The power of “the trust”!

That was the class I would never forget. To say that presentations were cool, awesome or brilliant would be too trivial. The biggest treasure is that all teams were concern about humanity of their brands not about monetization. We know that skepticism will be meeting all our brand promises when we will get out of GSB. But we have very powerful respond emphasized by Kartik, Jose and Yu-Han. Our respond is “the trust”. And there is nothing else to argue here, right?

PS I was curious to find this story about Ben Goldhirsh and his Good Magazine.
http://www.bnet.com/2422-13721_23-168499.html

Presentations, Farewell Takeaways

A fantastic set of presentations today ranging from videos to monologues to a vocal appearance from Herr Claudio Seidler.

From the DMarie presentation especially, there was a continuing reiteration of the power of passion, love, and social impact. Whether its a service or a consumer product, people feel good when they are part of something bigger and effective brands (and marketing) tell the social mission that brands have (in DMarie’s case, creating makeup that improves self-esteem).

A final set of takeaways, before we all begin our own adventures in the ‘real’ brand world:

• Simple frameworks. Big results. Never forget the tried and true image-identity gap analysis, especially at the starter to a broader conversation with the owner of a brand.
• Got Marketing? Many companies have tiny marketing departments, with substantial overlap in responsibilities for senior management, who may share these duties. There’s tremendous value delineating these responsibilities explicitly.
• Telling stories. Perhaps the most obvious statement of all: Powerful storytelling and design has significant power to redefine a brand. And yet, it’s important to realize that customers will associate you with where you’ve been, so that brand changes can be difficult (for example, Distilled).
• Employees. Customers. Both groups are important stakeholders which need to buy into the brand and its vision. The former is often neglected and yet they are brand ambassadors, who can provide significant leverage to a marketing platform.
• And finally, the iceberg. The power of brand is in the bottom of the iceberg, where a brand can subtly promote itself, rather than simply in the top where the brand directly imagines itself. Great things come from the bottom (of the iceberg).

Signing off …

Hammer, glad we were able to help…

Saw Hammer again at TWTRCON SF yesterday, where he was again talking about leveraging social media to build his personal brand. But in addition to Twitter, he is using associations (with fine institutions such as Stanford) to build his personal brand. He tweeted this Tracy Press article out to his followers a few days ago: http://is.gd/Jd8J. He was referencing his time with us before he even came.

A few quotes:

• “Now, Hammer (born Stanley Burrell), speaks on behalf of social media in front of Intel, Harvard and Stanford.”
• “In February, Hammer spoke to the Harvard Business School about social media. In March, he addressed the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab about using technology to promote music. On May 17, he’ll talk at Stanford University about branding.”

Hammer, glad we were able to help.

TWTRCON SF 09 – The Stickiest Takeaway

Be it a testament to the world’s belief in Twitter’s necessity or the world’s absolute confusion with Twitter’s product, TWTRCON SF 09 was packed today as “the first conference entirely focused on Twitter as a business platform: how to use Twitter to reach and engage customers, influence opinions and activate markets.” Unable to attend the conference, I still wanted to learn about Twitter – to appease my own curiosity and also to improve my presentation for class tomorrow morning =). Luckily, the live and thorough newsfeed (provided by who else but Twitter) helped me to easily track the conference events and insights online.

The participant tweets focused primarily around the old news of Twitter’s opportunity to partner with Google, the thoughts that it is too early to develop a robust revenue model, the suggestions to add more features, and the risk of Twitter losing its brand and turning into a “distributed ecosystem.”

Even though the conference was supposed to show businesses how to use Twitter for customer engagement, the stickiest takeaway for me (and also for many, as this quote has been forwarded all over Twitter) was a tweet from @TripAustin that defined Twitter’s edge in the social media space:

MySpace is for people you don’t want to know. Facebook is for people you used to know. Twitter is for people you want to know.
(http://twitter.com/TripAustin/status/1985641175)

Typically, Twitter’s “following/followers” device has been perceived as a detterent for everyday users who feel too much pressure to constantly tweet or too little confidence to believe they could have a great following. @TripAustin’s description could really help Twitter welcome and retain more users. It’s a great example of (a) differentiating Twitter and (b) appealing to the masses. He turns Twitter’s definition around by saying: There’s another smart way to use Twitter. You don’t have to become a broadcaster. Use Twitter to meet the people you want to know right now.