We recently launched The Last Degree, a collaboration with GE and digital strategy firm Undercurrent. We delivered identity, design, and a handful of web applications to support an online social ecosystem for the program.

The Last Degree is the story of a young man on a mission:

On April 2nd, 15 year-old Parker Liataud set out on an epic journey to ski to the geographic north pole. With nothing but a guide, a GPS device, and a backpack full of arctic gear, Parker’s journey is a global call to action on critical environmental issues.

Sandcastle: Not Needed

In the past few years there has been a lot of debate about the impending “death of the microsite”, so it was interesting for us to participate in a program that lived exclusively on social networks. Instead of a microsite, we created engagements that lived primarily in Facebook, but also integrated Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, Daily Mile, Foursquare, and Google Earth.

This fractured, socially driven experience was a great solution to engage youth around Parker’s mission- streamlined, cost effective, and embedded in the networks that young people spend their time on. Earned media was handled by Edelman. In addition, Foursquare created a North Pole Badge – which gained the attention of blogs like Mashable.

What to make of this? Well as I always say to the team: “Brush up those FB Page Admin Skills!”

Joking? Yes, sort of. It’s clear that the industry is rapidly trending away from big, beautiful, microsites – those very expensive (and uh, very processor intensive) experiences. Good news is that there’s plenty of work for visual designers and web technologists in a post “mega microsite” world – visualizing application states, mapping ecosystems, geeking on APIs, hacking away at FBML (grrrr), and working to deliver awesome UX across a spectrum of web, social and mobile platforms.

Don’t get me wrong though – robust brand websites are here to stay, and we love to create them. But on the campaign side of digital, it’s certain we’ll see a lot more of these fractured web, social and mobile experiences in the near future.