Fluid Media is pleased to announce the official launch of a web site for King Custom Cycles. We are excited about the opportunity to assist our good friends Laura & Phil King in expanding their community base of motorcycle enthusiasts via Web 2.0 tools, and to help them generate business for their parts and repair business.
Let’s share with you some of our initiatives:
First, to touch on the logo design for the brand. We were brought in on the tail end of the design process and Cameron was able to salvage some of the elements that had been developed, but immediately the concern regarding the “distressed” look revolves around replication issues on merchandise and smaller collateral.
So to avoid losing the little K in custom and other smaller bits, a non-distressed application is being created for certain usage.
We also added a secondary color palette and font styles for use on the web site and collateral materials.
The intention of the web site is to ultimately act as an online community where friends of King Kustom Cycles can interact, exchange tips on great places to ride, discuss new gear for their bikes … or just pass the time during the intervals when not on the road. In order to achieve this objective we are integrating some exciting new applications and are waiting for others to be released from beta testing!
We set up shop owner Laura King with a Facebook account so early on we can take advantage of the Fotobook plugin allowing her to upload pictures from the Shop, shots from sponsored rides and all the cool events they have planned … and they can be ported over to the site from Facebook. More importantly the photos and her activity stream are distributed directly to her growing circle of friends (her social graph) in the Facebook community. Short term marketing objective is to promote the benefit of joining Facebook to her customer base, and to encourage the millions of Facebook users to “friend” her & become a fan of the King Kustom Page. This direct form of communication is the future of internet marketing strategies.
We’re also waiting for the ultimate rollout of Facebook Connect from beta and the development of a Wordpress Plugin that provides for the portability of a user’s web presence. What this means is that as a Facebook user you can log into your Facebook account and via OpenID have a single login point for any site that has integrated Facebook Connect. Instead of having to login to comment and participate in numerous communities (and my how we hate to keep track of all those User Ids) your Facebook Connect ID provides you a solution.
Beyond the login aspect of Connect you are also gaining the integration of commenting and posting appearing in your Facebook activity stream so that your network of friends are aware of your activity. Using Facebook Connect on King Kustom Cycles we will be able to deliver marketing messages, event updates, and activity streams to our exponentially large friends network.
We also determined that it would be beneficial to set up a weekly podcast for Laura and Phil. This rich media content is an easy way to communicate all of the exciting activities happening at the shop while eliminating the grind of trying to write a weekly post. We’re in the process of trying to name the podcast so that we can develop a brand around the weekly shows. You can check it out at the bottom of the post.
These are the early stages of this site, and we could ramble on about long range micro-blogging communities and the setup of the Disqus commenting system distributed content, but we’ll save those topics for another day.
