The importance of good design and branding

A brand is a kind of promise. It is a set of fundamental principles as understood by anyone who comes into contact with a company. A brand is an organization’s reason for being and how that reason is expressed through its various communications media to its key audiences, including customers, shareholders, employees and analysts. A brand can also describe these same attributes for a company’s products, services, and initiatives. —allbusiness.com

The Apple brand is one of the most widely recognized, on a global scale. Their logo is clean, elegant and easily implemented. You may remember a certain point in time when the company began to use the apple logo monochromatically (as opposed to the rainbow stripes), signaling a new era for Apple. Smart branding allowed the company to clearly communicate a change in direction while continuing to build its reputation. The Apple brand is distinctive and delivers a promise: quality of design and ease of use.

We really enjoyed this video post, “How to design like Apple” from onlinemba.com (especially the video and whiteboard technique)! Take a look, then tell us what brands stand out for you.

Social Media ROI

Great video from Ignite demonstrating that Social Media’s ROI is real and measureable at every stage of the sales funnel:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Preference
• Intent
• Purchase
• Support
• Loyalty
• Advocacy

Check it out!

Best Practices for Social Sharing

Wendy Clark, of Coca-Cola: Seven Rules for Building a Social Brand

When it comes to social media, Coca-Cola‘s advice is king. With more than 53 million Facebook fans, Coke is the largest consumer brand on Facebook. 

Wendy Clark, SVP of Integrated Marketing Communications and Capabilities at Coca-Cola, was interviewed at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit earlier this month. During her flight on her way to the Summit, Clark emailed her ideas to her interviewee, Patricia Sellers, of Fortune.

After her interview, Clark (left) agreed to share her intelligent, helpful advice to the world! 

Below are Wendy Clark’s seven rules for building a mega-brand in social media:

1. Be share-worthy in everything you do.

In a market that is now completely socially connected, we increasingly are thinking about our audience in two ways: our Initial Audience–those we can reach directly (52 MM Facebook fans, 600k Twitter followers, 18MM My Coke rewards members, etc)–and our Ultimate Audience, which is those people whom our Initial Audience can reach for us. For Coca-Cola, our Facebook fans are just over one fan or friend away from the entire Facebook community of 1 billion+. So if we do our job well of developing useful, compelling, interesting and share-worthy content, our fans become our sales force for us.

2. Listen. Then respond authentically and humanly.

The days of hiding behind two-sentence corporate statements have to end. This is easier said than done. We’re still unlearning this. Consumers and all constituents expect more. Coca-Cola isn’t a faceless corporation to them; it’s a brand they love and enjoy throughout their day. So when they interact with us, they expect that same experience: a human interaction. There are more than 15,000 Tweets everyday on brand Coca-Cola; any that are a question, we answer. We have to. Consumers’ expectations are that we’re listening and responding.

3. Think big. Start small. Scale fast.

If you have an ambition that you want to double the size of your business in, say, 10 years, you had better have a big innovation pipeline to help get you there. When we’re at our best, we think massively, but we beta and test that thinking in small bets to learn. To meet our innovation (and growth) ambitions, we are trying to get much better at discussing failures or learnings. For a big company like ours, it’s critical. Because we’re built for scale and if we don’t get better at testing, learning and then scaling, we have the potential of scaling the wrong thing perfectly.

4. Social is not a silver bullet. But social can make everything else better.

So much is made of social media and marketing that we can tend to overrate what it can do. We do not see social marketing as a standalone. Rather, our mantra for our media and connections planning is “social at the heart.” So we think in terms of ideas and campaigns that are social (share-worthy) at their core and then we think about how we can amplify the ideas and campaigns. Too often, we get asked if our TV investment is declining and our social/digital investment growing.  This is the wrong question. It’s not an EITHER, it’s an AND.

5. Content is the new currency. Create accordingly.

With 72 hours of content uploaded every minute on YouTube (GOOG), the world is not suffering from lack of content. With this in mind, content creation has to be useful, interesting, important, share-worthy. We learned this in seeing the difference in interaction level between status updates and Tweets that we wrote vs. those that our agencies wrote. We also learned that replication isn’t always a good thing in social marketing.  When we had a hit viral video in Coca-Cola Happiness machine, our first instinct was to replicate the film. We did that and had a fraction of the views.

6. We might be shepherds, stewards and guardians of our brands, but we no longer control them.

At best, we get to participate and co-create with our fans. I’d estimate that 10-20% of the content and conversation on our brands comes from us. The other 80%+ comes from others. So we need to get invited in to these communities and co-create with our fans.

7. Think of your constituents as storytellers.

Taking the principle of Initial and Ultimate audiences, we’re increasingly thinking about all of our constituents as storytellers, not just receivers of our content. This includes our consumers, employees, NGO partners, media, etc.. So our principle becomes that we create content and tell stories that we want to be retold.

Click here to read the original article by Patricia Sellers.

Bodyform: From Crisis to Creative

On October 8th, Bodyform, a U.K. maxipad maker, received a negative post on its Facebook wall. This post, which has now gotten more than 92,000 likes, called out the brand for false advertising. 

Instead of ignoring the post or replying with an automated apology, Bodyform creatively one-upped the post, made by Richard Neill, with a video.

The video pretends to fess up about pathological lying. CEO Caroline Williams, actually played by an actress, says “I think it’s time we came clean. We lied to you, Richard, and I want to say sorry…Sorry.”

The video goes on to facetiously explain why Bodyform has used metaphorical images in advertising rather the focusing on the truth of menstrual cycles.

Not every brand would feel comfortable doing something like this, or would have the skill and creativity to pull it off, but this a great example of what social engagement looks like.

We think it’s brilliant! What are your thoughts?

Which Type of Social Media Addict Are You?

5 Ways Your Company Can Use Twitter Hashtags

If your company has a Twitter account, hashtags, better recognized as #,  should be a part of your social media strategy. Follow these five tips to improve your company’s hashtag strategy.

1. Look for Business-Specific Conversations

If you use Twitter for one thing, use it to learn from others. Look for hashtags such as #smallbiz or #socialmedia to find advice, resources, and influential people to follow. While using these hashtags to learn and gain advice is great, step into the conversation once and a while. Using a hashtag about a subject you’re interested in will put you in the conversation and will allow other people to engage with you too around that topic.

If you want to jump into a more specific conversation, narrow down the hashtag. For example, looking for a business savvy person to follow? Try #entrepreneurs. Wanting to meet new people? Try #networking.

2. Keep it Simple and Consistent 

When tweeting about a new blog post about creating and developing mobile apps, don’t do this: #MobileAppCreationandDevelopment. Try this: #mobileapp #development #design. Overwhelmingly long hashtags are hard to read, making your tweet buried in the mix, and also aren’t search-friendly.

3. Create Your Own Hashtag

Large and small companies can create their own hashtags, and they should! Hashtags are a great way to generate buzz around just about anything! For example, Domino’s Pizza told followers to tweet #letsdolunch. When the number of tweets reached 85,000, Domino’s split prices in half during lunch that day. Get creative! Hashtags are a fun way to engage with you followers and be more than just a Twitter account.

4. Organize Social Dashboards by Hashtag

Whether you use HootSuite or TweetDeck, using a social dashboard can conveniently keep you up-to-date with relevant hashtags for your company. You can create specific columns by social network, search term, or hashtag.

5. Take Advantage of Follow Friday

Micah Baldwin, CEO and Chief Community Caretaker of Graphic.ly, announced on Twitter that he would suggest people to follow every week. This trend took off with the hashtag #FollowFriday and has now been shortened to #FF.

You can use Follow Friday in two ways. You can create a list of great people to follow and try to fit as many of them as you can in a tweet using the hashtag #FF. You can also group your favorite followers in categories. For example, tweet #FF #entrepreneurs and then list the entrepreneurs you like following. This is a great way to contribute to the conversation while letting people know you like following them at the same time.

These are just 5 ways to use hashtags. What are some ways your company uses them?

Below is a current example of how our business used hashtags in the hiring process.

Determine Your Social Media Personality

In 1921, psychologist Carl Jung published Psychological Types. His theories presented in this book helped formulate a psychometric test called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. This test was used to categorize the psychological types of humans into 16 major divisions.

Still in use today, the results determine whether test takers tend toward certain character traits, such as introversion (I) vs. extroversion (E) or thinking (T) vs. feeling (F). The metrics produce an acronym per individual. For example, “ISTJ” is for an Introvert-Sensing-Thinking-Judging person.

The infographic below, based on the Myers-Briggs personality assessment, details the qualifiers for each of the test’s characteristics. It also predicts the psychological types most likely to participate on specific social networks. More extroverts reported using Facebook than introverts, for instance. People with inclinations toward Feeling spend more time browsing and interacting with people on Facebook, rather than those who tend toward Thinking.

According to the infographic, what type of social media personality are you? 

Statistics on Facebook User Interactions

A recent social media survey from Performics, a performance marketing firm, shows that 33 percent of people are most likely to respond to brand offers when they are reposted by a friend. The study shows that 27 percent will respond on the brand’s page, 26 percent from the newsfeed, and 20 percent from a social ad. 

The study also provided insight about branded content engagement: 44 percent of Facebook users are most likely to engage with branded content containing images, roughly 40 percent of users said they are likely to engage with status updates and 37 percent said they are likely to engage with videos. 

These statistics are based on the Performics Life on Demand social media survey, which studied 2,000 Americans who visit a social networking site at least once a day. 

Facebook Timeline Tips from Grovo

Whether you haven’t switched your Facebook profile to Timeline format or you’re already a Timeline pro, check out Grovo’s quick video-based tips for making your Facebook presence just right.

Grovo has video lessons on everything from controlling privacy to exporting Facebook birthdays and calendar events. The screenshot below shows”New Lessons” and “New Courses” Grovo offers.  

Let us know what you think. Did Grovo increase your Facebook knowledge?