As we say good-bye to 2011, we look forward to what’s to come in 2012 and gather a set of recomendations that could guarantee your brand growth in these dry times.

1) Incorporate Social Media to your company website.

Facebook pages or Twitter profiles are as important as reading reviews about your business as they are, in essence, word of mouth recommendations. Tap into the fun and let your customers learn about you and your profiles with ease.

2) Forget that awesome Adobe Flash Website.

In 2011, over 296 million smartphones where shipped globally. Next year, shipments could jump to over 630 million. You just might consider making your website available to all of these devices as well as for all those iPads, Tablets, etc.

Talk to your web team about HTML5 and CSS3 (Google it)

3) Be there.

Increase the personal support on Social networking sites. They have become an accepted outlet to share experiences and rants. Have a 1 on 1 conversation with your clients on your social media pages, respond their queries and comments… And respond to them fast.

4) Double check you Social media budget.

Social media has changed the world, it’s important that your marketing change at the same rate. Websites like, Facebook and Twitter, are such a large part of everyday life for so many people that it’s hard to picture life without this social connection.

It’s smart to take your advertising where the people actually are.

5) Increase your social media footprint

With the recent addition of Facebook’s Timeline, people can now look back through your Facebook “life” more visually and easily.

Yelp! profiles, Twitter, Flicker, Myspace, Linkedin, YouTube, etc. all increase your footprint. The more social media sites that are introduced, and you create an account for, will continue to increase your social media footprint and be more available to your prospects.

Happy New Year!

Seems that Twitter users are better educated than Facebook users, but users in both networks get an F when compared to users on LinkedIn.

Education distribution by social netwoking site platform

% of users on the following social networking sites with the following levels of education.
For intace, 12% of MySpace users have a bachelor’s degree.

Source: PEW Research center’s Internet & American Life Social Network Site survey conducted on landline and cell phone between October 20 – November 28 2010. Sample is 2,255 and margin of error is +/- 2.3%

What this means to you:

A bunch of stuff. For starters, if you are into professional services you should consider spending some time on Linkedin, or  use this data to consider the tone and type of content for your brand message when making social network strategies.

Everybody can have the same data, what makes a difference is the aaproach you use in the interpretation of that data.

Source: Pew Internet.

It’s true — commerce is the next major advancement in mobile technology. Through the use of ‘near field communications’ (NFC) chips, several companies are about to revolutionize the way we shop, replacing our wallets with our smartphones.

PayPal, the payments giant, predicts that the wallet will be dead by 2015. and It recently acquired a mobile payments provider for $240 million.

Similar moves have been made by Google and Visa on the verge of the what seems to be a wave of rummors reggarding mayor mobile manufacturers incorporating the NFC system to their next generation hardware.

Professional community service G+ decided to look deeper into mobile payment trends and created an infographic that tracks what experts and analysts believe will happen to mobile commerce in the next four years, including what will happen with near field communication (NFC). G+ also compared some of the current players in the mobile payment space.

Why should you care?

As technology moves forward,  identifying and understating this sort of “technical” trends will allow us to implement faster and better promotional strategies for our brands. We are living in a viral world and whoever taps first into consumer trends will by effect regard the biggest impact.

If it impacts your consumers lifestyle, it will impact your business”

Infographic courtesy of www.gplus.com

We found this article by Heidi Grant Halvorson for Harvard Business review and thought that it could translate perfectly to marketing to achieve better Brand Building habits.

Decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people reach their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do”

Here’s an excerpt.

1. Get specific.

When you set yourself a goal, try to be as specific as possible. “Lose 5 pounds” is a better goal than “lose some weight,” Knowing exactly what you want to achieve keeps you motivated until you get there.

2. Seize the moment to act on your goals.

Achieving your goal means grabbing hold of these opportunities before they slip through your fingers. To seize the moment, decide when and where you will take each action you want to take, in advance. Again, be as specific as possible (e.g., “If it’s Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, I’ll work out for 30 minutes before work.”) Studies show that this kind of planning will help your brain to detect and seize the opportunity when it arises, increasing your chances of success by roughly 300%.

3. Know exactly how far you have left to go.

Achieving any goal also requires honest and regular monitoring of your progress — if not by others, then by you yourself. If you don’t know how well you are doing, you can’t adjust your behavior or your strategies accordingly. Check your progress frequently — weekly, or even daily, depending on the goal.

4. Be a realistic optimist.

When you are setting a goal, by all means engage in lots of positive thinking about how likely you are to achieve it. Studies show that thinking things will come to you easily and effortlessly leaves you ill-prepared for the journey ahead, and significantly increases the odds of failure.

5. Focus on getting better, rather than being good.

Believing you have the ability to reach your goals is important, but so is believing you can get the ability. We focus on goals that are all about proving ourselves, rather than developing and acquiring new skills. People whose goals are about getting better, rather than being good, take difficulty in stride, and appreciate the journey as much as the destination.

6. Have grit.

Grit is a willingness to commit to long-term goals, and to persist in the face of difficulty. Effort, planning, persistence, and good strategies are what it really takes to succeed.

7. Build your willpower muscle.

Your self-control “muscle” is just like the other muscles in your body — when it doesn’t get much exercise, it becomes weaker over time. To build willpower, take on a challenge that requires you to do something you’d honestly rather not do

8. Don’t tempt fate.

No matter how strong your willpower muscle becomes, it’s important to always respect the fact that it is limited, and if you overtax it you will temporarily run out of steam.

9. Focus on what you will do, not what you won’t do.

Then plan how you will replace bad habits with good ones, rather than focusing only on the bad habits themselves.

The full article is here

An Influencer is somebody with a different thinking and a different way of expressing themselves ( it can be music, fashion, art, sports, technology experts, etc) they are the trendsetters, the ones on the a-list, the ones that, even if they are not celebrities, everyone ends up talking about them.

Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do” – Malcolm Gladwell

Bellow, you’ll find and excerpt of an interesting article from Mashable.com

Targeting the Right Influencers

It’s important for retailers and brands to focus on targeting small groups of online influencers who are experts in the niches they cover. Online influencers don’t care about news. They care about experiences — especially unique experiences that help them differentiate themselves from and to their audience.

Relevant influencers create signals. The “big fish” create noise.

For decades, advertising has trained marketers that noise equals success, which isn’t true. Getting the attention of influencers who have built authority with a target audience and have earned trust in communities relevant to specific businesses is what yields the best return.

Targeting relevant influencers drastically increases the “engagement hit rate.”

Instead of reaching out very generically with yet another media coverage request, you’ll be talking to someone genuinely interested in your issues, industry and products.

“Big fish are actually influenced by targeted voices”

They are much more likely to cover your story and get interested in your product after you gain “street cred” with relevant influencers.

In order to engage relevant influencers successfully, brands must:

1. Target relevant influencers based on expertise and desired outcome.
2. Talk to them inside their story, not the brand’s story.
3. Engage them early and build a relationship that outlasts the brand’s campaign.
4. Be honest and don’t just talk to people who already like your brand.
5. Give up control of the message and trust your influencers to tell the brand story through their words.

For the full article, click here :“How to Connect Your Brand to the Right Online Influencers”

Advertising is an exciting, visible business, and when another brand’s agency is making news, it can make their grass appear greener. Plus, it’s a business based on experience, confidence and trust. When trust breaks down, relationships end.

Whatever the reason for an agency switch, too many companies make their selection based on the wrong criteria. That causes heartache, inefficiency, and a significant amount of lost productivity”

10 guiding principles to consider when looking for an advertising agency

1. Don’t limit your search geographically.
2. Don’t screen out agencies based on size.
3. Don’t make industry experience a requirement.
4. Don’t ask for—or even entertain—speculative work.
5. Don’t let a spreadsheet make your decision.
6. Do determine what you need.
7. Do notice the advertising that you admire.
8. Do initiate a conversation.
9. Do invite the agency to your place to review a handful of case studies.
10. Do narrow your list to two or three agencies and spend time at their shop.

The full article can be found here

People are thinking less about “me” and more about what “we” can do together, whether for pure entertainment, for sharing resources or experiences or for addressing global issues”

We’ve seen this trend locally (Haitises, 4%) and internationally (oil spill, middle east) where people are organizing resources, sharing ideas and coordinating actions in their online and offline worlds.

This trend is the result of several factors:

a) The desire and ability to join communities based on similar interest.
b) The ease with which social media allows people to communicate, exchange ideas and organize
c) Generation’s Y desire to be more active and engaged in their world trough the realization that a collective problem needs collective driven solution.

Marketers should tap into this trend to create movement around their brands, they must consider their consumers’ online and offline worlds as one integrated whole and “genuinely” provide the tools for the realization of their collective interest.

Those brands will be also enabling a platform for consumers to show passion and engagement among their real-life social groups and ….for the product”

Once a brand successfully rides the Collective Consciousness wave, we’ll have the ability to connect emotionally and create loyalty with consumers that will go much deeper than weekend discounts or an ipod giveaway.

We’ve written more about some related arcticles here: (The viral video that could change the world) and here: (Got what it takes to be a leader?)

via YouTube – The Breakup – Subtítulos en Espanol.

This guys are posting kids reactions to some mayor viral videos.
On this episode:Golden Voice Homeless Man, Charlie Bit My Finger

On this episode: Double Rainbow, Obama Fail, Twin Rabbits, Snickers Halloween

As long as you say there is no hope, then there will be no hope, but if you go down and take a stance, then there will be hope.”

Asmaa Mahfouz recorded this video on January 18th, uploaded it to YouTube and shared it on Facebook. Within days, the video went viral and is credited to have inspired Egyptians to participate in the protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

The day prior to the recording of this video, four men burned themselves in front of the egyptian parliament in an act of “leadership” that inspired Mahfouz and made her “The first follower”. This is a clear example of the power of that first follower and the essence of the concept of “the movement”, where the movement itself is more important than the leaders.

Branding works the same way.

“Whoever says women shouldn’t go to the protests because they will get beaten, let him have some honor and manhood and come with me on January 25th, they don’t even have to go to Tahrir Square, just go anywhere and say it: that we are free human beings.”

By studying life, we understand people better and through that understanding we can communicate better. This dynamics are true to all types of relationships.