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Here is how Beyonce Explained her SURPRISE album:

Beyonce called the project a "visual album" and said "I see music."

"It's more than just what I hear," she said. "When I'm connected to something, I immediately see a visual or a series of images that are tied to a feeling or an emotion, a memory from my childhood, thoughts about life, my dreams or my fantasies. And they're all connected to the music."

Internet marketers and web designers should read Beyoncé’s note slowly since the visual marketing tsunami is impacting everything now as Beyonce proved.

How VISUAL is your content? How AWESOME? Up to Beyonce levels? When Beyonce introduced the album on Instragram with a single word image social media all but melted down. Here are stats from Jeff Bullas blog:

The tipping point?

With the evolution of the web there are some events that are small but significant. One of those happened on December 13, 2013. It was when Beyonce launched her latest album with an update on Instagram just captioned as “Surprise”

This broke convention.

Normally millions are spent on traditional media. Lady Gaga hyped her latest album by spending millions on bus advertising, billboards, 2 pop up stores and performed countless interviews. The result. She sold 305,000 copies in 2 weeks.

Beyonce, who has 8 million Instagram followers and over 53 million fans on Facebook decided to go straight to her fans. She decided to give the bus a miss. It was launched directly to iTunes and social media. She invoked the power of  ”World of Mouth”

The results:

* It sold 828,773 copies in 3 days

* Twitter reported 1.2 million Tweets in 12 hours

* It was the largest single week ever in the Apple iTunes store

* It was iTunes fastest selling album worldwide

Product developers, Internet, content and social media marketers need to understand the core TIPPING POINTS in the middle of Beyoncé’s results:

* Marketing is about the SOCIAL/VISUAL now.
* Rework creative if necessary to be more SOCIAL and VISUAL.

* Helps if you look like Beyonce.

* If YOU don't look like Beyonce, FIND SOMETHING that does!
* Weave SOCIAL and VISUAL into product development.

* Think about VISUALS as you go.
* Find visuals that work & double down.

* As for HELP as User Generated Content is GREAT if you don't look like Beyonce (They Might & Even If They Don't They Will Support).

Had fun creating CureCancerStore.org with my friends Eric and Cynthia Garrison's Agile7 template. As I worked I was reminded of a few tips that may help any web designer, and aren't we all web designers now, work with templates including:

* SEO Don't Forget it.
* Adjust YOUR Perspective Not Other Way Around.

* Get Creative and Modify What is THERE.

* Improve Shopping Cart LATER.

* Tables and old HTML are TOUGH.

This last bullet is important. The world is HTML5 and CSS3 and if you don't have CSS skills templates are both a Gift from God and a Curse from the Devil. If, like me, you still can write <tables> don't expect them to look like what you expect because their display is controlled by CSS (style sheets).

I tend to bull forward and do the best I can until a firm understanding of where and how we are making money. Once I understand how the site makes money I can invest intelligently in designers with more talent than me (not hard to find those btw lol).

This post should help anyone know how to work with templates better to design a website or blog and templates are in all of our futures because they are great, getting better and cheap.

Beats By Dre Web Design Lessons
A friend shared the impressive NEWSJACK Dr. Dre and his Internet markeing team pulled off last week. Beats By Dre (http://www.beatsbydre.com ) has some cool web design tricks to steal too such as:

* Consistent images across channels (the Richard Sherman image rode the crest of the wave created by his "controversial" statements after last Sunday's game).
* HUGE RED BUY NOW Call To Action on the home page.
* Hero moves but does so SLOWLY so it isn't jarring.
* They've programmed their Richard Sherman page so his picture matches to every style, something I bet the site does for all celebrity endorsements (cool and NEW).
* Their social buttons are a little low for my taste, but they are well labeled as the "Beats Army" and every major social net is there and they are robust and fresh on all social nets.
* I like how they handle the colors too via the small swatches.

All in all a great ecommerce site in support of one of the best NEWSJACKS I've seen (see my notes on Dr. Dre's multi-channel attack of the web here:   http://sco.lt/8bJiDJ