If you’re my brand: Never let me down. Keep on making me smile. Stay cool. Always surprise me. Change when you need to, but stay true to your heritage. Dress nice. Make sure I don’t have to hide our love. If you do something bad – stay honest and tell the truth cause I will forgive you. And finally! Never ever take me for granted.
Tokyo in sunrise – A Brand that didn’t let me down. Taken from my Instagram feed.
If you’ll stick to these simple guidelines – I’m prepared to spend the rest of my life with you and give you my all my love. If not – get lost!
Some of you might have followed my blog since way back while others followed me only a couple of days. So I decided it was time to dig into Google Analytics and gather my top 100 blog posts, based on traffic, (I have written 596 to this date) between the years 2005 and 2011 for you to read.
I did actually start my first blog back in 2002 but quickly stopped blogging. It was more of an installation experiment. Then in 2005 I slowly started posting again. Up until now I’ve had over a half a million pageviews and 367374 unique visitors dropping in.
Oh, by the way. If there’s anything you like – please Tweet it or put it on your FB page. It would make me happy.
The other day I wrote quite a long post on the future of integrated communication from a digital perspective. I stressed the fact that in order for your brand to create and maintain strongs brand in the future you’ve gotta provide people with true values not just fun stuff that entertains. On top of that I’ve also written a quite extensive post on how all your brands belong not to you, but to the consumer. You might wanna tap into that one too before reading this post. Here we go:
You’ve lost control of almost all of your sales process. Accept it and change or die. (Had to go punk style)
That actually happens to tactical communication as we know it when all rules are changed? What happens to ads, prints, point of sale, direct marketing etc?
Let’s me elaborate on that based on an old communication model called AIDA, Attention, Information, Desire and Acquire, first described in 1898 by E. St. Elmo Lewis. Some people say [click to continue…]
We’ve all heard it before. A brand is not a logo, nor is it your products or services. Your brand is the sum of peoples feelings when they think about your brand. Or said in a more ‘techy’ way – An emotional translation of what first comes to mind when neurons fire in the brains around the world when your brand, products or services is mentioned.
As people spend more and more of their life socializing online and searching for products and services your brand is naked, exposed and on it’s own. There are no sales people telling people about your product anymore, you’re left with seconds to raise interest before people leave you and most important – your brand no longer belongs to you, it belongs to all those people online who either say good things about you or worse, tell people that your brand suck!
Here are 5 things to think about when keeping your brand together in the future social world.
1. Brand presence not brand site
I’ve written about this and that before. But it’s something worth repeating. You should not – I repeat – you should [click to continue…]
In the offline world, if your customers didn’t find what they were looking for inside your store and left without shopping.
Would you:
a) Rethink the layout of your store today
b) Rethink the layout of your store next year
c) Rethink the layout of your store within the next three years
I am pretty darn proud to announce that I’ve been picked as a member on the jury of the first international social media award show for communication and marketing professionals. The award show called The Bees Award will be held in San Francisco on November 9 later this year and it’s open for submissions as of today.
The Bees Award have gathered some of the leading social media experts from around the world to judge this award and I’m honored to be included in that list. Apart from the honor it’s also a great opportunity for me to scan some of the best case studies in the world when it comes to social media. I’m sure once the 9th of november has passed I’ll be packed with inspiration to share with you guys.
This new buzzing contest will award winners in the following categories:
Best 140 Characters (SMS, Tweet)
Best Use of a Micro-Blogging Platform
Best Use of a Social Media Platform
Best Use of mobile
Best Relationship With Bloggers
Best Conversation with Customers
Best Use of Alternative Tool(s)
Best Use of Media Press Room
Best Writing
Best Art Direction
Best Social CRM
Best Student Work
Best Innovation
Best Campaign
Agency of the Year
Client of the Year
And besides me, here’s the jury and their twitter accounts and blogs:
There are no secret formulas, no secret recipes or magic potions when it comes to social media marketing. All you’ve gotta do is take in one single fact: People have moved lots of their behaviors online and you’ve gotta follow.
To succeed in moving your business, communication and advertising into the digital world, ask yourselves the following questions:
If people search for things related to my business via Google - how can I make sure they find me?
We’ve used to organize events in the real world -where can we organize events in the digital world?
When people started to use phones you gave your sales people phones - why are you not giving them Skype, MSN, Twitter, Facebook and live streaming accounts?
You would never automate a personal relation that could lead to sales - why are you automatic every single sales process online?
People don’t listen to brands, they listen to other people -how can we make sure other people say good things about us?
Since people tend to spend their time alone behind the screen -how can we continue to build human digital relations using video, photos and copy?
In the real world you do PR towards paid media – how can you shift your PR activities to be picked up by earned media online?
Traditionally you’ve spent lots of money on media -how can you shift focus to spending lots of money on value that leads to eyeballs online?
In the offline world you would value how people navigate in your store -how much do you value how people navigate in your online world?
Building a great house requires an well paid architect – why then are you hiring the cheapest architect when building a great online presence?
In the old world comparing products was hard - does your products stand the future transparency were everything can be compared?
Back then you could create a 3 year marketing plan – what can you do to turn it into a 3 month marketing plan?
Focus groups used to lead you right -is your organization prepared to listen to real time data instead?
Building brands took years and years -how can you build your brand in months?
Competitors introduced themselves at the next fair - are you prepared for the ones who wont introduce themselves at all and don’t care about the old way of doing business, only your old customers?
You used to write business plans - how can you get moving and learn on the way.
If you’ve got 15 right answers then you’re fine. If not – start running!
Apple, Nike, adidas, Google and so on. It’s always easy to point the wow pointer to these huge brands that have massive amounts of brand fans world wide. But sometimes you’ve just gotta remind people about why these brands often are leading the pack.
I have just gotten of stage in Tallin, Estonia after speaking on the future communication landscape. Right now I’m in a sofa listening to James Matthewson who seconds ago quoted Simon Pestridge from Nike and I just have to share that quote cause it’s what it’s all about:
Nike’s point of view on advertising: “We don’t do advertising any more. We just do cool stuff…It sounds a bit wanky, but that’s just the way it is. Advertising is all about achieving awareness, and we no longer need awareness. We need to become part of people’s lives and digital allows us to do that”
Simon Pestridge – Nike UK
And boy do they deliver on that promise. Here’s just one of thousands of projects they do every year to make people join their brand.
Do great stuff and people will follow you. That goes for products, services, support, communication and advertising. It’s a simple as that!
Last summer I got on a train leaving Stockholm for Gothenburg. Together with freelancing project manager, planner and colleague Caroline Karlström I had a meeting set up with diving brand Poseidon. This was the start of a project where I truly had the opportunity to work with all aspects of branding and creative communication. A [...]
Right now I’m trying to find the time to finalize a couple of posts hidden among my drafts. However I’ve got a quite tight schedule right now with 4 exiting speaking appearances (and another 4 closed ones) where I’ll be speaking about future communication, social media, branding and creativity the coming 2 weeks. So, if [...]
Think social media and conversational marketing might be the next train to heaven for your brand but don’t know where to board? Well, here’s three social media marketing models that will make sure you’ll find your station. If you wanna get moving into the social country of love where conversation rules you’ve gotta get one [...]
I’ve always wanted to write a book. This is NOT it! So far this year my blog have had more than 115 000 unique visitors and just over 240 000 visits. I’ve written more than 500 blog posts covering everything from design, gadgets, trends, technology, advertising, innovations, personal things, branding and more. About 28% of [...]
This blog is written by Johan Ronnestam. He's widely regarded as one of Sweden’s leading speakers and authorities in the field of modern creative and conceptual thinking and skill of innovating brands and their communication. The readers of Microsoft Indikat has named Johan Swedens most influential authority within digital communication
