branding

UEFA Champions League final: What brands can learn from 'Barca'

I’m nervous, seriously nervous. In a few hours, in the Olympic stadium in Rome, FC Barcelona (or “Barca,” as its supporters call it) will face Manchester United, the other soccer superpower, in the game of all games, the final of the UEFA Champions League, the most important club competition in Europe (and the world, for that matter). Both teams have already won two trophies this season (their national leagues and national cups, respectively), and a victory in Rome would see either one clinch the “treble.” For Barca, it would be a historic accomplishment–no other Spanish soccer team has … Read more

Twitter chats and sponsored hashtags--how to do it right

By Kristina Loring

With the Twittersphere reaching critical mass, lots of companies are establishing accounts to speak directly with customers, monitor their brand, and respond to questions and rumors. Most of them are using the microblogging service to become more transparent and as a trustworthy resource for their followers, while also exposing a more personable aspect of their brand.

Here are some examples, researched by Brilliant Ink, a communications agency specializing in strategic messaging and content development:

- Ford used Twitter to host conversations and answer criticisms during the recent federal loan hearings in DC: http://twitter.com/scottmonty. Scott … Read more

Multimedia 2.0: From paid media to earned media to owned media and back

Marketers face three types of media as channels of interaction with their audiences: paid media, earned media, and owned media. We know that in today's hyper-relational, atomized micromarkets, paid media's effect is somewhat limited. The days of broadcasting one-way messages via mass media are gone. Traditional advertising is struggling to cut through the clutter in an economy in which attention is the scarcest resource. Most ads are ignored or perceived as spam.

Earned media, on the other hand, has the merit of third-party credibility, and it reaches people when they are opted in and value the information. Media … Read more

The 404 332: Where we're trapped in a glass case of emotion

After yesterday's downer show, we're back and cheerier than ever. Even Jeff is in good spirits after the New Jersey Devils got stomped all over their home ice. We discover today that Wal-Mart really does rock, and not in a good way.

The lesson of today's show is DO NOT BUY ELECTRONICS FROM WAL-MART, unless you're a rock collector, in which case you'll be thrilled, because apparently the company is literally selling Nintendo DS boxes filled with sediment.

We need to get THE BONCH, aka Bonnie Cha back on our show to talk about the Palm Pre. Actually, Palm is offering preproduction review units to Average Joes (and Josephines) in hopes of receiving "true life" feedback on the smartphone. Wilson seems to think that most consumers will frown on the smaller screen size, but we all have high hopes for the brand since this is definitely a last ditch effort in the smartphone market.

In exciting movie news, Jeff is superstoked to hear about a "Drop Dead Fred" remake starring Russel Brand, that quirky English dude that played the hippy beauhunk in "Forgetting Sarah Marshall." His brand of piratey humor should do well as a young girl's imaginary friend, right? Oh! We also reveal another popular movie sequel in the works, but you'll have to listen to the show to get the full scoop.

Finally, we touch on the bloated cost of higher education and how NYU students are getting questionable phone calls about their financial aid. Apparently NYU financial advisers are individually calling students receiving significant amounts of financial aid and questioning their decisions to accept the money and attend the university. If I were still in school and someone called me about this, I'd probably just tell them to put the check in the mail and stop telling me what to do all the time.

Today's CFTP is rather heartfelt. Thanks to everyone who called in, and we'd like to personally welcome James Christopher Maximus to the world! You were born today, dude! Hopefully you're reading this in the year 2021, when you're old enough to fully grasp our jokes. We love your dad for breeding future listeners of The 404!

Per usual, don't forget to check out our live VIDEOcast (man it feels good to write that) every morning at 11 a.m. ET. We have a ton of fun in the preshow and you get the inside scoop on how we prepare for the show. And please please please call and leave us a voicemail at 1-866-404-CNET (2638)!

EPISODE 332 Download today's podcast |  Subscribe in iTunes |  Subscribe in RSS… Read more

Marketing with meaning: How KLM activates dormant social networks

I wrote earlier that "marketing with meaning" has the ability to "activate" customers. An effective way to activate customers is by activating the dormant social networks they inhabit (often without even knowing it). While social networking has visualized the so-called six degrees of separation, all business transactions have a social component and can be seen as expressions of the underlying social micro-universes, the "worlds within worlds," in which--shifting time and place--individuals travel and interact. As marketers face the daunting challenge of connecting with fragmented audiences that are increasingly split into billions of social atoms … Read more

SXSW thoughts on Twitter's past, present, future

AUSTIN, Texas--Someone blogged that South by Southwest Interactive is just like the Internet itself: disjointed, decentralized, scattered, fast, aggressive, random, fragmented, and so on.

In fact, the main commonality between the two may be that the number of attributes to describe them is infinite. Like the Internet, the annual tech conference here is an echo chamber of an echo chamber, a place where original thought and commentary get mixed up and mashed up in a highly self-referential meta conversation.

That was already the case before Twitter entered the scene at SXSW two years ago, but the microblogging service has certainly amplified the effect. It was both comical and frightening to see the uber-individualistic geeksters at SXSW captivated by the invisible rules of an ostentatious behavioral uniformity: within 1 mile of the convention center, you could observe the strange ritual of groups of people standing or sitting together, chained to their iPhones, twittering instead of talking: "SXSW. Twittering about SXSW."

The real conversation was often limited to a quick "What's your name?" or "Where's the next party?" just to have some input for the next tweet. It is indeed a read-write generation that is coming of age in the wake of an all-dominant present, with no particular loyalty to the past and maybe not even an interest in the future (see Peggy Orenstein's recent piece on "Growing up on Facebook" in The New York Times Magazine).

Yet the rise of the social digerati is unstoppable. New data by Nielsen Online shows that social-networking sites (which encompass social networks and blogs, by Nielsen's definition) are experiencing growth rates of twice as much as any of the main destination sites (search, portals, PC software sites, and e-mail). The time spent on social networks and blogging sites is growing at more than three times the rate of overall Internet growth. Furthermore, social networks are gaining traction among new audiences. … Read more

14 Twitter directories to find new friends

Digg.com founder Kevin Rose is at it again with a Twitter directory called WeFollow. And although it's capturing much of the limelight right now, it's not the only service of its kind. In fact, there are quite a few sites that let you search for other users or see who the top users are on Twitter. While some are quite useful, you probably won't be surprised to find out that not all are created equal.

The standouts

TwitterCounter. TwitterCounter shows you your worldwide rank in terms of how many followers you have. The site includes a full list of the top 1,000 Twitterers, and regardless of whether you have 5 followers or 5,000, you can look up your own Twitter account to see how many people have added you in the past few days, how many you'll likely have in 30 days, and more. It's also a great spot to find folks you might not have known were on Twitter.

TwitterHolic. If you want all the functionality TwitterCounter provides, TwitterHolic probably isn't for you. Sure, you can search for yourself and others to see how many followers they have, and how many they've added over the past few months, but there isn't nearly as much in-depth data on the Twitter community at large. That said, it features the same list of 1,000 Twitter followers, and based on my testing it's just as accurate as TwitterCounter, which means follower counts are usually within 10 to 15 followers of the real figure. It's also a great place to find who the top Twitterers are.

WeFollow. It might be new, but WeFollow has already made an impression on the Twitter Community. The site groups together Twitter users and messages using hash tags--words that can be added to your Twitter messages and begin with an "#". Twitter users can update their stream with a tweet containing up to three hashtags they want to be included in and WeFollow adds their messages into the proper categories. The user list in each category is organized by the number of followers they have. I was generally impressed by the service and found that it's the best of the bunch, even though it's not as full-featured as I would have liked. But for directories, it's top-notch.

The rest

… Read more

Is your brand vulnerable?

Social media strategist Shannon Paul, who works with the NHL Detroit Red Wings, said many good things on a SXSW panel this Sunday, but the one thing that stuck with me most was her assertion that brands need to become more “human” in order to connect with their audiences. She wasn’t referring to personifying a brand through a human face (be it an average employee or a charismatic leader), but rather to exhibiting ‘branded’ behavior that is truly human. What does that mean? What is the most human trait of all human traits? Shannon Paul posits it’s vulnerability.… Read more

Skittles - the end of the homepage (as we know it)?

Branding (and all branding is online branding these days) is changing at a rapid pace. Gone are the days of message control, and the only way to still manage your brand is to not manage it.

Here’s the latest and very bold example: The masterfood brand Skittles launched something quite radical yesterday that many marketers had thought about but didn’t have the guts to actually do - the "Interweb." Yesterday Skittles' home page was reduced to a Skittles logo over-layed above a Twitter search for the word Skittles. Today it overlays their Facebook page.

This is … Read more