The Power of Dreams

First yellow leaves cause shivers up my “move” passion and dreams. As little kids, we all got those ridin-swimmin-jumpin-climbin wounds and scarves.
Cycling gives you a unique feeling beyond the frame, cycling in the wild moves your soul and personal, open-minded mobility, a guaranteed freedom. Country/ mountain roads are the best, highways/ freeways are the worst…

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HTC to Samsung Galaxy S II

How to move/ sync your contacts, calendar, emails, folders and tasks from your old HTC to your new Samsung Galaxy S II?

Select all records > copy to SD memory card > insert SD memory card > Import from card… Not working? Sure.

Here comes the interesting part / the only solutions, which worked for me: Use your Gmail account as Microsoft Exchange server source to sync your stuff between Windows Mobile and Android. WTF?!

If you try to follow the Google Sync for Windows mobile set up instructions, a lot of details and and screens are missing.

1. Leave the email address as “@”. Uncheck the option to automatically determine Exchange server settings.
2. Tap next and enter your account info: use a FULL email address, including @gmail.com, since you can also use a Google Apps account with your own domain name.
3. Leave the domain field empty. Check “use SSL” and “save your password by default”. If you get “sync None” connection error, check only the boxes to sync Contacts and Calendar.

…and you’re done with 800+ contacts per minute.

Optionally download Kies and enjoy your new Android-friendly Samsung limitless Galaxy. It’s the smartest and lightest phone to date.

…and the Best Global Green Brand for 2011 is…

See ya at the top! Yours, BrandMover

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You can hear it here:Wild Ride

or in the Bulgarian National Radio Land Adventure’s interview (in Bulgarian)

Shadows on the walking path
stalled me for a minute
reminds of good ol’ friends
who burned fast still young
Sunny weeks on wide wild roads,
indian summers never ending
hours of speedy rides
and fairy clouds ‘n sky

Ch. (aborigines jabber)

I’m a rider to a world I can see
got a rhythm and a magic sound
the source of energy
I’m a rider and what you’ll want I’ll be
I’m a sophisticated exception
to your “stable” theory

Shall we strip the rusty wings
and look in our future
let’s believe in impossible things
and skip the possible pasts.
Abandon all your freakin’ doubts
career and bloody greed, babe
Trading the warmth of youth
for a drink at the bar

Ch.

Get back your freedom now
the calmness of your soul
stop gambling with your life
feel the wild wind calling
Sunny weeks on wide wild roads
indian summers never ending
hours of speedy rides
fairy clouds ‘n’ sky.

© 2010, Velly Petrov
lyrics & music

8CVQQSUW87A9

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The Third Lane

There’s a huge traffic flow these days. Billions of people worldwide take their lane, every day. We can see three kinds of driving behavior:
The first enjoy the rat race – from the kindergarten’s square sandbox, trough the cube-shaped university and cubicle career to the weighty top management position. In the System they see a secured “happy smile of success”, someday, somehow, somewhere – after 40 years of work FOR somebody. There’s lot of isolation from your own values, family and life here.

The second type of guys manage to establish and work IN their own companies, 12-14 hours a day, until they grow, sell or quit the business. Kind of ambitious, brave, creative, innovative and “suicidal“.

The third kind enjoy an automated passive income (web service, IPOs, commissions, etc.) on the third lane, while working ON themselves, globetrotting the world in a search of the perfect mate, life, value, etc. Kind of adventurous, speedy and peaceful at the same time.

Recently, I found (by investigation) that in this high density region:

1. We often pass each other from the inner lane
2. The traffic flow in the low density region of the outer lane is enhanced and kind of “reserved” for a strange, extra-ordinary, out-of-the-box type of people
3. There is a benefit if you stick to your lane and don’t change it unnecessary.

I used to stick to the first lane for an year, switched to the second for 10 more years and now, after I tried the third one (and it seems to be my type), I’m ready to keep the pace there and enjoy the freedom of doing what you love at the time and speed you prefer with the ones you love (their smile, creative time, etc).

Whichever your lane is, I wish you a safe and twister/ tsunami-free drive!

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October

Back to our personal values, goals, beliefs, muse… and digital branding projects. After a long vacation, it’s kinda  hard to sync back with ongoing projects and schedules. Shouldn’t independent consultants merge their free and working hours to dissolve the difference?

Well it depends from your level of lifetime design freedom – what you do, when you do it, where you do it and with whom you do it. Some of us still can’t afford to travel all over the world for 4 months and keep up with all important todos in parallel.  Even if you cover 80% of them, you still need the rest 20% shortly afterward.

Despite the falling leaves, energy is here, the timing is right, we just need some more time, right? October usually starts with a day for dissection of personal and business life. What we dream vs. what we should do. Today vs someday. Excitement vs. existential vacuum of business boredom. Realistic vs. Reachable.

My approach is to sit down with a sheet of paper and glass of good wine ( helps getting terrific life-hacking insights) and cut down half of my activities and tasks to the bone, leaving only the 3 most important projects. Less follow-ups, more planning. After eliminating the “muda” waste (as a Japanese friend of mine use to say) , it’s time to dig in the swipe-file data and deliver (and overdeliver!) what I promised to myself and to the customers ASAP. To do what we do best, with greater speed, accuracy, efficiency, creativity and honesty.

This means launching important websites, upgrading production equipment, tuning brand performance. No communication distracters, no trips, no music making, no poetry, no blogging, and most of all, no fakebook chitchat (sorry virtual friends, I’ll be off for a while and I don’t care “Which kind of pasta are you” . Let’s cut the fat from our schedule, clone or replace ourselves with partners, outsource the fluff, free our time and focus on bigger/ better things.
Searching for the best life, unleashing our potential on a world-class level, living our days to the best with energetic passion and harmony… 500 months still to go?  Just pass me an extra one please.

Cheers from the sunny slopes of the autumn mountain! Great branding brains are warmly welcomed at our official BrandBuild launch – 20 October 2009.

P.S. What’s your secret recipe to recover your performance and sync your time, financial and ranking independence? Where you will be in one month?

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Globalism removed borders, we created tribes – intimate social worlds, which we understand and participate in. Brands are the little gods of our modern life – each ruling different need, activity, mind share, tattoo, mood or situation. What is your tribal identity, which tribe you want to join today?

When a prospect finds your offer or company (one-click away, first choice in Google, good color, strong contrast, irresistible arresting brand message, etc.) he thinks:

1. What is it (Who are you) ?
2. What it does (What do you do) ?
3. Why should I care (Why does it matter, what’s in it for me) ?

It’s always better to get a rough answer to the right questions, than a detailed answer to the wrong ones, right?  Otherwise it will be less that it could be. So, go ahead, ask them Why you climb Everest? Because it’s there, dude! Why we have to brand-build? Because the BRAND DEPENDS on others for it’s existence: on 72% online searchers of products in information in EU, on the 85% top3 Google search result visitors for any given phrase and market niche.

Why Branding is such a big deal now?

Because our society has moved from mass production to mass customization. We are info-rich and time-poor. Now people value feelings more than informations. Design and aesthetics are the language of feeling. Only one competitor can be the cheapest. The other HAVE TO use branding to become a guarantee of trustworthy behavior. Our purchase choices have muliplied in thousands (sometimes million companies/ websites) and we have to differentiate, to stand out of the crowd, to be in top 3. If we can’t be #1 or 2, or 3, it’s better to redefine our field or to change our tribe/ category.

When people talk to themselves it’s called insanity, when companies do that, it’s called marketing, when customers talk about companies, it’s called brand-building.

Here comes the CBO (Chief Brand Officer)

Lot of people talk about it, few understand it and even fewer know how to manage it but still everyone wants it. Brand-building is connecting strategy to creativity, logic to magic, communicating and managing the difference.
Brand-building is a process that can be studied, analyzed, learned, taught, replicated and managed. Go for the huge worldwide trend of tomorrow; don’t look just for tiny improvements of yesterday’s data.
The more a brand becomes distributed, the more it requires strong centralized management.
The CBO is focused around building and managing sustainable and successful world-class brands.
It’s not about likeness, it’s about understanding: a brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is. The position and degree of trust is the determination and differentiation factor.
A CBO is the brand’s personal recession-proof brandometer – he will show you what the brand is and what makes it tick, he will manage your online reputation, write a brand education program, define the brand’s DNA for constant regeneration of corporate memory, he will control the chaos, necessary for brand’s innovation. If you are tired of thick quantitative studies and analysis paralysis, he will bring you some great brand building ideas into sharp focus, he’ll give you real market insights and new niche ideas in less than 3 days, using a rooster of worldwide research partners and databases. You will never skew or loose the focus.
The CBO is the executive, who lies awake at night, thinking “How can we build the brand?”. He will manage brand collaboration, innovation and strategy at the highest corporate level, forming a human bridge across strategy and creativity, connecting the left and right brain of your business.
A charismatic brand is any product, service or company for which people believe there’s no substitute. Any brand, backed by enough courage and imagination can become a charismatic brand, even yours.

Am I a CBO? I was for more than 10 years. Now CBOs are my best friends (and customers) in the great wild world out there. So, are you a CBO?

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Yes, we should. Some of us create to-do lists, (I prefer to make not-to-do lists), other are permanently writing “business-in-recession” strategies, but do we share our life strategies? Rarely. Are you interested to prepare a life strategy, if you knew how to?

We share those mumble-grumble social network status updates that “it was a great weekend, but now it’s Monday again and I have to wait 340 more days for my next vacation“… but there is no time to think and commit to paper?

Most of my friends from the past have only shorter life horizons because it is difficult for them to look far into the future and predict an outcome.
We didn’t learn why it’s important to create a life strategy at school. It was only “I want it all and I want it now”, or “I’ll be happy if I can afford a beer tomorrow”. Carpe Diem, live in the moment – spontaneous, natural and keep rolling?

Well my friends, I don’t agree. Well-being is the way you want it to be. We should be open to all possibilities and not overlook new opportunities, but how will you  know WHAT’s a new opportunity, if you don’t know where are you going?

A life without a strategy is like a ship without a target and a reason. Your canoe will definitely sail you somewhere, but where you end up may not be where you really want to go. Or the most important part is to live every moment as though the whole world were watching?

Life strategy is not about a boxed career, income, buying a house, getting married, having kids or being self-reliant, financialy self-sufficient entrepreneur, retired as multi-millionaire at 60. It’s about the big idea, HOW to achieve the desired level of freedom, relationships, income, business, emotional and spiritual intelligence, etc.

I’m happy that most of my current friends and contacts have a life strategy. They can share it with a Tim Ferris’ DreamLine or Richard Koch’s ActionPlan in 10 minutes  and we can compare our progress, meeting for monthly happiness plan brainstorms and and shortening the horizon to our goals together.

Do I have one, yes, I wrote one, called Clouds (abstract, but solid foundation of clear life-goals) when I was 15-17 and it’s continually tuned every day, with every new knowledge and experience, tweaked for perfect outcome. Clearly, developing and sharing a life strategy makes a lot of sense and can be useful to all of us, who want to find something to be happy about.

Why? Because we can feel unlimited where we stand, to know that anything that we desire can be ours, that we are eager and full of life, free and fun and easy. Let’s challenge our perception of personal limits and don’t let our dreams stay dreams.

Here are 10 highlights from my mid-2009 life strategy update:

In the second half of 2009 I will:

• Move from doing most of the things to what I do best and let others do the rest. (I can’t be expert on 80 things, just on 20
• Leap-frog my top5 direct competitors in the next 6 months, building and top positioning global brands with higher quality at 70% of the price.
• Increase the quality and reduce the quantity of my relationships and friend-lists by at least 30% for 6 months.
• Decrease compromising my integrity for anything or anybody.
• Decrease the communication and social noise by 60% more in 3 months.
• Say NO politely but immediately 20% more often.
• Stop wasting energy on peripheral issues that cannot yield a payoff no matter the outcome.
• I’ll use pure strenghts and truth instead of trying to make true that which I love or I am weak at.
• Use free will and energy to go ahead and uphill, day after day
• Stop wasting time talking about my plans to others. Give you only 2 minutes to say what you have to say quickly and simply – then we probably stop talk/chat? Zipping the lip.

We have all the time on this planet, but without Destination, Route and Actions, we are going nowhere.  Success is our own damn fault. So work less, succeed more, enjoy more, be more strategy-focused, less tactic-focused,  and let me know what do you think.

The Revolution starts on 1st of July. You are Vellycomed to join.

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Sofia goes global

Last month we had our first InterNations global event in Sofia. Thank you all for coming and making the get-together salutary, rich and interesting.

I hope to turn it in a bimonthly tradition, as most of you requested. We are preparing presentations and live jazz for the next time. We will be around 60 people. Any suggestions for time, place and focus are welcomed.

InterNations is the first online community for people who live and work abroad, reaching out to the international community: diplomats, members of IGOs and NGOs, foreign correspondents, expatriates employed by multinational companies and their family members. We also cater to the interests of local residents with strong ties to this community (e.g. journalists). While our network is represented by more than 260 local communities, membership is strictly invitation-based: you may join after receiving an invitation from a current member. In this way, InterNations will remain a network of personal trust, where data security and privacy protection are top priorities.

If you want to meet other global minds, stay in touch with international friends and receive advice from expats, let me know and I will send you a personal invitation to InterNations. Wish you a great day, see you again in mid July.

Dear friends in Sofia,

We are very pleased to announce Vellyslav Petrov as the InterNations Ambassador for the Sofia Community.
Vellyslav Petrov is a branding consultant, focused in corporate identities, web solutions and brand strategies for moving local and global brands to the top. His favorite activity is helping companies to grow faster and reach the top through digital marketing. Vellyslav is recognized for extensive knowledge of global web market trends and high-end web solutions, improving user experience, global visibility and brand popularity through design & technology.

As the InterNations Ambassador, Vellyslav is your on-site contact in your city. He will look after the local Guide, moderate the Town Talk forum, organize “real-life” events in Sofia and take care of the community in general. At our InterNations events, you can meet your online friends face-to-face and get to know each other better.

All the best from Munich, the InterNations Team

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Corn Brand wars (1340) proof

Choosing a name for your business, domain and brand is often the single, most critical decision you will ever make. Today it’s very easy to asses a solid, long-lasting, and highly profitable name. Can your brand name hook the brains in your niche? Yes, we all know that it should be intuitive, suggestive, benefit based, semantically short, easy spelled, memorable, sweet sounding, scalable and search-engine-friendly, so you will have a chance to hook them on mnemonics. Now what?

Before and after the launch of Google’s Chrome browser, more and more people love to skip irrelevant search engine results and attempt to reach websites directly by:
- Guessing and typing presumable URL domains
- Typing common brand names
- Using the search phrase suggestion tools in their browser
- Using search trends and social media “hot trends” tools
- Following links on web 2.0 status updates, social and RSS feeds

Sure, over 80% of the traffic still comes from the search engines (presuming the website is search-engine-friendly and optimized) and the first 3 SERP results still get 86% of the traffic for any given phrase, but this trend will change and we do see dozens of exceptions to this rule in our web reports already.

Google’s latest search engine ranking algorithm places Heavy emphasis on Branding, an enormous weight on branded search results. The top in most of our customer’s web analytics reports start with brand names, good brand names, burned, branded and tattooed into the customer’s mind, even in the marketplace.

SEO is not simple as the Florida update anymore. We notice more then 5 changes in Google ranking algorithm every single week. Smart brand’s CEOs and SEOs should incorporate the BRAND as the highest “trustful-content” factor and there are increasingly important signals from Google CEO Eric Schmidt in his recent talk:

“Brands are the solution, not the problem, brands are how you sort out the cesspool, brands are not getting away, it must have a genetic component” he said.

If you love researching and reverse engineering (as I do) you can track the recent changes with hot phrases to see Google’s changes. In most of the cases brands have 7 to 9 of the first page search results for some of the most valuable keywords.

The trend is clear:  Google is promoting brands for big money core keyphrases. Further more Google’s Chrome tracks your behavior and content interaction through Google Accounts/Friends, Google Analytics, Google AdSense, Google DoubleClick/  AdWords, Google Reader, iGoogle, Feedburner, Youtube and other Giant’s channels.

Lately I see hundreds of URLs and company names, which are even hard to spell. If a customer doesn’t  agree on a name/ domain/ identity change, we reject branding or SEO services, due to poor results. It’s not necessary to start your name with a strong-sounding consonants (like the sounds of “D” and “T” in DECART), or set a song-singing rhyme in a combination of suggestive words like in “BrandBuild”, but it helps to emphasis, remember, get huge market and web authority.

The web is a vast wilderness in which your brand message can run in obscurity, so don’t work IN your business every day, work ON your brand equity and awareness and we will see us each other on the top.

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First Mover Advantage

Branding is not a buzzword, but the foundation for sales and success in the recent economy situation. It doesn’t matter if you are a reputable dinosaur or a brand new startup – the initial occupant of a market niche always gains the first-mover advantage.

A better product will simply sell faster. Hence, it’s not only the product or service to be sold.

A brand is the collection of feelings, perceptions, quality, image, lifestyle, delivered guarantee and global status. If you can not convince the potential customers that your product is worth, no amount of advertising, packaging or PR will help you achieve your sales goals.Your brand and customer’s mind share is the most valuable competitive edge you have, because today there is nothing that your competitors can’t duplicate in a matter of days or weeks. Creating a strong brand identity will build that mind share. Someday when you have your rock-solid identity, customers even will think of your brand first when they think of the product category.

First-mover advantage

Web strategists often talk about the first-mover advantage or FMA. In terms of brand development, by “first-mover” they mean that it is possible for the first successful brand in a market to create, move and retain a clear positioning in the minds of target customers before the competition enters the market. The first entrant can gain control of resources that followers may not be able to match. However, being first into a market does not necessarily guarantee long-term success. Competitors, drawn to the high growth and profit potential demonstrated by the “market-mover” – will enter the same niche and copy the best elements of the leader’s brand.

In the recent economic situation, first-mover advantages can arise from
1. Innovative technological breakthrough and leadership (R&D), protect it through patents or keep them as trade secrets!
2. Preemption of scarce assets (select the most attractive niches, take strategic actions, establish positions in geographic or product space)
3. Switching costs and buyer choice under uncertainty (achieve consumer trial and define the attributes that are perceived as important within your category)

Enjoy many of the characteristics of the first-mover-advantage brand, such as:
- name/brand is synonymous with the category.
- customers entering the market are more prone to default to the major player, because it is the sole entity of their business
- continues to add plans and options to your customers.

- add some free oprions for members, improve and add to their successful business, but don’t become a victim of the First Mover Disadvantages like inertia and trend-blindness!

Digital Branding

As Howard Kosgrove says, “A brand is the one thing that you can own that nobody can take away from you. Everything else, they can steal. But your brand can go on and live. It creates a lasting value above and beyond all the other elements of your business.”

Today we have billions people online and no brand is going to appeal to all of them. That’s just great and help us target our prospects in a personal manner, they even create our brand on their own. If we have the right strategy, they position accept a good position in their mind. The value is called brand equity and it really can be quantified. Businesses that build their brand online have an advantage over brands in the physical world since the opportunity to start freehand new associations – if you are fresh and new, you have a clean slate.

As a brandmover, branding new unique products are my favorite projects, since a fresh start moves easier when all brand ingredients are mixed precisely:

name, identity, benefits, price, quality (which brings loyalty), long-term perspective (instead of short-term profitability), communications, positioning, distribution, media and online presence, recognition and the results of a successful branding and top positioning campaign: increased share of market, loyalty, brand awareness and reputation

How we do that?

1. We prepare a great brand message – focused promise, backed with support and relevant to our customer’s lifestyle
2. We spread and share it on our website, direct campaigns, web 2.0 networks, blogs, tuning our digital assets for the top
3. Relevance of the message and the top positions in Google make our prospect to decide which brand they will buy and which will discard.

Research confirms that, statistically, higher quality brands achieve a higher market share and higher profitability that their inferior competitors.
Focus to build a powerful perception of our brand’s quality and value is what we need. Strong brands have a clear, often unique position in the target market.

Financial and economical recession? Yes, indeed. That’s where branding, SEO for Google top positioning and repositioning helps your business to stay and sell at top performance.
See you at the top,
yours BrandMover

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I didn’t managed to shoot how the Mediterranean see met the Tibetan plateau when the Indo-Australian plate collided with the Eurasian continent to form the earth’s buckle Himalayas 60 million years ago, but I did manage to get thousands of great pictures and videos from the top of the world. From paddy fields with bamboo, mango forests and palms, through the tropical jungle, used as safeguard against possible invasion by the British (you can still see the rhinos, tigers and elephants in the Chitwan national park’s jungle) through the hills, where the large mountain ape gigantopithecus (my brother Yeti) was roaming half a million years ago, to the countless Himalaya snowy peaks and ranges…the soul for the Sherpas.

The Khumbu region, which was opened in the 1950s for trekking, is awesome. You can trek only with a daypack and spend over a month there with a relatively tight budget. A great holiday of fresh air, breath-taking views, great people and culture on the trail. In 1964 only 14 foreigners visited the region. Today they are over 25000.  Independent teahouse trekking is the most flexible, free and economical way to enjoy the mountain. You can stop or rush whenever you like. One of the great joys is that you meet common-minded people everywhere on the trek – at the airport, hotel, bus, lodge, on the trail. Another great experience is to mingle with the locals for a culture-rich and colorful adventure.

When I get a chance, I will publish my notes about the Nepal kingdom’s adventure as a rich-illustrated PDF.
Meanwhile check my HD video about the great world beyond laptop and iphone horizons and the Nepali-inspired music with western instruments, recorded in my studio back home.

Himalaya Spring – trekking in the Everest region

Instead of altitude sickness, I got altitude addiction.
So, keep brandmoving and we will see us at the top!
(both on Google and Everest)

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We are in the brand performance management business. It’s not cheap and it’s not for every business. But it’s worth. Some just look for dirty cheap “hosting”, they google for ‘free’, ‘cheap’ and ‘discounted’, next month they look for even more cheaper. Customers? No, thanks. Popular doesn’t mean valuable, it means inferiority complex and big headache.

Hosting providers such as BlueHost (and most others for that matter) have a particular target market in mind for the services they provide. If the type of website your company has fits their target market, then you will rarely have any problems with their service. Maybe. If you don’t host your brand with 740 blacklisted link farms and adult websites on the same IP. If you don’t rush the shared server’s CPU to manage or archive your database. If…

If the type of website you have doesn’t fit their target market then you will have problems. Lots of them, on a daily basis. BlueHost give people the opportunity to find out if your site fits their target market by offering to refund your money if you are not happy after the first month. You can get all your “money” back and move elsewhere, month after month. Year after year. Someday you will even find free hosting, full of big-breasted banners, which will please the eye of your customers, for free.

If several hundred commodity static websites can share one server without overloading the server’s CPU, then it is much cheaper for your website to host on a server that places several hundred sites, than it would be to host it on a dedicated server that only hosts a dozen or so sites in order to make available a much higher CPU usage that the static sites don’t need, but a dynamic website that gets and serves thousands visitors and customers per day, executing millions service, sales and support transactions in real-time and doesn’t cache pages – it definitely would need.

If you have a supercharged V12 engine, then you don’t buy a small car and expect the engine to fit, you’d buy a large car or SUV that has space for a large engine. You can’t reach the top with a Micra or Golf, or even VW Country. You drive a Land Rover. Or LandCruiser. Or PathFinder.

The same applies to websites and hosting as applies to engines and cars. You need to choose an advantage environment, which supplies the resources that your website AND BRAND requires and if you need more than minimal CPU for your website to run you need to buy more expensive hosting that puts fewer sites on each server so that the required CPU is available. And most of all you need rock-solid, fanatic, real-time support.

However, the server CPU performance is just one of thousands Brand Performance metrics, which you have to master and monitor. But it’s very important, as well as other mission-critical factors like:

• Brand Architecture and Strategy
• Business Process Reengineering and Change Management
• Web 2.0 strategy
• CRM, Website & Database Performance
• Business Intelligence dashboarding
• Search Engine Optimized and Friendly, usable website
• Google top5 presence
• Competitive Intelligence and web analytics metrics
• Conversion rate (CR), Customer value (RFM, LTV)

Performance management

Whoops, ten years ago we were happy with 100 visits and 10 bookmarks of our website daily. Shift happens.

It’s snowing today! Let’s grab the ski tomorrow. See ya at the top!
Yours BrandMover

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