Coke, Starbucks and Subway are leading social brands (courtesy of Slashfood)
How do you create a social brand? Are there any differences between a traditional brand and a social brand?
In the age of social and digital media, traditional methods of branding are not enough. The process of building and implementing a brand needs to consider the unique characteristics of the social ecosystem.
You don’t have to be a mad scientist to benefit from experiments (courtesy of Cliparts.co)
Imagine that you’re an entrepreneur tasked to start a new business. Or perhaps launch a new product.
How would you go about doing it?
Social media marketing is probably the most heavily written management topic on the planet. Unfortunately, many books, articles, blogs and podcasts on social media focus too heavily on the “feel good” factor of success stories. These tend to be more inspirational than instructional.
Ric Dragon’s seminal publication Social Marketology is different. Providing a methodical framework covering strategy, organisation, execution and measurement, the book provides a step by step process to managing the social media marketing function.
A curator hard at work (source of image)
Curators. I should know them.
Guardians of museum collections, curators acquire artefacts and artworks, conduct research, publish articles or books, and mount exhibitions.
Courtesy of Helping Psychology
Influence. That’s a neat word.
According to Dictionary.com, influence is “the capacity or power of persons or things to be a compelling force on or produce effects on the actions, behavior, opinions, etc., of others”. In other words, its how effective you are in transforming others and eliciting change.
Perfume advertisements are guilty of over-exposing celebrities (courtesy of Charlotte Whiting)
Watching commercials on TV is a bit like watching the movie Groundhog Day (or more recently Source Code). The same scenes keep re-appearing, like a never ending case of déjà vu.
Ad after ad, common themes and tropes surface time and time again.
Achieving speed doesn’t just mean being fast (image source)
You’ve heard of the saying “more haste less speed”. Apparently, this is true not just in life but in management.
Ed Boswell, former CEO of the Forum Corporation, shares in this clip from Harvard Business Review (HBR) that the most efficient firms pay attention to speed, pace themselves well, and take care of the people factor. By doing so, they can achieve up to 52% higher profit and 40% higher sales than the rest.
Courtesy of Poverty Project Salt Lake City
In its simplest and most basic form, there are four things that we need to take note of when rolling out any marketing strategy. This can be represented by the acronym TART as a yummy mnemonic device.
Target Customers
Courtesy of Geek and Poke
In the field of strategy and planning, there are two age-old dilemmas which one commonly encounters in the process of doing one’s work, namely:
1) How much research should we conduct?
Courtesy of American Hell
This is going to sound hypocritical for a business blogger like me, but I am going to say it anyway.
It’s better to get something REAL done than to spend too much time reading my blog. Or, for that matter, the hundreds of other business, PR and marketing blogs offering an endless buffet of secrets, strategies, tips, theories and models.