What’s in a name?

OK, I’ve just realised (in a slightly amateurish way) that there was already a company based in the UK called DigitalBehaviour. Therefore, my grand plans for BehaviourDigital as mentioned in my previous post have fallen flat before the first hurdle. I’m still going ahead with my plan but it will now be under a different name.

In the spirit of crowdsourced ideas and the wisdom of the collective I’d like some user generated business name ideas. I’ll kick things off with a couple of suggestions using the new (slighty ugly) polling feature in WordPress but you can add you own in the comments.

A change of scenery. Take two.

Nearly a year ago I blogged about suddenly being made redundant from my position as Creative Director at Interesource. In fact, the entire company went south due to a variety of reasons – none of which I want to replay here.

Well, here we are 12 months later and it’s all change again.

I’ve spent the last year as CD in a digital marketing agency. Much fun I’ve had to. But there’s been an uncomfortable feeling growing inside me for a while now and it was time to act.

So I’ve resigned.

Given the current economic climate, it’s probably not the wisest move I’ve made but it had to be done. Couple this with the fact that I’m getting married at the end of this month and it’s slightly nervous times. But exciting at the same time.

You see, I’m just entering my tenth year working professionally in this industry. I’ve been around a bit, ridden the .com wave and been washed in to shore. I’ve worked at four agencies full time and contracted at a further half a dozen or so. I’ve formed very strong opinions about how I feel things should work in an agency. I’m also tired of the ‘old’ web. I don’t want to spend my days designing corporate sites for Acme Widget companies. Though it pays the bills (well), I can’t muster the excitement I had for this type of work even three years ago.

I have ideas about the future. It’s the ‘next web’ (whatever that is) that excites me. As I’ve said to colleagues countless times; in London there are a thousand agencies in a 20 mile radius that can design and build a decent website. It’s almost become so commoditised that budgets are stripped to nothing and clients so blinkered there seems to be very little room for true innovation.

As such, I’m starting my own gig. Behaviour.Digital will come into being in the run up to Christmas and be up and running in the new year. What am I going to do? Good question!

I know what I’m good at. And in true artist style I’m going to try and make a living out of it. I can talk (too much some might say) and I can present. I can evangelise. I have ideas, passion and enthusiasm. I love the web and all its possibilities. I can even design stuff. I just feel that there are too few orgainsations making full use of what digital has to offer. It’s them that I want to work with and help. Those clients who share a passion and want to do new, exciting things. As I’ve blogged before, these are the clients that allow you to do some truly great work. And it is them that I shall seek.

I realise that, in the short term, I may have to turn my hand to a bit of design and html. I understand that I might have to do this to keep the thing I really want to do pure. But it’s that consultancy/thinking/innovation type offering that really excites me.

I will keep you up to date about how I am getting along. But for now, wish me luck. I have some clients to find.

Modernista – aggregation in the extreme

Whilst browsing Business Week’s Best and Worst of the Web this morning there was one particular site which really struck me as something new.

We’ve all been using sites such as flickr, YouTube and del.icio.us for a while now to host our portfolios. I myself have a bunch of (badly organised) stuff on flickr which, somehow, persuaded my current employer to give me the gig. Having a blog or one-page portfolio site with links or aggregations of all these things is one thing. Overlaying your site over the rest of the web and navigating between the relevant pages is something totally different.

If I visit the site of Boston-based ad agency Modernista I am confronted with their wikipedia entry but overlaid with a small navigation in the top left corner. Using their navigation you skip to their ads on YouTube, their print work on flickr and their digital work linked from del.icio.us. What they’ve effectively done is ‘brand’ each of the sites with their own little device. This removes the age-old tyranny of the agency having old/outdated/stale site content.

I love this. It may be a bit gimmicky. It may have been done before, but never as effectively and elegantly. In fact, I’ll stop trying to explain it, go and have a look for yourselves.

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Oh no! I haven’t posted for weeks. How bad am I… My blog will have lost ‘Google juice’ (whatever that is), my technorati rating will have dropped through the floor. Whatever! I have a feast of things to come. Sometimes these things just take time.