Today when you market a product and actually manage to make an impact the first thing that happens is that people go online, not to your brand site but to Google.

Have you Googlified your brand and business?

A search on your product or service reveals everything there is to be found related to that brand of yours. You might think they’ll head over to one of your campaign sites but think again. People who search for your brand online have already gotten past the attention phase. They want information that is not tampered with by that marketing department of yours. Since the web is constructed of links and those links usually don’t give a shit about advertising you can be sure your potential customer will go for user-generated content first.

Google ›› Search ›› Results ›› Bam ›› What will they find?

If you’re one of the lucky few who actually do create kick-ass products – Then you can be sure they will find good stuff about your brand. But most brands out there don’t since they’ve spent the last 50 years getting used to cutting costs and advertising their way into the mind of the consumer. Well, not any more.

The Nielsen Company bring some clarity to who people trust

User reviews and recommendations like Yahoo Answers, comparison sites like Pricerunner, crowdsourced customer support like Getsatisfaction, Social buying like Blippy, forums, online experts on About.com, Facebook content, blogs, fan or hate sites, tweets, wikis, professional bloggers, video sites, photo communities like Flickr, online newspapers and even books via Google books. All of these provide an alternative and often more credible point of view of your products. Even more important – they all show up in that Google search result and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Media companies no longer filter information. You and your friends do!

Once your potential customer has learned everything there is to know about your product the competitors are only a click away if your products aren’t up to the right standards.

So what does transparency mean for your brand and business?

1. Develop every product and service with a potential comparison in mind.
2. Good is not enough. Your product has to be the best
3. Move your media money from bought media to earned media in order to grow an online presence that creates true value for your customers.
4. Don’t create websites. Create web presence.
5. Don’t advertise things your products can’t live up to. Potential customers will be disappointed when they find out. If it’s bad they’ll even spread the news.
6. Everything communicates (as I’ve said before)
7. Don’t just look for potential threats on your local market. The web is global and your competitors will be too.
8. All that content generated by others can be your friend. Find it and learn about your strengths and weak spots.
9. Treat your digital fans like any offline VIP customer – give them stuff before other people get it and make sure they can share it.
10. When sustainability becomes key greenwashing is not an alternative.
11. Constantly innovate your products to beat your competitors to the finish line.
12. Constantly surprise people and they will love you for it.
13. You can’t hide bad news from people.
14. Don’t take credit for things you didn’t do. Praise people who’ve inspired your brand.
15. Finally stop creating complex products and services. Take Clay Shirky’s word for it.

Word!

Candy brand Skittles have produced some kick ass TVC’s (Skittles leak being one of my favorites) through out the years and now they’re innovating the use of social media within fast moving consumer goods.

This blog post started in my head after seeing this discussion below between two of the bloggers I’m following. David Armano from Logic+Emotion and Jackie Huba with Church of the Customer Blog. They’re talking about Skittles and how they changed turned their entire website into a Twitter search for the keyword skittles. Jackie doesn’t like it, David does.

Skittles is of course not the first FMCG brand to do cool things online. Altoids has been rockin’ the web with cool content since about 2001. Jackie Huba mentions Jelly Belly and their content heavy site. The thing though with strategies like this is that you’re not taking advantage of the social crowd out there. Instead you’re constantly paying to pull traffic to your own site instead of placing yourselves where the customers are on their terms.

What’s really cool with all this to me is not the fact that Skittles is using Twitter but instead the little widget they’ve created that goes on top of whatever they want.

So, instead of building they’re on site or even mashup, they’ve created the ultimate mashup – a Skittles widget that navigates you directly to the respective channels online – Youtube for video, Twitter for chat, Facebook for friends, Flickr for photos and ultimately Wikipedia for product info.

This case is a simple yet cool explanation what you can do online today. I’m speaking quite often about the power of distributing your content outside of your own domains and this is a good example of it.

Sum up. Experimentation has to be a part of your communication. Sitting at home waiting for the ultimate strategy won’t work cause the net is ever changing!

Aloha!

Yesterday Janis Krums found himself on a ferry outside New York witnessing the Airbus that made an emergency landing in the Hudson River. Only seconds later his first Tweet appeared on Twitter with a link to TwitPic and his now world famous photo of people leaving the plane.

Later during the day pictures started to appear on Flickr and the story keept on evolving on Now Public, a crowd sourcing newspaper online.

We’re living in a real time world were NOW is what it’s all about. Technology and social media are the enablers and YOU provide the information.

Found through Techcrunch.

My first Polaroid with Poladroid

If you’re looking to have more than 300000 download a little application of yours. What do you do? Easy. You create a desktop application that allows people to drop their Jpegs onto a little Polaroid camera hovering on your desktop. Then you let people, just like in the old days, wait for the actual photo to be developed. Once ready its a 400dpi “polaroid” photo that can be printed or uploaded automatically to your Flickr account.

Paul Ladroid (can it really be this good) is the man behind this simple yet genius idea.

And the stats are impressive. In just 4 weeks the site have had 390000 unique visitors, more than 340000 downloads of the software (and it’s only available so far for Mac) and 250000 incoming links.

This is exactly what creativity is all about. Something old + Something new = Innovation + Success.

Right now we’re rebuilding Foreign.se, the website of the digital communication company that I was a part in founding more than 6 years ago.

While it’s down we’ve placed all our work on Flickr. Thought it was a nice opportunity to send my blogreaders that way too. So, head over there to see a selection of what I’ve worked with through out the years at Foreign.