This is a new blog segment (its title being a bastardisation of the old macromedia shockwave website on the 90's) which aims to take a look at some truly horrendous websites and ponder, what in the hell were the cleint and the agency thinking when they did this?
The winner goes to Burberry's latest offering about all things trench, imaginatively called artofthetrench.com which has all the hallmarks of a truly disastrous project.
It seems that Burberry, buoyed on with the 'success' of getting people to sign up to their facebook page decided to take extend their lead in 'social media' by building this rogues gallery of trench-coat wearing urbanites. The motivation for which I still don't fully understand. Is it about the democratisation of a £400- £1000 trench coat? Or Is it just to show the poses of moneyed up hipsters? In any case, I am not sure what brand values they are projecting here. I suspect, Burberry felt the need to do something with 'social media' which is not surprising, a lot of companies are feeling that pressure and fail just as easily, just look at Wendy's latest offering of irrelevancy, Wendy's RealTime
Thing is, I suspect now one actually explained to Burberry what social media acutally is and what, for their brand, is a strong and robust social media proposition. Perhaps the people explaining it didn't know? (likely) or perhaps Burberry refused to listen? (the most likely).
As a social media site it is failure on a number of levels. The 'social' bit is seriously flawed. As an interface, It offers no connection between the trench photography and the social stuff that live around it. This is a major problem. Comments are ridiculously small and ineffectual, and furthermore are hidden away from the actual picture behind a poorly animated card. Really, the whole site could have been replicated on Flickr, and I suspect,done far more successfully. The comments themselves are also vacuous, are typically short one liners like 'I love it' or 'so chic'. With the commentary system so flawed it hard to see how they could expect any interaction with their brand deeper than the shallow level its currently maintains.
It 'curates' social content really poorly. The site encourages you to upload your own pics of your hipster mates wearing trenches. However, rather than opening this up, and perhaps risking negative commentary along with honest conversations about your brand, Burberry attempts to stamp down on this through what I suspect may well be heavy handed censoring. This makes all the social stuff appear stilted and contrived. By simply implementng this 'curatorial' approach to image submission, I suspect that Burberry has kicked a big own goal here by spending a lot of money on a 'social media' site that actually isn't social. Someone should have explained this to them.
Its disingenuous: I pre-registered to be informed when the site launched. I logged on immediately and it was full of comments, not just a bit full, but suspiciously full. I suspect everyone at Burberry was enlisted to tap on their keyboards.
The interface sucks. This is a biggie.
It provides, without a doubt the most retarded image viewer I have ever seen. It is just a wall of image which makes no sense whatsoever and provides no sensible was to navigate around. I am not talking about 'using your mouse to scroll across images', what i am talking about it people actually knowing where they are when they use this site. I don't know how many images there are, what i have clicked on, what ones are new, what ones I have already seen. As an interface, it FAILS big time. As an apology to this mess It offers filtering, which means you can, allegedly, filter out images you don't want. However, this doesn't work, as the ordering and arrangement of the images, changes very little from one filter to the next.
It mixes flash and HTML really poorly. Certain parts of the site are in HTML (e.g. photographer profiles) and other parts are in flash. A normal user journey would mean you move between both two content types and it is this that causes major problems. The result is that the flash file is reloaded, you lose your place in this wall of images. It really surprises me that such a fundamental flaw in the interface was allowed to go ahead.
All in all, a major fail here and it seems I am not alone. Alexa stats on the domain show an initial spike in interest, then a pronounced and regular decline since launch. If you are looking for ways to measure social media, well there's one to show a nose-diving audience for ya! Compare to the Burberry.com domain as a whole, you would at least expect page impressions to mirror the parent company. Especially at a time when 2009 was supposed to be the big thing for fashion brands
No comments:
Post a Comment