Let me first clarify what I mean by branding as the term is used quite loosely these days as different people have different interpretation of what it means. I am referring to branding as the process of professionally creating a brand image and a message and then pushing that message out to the general public/target audience. Branding through all means of communications in print and online, in order to establish brand awareness which in the long run could result in brand loyalty and therefore advocacy.

When attempting to start a branding process, I recommend that you designate a single brand to develop and go at it full force. Decide whether you are going to establish your company, your product or your technology as the brand. I believe, when companies try to brand several assets at the same time the outcome is usually less than desirable. I have seen many companies and startups with limited budgets try to push and brand several assets at the same time and either none of the brands have been very successful or only one has caught on with the audience.

Companies with limited marketing spend should not establish multiple brands simultaneously for the following reasons:

First and foremost, startups and companies with smaller budgets simply do not have the financial means to support such a task. It takes a great amount of time and money to be able to achieve brand recognition through investing in different forms of branding and advertising. I believe companies are really lucky if they can achieve brand recognition for one brand let alone two or more.

Secondly, you have to keep in mind that in today’s business climate with so many different mediums at work, your audience does not have the capacity to relate and register too many brands.
The question comes up as to which one should be branded. Should companies try and create a brand out of their company, their product or technology and I have to say based on experience this is very case specific and there are many factors that need to be considered before that decision is made. I would love to hear from your experiences and stories.

I have been looking at companies’ websites for a number of years now. Recently I am noticing more and more companies are embracing social media marketing and integrating it into their websites. At my design firm we also get asked quiet often to include social media into the new websites that we are designing and developing.

Everyone approaches social media integration differently and in varying degrees. Some companies ask to just include their CEO’s blog on to the homepage of their site, some establish Facebook fan pages and a twitter account for their company. Their request is to have all of those included on to their pages. Giving your audience the means to tweet the content on their pages is a technique that is becoming more and more popular. Including a “Feedback” button and a “KissMetrics” (like the one I have on this site) is also good to have.

Now here is a company (Optaros) that I just came across today and I have to say, they are at the top of their game. Their site navigation includes a sub-navigation titled “Follow Us”. Once you click on it and drill down, they have dedicated an entire page to their social media. They have:

- Different blogs for different departments within the company (ecommerce, media, open source and the operator of the social media)
- An area to follow or subscribe to their blogs
- Company twitter account and of course a button for following the company itself
- Company Facebook fan page and a link to become a fan
- Company LinkedIn account and link to connect as well as check other employees on LinkedIn
- List of all employees and management and their related twitter accounts and means to follow them
- An area highlighting their latest tweets

At this point and time, I believe Optaros’ website is using and integrating social media at its best. I would love to hear from everyone if you have seen any websites that you feel they have embraced social media successfully as well.

As I am observing the job market, I notice that more and more companies are hiring marketing professionals to handle their social media marketing. It seems like companies are starting to feel the need to integrate social media marketing into their existing plans and what surprises me is the fact that companies are mostly hiring these individuals as contractors, interns or on a part-time basis. I fully disagree with this as I am a firm believer that companies must incorporate social media marketing into their plans and this is definitely a full-time job.

I relate the trend of hiring part-time individuals for the position of social media marketing to the fact that either companies still don’t fully believe in the concept itself or that they just want to take advantage of the transient workforce (summer interns that are going to be hitting the job market). I can confidently say that companies who are not fully getting on board with social media marketing are going to play catch up later on.

I have taken the time to consolidate several postings into an all-encompassing ad that could potentially be used by companies as the basis for their own ads when searching for a social media marketing professional. Here it is:

Looking for a Social Media Marketing Manager

We are: … (About your company and what you do)

We are looking for a social media marketing professional to assist with the day to day management of our social media marketing campaigns. The “right” candidate will understand the social marketing space and be able to identify and communicate social media opportunities across the organization. The social media marketing manager will be the lead in helping take the brand/marketing strategy and create maximum value through social marketing/media & consumer engagement. You will work to develop and execute the company’s social media strategies.

Qualifications:
• You are a connector and a social networker
• Have strong attention to detail
• Love to participate in communities and forums know the rules of the game
• Experienced in managing an online customer community is preferred
• Are an experienced blogger and have exceptional writing and communication skills
• Fast Typist (50+ WPM minimum)
• You are twitter savvy and are familiar with all related tools and services
• Know YouTube and are familiar with video production and different tools and means of video distribution
• Love Facebook and eat and breath it
• Follow social media closely and keep up with the latest news and tools
• Responsible and professional
• Must enjoy working in a fast-paced environment with clear deadlines
• Ability to follow instructions and willingness to accept responsibility
• Must be able to multi-task and be a team player
• Have a B.A. or B.S. in; Business, Marketing, English, Journalism or Communications

Responsibilities
• Focus on the creation, management, direction and execution of on-going social marketing campaigns
• Research, develop and manage company and industry related content for social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube
• Work with creative, marketing and support to create, manage and track social media utilities and word of mouth marketing campaigns
• Use social media platforms to both promote products and services and educate customers
• Coordinate all social media efforts across departments
• Track, respond, analyze and report on social media campaigns and program metrics
• Manage, lead and develop content for customer-facing educational webinars
• Regularly train and educate staff about how to best use social media
• Develop and manage online communities
• Keep up-to-date on social media trends and best practices to help enrich our user experience and marketing initiatives.
• Adding Friends, blogger outreach, commenting, bookmarking, monitoring the conversations and more are integral to the job
• Manage all Word of Mouth marketing platforms, encourage product reviews on designated review sites, and increase social media mentions, sign-ups, and refer-a-friend sign-ups
• Create Customer video testimonials
• Participate in Customer/User events

Being the huge soccer fan that I am, I have downloaded an iPhone app for the World Cup by the name “2010 FIFA World Cup”. This morning I was checking the lineup of my favorite teams and a notice pops up asking me permission to send “Push Notifications” from time to time and of course, I approved it.

I was still not sure what these push notifications were but as I started my journey through the internet this morning, I came across an interesting startup by the name, “Urban Airship” and they offer mobile publishers a set of services one of them being “Push Notifications”.

So I dig deeper and found out what these notifications are:
“With the iPhone 3.0 OS update that arrived in June 2009, Apple enabled the ability to send push notifications directly to devices that have your application installed on them even when those applications aren’t open. The notification itself can be any combination of three things; ~150 characters of text, a badge update and/or play a sound that is already included in your application. Delivery of the messages to the iPhone use the data network and not SMS thus keeping the cost of delivery low.”

Now these push notifications could be used for number of reasons such as “up-to-the minute news alerts, notifications for challenging your friends in real-time to an iPhone game, sports alerts, social networking updates or any kind of update or information you want to deliver to the device when the application is not open.”

I don’t know if you are thinking what I am thinking but wow, what a great way to push advertising to mobile users! As I am looking through Urban Airship’s website thinking of different ways that the feature could be used, I came across this piece of information directly from their site:

“What can’t I do with push? – Apple is very clear about the terms of service for the use of push notifications. Having the ability to send arbitrary messages to a device can be a potential point of misuse and so they have clarified accordingly:
“You may not use the APN for the purposes of advertising, product promotion, or direct marketing of any kind (e.g. up-selling, cross-selling, etc.), including, but not limited to, sending any messages to promote the use of Your Application or advertise the availability of new features or versions.”

I guess this is the point where I took off my “entrepreneurial” hat and felt that this was at least a great piece of information to share with everyone.

I know this is old news but I get questioned quite often by clients on which Content Management System (CMS) I recommend. I completely understand how tough of a choice this can be for companies. Depending on their specific needs, the answer to that question could be different. There are so many of them available but my pick is WordPress.

I can definitely hear a lot of you saying that Joomla is better or Drupal is the king but from my experience (and I admit that I am personally not that technically savvy) WordPress has been great to use. I did a little bit of research myself before using Wordpress and consulted with some of my developers. Based on my requirements and their suggestions I selected Wordpress. For our clients as well, Wordpress has been the friendliest and easiest to learn and work with.

Today, I was asked by a great client of mine to point him in the right direction in familiarizing himself with the ins and outs of WordPress and I thought why don’t I just share this with everyone? If you are looking for basic training or for even documentation on WordPress’ more advanced features, go to: http://codex.wordpress.org. I also recommend joining and participating in their forums at: http://wordpress.org/support

Since WordPress is an open source product, there are multitudes of very useful plug-ins that are available. This in itself makes it a very attractive product in my eyes. With the SEO and analytics plug-ins that are offered our clients have really enjoyed using it. Try it, its FREE, so why not?

By the way I would love to hear from everyone on any other CMS’ they recommend and the reason why and if they have encountered any problems with Wordpress that everyone should know about.

I work with a lot of startups helping them develop their information architecture for their website. Of course, there are multitudes of areas that need to be included within the homepage of the website. Areas such as the company’s brand identity, a means for navigating through the site (main navigation area), a means of communicating with the company such as a contact us button, email address or simply the company’s main phone number. The following are main areas that I recommend all startups include when developing their information architecture:

1- Your offering – It’s very interesting how a lot of startups or even established companies miss this. Keep in mind that you are a startup and as visitors arrive to your website, most of the time they won’t know what you do. What you do needs to be shouted loud and clear. It does not matter whether you are offering a service or a product, the audience has to be able to spot your message instantly and upon reading it, understand what you do automatically. Also, I recommend not being wordy and technical as your audiences, regardless of who they are, don’t have the time or patience to spend reading paragraphs upon paragraphs of your company overview.

2- Your audience – This is second most important area. Of course, as they arrive, they have to know that your product is for them. Sometimes the best approach would be to navigate your audience to the right information depending on who they are. This way you will be able to talk directly to your audience and you can talk to them about their specific needs and pain points. You can drive them into your website based on their specific markets/verticals (To see an example of this approach please go to: http://www.vindicia.com ) or based on their position within the company. For companies that are able up-sell their product/service to different departments within the same company, addressing the audience based on their position within the company is best. To see an example of this approach please go to: http://www.marketo.com

3- Your differentiation – I left this for last but for a good reason. This is the most important area for startups/companies to include. Try to play this up on your homepage. Ask your design agency to make sure this message stands out. In today’s market there are companies popping up every day and sooner or later you will find a company that will compete with you in one way or another. You need to stand out and you need to differentiate your company/product. Basically, differentiate or die. There are plenty of debates going on out there in regards to whether branding is a necessity for startups or they should spend their money on other things such as customer acquisition and the entrepreneurs/founders of startups are divided on this issue but I will make my position known:

Without going through the process of having your startup professionally branded, you are taking a large risk. First impressions are everything and whatever impression you make with your website as you launch the company is going to stay with your audience as your brand.
Looking at the three must-haves I have to say that most startups should be able to come up with these pretty easily. After all, these are the three elements of your brand message and I must assume that every startup has gone through the process of defining their brand message early on in the game.

Lately, every client we meet that is looking to revamp and redesign their website, references a recent website that we have worked on for a past client of ours. They either want to copy the site’s IA or the look and feel. In some cases they resort to mimicking certain elements from their website. This client, who will remain anonymous, has shown great success both as a company as well as in terms of their website.

Of course, I can understand how people could get attracted to success. Especially since this is a world where everyone idolizes others that are successful and similar to people, companies also get attracted to successful companies. And by companies I’m specifically referring to their websites, logos and all forms of brand communications.

We should keep in mind that these companies and their websites become successful because they leave the work in the hands of professionals and dare to be different. They are brave to try new things and accept innovative site architecture and design when it is proposed to them.

By just following other successful companies’ website IA and design, it will not render your company instantly successful. Every company’s need is different and when you work with a consultant or an agency, you hire them to come in evaluate and understand your specific needs. Once they are aligned with your goals, they will be the one to provide you with a solution. So please listen to them and let them do what they do best.

Otherwise, you could just go with an online template that looks “nice” and would not really need to hire experts to help you with the process.

Marketo, a revenue-focused marketing automation company redesigned and revamped their website. For the second time around Marketo’s website information architecture was developed in collaboration with Arman Arami and the site has been a hit. Please visit their website at: http://www.marketo.com

There are many different ways that you can differentiate your brand but one truth that will always hold is that you must differentiate your brand in order to become the default choice when the customer decides to make a purchase, or- the next best outcome- would be to make it onto the short list of possible choices.

Branding is an approach to differentiation.

By branding and building a positive and familiar image of your product/service offering, you have a much better chance of becoming the buyer’s choice among competitors.
Differentiating your brand could be achieved in many different formats but they are always in one of these forms:

1- Appealing design – We are visual creatures and pleasing and beautiful design is one way of differentiating your product in order for it to stand out.
2- Technical innovation – Bringing the latest technologically advanced product to the market definitely sets you apart from the competition.
3- Customer service and convenience – In terms of ordering the product and/or getting support. There is nothing that works towards a brand’s benefit than pleasant customer experience.
4- Superior performance - Everyone indulges in luxury once in a while. Whether it is to enjoy a little more performance, a little better taste or a little more luxurious material. The buyers definitely would expect to pay for superior performance in some way or fashion (to a certain extent) but they definitely will always remember the experience.
5- Reliability and durability – This factor alone sets products apart. In today’s world of unreliable and uncertain outcomes, product and services that deliver durability and extended life stand out from the rest.

If you examine all the different forms in which you can differentiate your product/service you will notice that every single one of them needs to be done internally by the company’s internal team except “Appealing design”. From technical innovation to customer service, these are issues which should be handled internally by the company’s internal team. The one exception is the brand design which usually is and should be handled by an external team. This fact shows us how important is the process of selecting a branding/creative design team. So if you want to be successful in differentiating your product or service, do everything you can internally to improve upon the product and the support behind it and most of all be very careful with the selection of your agency.

As I meet with various startups, it is becoming more and more apparent that when I ask them about the nature of their business and their offering, they can easily explain, in a few words, what they do. However, when they share their company’s messaging with me, it is wordy and overly complicated and sometimes so cliché that it entirely misses the mark.

Common issues related to company (startup) messaging:
- Simply, you can not understand what they do.
- It is so general that it could belong to anyone.
- It over promises so much that it is not even believable.
- It is just like everyone else’s in their market or a combination thereof, therefore there is no differentiation.

These issues relate to what I call, “Paralysis by Over-Analysis”. During the process of developing a company’s messaging, which is one of the initial steps in developing a brand, startups usually stumble and sometimes disappear and never come out. There are many factors that feed into this over-analysis and I like to touch up on a few.

1- Too many cooks in the kitchen
Sometimes, when a single individual does not want to take responsibility for the messaging, companies tend to involve a group to take on the task. They bring in marketing consultants, PR firms as well as the company’s entire executive team and of course at the end they run the final message by the board of directors. You can imagine what happens to the company message at the end of this process.

2- Too wordy
When companies start becoming too wordy with their messaging it becomes borderline meaningless. This reminds me of a couple skits on the show, “In Living Color” by Damon Wayans and David Allan Grier, by the name “Booked on Phonics” and “Up For Parole”.

3- Over-Analysis of the competition
The study and analysis of competition is definitely an essential step. But I have encountered situations where clients have studied the competitive landscape so much that their messaging has almost become ingrained in their head. Incidentally, when developing their own message they end up creating a mash-up consisting of competitor’s messaging as their own message. This definitely does not help in differentiating.

4- Caught up in the technology
Developing the company’s messaging internally sometimes runs the risk of getting too technical. This is especially true when technical founders of startups get involved. Of course it is only natural for anyone so close to the product to get highly technical but we have to keep in mind that the audience might not resonate with the outcome.

So here is my final word of advice, don’t involve too many parties, keep it simple and let your trusted marketing folks do what they do best.