Tim Andren - At the corner of Innovation and Marketing Ideas

Stand for your brand. Endorse your business.

Can you imagine what it'd be like to have an agent call you up and offer you millions of dollars to simply push their product? ...wear their shoes? ...eat some fries?

What would it be like to be Tiger Woods or Beyonce for a day and have Nike or Pepsi on your caller ID? Picture someone asking you to smile for them - for a nice little check with a whole lot of zeroes on it.

Wake up! Your alarm is ringing! Don't hit the snooze button though. You're not going to fall back into your celebrity dream, but you can do something just as important and build major brand equity for your business by endorsing it.

Take the stand
When you commit to endorsing your business, you automatically become the face of your company. In essence, you're making a stand to personally vouch for whatever it is you're offering. Your endorsement is a powerful testimonial because you're putting your life on the line, or at least your reputation, which is just as important in business.

Testimonials are very potent marketing tools, because they help to reduce the amount of friction in the buying process. Testimonials fill the void that consumers feel when they are prompted to spend money and act as a bridge in humanizing a two-dimensional print ad or website. They put the soul back into your product or service that cannot be touched, felt or sensed otherwise.

Walk the walk. Talk the talk.
Brand endorsement means you must be walk and talk the attributes associated to your product or service. You begin to represent a guide that beckons your customer to 'Jump in! The water's great!' Your body language, words and actions shine a light on the safety and quality of their buying decision.

Be sure to proudly tell your audience just how great your service is while maintaining a sense of humility. Eat your product. Live it. Breathe it. Show your customer that your service is free of pain and you'll begin to embrace a relationship with them that your competitors are desperate for. Think about how difficult parting with your own money can be and acknowledge to them that your reputation is important. This will soften the process.

Earn their trust
The human mind naturally uses mimicry to learn and assimilate from others behavior and mirror neurons to empathize with their emotions. When you smile and stand for your brand, it resonates at a subconscious level to your audience.

A strong, valid testimonial is an endorsement that bridges many gaps for your customer. Step up and become the face for your company, you have the opportunity to earn brand equity gold - your customer's trust.

What can an endorsement do for your company brand?

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Put down the shotgun and build a bridge

Business owners should spend more time looking at what's on the horizon, instead of wondering who moved their cheese. The new media builders are coming and they know where the gold is.

•Your news, tomorrow.
Many old media business models are still alive today but are continuing to die a slow death. Lately we've begun to see some major cracks in their foundations due to the advent of the information age.

In case you haven't noticed, big media channels such as radio, television, print media, music and the film industry have all taken a major hit in the past decade from you and I - the mouseclickers.

Why would anybody be surprised that newspapers are dying when we have an easier, more efficient (not to mention more eco-friendly) alternative at our fingertips?

For example, if your brand is known for delivering the latest, relevant news and fails to embrace the internet, clinging to the hope that people will eventually go back to wanting their news tomorrow, is foolish. It's like the local bakery trying to sell solid loaves of bread, while the community is embracing the invention of the sandwich.

Each media industry is comprised of major money-making corporations, but they also used to be the distribution channels for virtually the entire advertising industry and their clients too.

The shift away from this model has been dramatic and swift -  we shouldn't be surprised to see it have a ripple effect on the economy overall. We are at a crossroads where the businesses who understand this change can harness an opportunity that can propel them into the new era, but it won't come from passive selection.

•Build a better gun?
Our new culture of open source business and shared information demands a lot more from the media channels that we choose. All of this came from a boom in consumer choice.

The shotgun approach used to be effective when crowds of customers congregated on specific media channels. Back when everyone had a few television channels or a handful of media streams at their disposal - business and marketing was a lot easier.

Our options were narrower, so we were limited to what each media channel could provide. Location mattered much more than it does today. The music or television industry and their advertisers would simply need to shotgun blast their marketing to the user base on a particular channel and business happened. Choices were easily trackable and measured to provide the necessary feedback.

As marketers found more efficiency, they realized that customers were becoming harder to track because they had more channels (and thus more choices) and so the 'targeted' approach ushered in. Marketers celebrated because they had built a better gun. This worked for a few little while, but it quickly became impossible to continue to improve the targeting relative to the increase in selection for the customer.

For once, technology favored the consumer because it gave them more control and left the advertisers scrambling. Agencies today have an unbelievable about of information about consumers, but their conversion rates are dropping. We can easily conclude that it's not about knowing every detail about your customer anymore. Why is this happening? The answer is that the laptop crowd is faster-moving and their interests too broad.

•Bridge the gap
Today we have an iPod generation of choice, people don't congregate in the same way because we have a smorgasbord on their laptop. Therefore, it stands to reason that a shotgun isn't gonna get you many ducks when they're spread out all over the horizon. Marketers are lucky to even find an audience, let alone one that will convert.

The new era is less about shotguns and more about tollbridges. The cloud computing and software-as-a-service model is all the rage because the open source, shared culture is growing out of the new Long Tail consumer.

Toll bridges are great snap-ons for social networks and the shared internet. All of these factors will effect how information and money is transferred...so yes, it will effect your business. It's now more important not to hit a specific target, so much as it is to build a platform as a utility that takes them where they want to go.

Put down the shotgun and build a bridge.

How has this change effected your business? Are you prepared for more change?

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Great marketing is the bees knees

I'm receiving more and more requests these days to assist my clients with implementing marketing right into their business models. I'm not surprised about this trend because so many aspects of commerce have changed in recent years that require this type of approach.

When a honey bee lands on a flower it is attracted to the offering of nectar which it will then turn into honey. The flower provides a free product, but it also has a marketing plan baked into the nectar acquisition process.

When honey bees gather the nectar, the flower's pollen sticks to their legs, which they will then distribute as they fly around from flower to flower. The completion of this process is essential to flower's life cycle and is a parallel to how marketing can work for your business.

Baking the marketing into your offering requires an extra time investment, however the potential dividends are great.

How can you make an offering that will incentivize your customer to tell your story or market to others?

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More on small talk

When I built the Definitive Guide to Twitter post I received some great responses about why people are choosing to use Twitter. In addition, I got a bit more insight on the subject of small talk.

A couple of replies clearly show that Twitter is being used by some as an outlet for those who want to participate in small talk, keep up with the latest news, et cetera. Twitter is a virtual water cooler.

When prompted with a question about why they are using Twitter:

@anjrued wrote "Working from home, I have no water cooler to congregate around. Twitter is that water cooler."

@ThePowerOfSmall wrote "It's a great way to engage in a little small talk with people all over the globe-- sort of like the world's largest water cooler!"

It doesn't surprise me that this facet of Twitter appeals to the solopreneur or work-at-home Mom's because they obviously don't have the same social opportunities in their independent work setting.

Whether we are aware of it or not, we humans seek out what we need and social media is a great example of isolated people getting connected.

The Definitive Guide to Twitter

Whether you love it or not, Twitter is the hottest thing on the web right now. This article will reveal some of the secrets to Twitter's immense popularity.

If you don't understand how Twitter works, why it's popular, or don't have the time to use it, the information here will help you wrap your arms around the enormous potential and buzz about the brand.

If you are currently a Twitter user, regardless of your level of experience, there's plenty of information to give you a deeper understanding of the platform with tons of links to add to your tool belt.

THE REASON
The original reason I sat down to write this article was to address the Twitter detractors. I wanted to guide the non-user and reveal to them that there's more to Twitter than meets the eye. I'd hear people say "I just don't get Twitter...", "I don't understand Twitter...", or "Why would I want to know what people are doing every minute?" and it occurred to me that on the surface that's all Twitter appears to be - a real-time, chatterbox, 'me too' application.

It didn't end there, I've also done quite a lot of consulting recently giving my clients advice on how to best use Twitter most effectively, and how to properly provide brand interaction with their customers. Much of what I have written here gives you a glimpse into those meetings.

WHAT IS TWITTER?
Twitter could be the greatest thing since sliced bread. Twitter could also be an insignificant trend and we may look back on it like an eighties fashion fad.

Will Twitter be all it's been hyped up to be? Nobody has the answers to this questions except Big Ben. What we do know is that Twitter is the straw that stirs the drink right now, so it's important to examine the reasons why everybody is talking Twitter.

In order to do this it's best to steer our focus away from the Twitter interface and the 'What are you doing?' entry point, and look at the user base itself. This is where the real power is.

DON'T BE FOOLED BY IT'S SIMPLICITY
Let's start by addressing the "Why would I want to know what people are doing every minute?" question. The answer is you don't have to. Twitter is a stream of information that you choose to dip your toes into when you feel like it. Pick and choose what you want to respond to and when.

Next, think of Twitter as a tool that allows you to listen in and learn about your subject of interest, to participate in conversation with fellow enthusiasts, or to broadcast your content to your friends/followers. Believe me, you can get just as much, if not more out of Twitter by being a listener than you can by producing content.

LET THEM SPEAK
For the sake of this post I used one of Twitter's many features and asked a group of my friends on Twitter to contribute their thoughts about why they use it.

My single favorite reply came from @leeodden:

"Networking, crowdsourcing, sharing, promoting, monitoring and ranting from just about anywhere, anytime."

Bulls eye. Lee understands how to use Twitter. In his reply he has touched on three core principles that make it all work. He uses Twitter as a platform to receive information that's important to him, interact with the community and broadcast his own media. His response is also alluding to the fact that he can do all of this from anywhere his computer or cellphone works. This is an example of someone who is harnessing Twitter's power.

THE POWER
There are so many incredible features that have been built around Twitter's information stream. I have chosen to highlight some of the best of the bunch:

•Twitter is your own personal army of worker bees

Contribute snippets of knowledge or link to an article, press release or blog entry and watch your friends help you promote it by ReTweeting your tweet for you. Be sure to show good manners and scratch their backs too.

Twitter is also a great platform to pose questions and get specific advice, or recommendations from the wealth of knowledge in your friends. Need a quick web fix or recommendation for a restaurant? You'll find all the answers you need on Twitter if you just ask. You can also use services such as Tweetbrain to facilitate your needs.

•Twitter is a chat room

Due to the easy access to topics of discussion with Twitter's hashtags feature, topic groups can form and dissolve in a matter minutes (as long as they are needed for surface-level discussion) or remain as static chat portals for less time-sensitive subjects.

•Twitter is a news source

Twitter is an incredible source for staying up to date on international, local or industry-specific news. The latest news is reported in a fraction of a second on Twitter. You'll have access to unfiltered opinions, relevant articles and links that won't hit Google for hours or even days.

Many people have turned off their RSS feed readers and strictly rely on their Twitter friends or groups to deliver the latest news, information or topics of interest specific to them. This saves a great deal of time as the search engine, crowdsourcing component of the platform continues to develop.

•Twitter is a search engine

Twitter has strong potential to behave as a search engine through crowdsourcing, helping you get the information you need.

•Twitter is a group of communities

There are a ton of communities growing in and around the Twitter user base. Communities range in size and breadth of topic from those focused on business and politics down to the micro-niche communities such as Work-at-Home-Moms, small business groups or hobby enthusiasts.

Communities matter in every aspect of life, and especially in business. You have an opportunity to join an existing community or create your own. This will enable you to participate in events, causes and charities that are important to you. [See Twibes or Tweetworks]

•Twitter is a network and sharing portal

Use Twitter to network and/or share information in your community, group or topic of interest. Make connections and watch business or relationships grow. Once you have established strong ties, you'll find that sharing information will only enhance business opportunities. Find people through Twitter's search engine or a Twibe or Tweetworks community.

•Twitter is a focus group

From the corporation down to the solopreneur, businesses of all size have the ability to listen in and use Twitter as a brand and market research tool. [See Trendrr or Twitscoop]

•Twitter is a customer service interface

Twitter is a great tool for customer relations on either side of business. As an owner, customer service or public relations representative, you can use the platform to receive inquiries from customers or clients, or keep people informed on the latest product offerings or updates.

As a customer you can stay in touch with the companies and brands that are important to you by providing feedback or filing a complaint. This will help all involved improve the level of service delivered and that can only be a good thing.

THE BUZZ

Can you imagine getting all of the above in one place? Twitter's hype makes a lot more sense now doesn't it?

Could Twitter be a Chat/RSS Reader/Social Network/Search Engine all rolled into one? It's looking like the multi-functionality, combined with a simple user interface is why it's so attractive to the Twitter community.

The Twitter bees are building the hive. No wonder there is so much buzz.

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Sign up for a Twitter account, sit back and watch what happens. If you feel up to it, write a few tweets and get involved. I'm betting that you'll get some followers. Feeling extra frisky? Jump into a quick chat and watch your relationships take off.

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Twitter and it's community will continue to evolve every day. Keep this article up to date with your contributions on major Twitter developments or services. We have no interest in staying on top of the millions of Twitter-related apps, just the significant ones. Contribute to this article in the comments section. You will receive credit and a link to your Twitter account or website.

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