Posts written by Bill Powell

I guess this is the lazy way of blogging rather than coming up with interesting stuff on my own, I share with you some of the good stuff I have found around the web.

1) Before we can read, we know what a logo represents. It shows how powerful a good logo can be. Track some of them through the ages here: Evolution of Logos

2) Have you or your company gone digital yet? A good short article on the benefits of investing in digital rather than traditional. Going Digital

3) Need to find a logo to use: Brands of the World

4) Newspapers in decline. Nothing new, but worth mentioning. Bye-bye old media.

Barack Obama is a taco salad. Oh Yeah, well … John McCain is a nacho.

This according to a new web strategy by Qdoba. Tastebud politics is a great new viral tool by the folks at Qdoba. After seeing this, I wanted to send it to all my friends, because after all if you can talk to your friends about what’s going on in politics and not end up debating about healthcare or the economy its a good thing, right? Now Qdoba turns that debate into nachos and quesadillas.

Remember back in the day (1997) when we were all a little less net savvy and we would get the email telling us about how Bill Gates would give you $1000 for sending that email to as many people as possible. Even though I am proud to say that I didn’t bite on that one, enough people did to make it a classic example of how a message can spread virally.

Many people took notice of how effective this strategy would work in the land of the internet. Many others trying to duplicate this viral strategy sent out all sorts of bogus messages telling of great news or tall tales, and luckily today we have snopes.com to determine which of these is true.

Web powerhouses such as hotmail.com, myspace and facebook have grown dramatically from viral methods. Much like a virus spreads, one person tells two, those two tell two or three more and so on, before long without an FCC regulated medium, hundreds if not thousands (or millions in some cases) have heard the message.

Seth Godin calls it interuption marketing and Steve Yastrow calls it ‘Brute Force Branding” Steve was a speaker this morning at the ExactTarget conference. He is the author of two books, the latest being “We. The Ideal Customer Relationship.”

Some thoughts from Steve Yastrow:
We get more than 5000 branding messages. How many actually work? Not many can cut through the clutter with brute force. Yastrow says that we need to use brand harmony-an overall picture that prospects experience from your brand, thus creating an image of your brand.

Most marketers think that they are the ones who brand the company. But it is the customer who brands the company. It is not what is said, but what is heard.

Yastrow says that the goal for marketers should be to create a customer relationship that is an ongoing conversation in which your customers never think of you without thinking of both of you. Not two. We.

More from the conference later.

I hope to be posting from the Connections 2008 conference in Indianapolis next week. ExactTarget is hosting some of the industry’s top experts on permission marketing and Inbox Orange is going with a half of dozen people to catch up on the latest trends in the industry. I will share what I think is interesting or relavant.

(I love new media/technology. I am posting this update from my iPhone).

Yawn.

No surprise here. The Herald Leader’s parent company is again dropping staff. Check out the story here, from none other than the Herald.

Another interesting article about the recent fate of newspapers from ClickZ.