Petit Bourgeois

Thanks Chris for the design upgrade (more legible typography, fixed width, refreshed header). There had been no design update since the launch of this version in 2004, was long overdue. Now I should also upgrade the software (to WordPress of course) so page titles are fixed and to make use of the awesome admin interface, but we'll see about that some other time, I've been procrastinating enough lately. I'd done this site by myself entirely (that is, using ready-made open-source packages), so this is a bit of a departure from the original idea, but I guess I'd better focus on the content, and putting pride in my design skills is simply misguided!! Seriously, thanks Chris, I appreciate it!

Jean-Marie Colombani, ex helmsman of quality French evening daily Le Monde, did not join his ex âme damnée Edwy Plenel at digital online journalism co-op Mediapart. Instead, he launched Slate.fr, a French edition of the ex-Microsoft, currently Washington Post-Newsweek owned Slate.

I suppose French versions of Slate articles will stop appearing on Mediapart rival Rue 89 (the last translation was published in August last year).

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The ASICS Netherlands web site was refreshed today, following the UK a couple weeks ago. This site features our own store locator, as well as the SportStyle collection of casual sneakers, which was produced by Amsterdam Worldwide, the ad agency in charge of this collection (and of many other projects for us).

Congrats Lisa and the team for this launch! Now we're moving on to the rest of Europe, at full speed.

After 8 months of hard labor, the ASICS UK site has launched.

With my Digital Communications team at ASICS Europe, Mairéad and Holger, we've explored the boundaries of patience, but also reached incredible peaks of elation.

I might take some time to post about this later, but I already want to tip my hat to the agencies I've worked with:

• my former employer CloudRaker who had the first crack at redesigning the site, when I was still with them and a supplier to ASICS. They're doing a great job with Onitsuka Tiger.
• AnalogFolk who helped frame our strategy, and worked with JH-01 to create user journeys that are a crucial piece in the quality of our work
• AQ who've done an outstanding job on visualizing the strategy, and getting it to work in the practice
• the incredible team at The Plant who stayed nights and weekends to pull off a launch within a week of the planned date -- after an 8-months project

We're using Merb to power this all, and I'm damn proud of the work that's been done.

With the launch of LabourList, Britain's governing party is aiming to up its game online. The Guardian gets a conservative blogger to write up a solid if somewhat unkind report about it.

Ironically, when I started doing digital communication for the Socialist party in 1996, the Labour was a shining example. Not so much for their online presence (which is now awesome and funny), as for the amazing work left-of-center techies were doing in supporting day-to-day party operations. Supplying internet access, developing software for canvassing, maintaining communication tools like mailing lists, supplying trainings and education for day-to-day activities as well as for policy-level staff -- the list of practical achievements was long.

Of course, the French socialist party is a very different machine to the UK Labour or the Dutch PvdA, in that it's never really been a mass party. As such, it's never felt the need to develop CRM capabilities. I believe this explains Ségolène Royal's success: unlike Obama, she's not a particularly articulate or inspiring politician, but she's the only one trying to build systems that favor the involvement of numbers of supporters. Her strength has been her ability to attract new members to the party, which she'd gather and keep motivated through an organized network, using technology and repeatable processes.

Ségolène won the nomination for the 2007 election, but lost the presidency to a short, regrettable man, and then failed to capture the Socialist party. Her 2006 momentum is now part of the PS's landscape, and she has shed a lot of its nontraditional supporters.

I don't know how LabourList will turn out. The stinging criticism (both on the site itself and in the comments under Ian Dale's article) does not sound very hopeful, and the first impression it made on me didn't make me think I'd return or follow its RSS feed.

Political positioning aside, Ian Dale has very sound advice (which I'm going to blog about at ASICS to motivate my colleagues):

[LabourList creator Derek] Draper plans to spend three days a week on the site. That's not enough. He needs to breathe it morning, noon and night, especially in the first six months. It's his baby and it is his efforts that will make it succeed or fail. He's got to be the inspirational driving force behind it. It needs to be updated many times a day.

But will that be enough? And how does one sustain such dedication?

The Obama campaign was the perfect example of an efficient division of labor, with the candidate taking the lead on policy, and inspirational for his team, but surrounded by a broad enough team of good professionals to amplify this goodness and make it touch as many people as possible. The right systems were put in place: brilliant CRM (customer relationship management is just the business term for canvassing, really), the right media mix (loads of TV, enough new media to reach further and deeper), and a very consistent, consistently well-delivered message.

But this entire approach was built on the existence of a very intelligent, likable, "satisfying" politician, who earned the support of many by being who he was. Perhaps this is what's missing in the UK and in France: a political leader so well-rounded he/she can federate the energies of all these good professionals, connect with a wider group of people, as well as come up with sound policy.

The sports fashion brand Onitsuka Tiger is re-launching its site, courtesy of my former employer CloudRaker. It's a first stage, with several updates planned in the next few weeks, but I'm pretty happy with the look already.

Before winning the 2008 US presidential election, Barack Obama was recognized by an AdAge panel of advertisement professionals as marketer of the year. While politics and business are often very different, especially in Europe, there are many lessons marketers can learn from Obama’s successful campaign.

His reach was particularly high: a reported 27% of voters have been personally contacted by his campaign, some of them directly by the candidate himself, ensuring his message was clearly and loudly spread throughout the electorate.

Obviously, the number of people working for a national political campaign in the United States is tremendous, but the combined media and human-contact usage, sustained by SMSes and the web site was incredibly powerful.

A staple of all campaigns and marketing efforts nowadays, e-mail seems to be less effective than SMSes in this context — while not perfect, this is another good example of the importance of being “native” and using tools for what they’re good at.

But to crown it all, his team launched Change.gov, the web site of "the office of the President-Elect". It's obviously cobbled together pretty quickly, and Slate has already poked some geeky fun at it, but he's there, doing his job, online as well. Congrats!

To celebrate the opening of the London ASICS store on Thursday, we launched a Tube Race challenge: you go to the store, and race the tube on a treadmill. Changes your perception of distances in the city!

Since I joined the European headquarters of ASICS, I've been battling on several fronts, with my colleagues, to improve the web presence of our two brands (ASICS for performance sports equipment, particularly running shoes, and Onitsuka Tiger for fashion-oriented products).

This is an acid test for me: I have the opportunity to implement many of the principles I hold dear, and my job is to create a couple of great web sites. And it turns out to be harder than I expected: many of those principles run into practical difficulties or differences of vision, and I find myself spending a lot of energy pushing things in the right direction, much more than I thought would be needed.

Some obvious choices need to be defended, not so much against people who don't have the same belief, but against an array of issues that passively stand in the way.

At the moment, I'm battling to nail down the ASICS site concept, and it turns out to be more complicated than it sounds, while my French colleagues aren't waiting for Europe.