We’ve identified five focal points of opportunity for 2010. They’re not an end-all priority list for brands, nor predictions, but rather initiatives, items born of trending behavior and emergent technologies being embraced by consumers.

1. Mobile-based marketing

Smartphones are fast becoming the center of consumer experience for work, home and play (see: Is Your Mobile Presence Brand Immobile?). A device capable of connecting people, places and things via text, voice, social networks, apps, tools, email, video, and images is a powerful medium. And the medium’s delivery mechanism is already in your audience’s hand, on their belt or in their purse. Smartphones are a direct way to connect with your audience and influence their behavior each time they use the device.

2. Location-based marketing

Aligning cultural trends and consumer behavior with location-based kiosks mobile and social apps can elevate your brand from relationship marketing to direct sales. Online and mobile apps such as foursquare combine locale, social game play and entertainment with information and tangible incentives. Geo-based marketing can deliver the closest, most highly-rated businesses, directions to get there and real-time incentives to entice a visit.

3. Brand design

Design continues to differentiate, now more so than ever. In a world deluged with cookie cutter applications and off-the-shelf adornments, consistent, appropriate and user-centric brand design compels and communicates amid the cacophony of visual noise.

4. Branded Edutainment

YouTube had more than 120 million viewers and 10 billion video views in August 2009 according to a September 2009 ComScore report. With the proliferation of on-hand, video-ready, mobile devices and a broad array of storage and sharing sites like Hulu and YouTube, online video is becoming ubiquitous.

Video is a powerful and potentially amplifying medium for your messaging when produced, integrated and distributed properly. But, it must be engaging, relevant, interactive, easily-consumed, readily-shareable, educational and/or entertaining for full effect.

5. Strategic Integration

There are many ways to reach and influence your audience—perhaps too many. Just because you have more options to extend your media mix doesn’t mean it needs to be less strategic. In fact, to penetrate the noise and stand out, strategy is more important than ever.

Facebook has hundreds of millions of subscribers. So what? Citing large numbers isn’t a strategy. And developing stand-alone initiatives without an integrated and targeted plan risks losing your message in a sea of irrelevant noise. Be it a person wearing a sandwich board on the sidewalk or an online video, your marketing efforts must be strategically integrated, well-planned, consistently branded, distinctively designed and metric-driven.

This year, don’t obsess over New Year predictions or resolutions. Assess, and act.

Related Reads:

Is Your Mobile Presence Brand Immobile? [.think]
Coca-Cola’s 100-Flavor Interactive Freestyle Soda Fountain
Shazam To ‘Tag’ Dockers’ Super Bowl Ad
Foursquare’s Marketing Potential

Share your experience.

Share everything. Make it easy.

A positive experience with your brand lingers with those who encounter it. It can become part of their life experience, and people enjoy sharing life experiences.

Therefore, it’s important to provide opportunities and simple ways for people to embrace and share your brand content.

Here are 10 ways to distribute your content and extend your brand:

1. Multi-Channel Distribution
   Use multi-channel distribution mediums like Posterous.com. Posterous allows you to assemble your content in, and send it via email. Simply send an email to Posterous with your formatted content attached. PDFs, text, images, even video are immediately forwarded to multiple social sites of your choice. Once distributed, users or fans can easily share your branded content with others.
2. Widgets
   Use widgets like Share This, Add to Any, or Add This to enable single-click sharing on other web sites and social media pages.
3. Micro-blog
   Create an account and build a following of constituents, friends, like-minded individuals, clients and prospects on a micro-blogging site such as Tumblr, or Twitter. Post short messages with information or links to your content and users can re-blog posts of interest. You can also feed your micro-blog to your web site, Facebook page or other online destinations for real-time updates.
4. iPhone apps
   Aggregate your content from multiple sources into a custom-branded iPhone app where fans and affinity groups can follow the content from your blog, web site, and social communities, all on one portable device.
5. Downloads
   Give your content away in the form of portable ebooks, white papers, digital audio and video downloads. Spread the word.
6. Flash drive
   Hand a prospect or influential person your content on a portable device like a branded flash drive. Encourage them to share its content with others. They’ll remember you and your company when they use the drive for their own storage and file transport needs.
7. Incentivize others to share
   Create a contest or sweepstakes to pull people to your content, then encourage and incentivize them to share it with others.
8. Think about the copyright
   Use Creative Commons to manage the proper usage of your shared content on sites like Flickr; it protects you, the author, and facilitates liberal sharing of your content.
9. Share the responsibility for content creation
   Extend the reach of your content to different audiences and demographics by collaborating from the outset to make your content, “our content.” When people share in the process of content creation they become invested and far more apt to share the experience and results with people they know.
10. Branded Watermarks
    Tastefully embed a logo or other watermark in the corner of your photos and encourage users to make them their own in device backgrounds or other digital applications.

Have an idea about making your media and messaging movable?
Share it with us.

Image: jonathanvlarocca

Gnaw Bone
(chew on that)

Our latest list of inane musings from the Brainstorm office white board:

Top 20 Vacation Hot Spots in Indiana

1. Chicago – It’s ours, it’s ours I tell you!
2. Columbus – Top-rated U.S. city on NatGeo Travelers list of Historic Places (#11 worldwide)
3. Notre Dame (Yes, The Notre Dame)
4. Brown County (Nashville) – It’s really green
5. Santa Claus (No, not him)
6. Madison – The place, not the donut girl
7. Um, Indianapolis – By and large, clean, safe, historical, sports-oriented, prospering…
8. Wauwausee (once you see it you’ll whine until you see it again)
9. Bloomington – sporting a campus ranked among the most beautiful in the U.S.
10. Turkey Run, Shades Park Combo
11. The Dunes – Sandy, but good
12. Bean Blossom – Boogie
13. Hoosier National Forest – You can see it for the trees
14. The oddly named Holiday World and Splashin’ Safari
15. Rose Hulman (Take that M.I.T.)
16. Lake Max (Like a Great Lake, but smaller)
17. Pete Dye – designed golf courses @ Purdue
18. Spencer County – Home of Abe Lincoln’s boyhood abode
19. French Lick (No, really)
20. Peru – Circus City
21. Gnaw Bone (Chew on that)

See the entire board

Image: Garden Beth

Sipho’s image by Fabian Biasio

Sipho Mabona, the origami artist
behind the Clio Award-winning film,
In Pursuit of Perfection.

Simple Vehicles; Collaborative Vision

Often the simplest elements allow viewers the most latitude to add their own vision to and create engagement with your concept or message.

The Nordpol+ agency of Hamburg, Germany created In Pursuit of Perfection, a short film honoring Asics founder, the late Kihachiro Onitsuka.

Central to the Clio award-winning short is the work of Swiss origami artist Sipho Mabona. Devoid of extraneous color and detail, Mabona’s hand-folded works add a human quality, proving the perfect medium to express the essence of the Asics story, from Onitsuka’s initial vision through its rise to today’s global sporting goods heavyweight.

A Tiger, a Microscope, an Octopus, a Foot…

Using only single sheets of square paper, Mabona worked on-site at Nordpol+ for five weeks, producing 17 models. He consulted as his designs were combined with stop motion photography, leading-edge motion control and 3D animation.

“The initial sequence featuring the tiger and the house, and the final trophy sequence are the scenes I am most proud of,” Mabona told .think.

More Mabona

Mabona produces custom-made models, animation, events and workshops for clients such as Antalis, Siemens and Epson. To learn more about Mabona and his work, visit his Mabona Origami web site.

via: A. C. Riley

Scott Monty is a complete pro.
Huge respect for others, thoughtful words, solid information, and the wardrobe
you need to do battle.

Meg Fowler
Award-winning writer and social media/marketing maven

Adroit in Detroit

Comic Steven Wright once told the story of two kittens looking on as a cat leapt from atop a multi-story building. The cat back-flipped and turned, somersaulting over and over before landing perfectly on all fours. One kitten turned to the other and said, “See, that’s how you do it.”

When corporate communicators and would-be social media experts watch Scott Monty’s agile representation of Ford Motor Company it’s not difficult to imagine them remarking, “See, that’s how you do it.”

Ready for Action

As the social ‘face’ of a major brand, Scott Monty is doing what many social media practitioners can only aspire to. And he’s teaching everyone how it’s done. He’s the corporate online (and, often offline) face of Ford Motor Company, their social network hub, legal liaison and lay interpreter, public relations mouthpiece, arbiter, friend, dad—in short, the Fortune 500 social media field agent archetype.

“For anyone asking about the Ford fan sites and legal action: I’m in active discussions with our legal dept. about resolving it.
Please re-tweet.”

Scott Monty
Twitter, 10 Dec 2008

A Man on a Mission

Several degrees from Boston University and a pharmaceutical and biotech background serve Monty well in the critical thinking department. And he’s had ample opportunity to think on his feet during critical moments over the past several months.

Monty’s offset a mainstream media harangue-fest of Ford’s CEO in front of Congress while quashing an internal firestorm over legal action against a Ford fan site. He captains executive-level initiatives, meting out messaging and sustaining, repairing and enhancing Ford’s brand on a daily basis.

Well-versed, well-equipped

And the man is everywhere, talking about everything to everyone and changing the way Ford is viewed in the public arena. Scott Monty knows the value of scaling numbers—leveraging every major social network tool, gadget and most importantly, relationship it takes to forge and sustain an organic social connection with Ford’s brand online.

Several select episodes from Monty’s tool of choice, Twitter:

Unafraid of refuting fellow Social Media elites

“‘Luddite-filled?’ That’s pretty strong language. What ’s your evidence?” -Scott Monty | 30 Nov 08

A self-effacing humorist

“Jesse Stay did you buy one of our corporate jets? ;-)” - Scott Monty | 10 Dec 08

Rallying community support

“For anyone asking about the Ford fan sites and legal action: I’m in active discussions with our legal dept. about resolving it. Please re-tweet.” - Scott Monty | 10 Dec 08

Swinging back

“Just wondering: with an approval rating of about 10%, why hasn’t Congress called itself for questioning?” - Scott Monty | 10 Dec 08

Instigating community connection

“At AquaVox in the Venetian with Ford CEO Alan Mulally. Stop by!” [from CES] -Scott Monty | 7 Jan 09

Promoting new ideas

“How about crowdsourced suggestions for the next iteration of Ford’s in-car SYNC system?” -Scott Monty | 19 Jan 09

Key Skill Set; Social, Very Social

Acting as both a representative and ambassador of Ford, Monty employs his easy humor, genuineness and intelligence to the greatest good, treating dissenters and supporters alike with respect and self-effacing self-control. In lending his formidable personal equity to Ford’s cause, Scott Monty has indeed become the social face of Ford.

Related links

Ron Ploof’s Ford fan site public relations case study:
The Ranger Station Fire | 488 KB .pdf