Friends from afar sent me not one but seven jars of assorted gelatinous delights for the holidays. Each homemade delectable is tastefully adorned with an elegant custom label and a short background regarding the origin of the harvested contents. Perfect.
I can barely wait to taste them all. But await I will.
The Assortment Include
Grape Jam · Wild Plum Jam · Apricot Peach Jam · Banana Butter
Chokecherry Jam · Black Raspberry Jam · Voodoogoo Jam
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Downloads
Give your content away in the form of portable ebooks, white papers, digital audio and video downloads. Spread the word.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This spring I broadcast a Tweet expressing my unmitigated joy over a delectable dish of fish - sea bass to be exact. Moved to the point of illustration, I added a hieroglyph depicting my meal - a fish graphic fashioned from alphanumeric characters:
Paul Tweeted a hint that he might add the typographic fish to the ShirtPizza product line. When he did so, he sent me a sample tee. The above video clip captures the Brainstorm “unboxing” of the unexpected gift.
A Takeaway
One-to-one relational marketing concepts are still a wise play for today’s brand marketers, but fortify them with WOM (word of mouth), Search, feeds, and a voice in the online community to bring one-to-many reach to what was once a private exchange.
In developing and launching a community-inspired product, ShirtPizza broadened not only their product line and their reach, but their customer base as well. We’ve been fishing around the ShirtPizza site, now maybe you will, too.
Top Canadian digital marketer and social media maven Kate Trgovac introduced me to “Unboxing,” the practice of recording and sharing online the opening of a package arriving via post.
In addition to her roles as President of LintBucket Media, Publisher of Canada’s One Degree and the ever-popular My Name is Kate blogs, Kate maintains a top-ranked Squidoo lense that reviews laptop bags, sleeves and backpacks.
Inadvertent Angling
So, in the spirit of unboxed reciprocation, I’m posting this picture of the BBP Bags laptop sleeve I just received from Kate. She sent me the sleeve after reading a comment about my daughter’s penchant for the color pink and bags in general that I left on the Flickr picture associated with her Squidoo review.
For the record, I wasn’t angling for the laptop sleeve, but her generous offer will net me a number of dad points with my daughter. Here’s to that, and to Kate.
Get Friendly
Your brand marketing takeaway? Get involved. Stay alert. Reach out. Act. Friendlies can be very friendly and help propagate insights about who you are, your brand and your message.
Haptica, a concept timepiece for the visually impaired designed by David Chavez, relies on a series of dials to represent military time in Braille. Users draw their finger across the tastefully integrated channel to read the time represented in raised dots.
The idea has already garnered international awards including a 2008 Spark Award.
The steely tones and stylish tech lines call to mind the abstract pattern designs of brands like Nooka—a good look on any metropolitan wrist. The Haptica is a thoughtful fusion of form and function.
Brainstorm Named Best of Show in International W3 Web Awards
Iconic Site Launch
Developed by Brainstorm for Anderson University and Warner Press WarnerSallman.com features, among other iconic images, “The Head of Christ,” from The Warner Sallman Collection - an image so famous it's been reproduced more than 500 million times worldwide. More from the Herald Bulletin article about the site.
under Branding. Grouped by topic, Alltop aggregates stories from “all the top” sites across the web (that’s their story and we’re sticking to it). View our .think listing, here: branding.alltop.
Our 2008 Multiple Sclerosis holiday project. Every run of Brainstorm's holiday, "Memory Machine," generated ¢.25 for the Multiple Sclerosis Society - up to $5000. It went viral fast - the $5k was just a memory by the time our holiday dinner started.
Brainstorm's 2007 holiday blog parody. A new post everyday featured the ongoing drama of an entirely fictitious corporation replete with fictitious products. Items like the "iPlanet,"NPI’s personal cosmos transport. Like Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine Happiness Machine, the iPlanet promises a “thoroughly self-absorbed social media experience.” Our content was tongue-in-cheek, but the chocolate and gifts we sent to commenters were quite real.
