On Saturday, I proposed something to ponder over the weekend. Namely, I suggested that we all think, over the weekend about the possibilities of a brand and design strategy that takes into account multiple degrees of control, in the various registers of user experience.

This is a deep and complicated question, and whatever strategies will be used to resolve it will likely involve brand strategies that are downright alien to the ones we know today. Why this might necessarily be the case, I thought, may give us some deeper insight into moving forward on this difficult problem. After all, diagnosis is one thing, treatment is another.

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Jonathan Baskin wrote an interesting post over at his Dim Bulb blog last Wednesday, about the relationship between brands in a search-driven world. His contention is that "search is the anti-brand," by which he means that while "corporate marketing is still focused on optimizing search terms to promote the stuff of branding, consumers are already past that step."

I would argue that even if there's a real trend to support this particular piece of hyperbole, it's not exactly time to throw in the towel on old-style declarative brands, at least in most industries (e.g. Nick's cheez-flavored crackers: ain't nobody increasing the profit margins on these with an internet search. Now, a catchy jingle...).

Nevertheless, Baskin is making an important point: The climate is changing, and there are contexts in which potential customers interact with a brand, which aren't subject to a traditionally branded experience. The challenge for designers inside of this climate is to evaluate potential responses to sort of brand DMZs. Which is exactly his point.

From where I'm standing, though, we can't just throw the baby out with the bathwater. Traditional branding techniques are still relevant, and I believe will continue to be for the near future. They are going to provide the substratum for user experience in a variety of contexts, even if they don't work exactly the same way they used to.

Hence, your weekend ponderable: Meditate on the possibilities of a brand and design strategy that takes into account the multiple degrees of control possible in the various registers of user experience.

If you haven't checked out Google Insights yet, and you run a website, you probably should. The idea behind Insights is that you can compare and evaluate a handful of metrics — volume, regional interest, top search terms — on search results, given a particular topic and/or geographical area. For example, I took a look at the search patterns and volume in my area (Omaha) for "web design," a key item on the DLB menu, and promptly established that we're in the wrong business.

This is clearly an unproductive metric. (From top: Generic search term, generic search term, generic search term, generic search term, indicator that people are uninterested in paying for service, indicator that people are uninterested in paying for service, generic search term.)

All glibness aside, Insights could certainly be used smartly to provide agile firms with a real-time look at trends in their geographical areas. These trends could be used to indicate growth markets, and this information could inform rapid-SEO strategies (aka. blog post keywords).

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Microsoft Research just published a paper revealing a new type of web search ranking — BrowseRank [pdf] — as revealed at last week's SIGIR (Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) conference. (Thanks for the heads-up James).

The gist of the proposal is that search results are ranked by how long users tend to stay on a single page vs. the amount of incoming links a page has (i.e. PageRank).

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