If you haven’t heard of Quirky before, let me introduce you to one of the most dynamic and creative companies out there. There approach to product development is pretty unique in that they take a crowd sourced approach in inventing new products.

Here’s their official manifesto to get you inspired and start creating!

Quirky Manifesto from Quirky on Vimeo.

Google+ introduced “Pages” for brands and businesses earlier this week, making what many predicted as Google’s version of Facebook Pages.

The verdict is still out on how effective Google Pages will be for brands and businesses, but I’d imagine many companies will soon adopt their own Google Page. Especially with the valuable SEO value that will come of this. It’s a Google product directed at businesses and brands, so I’d imagine it would carry a nice amount of SEO weight.

I’ll be creating a few product pages in the next few days and be sure to report on my experience. In the meantime check out this cool post by Sean Percival on an early Google Brand Concept Page he created a few months back.

In its simplest terms, Klout.com is the the first ever “street cred” authoritarian online. Using social network activity on sites like Twitter and Facebook, Klout acts as a barometer, granting users a “Klout Score” based on their own algorithm. There are a lot more features, but that is the gist of the site. Check out the video below by WSJ for a better understanding:

As an “OG” member of Klout (I actually have the badge to prove it), I’ve seen the site grow into what is now a fairly legit social analytics site that appeals to everyday users. Since I use the site more as a brand strategist, than a personal activity, I can’t exactly say how popular Klout is amongst the general public. But compared to most social analytics sites, it definitely wins in UI/UX and easy-to-understand terms.

The best part of Klout and I think most users would agree is their Perks system. Still in its infancy, Klout Perks awards social influencers with review products ranging in AXE Bodyspray to a Chevy Volt for the weekend. Some perks are directly through the site and others are directly from brands, who used Klout to determine which social influencers to award.

Today Klout introduced a new algorithm that claims to be more accurate with scores and how they calculate user activity across social networks. Many “Klouters” (not sure if that’s the correct term) were angry about dropped scores after this update and let it be know on the corporate blog. I myself dropped quite a few points with the new update, but am not too surprised by that. I believe it’s all in the secret sauce of Klout’s success.

The narcissistic nature of all users on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and every other major network is what powers Klout. If they can keep users coming back to their site, day after day, checking on whether their score went up or down, they’ve ultimately succeeded in their goal of being The Standard “Score” of Influence online.

The concept of Guerrilla Marketing has always been of interest to me. To be able to spread an idea or message through creative expressions in everyday life is simply amazing. After doing some thorough research online, I still haven’t found any obvious patterns. The only commonalities I’ve seen through various Guerrilla Marketing tactics is the magic balance between authenticity, entertaining content and relevant timeliness. These three very different elements seem to harness the soul of Guerrilla Marketing.

In my latest entrepreneurial venture, Fizzm (currently a stealth Web/Mobile app), I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out unique marketing tactics that utilize the essence of my message. It’s a lot a more difficult than I could’ve ever imagined, but at the same time allowed me to push the limits on how I see Fizzm being accepted. What I’ve come to realize through this process is that, like most marketing campaigns, an interesting story must be told through whatever message I put out. The message must be relevant to my brand and interesting enough for strangers to share with their friends.

Some of my favorite examples of Guerilla Marketing, are the Improv Everywhere videos on YouTube that showcase professional actors in public settings, performing chorogrephed musicals and dance numbers. Flash mobs as their popularly called, are almost instantly recongnized by notable news outlets, publications and the general public through social networks. They surprise, entertain, inform and showcase their creativity through thoughtful execution.

The real reason I’m writing about Guerilla Marketing is to cover two points that have been become of interest to me:
1. To flesh out the importance and meaning of Guerilla Marketing
2. To try and understand what makes some GM campaigns successful and others go virtually unnoticed.

The answer to the 2nd point can be varied and extremely unpredictable. Yes, adding a celebrity to a viral video about your company may increase the number of views to your site. Or creating a contest of sorts may incentivize your audience, but in my 3-4 years of experience in Internet Marketing, it’s hard come up with the magic formula that will essentially blowup your brand to Rebecca Black proportions.

In the end, I don’t believe that there is one secret to making your Guerilla Marketing campaign a success. But rather a sequence of events, articles, videos, conversations on Twitter etc.. all encompassing of your brand identity.

It’s been a while since I’ve last updated this blog. I don’t like to make excuses, but I’ve been fairly busy with a handful of projects that will soon reveal themselves to the world. All I can say is that 2011 has definitely been an exciting year. From getting funding for my first startup project to working as consultant on some cool projects. At the end of the day, I’ve come to one conclusion. No sleep in 2011. It’s my new mantra. I’m exaggerating, but that’s how I’m feeling. I look at sleep as a waste of time. Sometimes, I wish I could just close my eyes for 15 minutes and get a full night’s rest. Hopefully that’ll be my next invention.

I’ve also been fortunate enough to interview successful entrepreneurs in the field I work in. It’s really great to hear stories from individuals who were able to flip their own ideas into multi-million dollar businesses. I don’t watch Shark Tank, but I think my experiences interviewing entrepreneurs plays on the same interest that America has taken a liking to. I have some really interesting interviews coming up and look forward to sharing them all with you.

The startup projects I’m working on have taken up a bulk of my free time, but I’ve learned so much and am really excited for what lies ahead. I can’t speak too much about the projects I’m working on, since we’re still in stealth mode. But, I’ll definitely have more information in the next few weeks (and hopefully some press!).

It’s crazy how it’s already March. Back when I was in school, time moved a lot slower. Now I’m trying to squeeze every hour possible out of each day. Sleep is definitely a luxury I’m glad to have, but I’m forecasting a lot more 18 hour+ days in the next couple of months. It should be exciting and I’ll for sure be blogging about my experiences.

In the article Edelman breaks it down for us in four stages:

Consider, Evaluate, Buy, and Enjoy/Advocate/Bond

The idea here is to figure out which stage is most lucrative to the overall strategy. Edelman claims the last stages are the most important and where we can affect the consumers decision.

Our analysis of dozens of marketing budgets reveals that 70% to 90% of spend goes to advertising and retail promotions that hit consumers at the consider and buy stages. Yet consumers are often influenced more during the evaluate and enjoy-advocate-bond stages. In many categories the single most powerful impetus to buy is someone else’s advocacy.

He’s basically emphasizing the power of word of mouth and how consumers always trust the voice of who they know over common marketing tactics. Edelman also iterates the importance of channels and how to best reach your target consumers.

Management focused on “working media spend”—the portion of a marketing budget devoted to what are today known as paid media. This no longer makes sense. Now marketers must also consider owned media (that is, the channels a brand controls, such as websites) and earned media (customer-created channels, such as communities of brand enthusiasts).

This definitely makes sense. By connecting with consumer trusted resources, we are able to effectively hit our target through an avenue that they believe in. We’ve seen countless examples of big brand companies, rethinking their strategy and repurposing their marketing budgets to focus more on community engagement. Pepsi was one of the major brands to forgo Super Bowl spending and instead launch a social media campaign around cause marketing.

The most important concepts to understand in what Edelman calls CDJ-driven strategy are the overall execution tactics.

The shift to a CDJ-driven strategy has three parts: understanding your consumers’ decision journey; determining which touch points are priorities and how to leverage them; and allocating resources accordingly—an undertaking that may require redefining organizational relationships and roles.

By correctly analyzing these stages, you will be able to create an effective strategy that capitalizes on every opportunity. More specifically, you’ll be able to identify your consumers needs/wants and what they’re looking for at that decisive moment.

The article goes on to talk about how more touch points are becoming digital and CMOs need to understand how to approach these interactions. Often times Social Media Marketing or Online Brand Strategy is coupled with mere Twitter accounts and Facebook Fan Pages. Although these are vital tools and networks most strategists call upon, they don’t define the digital branding and what it means to be socially relevant. The integration of social networks, effective marketing strategies and authentic appeal is what makes a winning campaign.

Every company in the world holds one commonality with one another. Culture. It doesn’t matter if you run a custodial contracting company or ad agency, company culture is prevalent in both. What most brands don’t know is that they can now broadcast their cultural motivations to the rest of the world. Many companies are unaware of the vast online outlets that allow brands to share their cultural cues. (Side note: Have you ever heard of the term CCO, stand for “Chief Culture Officer.” Here’s a great article on Entrepreneur about this new phenemon).

So what? Why would you want to share the inter-workings and cultural of your business with the public, potential clients and your competitors. The answer is Social Media. At the heart of this overused, yet highly effective marketing method is cultural. From blogs to Twitter, the main purpose of Social Media is to share what was once taboo. Back in the day it was unheard of for companies to discuss their marketing strategy in public. Now we have American Express, Virgin and Kodak leading the way in demonstrating the effectiveness of this phenomena. The cultural of one’s business drives their core social media messages and ultimately increases their brand’s visibilty.

The motivation for this article was my recent addition to my sidebar. If you notice I added a Tumblr widget. For those of you unfamiliar with Tumblr, let’s just say it’s what Myspace should have evolved into. It’s a more intuitive than Twitter and boasts some of the most creative blogs on the web. I’ve been playing with Tumblr for a couple years now, but just realized the actual benefit it offers. It’s literally a blank canvas that allows one to communicate exactly what they want, in the most efficient way.

The reason I bring Tumblr up is because I strongly believe every company should have one. If not Tumblr, at least an interpersonal communication platform that allows, customers, clients and employees to interact with one another. Facebook and Twitter are great avenues, but most companies don’t use these platforms effectively. They look at Facebook and Twitter as generic social badges to add to their company website. Thinking that by automating every update they will be more relevant in the eyes of their core audience. Tumblr on the other hand is more insightful and lends more to the customization of company culture. Involving employees to share in the company culture by startin their own blogs is another great way to grow your network. As long as their are guidelines in place that state the legal parameters of what can be published, things should go smoothly.

By involving your audience, clients, consumers and employees in the your cultural process, it’s only natural that your brands visibility will spread. Instead of trying to reach your target demographic, you’ll find that they will look for you and seek out your expertise. At the end of the day, people relate to the authenticity of your message, so why not express that in your own unique way.

I could probably convince a room full of college students that failing a class is easy. All you have to do is follow these simple steps. Stop showing up to lecture, do not turn in homework assignments and make sure not to study for exams. That’s a surefire way to fail a class correct? Sounds easy enough. Now, what if I took that same approach and tried to convince those same students that success is easy? Getting an “A” only requires the following steps to succeed. Show up to lecture, turn in homework assignments and make sure to study for exams. This is the exact opposite formula I used when describing how to fail a class. So then, why would it be easier to convince a room full of students that it’s easier to fail than succeed?

The answer I’ve come up with is that people don’t honestly believe that success is possible. As humans we often don’t believe anything until we’ve seen it for ourselves. We need physical or first-hand proof that it’s exists. That being said, if someone has never received an A in class, they usually don’t even go for it. They take what some may think is the “easy way out” and settle for whatever they can.

This is why the idea of “being successful” is hard for many to comprehend. In our society, being successful is rare and thought to only be reserved for the elite few. Many have never experienced it (or think they’ve never experienced it), therefore don’t know if it truly exists to them. So the question now becomes, how do we switch our idea of success from a thought to a potential reality?

The most effective way to change one’s perspective of success is to practice it. By setting and accomplishing small goals for ourselves everyday, we experience success on a fundamental level. If you ask most professional basketball players how they became so good at shooting the ball, they’ll tell you that they started shooting from a closer range. Once they were comfortable with the short range shot, they slowly moved back. At this moment, they noticed their technique began to form and even started making more baskets. Success basically uses the same formula. As you complete the tasks you set out for yourself and do so on a daily basis, you begin to form your technique for success. From that point on, it’s all about refining your techniques and taking on bigger shots. At the end of the day, you’ll find that success isn’t really as hard as it sounds.

The funny thing about personal branding is that it’s literally open to anyone interested in pursuing it. CEOs, actors, models, real estate agents and lawyers aren’t the only ones allowed to have their own personal brand. Each and every one of us should feel entitled to creating our own brand awareness.

Let’s look act actors for example. Traditionally, actors find themselves an agent, get head shots and then hope for an audition to book a gig. I see this everyday living in LA and ask myself, why don’t these people take their careers into their own hands? Instead of waiting to be called for an audition, why not try to make a name for yourself and have the companies come to you. Going against the grain in traditional industries right now is the latest trend and should be exploited. Rule books are no longer relevant and there is no right way to be successful.

The magic of personal branding is the ability to form a strategic public personality for all to see. By thoroughly researching your industry and figuring out ways to truly advance in it, you’re creating your own unique brand, while adding value to your sector. We can be known for whatever it is we want. That’s the beauty of the web. Solidifying your brand is a quick way to jump start your career by examining what you are passionate about.

Some people might be turned off with the idea of personal branding. More often than not it’s seen as a PR ploy in resurrecting ones image. We often see publicists and PR people hinder the brand of celebrities and try to make them as “human-like” as possible. The problem with this strategy is that it’s fake and people can easily see right through it. Covering up any kind of controversy these days is damn near impossible and should be reexamined. The web specializes in uncovering tapes, pictures and other media you think no one else has (See Ari Gold scandal on Entourage). At the end of the day, honesty is king and being able to authentically connect with your fans, followers or friends is key.

What is Branded Entertainment? According to Daymix.com “Branded entertainment, also known as branded content or advertainment, is an entertainment-based vehicle that is funded by and complementary to a brand’s marketing strategy.” That sounds a little confusing. Why don’t we look at this term through some real world case studies?

Music has plenty examples of Branded entertainment. Dating back to Run-DMC’s “My Adidas” artists have always found a way to market their favorite brands in their songs. Most musicians are similar to brand evangelists themselves. They believe in a brand so much, that they will go as far as including that brand in their art. The question I have is: Who really benefits from branded entertainment? Most musicians who sing and rap about their favorite brands are usually not getting paid from them. I don’t think Young Jeezy received any Product Placement requests from Chevy after releasing his smash hit single “Camaro.” Or Lil Wayne for his admiration of cough syrup. Granted, some brands do not want to be affiliated with their own brand evangelists, they should understand that branded entertainment is a viable marketing avenue especially with music. That being said, why can’t branded entertainment infiltrate every professional sector. Musicians, athletes and entertainers shouldn’t be the only one’s collecting a check right?

The biggest difference between professionals in the entertainment industry and those in other sectors is the almighty power of celebrity. It’s the sole reason big brands seek out professional entertainers. They want to exploit their following and integrate their brand with that celebrity’s likeness. Does this mean if your a working professional that you have to be a celebrity in your field? Not necessarily, but it would definitely open up a lot of opportunities for you. For those not interested in being a celebrity at all, I’d highly recommend being an authority in your field. This gives you the credibility that you know what you’re doing and that you do it very well. Examples of these type of people include Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz of the Oprah show. These two individuals properly branded themselves so that when Oprah needed a Dr. to call on they were the first thought of. That may not have been exactly how it went down, but at the end of the day, they were able to utilize branded entertainment to influence their persona.

Going back to the music industry, more and more artists are beginning to understand the true potential of branded entertainment. Jay Z, Rihanna and Lady Gaga are three pop icons that understand the marketing power of their brand. Each have embraced branded entertainment and utilized it in their careers. Jay Z broke sales records with his sneaker line on Reebok in 03′, while Lady Gaga was named Creative Director of Kodak this year. Yes, each of these artists have entire teams behind them pushing the buttons, but the overall direction of their brand is up to them.

Professionals in every industry should look at these examples and figure out how they can apply it to their own brand. Whether you’re a mechanic or a hair stylist, branding yourself as an authority in your field ultimately increases your bottom line. No matter what industry you’re in. Aligning with entertainment outlets, that you are able to effectively collaborate with expands your network and establishes opportunities you never knew existed.