I´ve just got started reading John Gerzema and Ed Lebar´s Brand Bubble. In their book they lay-out and explain a twenty-year trend that reveals scarry concerns in Brand markets. Over the years CEO´s, investors and venture capitalists have placed way too much value in intangible assets of Brands. According to them, organizations underestimate and overlook this trend, ignoring the huge gap between brand value in Wall Street and consumer value in real life. Brand value these days are out of proportion with actual earnings. While brand value in Wall Street grows, consumer perception about them tumbles. The answer: The Energized Differentiation.
This morning I got tipped of this article which lays out 5 PPC tools every ppc´er should use. Well, I´d say only 3 of them is actually useful. If you don´t wanna read the entire post, in short these tools are:
Adwords Editor: Free Google tool that allows you to upload and make large changes in keyword bulks.
Visual Thesaurus: It´s not free, but for only $2.95 a month you can get synonyms ideas for your keywords. Its grid helps you visualize keyword relevance.
Keyword Combiner: This tool helps you combine keywords and generate multiple key phrase combinations for your keyword campaigns.
To keep updated with Google´s latest tools visit Agency Tool Kit.
Since it´s another long holiday season in Spain, Semana Santa, I thought I would enjoy some free time and take some days off from work. Tomorrow I am on my way to the South, to visit Granada and the Pueblos Blancos. I will take the time to relax, enjoy the landscape and take long hikes to empty the mind and renew my thoughts.
I also can´t wait to spend some time reading. On this trip I am taking Hermann Hesse´s Siddhartha and Garcia Marquez´Vivir para Contarla. Queued up for when I return are two very interesting Marketing books: Guy Kawazaki´s Reality Check and John Gerzema´s Brand Bubble.
The largest Facebook page is Obama´s. The US president´s page has over 6 million fans. The second largest belongs to the world´s king of brands: Coca-Cola.
Coke has actually several pages in Facebook. A search in Facebook returns 500 hits for the world´s most known brand. The number one was set up by two brand enthousiasts, Michael Jedrzejewski and Dusty Sorg in 2008. By December their page had grown to 1.2 million fans, today it totals more 3 million.
Coke has about 200 user generated pages in Facebook. According to Michael Donnelly, Coca-Cola’s group director of worldwide interactive marketing, this page in particular has succeeded due to the right use of Coca-Cola´s brand image (there are over 200 coke pages in Facebook).
According to an article recently published by WARC, World Advertising Research Center, Coke has stepped up to establish a joint administration of the profile with its creators. This is to make sure the brand is communicated in accordance to the company´s guidelines, and to keep the user generated character of the page.
If you visit the page, you will be amazed with how users generate content, engage with the brand. They post comments, mostly about how much they love the soft-drink and which variations they like best, share links and upload videos and foto´s. They have an unstoppable conversation with and about Coke.
According to WARC, a succesful social media approach begins with “understand (ing) how customers discuss your brand in social networking spaces, and what you bring to the conversation.” Some advertisers fail to understand this, and see social media as just another channel to bombard customers with ads to promote sales.
As I have argueed before in this blog, direct convertion and sales should not be the goal in social media. Instead brands should aim at building long term relationships with their customers by creating a platform for them to engage in a conversation with the brand.
On the 25th of February the chica on the picture appeared in a nation-wide news show in the Spanish TV. She was asked what she would miss most if there was no internet. Her answer: “Atrapalo and its great holidays!”
We were so happy about what she said about us, we thought we would give her free trip, all inclusive to New York City.
So if you might know her whereabouts, drop us an email at buscamos@atrapalo.com or visit our official blog and help us find her.
