50 Social Media Tactics For Non-Profits

For my friends in the non-profit sector – here’s a great load of ideas for you to consider when it comes to embarking on Social Media. Thanks to Chad Norman.

5 Tools That Measure Your Online Brand

You should know that brand management – whether personal or as an organization – now encompasses your presence online. So, here are five tools for you to measure your online brand via The Ladders.

10 Twitter Tools To Help You Track & Perform Better

Socialmouth shares 10 Twools to help you track and perform better on Twitter! Very, very helpful if you’re planning to do branding or marketing on Twitter (or any project that needs to look into some sort of ROI measurement on Twitter – or if you just like analytics!).

12 Breeds Of Clients

Here are 12 breeds of clients and how to work with them. Which one are you? Do you have any others to add to the list?

Seth Godin On Defining Brands

Seth Godin offers one of the best definitions of brands and brand values that I’ve come across to date:

A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.

A brand’s value is merely the sum total of how much extra people will pay, or how often they choose, the expectations, memories, stories and relationships of one brand over the alternatives.

Original post link here.

5 Steps To Developing A Client-Centred Business Model

Pam Slim, of Escape from Cubicle Nation fame, shares 5 steps on how she develops a game-changing client-centred natural business model. Great stuff – but, as they say, the devil’s in the details. Thanks for this, Pam – I’m taking a crack at it to see how this might work for me…

So how do you tie the needs of your market and their natural path together in a business model?

NY Times – The Year In Ideas

The New York Times Magazine releases their ninth annual Year In Ideas. Really great stuff to look back on – and for looking towards the future.

Here are some of my favourites from Business, Design and Technology categories (the interface doesn’t seem to allow linking to individual ideas. So, if you want to find them on the actual site, you can use the alphabetical browser-sorter interface. Ideas are sorted by the first letter of the idea titles, ignoring “the” – i.e. “A” for “The Advertisement That Watches You”):

5 Reasons Brands Die

Here are five reasons why your brand could die. Don’t be caught dead with them:

1. Arrogance
   Companies forget the fundamental truth about brands: that they belong to consumers, not brand managers. They forget what made brands useful to consumers. And, because of that, brands start to lose their coherence, which is fatal.
2. Greed
   Taking cost out of a product formulation sounds efficient but as often as not it’s the most effective way to starve a brand to death.
3. Complacency
   A company or brand builds a good reputation, sits back and rests on that reputation, and then wakes up one day to
   find out that faster, hungrier, more innovative competitors have passed them by.
4. Inconsistency
   Consumers increasingly expect the values of a brand to be reflected in every aspect of the business behind the brand. Brands can no longer be securely ring-fenced from their corporate owners.
5. Myopia
   The world is in a state of permanent change. Those who fail to understand the consequences of this for their brand put those brands at serious risk.

Thanks to The Chartered Institute of Marketing.

AIDA Doesn’t Work For B2Bs

Today, I was fortunate to have been able to carve out some time over lunch to read and think today (compared to rushing harriedly from meeting-to-meeting, to-do item to to-do item)… so, naturally in my geekiness, I was thinking about branding and marketing.

While sitting down to jot down some notes and put structure to my thoughts, I ended up on this very fascinating blog post (from last year!), “AIDA Doesn’t Work For B2B” by Lindsay Willot of The Marketing Practice.

Her essential premise is this that the AIDA (Awareness-Interest-Desire-Action) model of a customer’s path-to-purchase is based on an emotional aspect that is relevant in B2C industries, which is not suitable in a typical B2B decision making process that is based on rational justifications.

Instead, she offers an alternative model for B2Bs:

50 Totally Free Design Theory Lessons

While I am not a designer, anybody specialising in branding and marketing must certainly have a sense for “design”. Although I’m sure there are much worse things in life, it really is quite sad to see a great idea/concept expressed poorly. In fact, this phrase comes to mind, “Execution is strategy”.

So, here are the areas of design theory covered in this comprehensive listing of 50 totally free lessons, courtesy of www.psd.tutplus.com.

1. Typography
2. Grid Based Design
3. Color Theory
4. Design Theory
5. UI & Usability

Click here for the full list of 50 great lessons across the five topic areas.