Tag Archives: branding

Your brand is what your customers say it is

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Your customers have their own idea about your brand and with today’s social technologies they communicate with each other and decide what your brand is. Listen to what they say and:

  1. Find out what your brand stands for: Monitor the difference between the message you are trying to get across with what your customers or people and general are talking about.
  2. Understand how the conversation is shifting in time: Social media can give you better answers than surveys on a weekly or even daily basis. There is a growing evidence about the correlation between social media buzz and sales.
  3. Identify the influence sources: Find the people talking about your products, the so called influencers and cultivate them.
  4. Manage PR crises: Monitoring your brand is an early warning system allowing to respond to a crisis before it escalates.
  5. Generate new ideas: Listen and you can tap into the ideas your customers may have for new products or services

If listening to your customers is your current goal, expect at some point to be talking to them using social technologies– every fruitful conversation includes listening and talking.

First video ad ever in print magazine

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An upcoming issue of Entertainment Weekly’s print edition will be embedded for the first time with a video player that will run ads for CBS shows and Pepsi.

The video player insert, made by a Los Angeles company called Americhip Inc., will be able to withstand the binding processes and mail delivery. The screen is 2.7 millimeters thick and has a 320×240 resolution. The battery lasts for about 65 to 70 minutes, and can be recharged with a mini USB cord via a jack on the back of it. The screen, which uses thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT LCD) technology, is enforced by protective polycarbonate. A speaker is embedded below it.

The cost is estimated at a several dollars per unit,  but the idea behind is to charge a premium for advertising that has potential to catch readers’ attention.

The ad comes in a heavy-paper package resembling the kind of novelty greeting cards that make noises. A roughly two-inch screen starts playing automatically as the page flips open:

This is an interesting development and if paired with other technologies such as RFID, maybe paves the road to the holy grail of all marketers: offline interactivity.

Branding with Facebook’s vanity URLs

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Starting Sunday, June 28 at 12:01am EST, Facebook has allowed all page owners to register a so called vanity URL.

With a vanity URL, brands can improve their presence on the web. These URLs can be easily recognized anywhere (i.e. http://www.facebook.com/audi for Audi), and they can help a profile page appear more prominently in search results. There’s another incentive to get a vanity URL: preventing someone else to use a vanity URL with your brand.

Vanity URLs come when FB is rolling out a number of other public-facing features useful to brands. FB’s new “Everything is Public by Default” setting allows to send out status updates and other information that are publicly available. This is excellent for brands, as a public-facing profile can be viewed by anyone. Companies can now have their social media presence established as a true extension of their brands, products and services.

FB is also making ads more interactive. For example, you might see an ad for a brand’s page, see a “become a fan” button, and officially become a fan without having going to the page itself. Vanity URLs facilitate consistency with the ad message or title.

Summary: FB is blending advertising with content users are sharing. The URLs make the brand more transmittable and accessible, while the ads invite users to create and disseminate co-created content. This branded content then becomes increasingly public and relevant.