At Brandsplat, we’re all for anybody becoming the next online multi-media maven. The great thing about today’s landscape of digital media is that anyone can launch his or her own blogs and newsfeeds. With the right amount of promotion and gumption, these little blogs can become widely read and forwarded brand names in online media. So it struck us as odd when Glenn Beck, he of the ridiculously high rated Fox show and of the recent rally in Washington D.C., announced with his usual red-faced fanfare that he was launching a website a la The Huffington Post to serve as “news and opinion” (and by opinion he means his opinion) called The Blaze.

Beck, agree with him or not, is trying to establish himself as a brand name in conservative journalism — and he has the flock of sheep to prove that he’s capable of doing so. Our issue here is not with his politics but with the utterly whack name of his new website. To prove how uninspired a name The Blaze actually is, we’ve collected a few other, longer-established websites and media outlets from the Interweb that were called The Blaze first.

The Blaze, as it turns out, is a super popular moniker for radio stations. Country, alternative, hip-hop and classic rock stations all seem to favor the name. Poor Beck’s fans might be in for a surprise if they accidentally visit the wrong Blaze and wind up listening to the latest hit by T- Pain. From Tyler, Texas, to Chico, Calif., we dug up at least four radio stations dubbed “The Blaze.” Strange that Beck’s marketing folks didn’t catch this, especially seeing as he was discovered on morning radio. The biggest chuckle in the bunch definitely comes from down under, where The Blaze is a popular gay and lesbian news website. Visitors to this Blaze are greeted with a distinctly un-Red State view of a man’s behind in black underwear. And it doesn’t end there. We found a head shop, a strip club, a barbershop quartet newsletter (?) and we fondly remember it as the name of the school newspaper on the original 90210 run by that pesky Andrea Zuckerman.

We’re certainly not in the business of politics here at Brandsplat, but the lesson from The Blaze is a good one everyone, regardless of his or her field. Choosing our website and brand names is an important move that needs to be mulled over with careful consideration. Beck omitting his own name in the title somewhere in the website is a big mistake. Beck is a brand name already and leaving it out of the equation is a definite fumble. It is important to have consistent branding and thoughtful company names, especially in the era of mass Google confusion.

Now you tell us: What website names fail to hit the right marks? Blaze up our comments section below!

I recently attended the OMMA Video (#ommavideo) event at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Los Angeles. A lot of our customers ask us about viral video, so I hope this post sheds some light on the subject. The panel “The Art of Being Discovered: Is Viral Video a Strategy” was moderated by Bob Heyman, (Managing Director, The Digital Engagement Group) and included the following panelists: Andrew Budkofsky (SVP Sales and Partnerships, Break Media), Benjamin Carlson (Chief Strategy Officer, Bradley and Montgomery), Gregory Markel (Founder/President of Infuse Creative), Matt Martelli (CEO/Creative Director, Mad Media) and Bret Wilson (Co-Founder/CEO of TubeMogul). Here are some of the talking points I walked away with that I found interesting:

• The best techniques for driving “virality” starts with content. But it doesn’t end there. Then you have to promote your video via SEO, social media (Twitter, Facebook, Myspace etc.), social bookmarking sites (Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon etc) and  getting bloggers to review and talk about your video.  Oh, and it can’t hurt to launch a full PR campaign to get a reaction from appropriate media outlets that are relevant to your audience.

• Getting a video to go viral is getting harder and harder because there is currently a glut of video out there and it’s harder to stand out. Video is following the same trajectory as banner ads; at first everyone clicked on them and thought they were novel. But today, people pay less and less attention to them. The idea of going into a teen chat room and asking them to check out your video and expecting a response is kind of creepy and pretty much over.

• Want to spread your video effectively? Consider hiring a Weblebrity (a web celebrity that has a following of a million plus fans). Pay them to review your video. Or, even better yet, have them make a video in response to your video. This practice is becoming popular among viral video marketers and weblebrities seem more than willing to participate.

But at the end of the day, it still comes down to the quality of your content and being relevant to your audience. As one of the panelist said, “sites want good content. They’re going to start banning people who flood them with crap.” Woudn’t that be nice.  If you couldn’tt make the OMMA video event, you can see highlights at the MediaPost Raw >> OMMA Video .

Social media is just one of many new media outlets that brands have at their disposal to communicate to loyal customers and new prospect. Trying to figure out how to get your brand in front of the right customers may be a daunting task considering the plethora of media channels available to marketers. Between traditional media like print, radio and television and new media like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube, choosing the right outlets for a brand can be massive undertaking. According to a recent survey, more marketers and brand managers are considered creating their own content and delivering it directly to their target market. The survey, conducted by custom media guru King Fish Media , was completed by 230 respondents who were either in corporate management or marketing/sales management. Among the respondents, a whopping 86% said their company was planning to create original content for their customers/prospects. The survey suggests that digital media strategies are becoming attractive to advertisers and marketers because they offer a more affordable solution than traditional media outlets do.  According to the survey,

“Structural and cultural changes are leading companies and brands increasingly toward original content in the form of their own media channels and in custom media and social media networks. These company-owned and managed media channels give them direct interactive access to customers and prospects, allowing for more measurable return on investment.”

This growing trend has produced brand engagement on a scale never seen before. Sites like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook offer brands and customers a back-and-forth type of opportunity to communicate. This can have a real effect on customer loyalty and the bottom line. More and more brands are opting to use these new media outlets because they offer a two-way conversation rather than the old one-way conversation more traditional media offers. To download a copy of the King Fish Media 2009 Survey on Marketing, Media and Measurement, click here .

New and exciting things are popping up everywhere at TechCrunch50 One of the coolest is The Whuffie Bank. According to the company,

“The Whuffie Bank is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building a new currency based on reputation that could be redeemed for real and virtual products and services. The higher your reputation, the wealthier you are.”

Pretty simple idea. Currently supported by Twitter, the The Whuffie Bank  plans to offer access via Facebook, FriendFeed, Digg and any other reputation driven online tool. So how does it work? You’re encouraged to communicate via your social media many times a day. But make sure your tweets are relevant, because your peers can thumbs up you or send your Whuffie Bank account into the red. To build up your account, build a good online reputation. Here is how your Whuffie worth is calculated by a fancy algorithm that:

“1.  Detects Public Endorsements — Each time a message you put on Twitter gets retweeted or a Facebook post gets liked by others, that’s considered a positive endorsement for you.

2. Measures Level of Influence — A person that’s constantly retweeting others will be spreading the impact of his influence among many people. On the other side, if a person retweets a message once in a while, that will have a bigger impact.

3. Considers Existing Reputation of Members — Being endorsed by a Whuffie-rich person will have a stronger impact than being endorsed by an average user.

4. Analyzes Content of Messages — A message with a link that gets retweeted usually it’s because of the content in a website rather than the person sharing it in the first place. So when someone gets retweeted for something they exclusively said, that will have a bigger impact on the algorithm.

What’s really cool is that they actually plan on printing (or minting) real Whuffie currency that you can use around the world. I want a Whuffie! I promise I will use it only for good. So how do these guys make money? Well, for now they are a self-proclaimed non-profit.  How fresh! Maybe one day the greenback will be replaced by the Whuffie and we will all get along. But then will the Whuffie become the root of all evil just like other currencies? Let’s hope not. To start building your Whuffie empire, check out the The Whuffie Bank homepage.

A new report conducted by Q Interactive suggests that women who are active in social media are turned off by brands and influencers who use the medium to push products/services to them. A report which will be released at ad:tech Chicago today suggests that 75% of 1000 women who were surveyed said they were not influenced by social media when it comes to making a purchase. While social media and micro-bloggin accounts for fewer purchase decisions, the same may not be true for women who are influenced to purchase by blogs. According to a study conducted in May of this year by BlogHer, women are more likely to purchase as a result of a recommendation or customer experience posted on a blog (%85) than on social media (%37). This comes as no surprise as women use blogs more for a source of information and to get recommendations on what to buy whereas they use social networking more as a way to keep in touch with friends and family. But as social media technology becomes more widely accepted, we may see a trend where the lines between social media and blogging start to blur. For now, however, it’s clear that women utilize the mediums for different purposes. For those women who understand and successfully use the mediums as a platform to develop a fan base, they can gain momentum in their power of influence in a salient way. For an interesting look at how some top women bloggers fare by using social media as part of their platform, check out this interesting report released by PR agency Access Communications and twitter analytics company Twitalyzer which suggests that while it may be difficult to achieve “influencer” status in the social media sphere, those who do can solidify their influencer status and create a measureable impact.

It’s late Sunday night at the time of this writing and I just came across a press release announcing The Future of Influence Summit by futurist and entrepreneur Ross Dawson.  If I set my alarm clock for sunrise, I can probably get to the airport in time to grab a flight up to San Francisco for the event, which sounds like an interesting one. According to the press release a new trend of “influencers” comprised of self-made influentials like bloggers, social media gurus and individuals are taking the power away from more traditional influencers like advertising agencies, newspapers and corporations. The shift away from “group influencers” to “individual influencers” is really giving advertising and marketing agencies heartburn as they scramble to figure out how to understand this new trend. In the pre-Internets era, people got their information about brands from traditional advertising like print, outdoor billboards and television commercials. The more a television commercial or print ad ran in the days of old, the more likely a person was to buy the product or service from that brand. Fast-forward to the Internets of the present. The media landscape has been fragmented into a million digital outlets, which is causing traditional advertising to lose its heavy-weight status. Media planners at advertising agencies now have to look at social media, PPC, banner, online video, rich media, email marketing, viral marketing, SEO, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and on and on and on. Couple that with the fact that now anyone with an authentic voice can build up a community of “fans” and influence if you buy a product or service and you’ve got some huge learnins to do if you’re a media planner in a traditional ad agency. Many times these “influencers” get huge audiences  because they carry with them the reputation of being an authentic, reliable voice. Take a recent blog entry where I wrote about Dave Carrol an irate United Airlines passenger who allegedly had his precious guitar broken by the airline. Instead of relying on customer service or filing a complaint with United,  Mr. Carrol took matters into his own hands by expressing himself in his own way; he wrote a song about the experience and released it on YouTube. The result was over 5 million viewers of his music video. Advertising agencies are still salivating trying to dissect and replicate the success. The point is that one individual can have a huge impact on a brand if the voice is deemed authentic. Long gone are the days that we take a corporations word for it when they tell us how great their products or services are. The individual is now the centerpiece of the show and advertisers better take notice. For more information on the program for Monday, check out The Future of Influence Summit Agenda

Don’t expect people to come knocking down your door just because you have a website. The bottom line is you must have products and/or services people are interested in first and foremost. No duh, right? Let’s say you know there is a demand for what you’re offering and you are ready to attract traffic to your site. This is where Brandcasting comes in. Think of Brandcasting like casting a bag of seeds across a vast field (the Internet). Each seed that is cast will need to be nourished and watered in order to grow tall enough to have a presence. But once a presence is established, you will see many iterations of your brand sprouting up for any passerby to come across. The longer you nourish the seedling, the higher and more prominent it grows.

There are lots of ways to deploy intelligent brand marketing online. We’re just scratching the surface here. I haven’t even touched on press releases, banner ad campaigns, viral videos, ppc campaigns, newsletters, affiliate programs, email marketing and a whole slew of other tools a business or an individual can apply for effective Brandcasting.

The metaphor of scattering seeds and then nourishing them is an apt one. For example, lets say one such seed is intended to grow a branded blog for your company. Having the best blog or writing the best entries doesn’t mean diddlysquat unless someone is interested enough in what you’re offering. So it is really important that you nourish your blog with quality content and engaging information and “water” your blog daily, that is, add content to it daily.  Having a good mix of seeds is helpful too. Having a multi-level marketing strategy that employs the best combination of “seeds” may be the best way attract different niche audiences. So one set of seeds may be intended to grow the company blog variety, another seed is intended to create a presence via article marketing, another seed may be intended to give your brand a video presence, and so on. Ultimately, you want the right mix of seeds to catch the attention of the right mix of customers.

Whether you do it yourself, or hire a company like Brandsplat to deploy an intelligent online branding campaign, you have to choose a strategy and remember to manage your strategy as certain milestones are met. Brandcasting can boost your company’s visibility and over time can give your brand a lasting footprint on the Internet. Just remember that it takes time to build your presence online and don’t get frustrated if you don’t see results right away. Cast those seeds, water and feed them and watch them grow your brand into one that has a healthy presence on the web. Happy farming.

When social networking first came on the scene with sites like Myspace, many people viewed it as technology meant for younger, tech savvy users who want to have a common digital space where they can chat, exchange music, share information and do just like teens do in Europe in their local town squares. This was an ideal solution for towns across America that didn’t have a town square; a digital piazza was the perfect solution. As time went on, it was clear that something more powerful was forming on the horizon. Sites like Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin have soon become “virtual piazzas” for much broader ranges of users that include adults, professionals and now, businesses. As I have written about in a previous micro blogging post, businesses now have the power to broadcast deals and offers to loyal customers via micro-blogging. Think of how Kmart used “blue light specials” in their stores to create a loyal following of shoppers. Now businesses can do the same without the corny spinning blue light and they can reach far beyond the confines of their brick and mortar store space. But don’t think that just because you are tweeting deals to your audience that the dollars will start rolling in. You have to have a strategy. To get started, Twitter does a nice job of explaining how the power of micro blogging can help businesses of all sizes. For the novice, I have written a post detailing how to get started with Twitter here. The subject of using social networking is a huge one, so we will just scratch the surface by offering up a few tips for the novice micro blogger.

Micro Blogging Tips

1. Keep ‘em coming back for more. Offering incentives and special deals on an ongoing basis will keep your audience engaged and willing to follow your micro blog. Also, give-aways and promotions work well in growing your audience and keeping your loyalists happy.

2.  Manage your online reputation. Because micro blogging is a social medium, anyone can have a voice. That means that you may receive negative feedback from your customers in a public format. Always address negative comments and if you can, look for ways to turn those negative comments around in your favor by offering a solution or a “make-good” for that customer. While many will agree that there is no such thing as bad PR, there is such a thing as a bad brand reputation and anything you can do to snub negativity can help in the long run and may even turn a sour situation into a sweet marketing win.

3. Bond with your fans. Social media allows you to have back and forth conversations with your most loyal customers in a public format. Always invite your fans to have a platform and create a healthy exchange with your brand. Who knows, you may discover your version of Subway Jared, Subway’s spokesperson who was one of its most loyal fans.

Again, we are just scratching the surface here. Micro blogging can be time consuming yet rewarding if you do it right. It’s up to you to do research for the best micro blogging techniques that fits your marketing strategy for your business. For a better handle on micro blogging, I recommend looking to other businesses that are similar to yours, how-to books and online resources like Twitter. Be sure to check back for tomorrow’s post, the final part of a seven part series. As they say in the local piazza, ciao.

Planning a viral hit is like picking the numbers for a winning lottery ticket. And anyone who tells you otherwise is either a liar or trying to sell you a creative ad campaign. Many companies turn to desperate measures by latching on to successful product launches by spoofing them. For example, there have been a rash of spoofs of the famous Shamwow and Snuggie Blanket next commercials that have appeared for a myriad of companies on Youtube. Here’s one that Colgate recently released. It’s really not that funny and seems to be gratuitous. You’d think that a big company like Colgate would have had the funds to hire a funny writer. Firstly, spoofing should be left to people who know funny, like Jimmy Kimmel or the folks at Jack Films just to name two. And even though you may get in front of a lot of people, if your content isn’t great, your un-greatness will stick to your audience like gum to a shoe. They call it reputation marketing, and like it or not, your reputation is on the line every time you release content with your brand’s name on it. Are marketers trying too hard? I think so. Successful viral videos aren’t trying to give you a hard sell. The best ones come from ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Check out this wedding video which recently got over 12 million hits in less than a week. According to an article from The New York Times , this video “set to the Chris Brown song “Forever,” had sent sales of the year-old song skyrocketing to #4 on the iTunes chart and #3 on Amazon’s MP3 store.” Did Chris Brown’s people plan this? Highly unlikely.  Did the bride and groom have their sites set on becoming a Youtube phenomenon? I doubt it. But I bet that won’t stop salivating marketing people from trying to convince you that their whacky videos will help you reach your marketing objectives.