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

“No great marketing decisions
have ever been made on quantitative data.”

John Scully
Former PepsiCo president, former Apple CEO

The Tree of Knowledge

Marketers commonly use decision trees to assess features and benefits to determine what is most important to consumers. Quantitative results can be obtained by asking respondents a sequence of very specific questions that branch out using if/then methodology.

Unreasoned Response

In a focus group years ago, an outspoken man was asserting himself by speaking out of turn, disparaging the process, and scoffing at the premise that brand had any bearing on his buying decision, ultimately proclaiming, “I’m just here for the money.”

“Control” Group

Experienced focus group moderators realize if unaddressed, dominant individuals can establish control, affect the group and ultimately hinder true and useful input. The deft moderator began to ask a series of if/then comparative questions that challenged the man to reconsider his inherent assumptions. In essence, the moderator drove him through a decision-making process to help him formulate reasoned positions.

Once back on topic the naysayer became the moderator’s most vigilant and attentive advocate - offering considered and definitive feedback. The rest of the group followed suit.

“The only relevant test of the
validity of a hypothesis is comparison
of prediction with experience.”

Milton Friedman
Nobel Prize-winning economist

Overrated Ratings

Similar principles apply to common online qualitative tools such as the five-star, numerical value, or Likert scales used to value or measure a respondent’s level of agreement with a given statement. Although quick and simple for respondents to complete, unlike decision trees, these methods ask subjects to value an attribute or preference without any measure of comparison, which lacks objectivity and is prone to positive or negative bias when respondents rank nearly everything of high (or low) importance.

Minimize Error

In What Do Customers Really Want on the Harvard Business Review site, Eric Almquist and Jason Lee explore Maximum Difference scaling. An extension of the Method of Paired Comparisons where subjects select a preference from two choices, MaxDiff asks respondents to identify their highest and lowest preference from a subset of attributes or statements. Multiple subsets are tested as part of a series. Almquist, a partner at Bain & Company, talks through one MaxDiff study on the relative importance of restaurant attributes in this presentation.

Asking respondents to rate selections is helpful and informative, but requiring them to decide between selections forces them to weigh answers. It inspires considered input, and generates more defined, useful and valuable feedback while eliminating undecided responses and mitigating positive and negative bias.

Maximize Outcome

Qualitative research adds relevance and validity to quantitative findings. In brand marketing research, consider your premise and process carefully from the outset to limit risk and maximize return. Remember, research often drives strategy, strategy drives spending, and spending drives outcomes – both good and bad.

Let well-considered decision trees help you branch out in the right direction.

image: pkeyn

What’s a picture worth?

Inline Email Insertion

External attachments are great but when you don’t have time to type a thousand words, only an inline picture will do. Until now, Gmail didn’t offer that functionality.

Google just announced the ability to insert images anywhere in the body text of an email by simply enabling the feature in your Gmail Settings under Labs. It will add this icon to your email toolbar; just click on it to insert an image:

Check out The Official Gmail Blog for more information about this and other new features.

image: adria.richards

See how different web fonts render with Typetester.

When it comes to font usage on the web, sometimes developers, designers, account executives and clients speak different languages.

The Conflict

Developers describe typographic attributes in cryptic terms: “Font color=#666999.” Designers use more esoteric descriptions: “More chroma, a tad bigger.”

Clients often sound like brand police: “Just match our brand standards,” and account people adopt the role of arbiter: “Just give the client what they want, PMS 285 blue, and don’t be difficult.”

These are all valid approaches, but if a font doesn’t render properly for a large percentage of your audience and makes the end user feel like the site was designed by committee, the whole team loses.

One Picture, 1000 Words

Enter Typetester, an online resource tool that allows you to view and compare font family members (web safe and otherwise), see tracking, colors, and line spacing—even specify background colors—and view it all across multiple browsers and platforms.

Typetester is simple, useful and efficient, and helps bridge communication gaps between web project team members and stakeholders through visualization.

The Resolution

Typetester takes the guesswork—or at least the assumptions—out of web design.

Next thing you know, developers, designers and marketing people will be going out to lunch together.

Test it out for yourself here.

Above: a highly rated Kuler bar

Color blind? Struggling with triads? Color your world at Kuler from Adobe Labs.

If you’re in need of a working color scheme, you just found it. Kuler allows you to exchange and explore color across a spectrum of interactive formats. Peruse the most popular schemes or create your own palettes and share them with other color enthusiasts via the Kuler community.

From forums to feeds Kuler promises the most socially infused color site on the planet. And we thought The Color Schemer was a colorful inspiration.