understood that the more options a user has at one given time, the likelihood of them becoming confused increases exponentially. Certain tasks can become daunting if they’re overloaded with options or if the user interface isn’t easily understood. The problem is, as devices become increasingly complex with options, whether it be the addition of the internet, email, text messages, or apps (the list goes on…and will always go on) the user interface and experience of these devices becomes more complex to interact with and pick up for the first time. This is where Apple products shine compared to its competitors…

At any given time on an Apple product, you are only given a few options (more often only one) and a back button (the home button at the bottom). This keeps information organized and easy to navigate without confusing the user. Instead of some devices that give you drop down menus all over the place, Apple instead creates processes that usually only have two options: Move forward into the action or use the home button to go back to the main screen. This simplifies tasks into easily dissectible processes without confusing the user. Other mobile devices try to combine tasks but instead of making the user experience easier, it’s daunting and confusing to someone who’s never used the device.

Take the video below for example. A two and a half year old is easily navigating the iPad OS with intuitive hand gestures and the simplified ‘forward or back’ control system. Entering any type of action isn’t as daunting when you know that with one touch of a button, you’re back where you originally started. This cannot be said with most of the competitor’s handheld devices. For example, although a Blackberry has an abundant amount of options, they were often nestled into some dropdown that make them difficult to find. It shouldn’t be a matter of remembering where to find a particular option but instead, having it presented to you only when you need it.

Here’s to keeping it simple…if only other companies in this world would follow suit, it might just be a much more intuitive place.

A 2.5 Year-Old Has A First Encounter with An iPad

Wikipedia describes the term viral as: “…becoming extremely popular in a very short amount of time. Often for something to be considered viral it needs to make its way into everyday non-internet life.”

Entire seminars, conferences and marketing strategies are now dedicated to how to create something that will go viral. Something about that seems completely counter-intuitive. I don’t think you can ever truly set out for viral success, let alone define a formula for how to make it happen.

I think viral content happens due to a number of different reasons, but usually involving some combination of the following…

1. Really engaging or great content
2. A brilliant or creative idea
3. Something we haven’t seen before
4. Cute or funny kids
5. Something that’s truly laugh-out-loud funny
6. Something that happens completely by accident and is captured on film

I’m not saying that companies haven’t had great success creating viral videos as part of a marketing or advertising campaign…I’m merely saying I think it’s important to change the strategy and thought behind coming up with that content.

A “viral video” can’t be looked at as just another check on the checklist of planning a campaign, like a direct mail piece or a website. I think it’s important to take a step back and look at what you’re trying to accomplish and ask yourself or your client: “What are we trying to accomplish here?” “Who is our target and what interests them?” “Is this something that I would be so moved / entertained / [fill in the blank] by that I would actually forward this to my friends?”

In my opinion, those are the questions to be asking…not, would you like a viral video?

To close, I’d like to leave you with an assortment of some of my favorite viral videos, in no particular order…

1. The Cadbury’s Gorilla
2. Single Ladies Devastation (by Atlanta’s own Carlos Whittaker & family)
3. Charlie Bit My Finger
4. Toyota’s Swagger Wagon (This is the most recent on this list and yes, completely part of Toyota’s latest marketing strategy surrounding the Sienna…I say, bravo Toyota, job well done on this!)

What are some of your favorites?