Category Archives: Branding

New Cap Partners' Thomas Turney Talks about Important Issues to Economic Growth! Podcast #2

You heard part 1 of Tom Turney’s podcast about the economic growth and problems as it applies ot the state of California, the US and globally. While we are standing in this wobbly middle ground — watching the global markets shift as well as that of the nation, it’s often hard to realize what’s really important to know what are the critical or tipping point issues. As seen in part one, it’s often best to talk to someone who has a truly “global” view of the business landscape. One such person happens to be Thomas Turney, managing principal in NewCap Partners.

Thomas Turney turns his keen eyes to what is one of the key issues on solving the economic situation within the state of California, locally as well as nationally.

Salient points:

-Use of the internet and engage students with computers used in classrooms and at home. Students can work at their own pace and there would be less “dumbing down” of curriculum or even teaching to meet state or federal test standards. Learning at the student’s personal pace is something that should be seen as important.

–Education is not just for K-12 or college level. It’s a life-long process and whether it’s for personal gain or to improve one’s work skills, education should be available to all who seek it regardless of age. MBA’s from major institutions with online instruction are available today.

–The hot sectors of technology that education should be focusing on in terms of training – whether it’s vocational or degree-oriented include medical technology particularly diagnostic procedures.

–Computers and wireless revolution will evolve particularly looking at cloud computing. IT security when it comes to cloud computing will be ramping up as well as reflected by the breaches of major corporations . Hackers will always be attempting to breach the security and one has to realize that you need redundant back-ups for security purposes.

However the ease and simplicity (and lack of physical hardware) will outweigh the security risks providing that companies and people realize that they need to have stellar security in place. More apps are going to move to the cloud because IT labor is very expensive. By moving things to the cloud, makes it more affordable when there’s less hardware and maintenance costs. It does not mean you don’t need IT people or people or apps to cover security, but just less employees. The evolution and innovation of technology will create new sectors and new jobs to be filled while others are down-sized or less in demand.

–Social media and its evolution was discussed in this podcast as well with new destinations like Namesake.com and other developments. The concern about social media from an investor’s perspective is the crowded space and some social media platforms are over-valued. There is discussion of Pandora and when if ever they will be worth their valuation in real dollars. The competition in social media makes it hard to achieve those important benchmarks. (The question begs to be asked will social media apps and platforms EVER make their IPO valuations?)

–Outsourcing of labor costs has made the cost of the products so much less.. which affects labor costs here in the US because we need to be more competitive . The standard of living has gone down 30% and the social divide has created a significant difference between the haves and the have nots.

Thanks to Thomas Turney for his time for this podcast (1 and 2)

If you missed part 1, please click Turney Part 1 or www.la-story.com
Thank you to Gray Defevere for facilitating this podcast/interview series with Thomas Turney.

You can also find more content & interviews with venture capitalists, start-ups and lots more at www.la-story.com
Follow me at twitter.com/lastory
“LIKE” LA-Story on Facebook.com/lastoryblog
Hit me on Pinterest at http://pinterest.com/lastoryblog

Stevie Wilson,
LA-Story.com

Bloggers and Brand Influence

We all know that the blogosphere is an immensely large community with interconnections between bloggers and readers everywhere. The blogosphere is continually growing with powerful influentials who can change the way we think and look at things.

Internet marketing company eMarketer Mobile recently published an article that proves just how influential bloggers, whether hobbyists or professionals, truly are when it comes to conversation about products or brands.

About 38 percent of all bloggers post about brands that they love or hate and about 34 percent write product or service reviews, according to the “State of the Blogosphere 2011″ report from Technorati.

In addition, Technorati reported that about 29 percent of bloggers were influenced by other blogs that they read last year. This year, the number increased to 68 percent, which is more than half of bloggers.

With the increasing numbers and influence of bloggers, it is essential for brand representatives to maintain good relations with these individuals. We wouldn’t want another episode between The Bloggess and Brandlink now, would we?

Click here for the full article from eMarketer Mobile titled “How Blogs Influence Purchases and Recommendation.”

Continue reading →

The spectrum of online friendship

At Abraham Harrison, a bulk of what we do is online outreach; finding optimal blogs and online databases to feature the clients that we partner with. It’s a full blown science trying to understand what conversational skills appeal to one blogger versus another but today’s infographic tries to tackle the variety of relationships we come into contact with:

Agencies are too afraid of bloggers to do their job (chrisabraham.com)
Fire for effect when you can’t get a direct bead on your market (chrisabraham.com)
Write your blog to be taken completely out of context (chrisabraham.com)
Free ‘Twitter for Business’ Webinar on April 30 (socialmedia.biz)

Is Blogging an Everyday Necessity?

We’ve all read our fair share of blog posts. Trends start to emerge; patterns in tone and mechanics and particularly urban legends of advice which we should all begin to ignore. Ali Luke over at DailyBlogTips has written her fair share of blog posts and targets the number one tidbit of blogging advice that she thinks is overrated-

Blogging Everyday.

Luke believes that there are several drawbacks to blogging everyday:

#1 You’re wasting your time

#2 Your posts are poor quality

#3 Readers don’t necessarily like it

#4 You’ll burn yourself out

It depends on the blogger. This may be true if you’re a young and developing blog written by an individual. Luke suggests that instead of blogging incessantly once a day just to have something in by midnight, blog twice a week with engaging content that your viewers can look forwards to. Spend just as much time editing your post as you do writing it. Spend just as much time promoting your post on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook as you do editing it. Then communicate with your readers. What do they want to read about?

In fact, I’ll put this to my audience. Audience- what would you like to learn about? Tweet at @marcon or at @jenna_levy and I will take all of your suggestions into account.

If you are a larger company with an increased following, then I disagree with all of the above. At Abraham Harrison, we’re a communications firm dedicated to spreading the word about not only our clients, but advances in technology and social media, and firsthand media news. If we’re not blogging everyday then we’re doing something wrong, because we’re not providing our audience with entertaining and educational information as often as we should be.

Mitch Joel at Twist Image is of the same mindset and frames Luke’s opinions for company branding instead of individual. He sees blogging everyday as a necessity because it’s about practice and experience. Habits are hard to create.

Ultimately, Blogging is not easy, it’s not obvious and it’s hard (very hard) to get real traction with as a Marketing engine. Nothing happens unless you are consistent in your effort and work. It has to be relevant to your audience and yes, you need a high level of frequency in your publishing habits. But, you have to define what “consistent,” “relevant” and “frequency” means to you and your audience. Nobody can do that for you.

-Joel

Joel compares blogging for the mind to exercise for the body. Yes, the journey to the computer may long and arduous, but when you press publish, it’s all worth it for your brand. My favorite piece of advice by Joel is “…use your Blog as a sketchpad for your day and the industry that you serve.” Branding is up to you, blogging can only serve to assist it along its journey.

Do you think that it’s necessary to blog everyday?

Branding is More Relevant than Ever

That shirt you’re wearing–one look with the distinctive horse on the side tells everyone whose got you branded. That coffee cup you’re holding–ah, you’re a Starbucks woman! Your baseball cap with the prominent swoosh, the handbag covered with the letter C…

You’re branded, branded, branded, branded.

It’s time for you–and me–to take a lesson from the big brands, a lesson for anyone who’s interested in creating a brand, rather than just a message, that engages others.

Stacey Acevero, the social media community manager at Vocus and PRWeb, shares four simple rules to not only make your brand talk but engage with its audience:

1. Understand your audience

2. Give, give, give

3. Keep content community minded

4. Tie into causes people care about

But why is branding important?

Branding is more important than ever due to increasing advertising clutter, media fragmentation, the demand of products and the limitless choices of every product category.

When customers buy a brand, they buy its values and promises, and feel that their expectations are aligned with the company. The product or service the customers buy and the quality experience they receive is what persuades them to buy the same brand again.

Successful branding efforts build strategic awareness so that your audience not only recognizes your brand, but they also understand the distinctive qualities that make it better than the competition.

Remember, creating a personable, engaged brand is no easy task. It takes time and patience. Following these four steps will help you on your way to having a brand with which people can’t wait to engage in. From there, success is surely to follow.

To view Stacey Acevero’s list in more detail, click here.

Tech Talk: Create Your Own App on Appsbar.com in about 60 Minutes –for Free!

As digital engagement spreads from the web (Facebook, Twitter, websites) to smart phones and tablets, apps have become a critical factor to gain user attention by providing a function, service or information. It’s more than the icing on these devices that we buy and use. With the smartphone/tablet dimension, apps are embedded into the user experience landscape as serious, useful and fun additions to their device. Often the availability of the apps to improve the function of the devices from phones to tablets and the variety of apps available make the choice of host product purchase a real effort in research prior to purchase.
(Article first published in abbreviated presentation as Tech Talk: Create Your Own App in About 60 Minutes with Appsbar.com – for Free!! on Blogcritics.org)

There are a few key few issues concerning the app marketplace. First is the exclusivity of an app to a particular platform. Often your favorite iPhone app is not available on Android or Windows or tablet platforms. Cost is an issue. While there are a number of apps in the free to three dollar range, there are apps with premium prices ranging from five to twenty dollars. The third issue is that perhaps the app or function you want or need is not currently available or doesn’t function in the way you need. I heard of a woman who wanted a “mirror” app so that she could see what she looked like on the fly– but she couldn’t figure out where to find that app.

Should you be so entrepreneurial as to want to create an app, you have a few choices. If you were smart enough to get into IT when in college or are taking classes for that, you know where you can make extra bucks — creating apps on the side. If you are a “geek freak”, you could dig into this as a DIY project and buy the books to create an app yourself. Or if you are like the rest of us (especially moi), you could hire a programmer and find out what it will cost. The price tag– even on the bargain end can be about $3000. Most of the pro apps cost about $10,000 and can cost up to $100,000 or more depending on the sophistication of the app. The time frame for app development can range from six weeks to three months. Until now, these were the only options you had.

The apps paradigm has shifted courtesy of Appsbar.com, an open-to-all-ages website that offers members the ability to quickly and easily build an app for a specific platform with lots of bells and whistles in about 30-60 minutes– and it’s free! Plus once you create the app, it’s funneled to the Apple, Android or Windows markets for others to download. It’s a win-win proposition. In a little more than 2 weeks since the site launched, eleven thousand apps have been created.

Appsbar.com is a new website that allows anyone of almost any age to build their own app on a variety of platforms including iPhone, Android and Windows and also get them into their respective markets. The “digital engagement” that appsbar.com provides allows you — as the user– to create the app for anything or everything you want– depending on how much time and creativity you bring to the table. Generally speaking, if you are thinking about a relatively simple app to build, it could be done in about 30 minutes. The more complex you want to make it, the longer it will take– 60 minutes is about the baseline. However if you get really creative and want the veritable kitchen sink, it could take longer.

Here’s what the site (and their press release) says you can create on an appsbar app
•Event Notifier – which delivers real-time or scheduled notifications to app users.
•Menu – allows creating of catalog of products or services.
•Form Builder – which can be used for customer service surveys, a restaurant to-go order, or answers to questions asked through the app.
•Social Interaction – adds the ability to share content within an app across social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
•Soundboard – lets users create a unique “app ringtone” by uploading any sound which can play when a user shakes or taps their mobile device.
In addition, appsbar can also handle RSS, photos and videos like other similar services

This isn’t just for play boys and girls. This is serious business masquerading behind a fun game-like wizard that will be blowing away the competition in a very short time. As the community grows, watch what happens as the members connect, communicate and collaborate. It’s bound to create something exponentially better than anything out there. This isn’t just for consumers only– bloggers. brands, companies can create their own apps for micro-consumer engagement. There are a wealth of uses for this application wizard.

I was able to snag an interview with CEO/founder Scott Hirsch to talk about this new site and honestly- to ask a lot of questions because appsbar.com is as big a shift in paradigm in the app world as iPhone was to cell phones. Flat out truth, appsbar is on its’ way to changing the perspective of the marketplace and how apps are created and how much the public wants to be involved in the creation. So far there has been little public involvement until now because the public had no way to get involved in the interface of building an app. Hirsch and company have remedied that situation.

How?
1) it’s free
2) they created a very simple wizard to walk you through the building process so that anyone from 18 to 70+ can create their own app.
3) the collective imagination of the appsbar user community is creating new processes for and ways to create apps and the appsbar team is learning from that collective imagination just how to integrate or improve upon what the users have created or asked for to facilitate the building of the most customized app around at the phenomenal price of free plus your own time.

I had the opportunity to interview CEO Scott Hirsch about Appsbar.com and ask a slew of questions about the site– and app development; questions about funding, advertising and how long the site will remain free. The podcast provides answers to all these questions.

I tried the Appsbar.com wizard to create an Android app for my blog. The app creation wizard is easy to use and it’s a lot more fun than a Zynga game. Pick your platform and get started. Do realize that after you complete the first version of your app, you will want to upgrade it as you figure out all the options that you can add to the app and how to make sure that it integrates with your goal.

The community of members can share information and also ask for additional features (coupons, discounting capacity) and the Appsbar.com team will start working on it. While it’s taken me a little longer than the hour, it’s because I kept changing the visuals, the essential app is easily done in 60 minutes or less and I took longer because as I saw the options come up, I was playing with the integration of those options into the app. In other words, I was throwing the kitchen sink into the app and it was definitely fun. Check out the site www.appsbar.com

Thank you to Scott Hirsch of Appsbar.com and Joe McGurk/ Rubenstein PR for facilitating this interview which literally was done in 3 days.

Thanks to Chris Abraham & MarketingConversation.com too.

Stevie Wilson,
LA-Story.com

Your Brand Isn't Just A Logo

Marketers spend a lot of time coming up with a brand name, an it takes a lot of creative and logical thinking to draw a brand logo, but what does your brand really mean? What does it stand for?

The word “brand” doesn’t just pertain to your company logo, or your name, it stands for something else, something deeper than what we can perceive by just looking at the surface, something more valuable. Your brand is the whole personality of your company. It may only take you a couple of hours to come up with a catchy brand name and an eye-catching logo but building a brand is a continuous process.

Brad VanAuken answers the question “What Is A Brand?” :

A brand is a source of a promise to its customers. It promises relevant differentiated benefits. It does so not only to place itself into the purchase consideration set, but even more importantly, to be the brand chosen from that purchase consideration set. This is also sometimes referred to as the brand’s unique value proposition. Whether it is called a unique value proposition or a promise of relevant differentiated benefits, it is very important that the promise or proposition be delivered consistently at each point of customer contact, time after time.

I would like to view a “brand” as a person’s name. It isn’t just a word or a common noun – it is by name that we recognize each person’s identity, and personality. The person’s dignity and honor is all attached to his name, and this is also true in brands. As a person, we do not want to be remembered only by name, we do not want everyone to know our names and forget who we really are. We like people to remember who and what we are.

On that note, brands symbolizes not only the company but the people who are behind it, the quality of their product, the efficiency of their services and how committed they are to their customers.

And that being said, the most important is to nurture and build the brand by actions that are appropriate.

Social Media Expectations

Some brands and marketers utilize social media as part of their marketing strategies blindly. They don’t have a clear view on what part social media really should play in their strategies.

The issues raised by this carelessness can be solved by determining the expectations of social media from the customers.

Sally Falkow presents a list of what customers are expecting when they participate with your brand through social media in her “What Your Customers Expect in Social Media” :

What customers want and expect from a company organization:

A collaborative relationship

Marketing relevancy

Choice

Good value

Trust/piece of mind

Prompt dispute resolution (customers don’t care what department you are in)

Feeling of importance

Personalization

Transparency

Accountability

Consistent presence

Two way communication

To summarize the list, customers expect to connect to you, up close and personal, and look to build a relationship deeper than just a buyer-seller relationship.

These things should be taken into account if your brand is going to participate in social media. Of course the business itself should expect some things from utilizing social media to be able to address the future issues.

Brands should expect:

Huge amount of noise and clatter. You are letting everyone be connected to you, therefore you will hear people from all sides of the room.
Valuable insights. Brands should expect that there are lots of useful insights from loyal and customers that care about the brand.
Tons of haters. “You cannot please everybody” should be implanted in every marketer’s mind. Sometimes the popularity of one brand and effectiveness of the campaign can be measured from its haters. The more the haters you have the larger the audience you have reached.
Negative publicity and Destructive comments. Of course haters won’t just sit there and tell you they hate you. They will find ways to say they hate you that will resound over and over again or have a great impact on the campaign. Brands should learn to filter these and interpret them carefully to be converted into positivity.

“I Followed You On Twitter, Now You’re Fired!”

A social networking site is a place where we can hang out with friends, friends that are far away or friends that we don’t see everyday. These networks, like Facebook and Twitter reach to the corners of the earth, and can send your message to wherever they may be. This is one of the great things about social networking but this is also one reason why you should be careful while you are at it.

Facebook and Twitter let us connect with people who we want to talk to, especially in hard times. These are some of the places we can seek sympathy or a place where we can shout our deepest regrets, frustrations and other complaints. Twitter and Facebook sometimes become oceans of stress where employees or students and others swim after a long hard day.

You have so much freedom that you can even curse at your boss, call your professors names or just let your anger flow out into the web. But what if your boss or your professor saw your post? What if he is following you on twitter and even retweeted your tweet? That is where your story ends.

There are cases of employees being fired because of what we can call social media misuse. We may forget that however a thing was done, it was still done. We may be too confident using social networks and actually forget that there are people listening to what we say. Priya Ramesh relays a list of what we can implement as rules in using social media in the post “Ten Things to Include in Your Social Media Policy” on CRT/tanaka :

Be conversational, participate on social networks in a meaningful way and refrain from saying anything that might hurt your employer’s, customers’ and in some cases even competitors’ reputation.

Everything that you post online is visible by all. You do not have permission to share any information that compromises [Company X] policy, management positions and customer information.

Please refrain from posting items that could reflect negatively on the company’s reputation including comments or other posts about drug or alcohol abuse, profanity, off-color or sexual humor, and other inappropriate conduct.

Respect the law, including those laws governing defamation, discrimination, harassment, and copyright and fair use.

Don’t use the company logo, unless specifically authorized to do so.

Don’t reference staff, members, partners or vendors without their approval.

If you publish content to any website outside and it has something to do with work you do or subjects associated with [Company X], use a disclaimer such as this: “The views expressed here are my own and don’t necessarily represent my company’s positions, strategies, or opinions.”

Ensure that your social networking conduct is consistent with the all policies contained in the Employee Handbook/HR guidelines.

Make sure that your online activities do not interfere with your job performance.

If you see something that questions your company’s credibility or any customer complaints, alert your PR/social media/marketing team that’s responsible for responding back. DO NOT feel like you need to respond to negative comments online.

Just being professional inside and outside the company and being reminded that we shouldn’t let social media take away our human norms can help us prevent this kind of trouble. Also by remembering to respect our fellow humans be it in person or online we won’t lose anything.

Brand Is All We Need

The first thing people will encounter (and you hope that it stays with them) is your BRAND or brand name. Brands need to tell consumers something about you and they need to stand for something so that consumers can relate to them personally.

Having a good brand will give you an instant advertisement. Brad VanAuken states in his “Brands Must Stand For Something” :

People connect emotionally with brands that stand for things that are important to them. They become loyal to those brands and they become advocates for those brands. They also often use those brands as a way to say, “This is what I stand for.” That is, people use brands to express themselves.

Related articles