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    Trademarkia.com A Path Thru the Trademark Jungle.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    trademarkia

    What happens when you put a lawyer and marketer in a room together? A lot of quiet. What happens when you put a lawyer and a small business marketer in a room? Nothing, it doesn’t happen. The same is often true for mid-size marketers because like Ocean Beach, NY, long known as the “land of no,” small businesses operate by a don’t ask don’t tell ethos – and they don’t want to pay lawyer fees either.

    Enter Trademarkia.com, a company with a great name which combines “trademark” and “Wikipedia.” The name passes the Is-Does test – a big plus for start-up businesses. Trademarkia CEO, Raj Abhyanker, also a patent and IP attorney, realized that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and patent attorneys have not yet caught the Web 2.0 train. Furthermore he realized that there are millions of expired company names, logos and slogans in the morgue, all of which are marketable.

    Mr. Abhyanker’s press releases refer to Trademarkia as the “freshest, easiest way to create a Brand” and though that goes beyond just the Wikipedia metaphor, it does capture the essence and functionality of the site. One can go to Trademarkia and for about $159, buy an expired mark and secure it. Or search for a never been used mark through the Trademarkia database and secure that.  The searching part is free. (Trademarkia was a TechCrunch50 participant this year.)

    Trademarkia does a lot of other things like send competitive alerts but its single biggest breakthrough is creating a place filled with lay explanations and search tools, to help business owners and marketers chop through the jungle that has to date been the expensive provenance of trademark lawyers. Peace!

    Social Media Inside and Out.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    2

    The smartest, most progressive companies in America are using social media to demonstrate brand strategy and brand value. It helps them recruit new (young) employees, create affinity with prospects, and retain and maintain existing customers. Social media is currently too tactical and not well governed, but that’s a topic for another post. That is what’s up in social media outside the company.

    Social media inside the company is intended to extend and make more robust information sharing and collaboration with an end-goal of creating shareholder value. Social media within the enterprise started in earnest at trade shows like Web 2.0 Expo and Enterprise 2.0. Lots of companies are doing it well, but collectively we’ve only scratched the surface. The 10 years leading up to social media inside the company were the domain of software and consulting companies selling business processes reengineering (BPR) and enterprise resource planning (ERP). They made gazillions, but their solutions were 80% machine, 20% people. I like to think today’s social media offerings will invert that mix, but it will certainly be a challenge.

    America’s free enterprise system rewards big ideas and breakthrough findings; our business history is filled with the names of inventors, yet we don’t have a lot of collaborator stories to tell. Companies like The Dachis Group are dealing with this needed culture shift. (A shift that might, someday, cure cancer more quickly.) Consultants of this ilk are studying how companies, enterprises and associations work — defining the 1s and 0s or the ons and offs of the enterprise knowledge worker. Dachis call it the Hivemind mentality. It’s not going to be easy. In America the hive always has a queen bee and lots of wanna bees. Stay tuned.

    Macs, Markers and Music.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    serverfarm

    Technorati code: xtkb2apfmv

    I just read the first page of an IBM white paper entitled “The End of Advertising as We Know it.” IBM spends a lot on advertising, is should know of what it speaks. But IBM also spends a lot of energy and Benjamins getting people to buy machines that process data.

    The IBM thesis is that one-to-many advertising – using TV to create demand and preference for brands — is old school and the new school model surrounds micro-segment targeting, where handfuls of people, even individuals, are targeted. The new school messages are delivered over a number of mediums, especially the web, in ways that are much closer to the point of sale, much more measurable and efficient. A one-to-one approach.

    IBM is wrong about the death of advertising. Way wrong. TV ads will live on. In fact, they will get better as we ferret out the sloppy craftspeople. But IBM is right in that marketing budgets will be using a lot more digital tools to help find customers, set the hook and maintain loyalty. These things will coexist; finding the right mix is the key.

    The problem with IBMs of one-to-one prediction is that it requires more data analysts, marketing scientists and technology to get involved in consumer communications. The highly paid creative geniuses and the poorly paid Millennials who sit at their feet are not crafting the myriad brand stories. And product image suffers. The art of brand building and brand maintenance is lost when handled by the technicians in IBM’s data-driven world. The percent of actual dollars spent on marketing will tip in favor of computers and computer services and away from Macs, markers and music. A slippery slope indeed. Peace!

    Posters. Where art thou?

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Posters are original content creators who rule the social web. They write blogs, upload pictures, create and hang videos on YouTube, microblog on Twitter. The good ones create interest and action. Action might take the form of a comment or pass along of the original content — a behavior I call Pasting. So there are Posters and Pasters on the Web. The ratio is about 1 to 10. I counsel clients to target Posters and the Pasters will follow. It’s more efficient.

    The million dollar question is “How do you find Posters?” Where do they congregate? And once found, how do you know if a Poster has a following? The beauty of the web is that there are a crazy number of measurement tools. Views is a good indication of a Poster’s popularity on YouTube. Number of comments on a blog is a strong litmus of sway with readers. Number of friends or tweets on Twitter is a good measure. With Flickr the number of photos or recency of photos are telling.

    Numbers and measures are one thing, but sometimes the best Posters are hidden. If you find them first, on the way up, it’s like finding marketing gold. A good way to determine if a Poster is on the way up is to get into their art. Read them. View their work. See how they treat people. Do they listen and help or are they just there to crack wise. Do they care about their topic or are they just clicking for friends. What’s their motivation?
    Posters earn the earned media for marketers. Peace!

    Penske. If not today…

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

     

    penkseI was very sad to read Roger Penske has dropped his plan to buy the Saturn Corporation from General Motors. My bet was that Mr. Penske, who has a record of automotive turnarounds, was going to have great success with Saturn. That bet was placed upon the idea that a lot of NASCAR enthusiasts and “car heads” know and admire Mr. Penske. Admiring someone who actually knows a thing or two about a carburetor, driving at high speeds, and what a garage looks like at 2 A.M. under a hanging light bulb is way different than trying to feel affinity with a company run by “phone guy” walking around a gleaming showroom in a Hermes suit.

    One of the reasons I got into brand planning was to answer the question “Why will a rural, head-of-household with an annual earned income of $25,000 spend hard earned cash on premium motor oil for the family truck and then go in and eat chicken gizzards for dinner?” (Fried gizzards are actually quite good, if you must know.) It’s about brands (claims, supports and demonstrations).

    There are lots of American’s who trust Mr. Penske. They would buy a car from him sight unseen. He is real. He is an expert. He’s not a paid pitchman. He commands market share.

    Mr. Penske will be back. My guess is he will have an electric car offering and it will rock our world. Peace!

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    Penske. If not today…

    I was very sad to read Roger Penske has dropped his plan to buy the Saturn Corporation from General Motors. My bet was that Mr. Penske, who has a record of automotive turnarounds, was going to have great success with Saturn. That bet was placed upon the idea that a lot of NASCAR enthusiasts and “car heads” know Mr. Penske and admire him. Admiring someone who actually knows a thing or two about a carburetor, driving at high speeds, and what a garage looks like at 2 A.M. under a hanging light bulb is way different than trying to feel affinity with a company run by “phone guy” walking around a gleaming showroom in a Hermes suit.

    One of the reasons I got into brand planning was to answer the question “Why will a rural head of household with a annual earned income of $25,000, spend hard earned cash on premium motor oil for the family truck and then go in and eat chicken gizzards for dinner?” (Fried gizzards are actually quite good, if you must know.) It’s about brands (claims, supports and demonstrations).

    There are lots of American’s who trust Mr. Penske. They would buy a car from him sight unseen. He is real. He is an expert. He’s not a paid pitchman. He commands market share.

    Mr. Penske will be back. My guess is he will have an electric car offering and it will rock our world. Peace!

    Usability is the New Black.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    I speak to account and brand planners all the time who are in search of the next big trend. Anyone can plan based upon what has already happened but to plan for what will happen takes huevos (unisex reference).

    So here’s my trend for the next few years: Usability.

    Some things will never be usable: financial prospectuses, tax documents, legal briefs, pharmaceutical disclaimers, website registration guidelines, HTML and information technology (IT) setup. We don’t expect them to be usable and we’re okay paying people to do it for us. Though with money tight, more and more of us are trying to do things ourselves and usability is becoming not only a differentiator but a business. 

    Online services are getting so intuitive you rarely need to click on “help.” New products are getting easier to use because the “out-of-box” experience is improving and the products themselves have been simplified. Can you say “Flip” video recorder?   And lastly, smart entrepreneurs are looking for ways — especially on the web — to make difficult, time-consuming processes clickable. Is the 3 minute divorce that unrealistic?

    More and more branding ideas and taglines containing the words “fastest and easiest” are finding their way into consumer messaging each day. And I love it. Peace.

    The Haque

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    umair-haque
    Umair Haque, Director of the Havas Media Lab, and writer of Edge Economy for the Harvard Business Review is an amazing new economy thinker and a bag of chips (a whole lot more). He’s very contrary (check out this current post pooh-poohing innovation), he is very right, and he is quite a communicator. I read his “Twitter’s Ten Rules For Radical Innovators” and thought them worth sharing:

    1. Ideals beat strategies.
    2. Open beats closed.
    3. Connection beats transaction.
    4. Simplicity beats complexity.
    5. Neighborhoods beat networks.
    6. Circuits beat channels.
    7. Laziness beats business.
    8. Public beats private.
    9. Messy beats clean.
    10. Good beats evil.
    (For the full post, click here.)

    I have never met Mr. Haque but hope to. And though I don’t agree with Rule number 1 as a general statement, in this case I do because in this case he suggests the idea to build Twitter was more important than the idea to build a Twitter business model. Agreed.

    Mr. Haque is poster. But he is more than a poster, he is an uber poster. An inspirer. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Haque is already a force of nature and commerce. My prediction? This dude will be historic! Peace!

    The Future of Healthcare.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    nslij logo

    A number of years ago I wrote the brand plan for the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System. Though I had to fight to sell it through – the strategy had the cold, cold word “systematized” in it – most approvers agreed it captured their essence.  Of the three brand planks, the two that carried real water were resource and information sharing and community integration.

    Today it was reported that North Shore-LIJ has decided to lead the way in creating and implementing digital patient records. The system has creates financial incentives for docs to record and save all patient procedures and outcomes on computers. Digital patient records were inevitable, but someone big had to do it first. The two key benefits of this approach are less mistakes and improved best practices. Thank you Jesus.

    I write about this because it shows that a good brand plan should have legs. The systematized approach to improving healthcare was written the summer of 2000 and it’s not only still accurate today, it’s more powerful today. More powerful because the system has spent millions of dollars and millions reminding doctors, patients, employees, administrators and others that this organization is “Setting New Standards in Healthcare.” Brand plans must see and prepare the way for the future. North Shore is still living its brand plan. Peace!

    TV and The Internek

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    mtv

    Sorry, I just like saying interneK (hard k). While the head of marketing at now defunct Zude.com I woke up one morning to see a crazy influx of new users from India. Remember the UPS commercial where the employees of a new online company huddled around the monitor when the service is launched to watch as orders come flooding in. Slowly at first, then as a scary deluge. Anyway, during the Zude deluge our CTO was exchanging snot mail on blog comments with a competitor (whose funder was in India) and I wondered if our servers were under attack; if the competitor had created a bot to signup fake users. (Paranoia is a bitch.) Turns out they were all real users.

    I hadn’t done any promotion outside the states so was at a loss. Well, after some digging I found out that an MTV India had done a review in a tech segment pulled from coverage by U.S. tech bloggers Robert Scoble, ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, etc.  Zude was on TV.

    TV still wields an amazing amount of power. There’s a validation of your story when it’s on TV that sometimes doesn’t happen on the Web. TV is part of the virus that results from good communications planning even if you are not buying GRPs.  No channel is unimportant.

    I’m not sure about Twitter’s (cha-ching) numbers in India, but if they want to grow users there, which is an excellent idea, they may want to get in touch with MTV India. Peace!

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