40 of the Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them
http://mashable.com/2009/01/21/best-twitter-brands/

"Smart brands use Twitter in meaningful ways, and most of them use their brand name as a way to make sure customers can find and recognize them. This piece, and the knowledge I learned from the incessant hours invested, demonstrate why brands do belong on Twitter. No other medium gets you inside a business or brand quiet like Twitter."

A good overview of what's effective on Twitter, and how some brands are managing to have authentic conversations with the community.

We all know brands are using Twitter — whether or not you want them around. Some of them don’t quite get the medium and just tweet self-serving links or marketing speak, but you won’t find any of those brands here. We’ve handpicked 40 of the best brands experimenting with the micro-blogging platform, and asked them a few short questions about how they’re using Twitter.

Some really good examples

from Mashable

As we battle a global recession, corporations are looking for new ways to sell their products and engage their consumers. Many have turned to the Internet, with Social Media in particular, to market their goods. Let’s take a look at 10 companies that have done a phenomenal job of taking advantage of social media platforms.

Business Resource

Personal Branding 102: How to Communicate & Maintain Your Brand Personal Branding PersonalBranding brand brandbrand

Personal Branding 102

Put on your personal PR hat and start to promote your materials. Before you go crazy with self-promotion, realize that the most successful people are able and trained to promote the work of others as well. Here are some proven personal PR tactics:

Listen Better. Innovate Faster.A powerful, web-based application that tracks social media and finds signals in the noise to help your team build better products and stronger customer relationships.

Could you define yourself with only 5 brands?

Last fall, Facebook launched a major site redesign that primarily impacted the profile page, home page, and application developers. With the redesign, the Facebook profile page changed from a “box-oriented” design to a “Wall and tabs” design to make sharing more prominent and viral. Now, Facebook is preparing advertisers and brand managers for a similar redesign to its Pages product for businesses that could launch as soon as sometime in the next few weeks.

Redesigned Pages for Businesses

Suggestions on whether to use Group or Pages as well as discussion of posted policies for comments therein.

KONGEARTIKKEL!

"Losing control is a primary reason stated by brands who are unwilling to open themselves up to the conversation - and a major reason why most continue to use social media as little more than a brochure on the web. And yet the illusion of control is just that – an illusion." (Via @bentforkz)

Fin mikroguide til hvordan man skal agere som brand i sociale medier.

1. Know your audience -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Too many people are sharing information to the wrong audiences. Your manager doesn’t want to know if you just went to the bathroom and, although your parents would love to eavesdrop on your relationship with your girlfriend or boyfriend, you might not want to share those details. Since our lives are starting to converge more and more every day, you need to decide what audiences you want to connect with on Facebook. 2. Decide on your branding strategy 3. Set your privacy settings 4. Fill out your profile completely 5. Import contacts and grow your network 6. Update your status 7. Start a group or a page 8. Join or start an event in your area 9. Link out to your Facebook profile 10. Feed your social networks

With its recent redesign and a slew of new features, Facebook has been moving to make Pages a focal point of the site. Personally, I recently described these changes as “the business model that moves [the company] from a successful social network to a highly profitable business.

With its recent redesign and a slew of new features, Facebook has been moving to make Pages a focal point of the site. Personally, I recently described these

"Do you want the people visiting this site to notice it?"

Great example of what sort of site a client would need.

De eerste vraag die een designer aan een klant moet stellen is, volgens Seth, "Wil je dat je site opvalt?" En dat is, hoe vreemd het ook klinkt een goede vraag die verschillend beantwoord kan worden.

Not for nothing, but I've been saying this for years.

About your personal brand.

Five easy and initial steps you can take to start building your brand today. These will help you control your online identity, protect your future, centralize your digital assets, safeguard your brand from threats and more.

With a bad economy, more pressure at work and overwhelming competition, investing in yourself and your future is crucial. There are a lot of new trends and tricks that you can take advantage of now. Below are five easy and initial steps you can take to start building your brand today. These will help you control your online identity, protect your future, centralize your digital assets, safeguard your brand from threats and more. Tell us how you’ve taken control of your personal brand in the comments below.

Earlier this week, we posed the question “Where has the old Facebook gone?” to address the frustrating experience that many users are having with the latest homepage design. The post attracted tons of feedback, most of which agreed with the sentiment that the new homepage is less personal, less informative, and less attractive to application users and developers.

YOU might not love the new Facebook, but brands should ~via @mashable http://bit.ly/gQdt [from http://twitter.com/sbeckham/statuses/1355500301]

brands should love new facebook

Earlier this week, we posed the question “Where has the old Facebook gone?” to address the frustrating experience that many users are having with the latest

Users aside though, there is one audience that appears to be benefitting greatly from Facebook’s new design: brands. Not only are Facebook Pages – the network’s competitive play against celebrity Twitter (Twitter reviews) users – revamped and more social, but their updates are taking up space on member’s homepages, and in turn, as our data shows, driving lots of traffic and engagement for brands.

Keeping up with online conversations can be a daunting task. As a freelance consultant, I not only need to keep up with what people are saying about me and my company, but I also need to monitor the latest industry trends to learn new skills and stay relevant. While wearing my blogging hat, I also have to keep up with conversations that would be interesting to web workers for this blog, or relevant for people building online communities for my own blog.

social media measurement, monitoring

branding web design tips

Premium goods, on the other hand, are expensive variants of commodity goods.

An important concept to hold onto in marketing--is your deliverable psychologically or intrinsically more valuable than the competition's?

Cool article on luxury vs premium. Doesn't reference Microsoft's recent ad campaigns indicating that apple is a luxury brand, but its definitely interesting with those ads in mind.

The first place to buy and sell twitter names or exchange them for things

Buy and sell twitter names

Complete Brand Marketing on Facebook | Involver - http://involver.com/pages/index.html

"Complete Brand Marketing on Facebook"

Trying to figure out the best way to brand yourself or establish your company’s brand identity on social media sites?

Twitter

Reputations are created and destroyed online in the speed of 140 characters. Seven tools to earn you a thumbs-up.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- As Twitter moves into the business mainstream -- nearing some 35 million unique global visitors, according to ComScore -- it's increasingly clear that one community has yet to fully embrace the social-networking tool du jour: agencies. The irony is that the same people clients hire to erect communications and social-media strategies often appear uncomfortable using Twitter themselves. One stark example: A couple of months back, Volvo struck a landmark ad-placement deal with YouTube to promote the Twitter feed for its XC60 model (@VolvoXC60). But the agency that created the innovative rich-media ad for Volvo, Havas' Euro RSCG, has an account (@Euro_RSCG) that's never been used.

Agencies are struggling to get their heads around Twitter

The irony is that the same people clients hire to erect communications and social-media strategies often appear uncomfortable using Twitter themselves. SO TRUE

Learning Twitter? Don't Take Your Cue From These Ad Agencies - Agency News - Advertising Age

y's brand, but don't hit people over the head with a litany of press releases. Be human. Attach a personality -- a name, a photo -- to your Twitter feed and balance promoting your brand with some personal updates so followers can get a sense of your company culture. Remember, Twitter is public! A client probably won't appreciate your tweeting "Ouch, got a nasty hangover" when you're late to the meeting. Keep clients looped. Be sure to share your agency's Twitter strategy with your clients. Get permission if you want to mention one by name, and don't forget that a lot of your work is proprietary. Don't let a careless misstep to cost you the relationship. Listen. Know what people are saying about you on Twitter. Use search.twitter.com or an application such as TweetDeck to monitor the chatter. Respond. The point of being on Twitter is to engage wi

Over-promotion is a big problem on Twitter. At the same time, an agency's Twitter feed should share relevant information -- not only press releases -- so the balance can be hard to find.

wow

great article on mashable.com

Great article on luxury consumers and social media.

Attività sui media sociali con marchi di lusso

The Barack Obama Strategy

What big brands do the best job with social media? A new study by analyst Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group and Wetpaint ...

What big brands do the best job with social media? A new study by analyst Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group and Wetpaint ranks the top 100 brands by social media engagement. You can find the report embedded below or on ENGAGEMENTdb, which was presumably created with Wetpaint’s site-creation software.

Ranks the top 100 brands by social media engagement - claims level is tied to revenue growth (correlation does not mean causation?)

A new study by analyst Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group and Wetpaint ranks the top 100 brands by social media engagement. Contains report

Want to know not just what companies are doing on the social web but how well they're doing it? We have brought you just the tool to measure and monitor brand engagement: for the first time ever, ENGAGEMENTdb ranks the world's most valuable brands based on how they leverage social media to interact with customers.

World's first report ranking the top brands' use of and engagment with social media tools.

Social media database showing customer engagement by brand.

interesting chart might have more info

A comprehensive guide to help you build your personal brand on LinkedIn.

Dan Schwabel/mashable

Saw this in a tweet the other day, subsequently brought it up in a conversation last night. Coca-cola is alien good.

An interesting historical look at the branding for competing brands - coke and pepsi.

Seth Godin sums up the sentiment that when it comes to the brand you work for, the buck always stops with you...even if the true responsibility for your brand's shortcomings arise from a different team/divison/location/etc.

Advice for both employees and employers

buildabrand.com is an online branding system that allows entrepreneurs, businesses and individuals to create, manage and apply instant and personalised branding to their business.

Great examples of logo design

"A Logo is a graphical element that, together with its logotype (a uniquely set and arranged typeface) form a trademark or commercial brand. "

Here are three new strategies for building, promoting, and expanding your personal brand using Facebook.

Includes tips to make fan pages interesting

Just as it is for big corporations, successful branding is essential to the success of a freelancing business and to just one self-employed web worker. It is

This is a fantastic read for any freelancer - Brand yourself

* 1 Oct The Art of Branding Yourself and Your Freelancing Business

reasons why companies are scared of social media

Logolicious

-

60 verschillende logo sites.. waar de meest opvallende logo's verzameld worden!

When you boil it down it’s about listening to your customers, being helpful by offering your knowledge and giving them interesting content to share and thereby advocate for you.

Social media isn’t complicated. When you boil it down it’s about listening to your customers, being helpful by offering your knowledge and giving them interesting content to share and thereby advocate for you. The IMS speakers shared several case studies (yes, too many of them mentioned Comcast and Zappos) on how organizations have embraced social media to connect with and built trust and affection among customers. None of the examples required hyper-specialized knowledge or technology for a company to connect with people.

Companies that can't talk about anything other than their products, or don't respond to their customers online are hurting their social-media efforts, Amy Mengel writes. Companies also need to make sure that their internal processes are in line with the technology and that the company culture is cut out for social media

“It’s not rocket surgery.” That malapropism became a bit of a mantra at last week’s Inbound Marketing Summit. Social media isn’t complicated. When you boil it down it’s about listening to your custo

One of the ultimate excuses for not measuring impact of Marketing campaigns is: “Oh, that’s just a branding campaign.” Admit it, you’ve heard it. I suspect you’ve even used it liberally!! : ) Before we go any further I must clarify that I love branding campaigns just as much as the next guy. I love campaigns that Visa runs. I love watching the IBM ads (with the Linux kid perhaps the best of the lot). I loved the I’m a PC ads from Microsoft (and I am a proud PC!). I loved the Wario Land: Shake It ad from Nintendo on YouTube (now that’s creative!). I love a good billboard ad, Budweiser does good ones. My absolute favorite branding campaign of all time: Think Different.

One of the ultimate excuses for not measuring impact of Marketing campaigns is: "Oh, that's just a branding campaign." Admit it, you've heard it. I suspect you've even used it liberally!! : ) Before we go any further I must clarify that I love bra

Brand Measurement: Analytics & Metrics for Branding Campaigns

Brand = User Experience: The Interface of a Cheeseburger

50 Most mentioned brands on twitter

TweetedBrands - The most mentioned brands on Twitter

50 Most mentioned brands on twitter.

A guide on how to create a custom look to your youtube page.

Use for Capstone

Excellent tools for using youtube properly

reaosns, news etc

By http://bit.ly/Tweets2Delicious

Digital marketing company Razorfish has just launched its third annual FEED survey of 1,000 "connected consumers." The survey is focused on online consumer behavior. This year Facebook and ...

40% of People "Friend" Brands on Facebook

[Follow for the deals/discounts... instread of a love for them. Is that really so surprising?] This year Facebook and Twitter feature prominently. 40% of respondents "friended" brands on Facebook, while 25% reported following brands on Twitter. What's more, Razorfish found that consumers access brands on Twitter and Facebook mainly for deals and promotions.

Good points, but you don't need to tell designers.

"What a logo does not have to be or do" http://j.mp/14WuMy

Marketers may be adopting social media in droves, but are consumers reciprocating by following or becoming a fan of companies and brands on social media sites?

A study published today by eMarketer, more than half of social networking users have become a fan or follower of a brand online. Moreover, users are far more likely to say something positive about a brand than something negative.

Types of audits, pricing

fashion retail

About 5 months ago Alison Driscoll Comments 9 Fantastic Facebook Pages for Fashion 146Share email share facebook logoAlison Driscoll is an interactive copywriter and social media consultant who specializes in Facebook. She authors a blog at alisondriscoll.com. The Internet has revolutionized the fashion world, making trends more accessible and affordable for everyone, and expanding where and when we can shop. Social media has taken fashion a step further, encouraging discourse on designers and providing real-time feedback on the looks that work, and the ones that don’t. Facebook (Facebook)’s extensive list of features lets users comment on, post and share their favorite outfits and accessories with just a few clicks, anytime, from virtually anywhere. This social network has proved itself to be popular with savvy social shoppers for its fashion-forward Facebook Pages; here are 9 that use photos, apps and fan discussions for maximum impact. For Deals 1. Rue La La Rue La La is one

tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog: Eight Lessons Learned as a Brand on Twitter

@geekygirldawn came across this article, 8 Lessons Learned as a Brand on Twitter, thought it'd be of interest 2 u http://is.gd/plLo [from http://twitter.com/eighteyes/statuses/1465882491]

Article describing how a brand has used Twitter for business.

Back in January, we set up the official Blogger account on Twitter. We had a general idea of what we hoped to accomplish - better interaction with passionate users, quick communication of known issues, bug fixes, etc. - but this was not a long planned deliberate move by us. If anything, it was a bit of an experiment.

akes monitoring Twitter much easier. This was a particularly acute problem for Blogger, since "blogger" is a pretty generic term. Setting up a persistent query for "blogger" yielded far too many hits per minute to be worthwhile... weeding through all of them to find the few that were specifically about big-B

significations des logos

Simple steps to ensure the initiative doesn't lose focus.

The 20 Best Logos from 2009

100 brands of interest

This article is the sequel to 100 brands of interest, published on the dacheboard on December 4, 2008. After the last article and the feedback received, it was clear that another article of this nature was in order so, here it is! Over the past few months, I have been compiling another 100 brands of interest and have been very lucky to have such a selection to choose from. The standard really is very high.

众多知名设计公司

The Most Relevant Identity Work of the Decade - Brand New - http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/the_most_relevant_identity_work_of_the_decade.php

O Brand New fez um apanhado das identidades visuais/logos mais importantes e relevantes da década. Aquelas que realmente fizeram diferença no mercado mundial, aquelas que mexeram com a cabeça dos designers e dos consumidores.

Brand New: Opinions on corporate and brand identity work. A division of UnderConsideration.

170+ Excellent Fresh Logos

Great logo examples

Programing the social web around a brand requires a consistent flow of engaging social objects. Here's why smart social content should be a major priority.

Revolution teamed up with i-level's social media agency Jam to reveal the 100 most mentioned brands on Twitter and how they are aiming to capitalise on the buzz. Brand Mentions Followers Twitter 1 Starbucks 3.37m 120,868 @Starbucks 2 Google 1.01m 307,342 @Google 3 BBC 703,000 15.777 @bbcnews 4 Apple 512,110 None 5 AIG 455,000 None 6 Amazon 245,760 1007 @amazon 7 Microsoft 221,000 None 8 Guardian 211,000 14,913 @guardiannews 9 Dell 185,000 287,575 10 Coca-Cola 135,600 None 11 Ford 130,000 2,256 @ford 12 Sony PlayStation 117,550 20,651 @SonyPlayStation 13 eBay 107,000 1329 @ebayUK 14 Sony 107,000 None 15 Disney 106,000 7,354 @wdwnews 16 Yahoo! 94,500 9,541 @yahoo 17 Sky 74,370 10,248 @SkyNews 18 IKEA 72,300 None 19 IBM 70,400 1,180 @ibmevents 20 Nokia 68,100 None 21 Ford Scott Monty 62,600 16,562 @scottmonty 22 Guinness 59,700 None 23 HP 56,720 1,682 @hpnews 24 ComCast 50,400 14,688 @comcastcares 25 Skittles 48,600 None 26 Canon 48,200 605 @canon 27 McDonald's 45,340 234 @MON

Las 100 marcas más mencionadas en Twitter

Companies who don’t have iconic brands with millions of adoring fans, often have to resort to other ways to get the attention of the market. This isn’t evil, nor is it uncommon, it’s just business, and was here before the web, and will be afterwards. Don’t get mad or emotional about it, let’s break it down to understand how it’s going to work, if you’re a concerned user, use this post to figure out how to beat it. If you’re a marketer, figure out what works –and throw away what doesn’t.

Whether it's getting instant responses or meeting people in real life via tweetup, some Twitter tips are not to be forgotten.

http://bit.ly/331kzj 8 Twitter Networking Tips: From Online to In-the-Flesh [from http://twitter.com/sahana2802/statuses/1249450959]

Brands today have the incredible opportunity of interacting with consumers on the #1 social network in the world – Facebook – and creating relationships with them that are long lasting, personal and relevant.

How 5 Brands Are Mastering the Game of Foursquare http://bit.ly/cnOgxy

We’ve already written about Foursquare’s savvy relationships with major media and entertainment brands and even talked about how it’s changing the world as we know it. In this post, we’ll delve deeper into the big brands and businesses that are experimenting with the platform and finding success with location-sharing.

apple4us.com张亮+ganmabook.com飞猪

RT @KOttavio: 10 Dos and Don’ts for Brands on Twitter from @mashable: http://bit.ly/aBZBEI

This could apply to libraries & other organizations too.

In short: be professional, use grammar, be content oriented, don't get too personal, engage users who say positive things about your brand, make it a conversation

corporate Twitter how-to

By helping each other we can make more informed buying decisions, influence business behavior and, with enough of us involved, make the world a better place - one brand at a time. Social media with a motive and it makes every1 an activist with a small "a". We believe in action – we're what we do

Sito dove le persone possono dare un rating al "karma" dei brand in ambito: planet, customers, employees, suppliers, investors

Brandkarma’s mission – ‘to help everyone make better brand choices and influence brand behavior for good’. Make the world better, one brand at a time.

let the collective speak out and make a difference. stand up and speak out!

With 450 million users globally (and millions more being added each week) Facebook is dominating the web in unparalleled ways. Yet, even as the social network has steadily grown over its short but remarkable history, many brands have remained on the sidelines of the social media revolution. Facebook was the most visited site on the web for the week ending on March 13, 2010, surpassing even Google in week-long stats for the first time in history, according to Hitwise. The shift in user habits and audience targeting is palpable and it provides marketers, brand managers, issue advocates, and political campaigns today with an age old choice: Adapt and change or face irrelevance and extinction.

"Change happens. To survive it, you must anticipate it; and to be successful, you must embrace it." - http://krz.ch/vx1E – Lars Neumann (lupmac) http://twitter.com/lupmac/statuses/12171530699

Barbican Identity Guides

Flickr set of Barbican print identity guidlines

a set on Flickr

done by north studio uk

Brand Identity - Logo Design

It's exactly what it sounds like.

good stuff

social media management/measurement

A starting place for those that are looking for how to measure social media

looks relatively understandable

good stats about users talking about brands on Twitter and Facebook

at least once a week, 33% of active Twitter users share opinions about companies or products, while 32% make recommendations and 30% ask for them. Connectés à la marque, ces taux augmentent.

TWITTER IS A GOLDMINE (STILL UNTAPPED!)

Coupons remain a leading driver of brand interactions in social networks

“Those who still think that social network users are too busy engaging with friends to notice marketers must change their viewpoint,” said Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report “Brand Interactions on Social Networks.” “Brand interactions are real, valuable and growing. “ According to a February 2010 survey by Chadwick Martin Bailey, a market research firm, 33% of Facebook users have become fans of brands on the network.

The Social Media Style Guide: 8 Steps to Creating a Brand Persona

The Social Media Style Guide: 8 Steps to Creating a Brand Persona http://ow.ly/238zf – weknowmore.org (weknowmore) http://twitter.com/weknowmore/statuses/17027325488

Brian Solis ----> Anyone who has ever worked in corporate marketing, advertising, and branding is more than familiar with a brand style guide. It’s how we ensured that the brand was represented as intended through marketing aesthetics and messaging – including detailed usage instructions on font, style, color, language, placement, positioning, etc. It is our bible and adherence to its tenets and instructions is strictly enforced. However, with the unstructured proliferation of social media within many organizations, the brand style guide is seemingly disregarded or not considered in favor of expediting the creation of profiles in social networks and the participatory engagement that immediately ensues.

Smashing magazine on the evolution and future of the logo in a post-brand era. Very interesting. http://ow.ly/280jL – Simon Mainwaring (simonmainwaring) http://twitter.com/simonmainwaring/statuses/17971112135

Although it covers the history of logo development, the final paragraphs cover the future of brands and branding

Logo design has been a controversial subject in the design press lately. One branding professional recently claimed that logo design is not that hard to do and another said that logos are dead; some rebutted while others concurred. Why all the fuss?

Social Media Identity Management

Social Media Identity Management

Social Media Identity Management

Social Media Identity Management

Social Media Identity Management