Retail’s Best New Back To School Viral Campaign: YearbookYourself.com.

Ever wondered what you might look like in a past life? (Ewwww, did you look like your MOTHER?! Now you’ll know for sure.)

In the cleverest viral campaign since OfficeMax’s Elf Yourself, social-networking-savvy Taubman Centers, owner of upscale shopping malls nationwide, has created a buzzworthy new site to drive more teens and their parents into its malls for back-to-school shopping.

YearbookYourself.com allows you to upload a photo and see yourself with classic hairdos and vintage outfits through the decades. Era-appropriate music plays while you’re waiting to be stunned by your new ‘do. Once Yearbooked, people can save their pictures and post them to their favorite social networking site, such as Facebook and MySpace, as well as share them with friends. All I can say is: Keen! (1956 Guru) Groovy! (1966 Guru) Awesome! (1988 Guru)

Unfortunately, for all its blockbuster potential, the site architecture breaks a number of basic social marketing rules. In fact, parts of the site are somewhat kludgey and even confusing. Most significantly, the fact that the Taubman shopping center connection is never explained until you’re suddenly asked to Choose A Mall.  Huh?  Yet all they had to do is add a screen or a crawl along the bottom that explains who is behind the site.

The Malls themselves require registration — that typical My Mall stuff –which is really annoying. It stops the flow; it stops the excitement. It is a significant barrier to continued engagement. I was interested in seeing how Lucky jeans were an update on 1978 jeans — but I couldn’t see them without ponying up a pile of my personal information. Why create this terrifically trippy widget if you’re going to make it difficult to explore?  What’s likely to happen is the sponsors’ worst nightmare: a high level of engagement with the YearbookYourself pictures and then a marked percentage of abandons when the user hits the reg-required mall pages.  With all those teen fashionistas out there scouring the web for store and style content, its a shame to lose them with barriers and bumps that should have been prevented via Usability Testing.

Worse, once you’re in Mall World, you can’t easily return to the YearbookYourself you’ve already created.

I do applaud the erstwhile attempts to connect yesterday’s styles and trends with today. 

The site also features “homeroom” pages that allow visitors to save their favorite yearbook photo to a page and then invite friends to post their photos as well. Once invited, friends post their photos, a virtual yearbook page is created. Shared links allow friends to view each others’ homeroom pages. They can also save, print, email or post their yearbook photo creation to a webpage or social network site.

I’m conducting some mini-research this week to see if teens think YearbookYourself.com is fun, corny, cool or lame — and will track if and where they actually post. My focus-group-guru self thinks they won’t admit a thing . . . but that MySpace will see some Yearbook action soon.

Wouldn’t it have been a kick if Taubman, and always innovative ad agency Colle + McVoy,  had added:

• A celeb component, with a Gossip Girl, hot band, or Jonas Brother getting Yearbooked? MySpace would have been an awesome partner here.
• A Buy-and-Sell-Your Friends game.  Does your bff cost more in 1978 or 1954?
• Stimulated Homeroom usage by mixing in REAL celeb yearbook pix as part of a prize-winning scavenger hunt or name that celeb.  Again, partner with MySpace.  Wouldn’t The Ubiquitous Tom be perfect in Yearbook ‘disguise’? 

The Death of Email. RIP Email.

Email has been ailing for quite some time. I knew it was on its last legs and even with a fresh infusion of retro Rocketmail from Yahoo, things have not been looking good. Then last night on ABC Family’s new “The Secret Lives of Teenagers” the official death rattle sounded. One of the show’s main characters, clearly the series’ resident good girl, stared directly into the camera, opened her perfectly-puffed lips and delivered the final blow: “Email? No one emails anymore.”

Today, mere hours after this chilling proclamation, Facebook launched its new interface, upping its privacy standards and increasing its focus on improved user experience. MySpace has cleaned up its interface as well and has more upgrades in the works. Uber-user-friendly and growing phenom etsy.com, funded in January to the tune of $27 million from Accel Partners and others, is also growing its social networking features.

And just days ago, Hitwise recently reported that traffic to Twitter increased 500 percent for the week ending July 5, 2008, compared with the same period last year. That’s a killer jump for a service that’s plagued with technical glitches and perpetually flashes its famous Fail Whale.

A study by the Pew Research Center waay back in 2005 revealed that even then, almost half of online teenagers preferred to chat with friends via IM rather than e-mail. And that was before Apple’s iPhone.

Can email be saved? Should email be saved? Stay tuned.