Branding

Your brand is your emotional DNA. It’s that feeling a potential customer gets when they have a need and top of mind brings up your name. Your brand and the feeling you give them in the pit of their stomach is what determines whether you get that lead or if they’ll instead go to a competitor. Are you doing everything you can to carve out a positive brand identity? Do you know what a positive brand identity is?

The truth is brands could once be controlled, contrived even. Not so long ago consumers and their voices were fragmented and weak. Big companies could sweep issues under the rug without having to worry about the toll it would take on their brand. However, the birth of blogs, social media and sites like Twitter have banded consumers together, creating a much larger platform for them and a greater need for you to promote a positive brand image. Consumers have demanded that brands become transparent, authentic and that they deliver more value than ever before.

In this section of the blog you’ll learn the Who, What, When, Where, Why and How of corporate and personal branding. We’ll show you how to create a brand, how to manage it, and how to use it to create a compelling point of difference that attracts customers. We’ll even show you how to create that personal brand while working for someone else to help you get a better job.

If you have suggestions for posts we should do or techniques you’d like to see covered, contact us and let us know. Or, if you want to know how we can help you through our Internet marketing services, feel free to contact us about that, too.

Lies Writers Tell To Cripple Your SEO Copywriting

January 27, 2012

Even the newest of SEOs and marketers understand how important content is to developing a brand presence. Your content is who you are. It’s your voice in the market and what you use to convey your message to customers. It’s through the combination of your Web site copy, your blog, your article marketing, your pitches, [...]

Read the full article →

How To Avoid Community Manager Burn Out

January 25, 2012

Monday was Community Manager Appreciation Day, an online event started by Jeremiah Owyang three years ago to honor and recognize those who fight on the brand front lines every day. Last year I honored the day by offering up 8 ingredients that make a community manager and paid homage to a few folks who I [...]

Read the full article →

Dear Brands, Be Edgy Without Being an Idiot

October 12, 2011

Well, hello there. You look a little parched, like you could use some refreshment perhaps? How about a Dr. Pepper Ten to cool you down? Oh wait – sorry ladies, you’ll need to go powder your nose or go re-vacuum the stairs. This extreme beverage is only for men – no women allowed. I know [...]

Read the full article →

Crafting a Memorable Brand Story

October 10, 2011

To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world; it’s a very noisy world. And we’re not going to get the chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.” — Steve Jobs [...]

Read the full article →

The 6 Arms of Building A Marketable Persona

September 28, 2011

You know that you need to create a personal brand. You’ve heard me say I think you need to develop a character to help you do that. You’ve even heard about all these social influence tools designed to help you measure how you’re doing and whether you’re interesting enough to be perked a free umbrella. [...]

Read the full article →

10 Terrible Tweet Types Killing Your Twitter Strategy

May 18, 2011

[This is a guest post from Rohin Guha of Blue Phoenix Media. I met up with Rohin a few months back while in town for SES New York where we discussed pop culture, the days of Live Journal and the grammar mistakes that make our skin crawl.   We are now linked for life. Today, Rohin [...]

Read the full article →

Preparing Employees For the Front Lines
… of your brand

May 11, 2011

Once again, Amber Naslund is right on the money. Amber’s right when she says it doesn’t matter how great your product is, how well known you are or what fancy features you may hail – your brand lives and dies by your front line employees, nothing else. And in this hyper-connected world of social media, [...]

Read the full article →

Bad Bots, Bad Bots, Whatcha Gonna Do?

February 18, 2011

I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but Twitter is infested with bots. Dirty, dirty, bots! For the past couple of weeks, the Twitter spam bots have been out in full force, often hitting accounts with handfuls of new cleavage-baring followers per minute. There’s been a lot of conversation about it on Twitter and lots of [...]

Read the full article →

FAIL: Groupon Picks Boring Over Polarizing

February 11, 2011

A lot has been written about the ads Groupon ran during the Super Bowl, including an interesting social media CPR synopsis by Fast Company. If you’ve somehow been living under a rock, here’s what you missed this week in Social Media Melodramas. Groupon was looking to increase brand awareness at the biggest dance of the [...]

Read the full article →

4 Branding Lessons From The King’s Speech

January 20, 2011

This past weekend I had the opportunity to go see The King’s Speech with a group of new friends. The film chronicles the story of Prince Albert of Wales’ (Bertie, to close friends and family) unexpected rise to the throne as King George VI. If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend you go check [...]

Read the full article →