Let me introduce you to EXPOSE — the world’s first all-glass multi-touch kiosk with 25″ full-HD digital signage display and built-in surround sound system. Designed and manufactured by BrandTouch Europe, its less than one inch thick body integrates hundreds of hardware modules and software applications for your bank, boutique, hotel, trade show, event or residence.

With its ultimate HD multimedia, intelligent analytics, mobile CRM, hundreds of connectivity and application options, EXPOSE is the perfect ambassador for every brand, striving for top visibility and excellence.

Check www.brand-touch.eu for more info.

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Top Brands

Every third import in the united European market is suspicious counterfeiting with infringed brand or design rights. The global loss is $30-50m just for one brand and billions per year for the top 5 cosmetic brands, mostly in less developed markets. Seems when your brand is 120 years old and you sell in 210 countries, you have an attractive critical mass to be attacked by counterfeiters, even if your licensee produces the goods in the same Chinese factory where the fake products come from.

What would you do? You develop a brand integrity strategy, you invent optical quality packaging, laser-focused quality control, nanocoatings, sophisticated visible/ invisible color shifting labels, individual 2D barcode tagging, transparent packaging, licensed factories and exclusive authorized distributors. You constantly secure, enhance, deter, partner and do brand ID trainings of law attorneys, National Customs Agency officers, The Border Police, NSCOC (National Service for Combating Organized Crime) agents.

Thanks to Turcu & Turcu law office, we had a chance to meet dozens of brand integrity managers and government, police and customs agents, monitoring and protecting global brands such as Sara Lee, Timberland, Samsung, Epson, Eli Lilly, Nokia, Estee Lauder, Coty Prestige, L’oreal, Lacoste, Chanel, General Motors, Levi Strauss, Puma, Daimler, Adidas, Bvlgari, Harley-Davidson and many others.

Sofia is a part of a worldwide network of administrative and brand integrity investigators and I was happy to see so many fake website knock-downs, seizes, raids and litigation programs. With more than 75 000 annual counterfeiting cases for Europe only, you can be sure that buying a fake Estee Lauder perfume, full of sulfur, ammonia, phosphorus, potassium, titanium and horse/dogs urine as a binder to keep the alcohol and oils, will not be the best bargain to make you girlfriend happy, especially if you don’t wanna see her face and skin burned tomorrow. It’s not only a brand protection or tax/unemployment protection issue; it’s your own health and consciousness.

Keep brandmoving. See ya at the top!

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I decided on a TabletPC because I didn’t want to be chained to my desk at the office/home when you can design and sketch digitally everywhere – on the plane, on the beach, in the mountains, in the café –  sketching your ideas, stories and the life that surrounds you….only a TabletPC can give you that freedom and experience. This devices are the perfect match for creative professionals – a digital sketchbook where you can do everything we used to do in our studio + much more – getting notes and digitizing content, sketching logos and websites, painting with thousands of brushes and canvas types, sculpting and rendering 3D models with endless choice of materials and lights, designing business presentations, CNC toolpath, SWOT/ web analytics/ SEO reports for customers  and of course the casuals – web surfing, video conferences and Skype calls,  music, emails, eBook reading, office apps  - all of this on the move, out of the office, on the fly – wherever you want to go. Once I grabbed a tablet PC, I never looked back (currently spending less than 3 hours per week at the office). Designers love to use simple things like stylus (pen one end, eraser on the other) or fingertips in 90% of the cases, using a PC as natural as possible.

The first major UMPC improvement came last year with Dell Latitude XT2 and HP TouchSmart tx2, packing a 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo behind a 12.1” multitouch screen, 4GB of DDR3 memory, a 320GB disk, secured with a fingerprint scanner, which I enjoy every day. The only drawback is that the 256 pressure-sensitivity works only in a couple of applications, while  Wacom Intuos4 has 2048 pixel-level pressure sensitivity, with several different brushes  and even detects at which angle you hold the stylus to the surface.

After Apple joined the “tablet” party with it’s iPad this month (a pen coming soon), the slate PC market will grow exponentially, but the creative professionals are (almost) forgotten. The NetTabs are only larger media-focused readers/ phones, so I have to use my old convertible C300. After Acer discontinued all their tablet PC recently, I’m still searching for the ultimate tool for creative professionals:

• Large Screen – 12.1” SXGA  is my favorite and it really does matter. The larger the device, the more useful it is, as far as you can carry it in a standard office bag.
• Wi-Fi, 3G/UMTS – I can leave with a Wi-Fi + Bluetooth connectivity , a tablet is not a second phone plus you can always speak in speakerphone mode. Data plans will come down when 4G is spread in 2013
• Rigid design and Battery Life – you can choose from 2 to 10 hours. Just cut in half what the vendor says or get a second battery to secure your new customer while making your great presentation.
• eBook Reading – while electronic paper is still the best display type for reading if you read a lot, but  we need a devices that work well for both books and multimedia, artists don’t think in black and white.
• Win 7/ i7 applications – content is critical, applications are critical. We need a working tool to make us $$$ per hour, not a plastic toy. Multitasking? Intel does, iPad doesn’t. Games, TV and videos are different story for other devices.
• Pens, Brushes, Rugged, Waterproof… – sometimes a feature makes the device. If you want to use it outdoors, in the rain or charge it in the car?  Get a Motion computing tablet
• Price? $500 to $5000. My first generation Acer was very expensive, this year we’ll have a convertible for less than $500!

Toshiba Portégé M750 and Fujitsu Lifebook T4310 are nice office tablets,  Motion J3400 and Duros 8404 are great rugged tablets with the best outdoor display on the market, iPad and Pegatron are nice entertainment media tablets, but I can’t see the ultimate device for creative professionals. Rather than buying a dust-collector, I will wait until the end of the year, hoping to see the best tablet PC. Lenovo U1 Hybrid is really close to the perfect one!

What’s your tablet PC experience?

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the perfect One

Many philosophers have thought there is no universal, ultimate perfection – the perfect One is different because everyone has different wishes. Other argued that the perfect One is flexible enough to be able to meet the wishes of anyone or at least the wishes determined by the majorities. Evolution theories, fairy tales, magazines and movies propagate ultimate beauty as essential for well-being and survival. I have to admit, there are some “beautiful” features, which are fundamental signs of health, growth and evolution, beauty as certified quality – attractive attributes, that positively correlate to quality, healthiness and fertility (no, not the hour glass 0.7 waist to hip ratio or the ultimate celebrity features):

Wise & Intelligent – mature, insightful, trying to go beyond your exact search, seeking to get a sense of what you’re looking for and pull up the best, based on understanding, experience, trends and hot topics.

Organic & Natural – with a good sense of humor and ear for music, optimistic, attuned, deleting all things against us (like grudges, past, etc.)

Warmhearted & Broadminded – talkative, sincere, funny, patient but passionate, caring but sensual, outgoing but easy-going.

Intuitive & Creative – energetic, one who makes us feel like we’re the best one in the world and one who can complete us, encouraging to change for the better.

Diverse & Flexible – one with multicultural heritage, self-confident and inspiring, trust-worthy and surprising, mission-critical and adaptive

Beautiful & Humane - curvy and asymmetrical, kind and polite, with a sense for the most relevant actions to current challenges and problems, especially in extreme situations, where coolly observation is required.

Focused & Suggestive on the best traits and strengths, outsourcing the rest to third parties, helping to find the best way to the desired topic.

Communicative & Sharing knowledge, experience and solutions, supporting your common world of interests, goals and everything, which contribute to higher soul/body/ lifestyle levels.

Now finding the perfect and successful one is easier than ever. We can search, create, enjoy, present to the right friends and audience and archive, if necessary. She has a great voice, keeps us well organized and comprehensive, increases the assets and reduces the maintenance costs – an outstanding solution for us, our SMB or even our brand. She is multifunctional, solving problems in minutes, with a wide supporting community of friends and contributors. She offers intuitive management, fast and easy to use, without advanced knowledge, attended by detailed life-books/ manuals?…

HolyMoly - who is she: a perfect Woman, Muse, Content Management System, Search Engine, musical Composition or all of the above?

Never mind, she is always on the road to perfection. See ya at the top!

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December was full of rebranding projects. We helped 10 brands – most of which with over a decade of history – to start the New Year with rebranded identity and websites (links and case studies coming soon).
After thousands of answered question concerning their brand strategy, web architecture, site structure, layout, design, content, ranking, long-tail keyword clusters, tags and gadgets…in the end of the day the formula of industry perfection, profit explosion and business optimization is brilliantly simple and repeatable:

   80% quality traffic share
+ 80% customer’s mindshare
= 80% marketshare

Not only to survive, but to grow and thrive the highly challenging “downturn” economy, we need a systematic approach and focus to identify the current values and capitalize on new opportunities, far ahead of the competition.

So, what will work for 2010 is absolutely the same top 10 trends, which worked perfectly in the last 3 years:

Brand strategy – a clear and solid foundation for your sales. Leverage all channels and maximize your current resources and business growth activities with measurable, brand performance metrics.

Innovation – creative thinking, mindmapping, drawing, playing music – one hour a day, away from the stressfull  office meetings and negotiations.

World-class design. Good design means clarity, clearly differentiated value proposition, performance, function and service, sales and trust. Quality in products, customer experience and content is the king. Brand reputation through word-of-mouth – the queen. Satisfied customers – the key to repeat business.

Budget & time to cut operating costs – everything which helps to cut costs and improve performance. Focus on what you do best and outsource the rest. The core fundamentals – strategy, KPI’s and most profitable customers. Outsource areas that are not your business’ core competencies. Let the experts do the work. They are better, faster and more cost-effective.

Digital media as the main channel for reaching your customers. Web & mobile are now mainstream, faster, cheaper and easier to target your perfect customers with immediate, real-time and measurable results.  Forget print and postage delays and fees. Go wireless, invest in digital and grow organic.

Reach the top of the Search. 1.3 Billions of indviduals are searching for a specific need every day. If you are not found by your target audience on the first page of Google, you don’t exist. Being on the top leads to serious sales. Digital users research and digg before they buy. Leverage Web 2.0 tools to allow the customers to engage, share, follow and become fans of the brand. Get the best brand awareness, market research and real-time knowledge about your customers for free! Local or global – search engine optimization and top ranking are sophisticated, time consuming and change on an hourly basis, so better outsource them to an expert.

Build the Brand. Top companies make absolutely certain that brand is a central management principle, the platform on which your customers make their buying decision. Any time  they touch the brand via any channel, it must consistently and credibly communicate its promise and value.

Move to the SaaS cloud, digg the CRM Database. Make sure your have a detailed platform, deeply integrated with all brand channels and Web 2.0 interfaces.The new world of permanently online, social & knowledge hunting communities provides you with endless opportunities.

Leverage the good old analytics – we define and measure progress toward critical organizational goals,  offline and online metrics, established in the strategy. Try and improve – new layouts, design, titles, copy, meta… Only  results matter.

Wherever you are, enjoy your holidays! Cheers for a great 2010!

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Caffeine ranking

Yesterday was the first clear day in a month, clear and sunny enough to dream about snowy peaks, ski vacations, Christmas and presents… after the rain is gone, one can see clearly that we all are eager and busy to update our brand platforms, deeply immersed in Google Wave or Huddle’s tags-based collaboration. The localization of our branding platform in 4 new languages runs well, the last projects for 2009 are polished on a staging server.

Recently some clients of mine have been asking about Google changing the SEO game again, why all their linkbuilding efforts crashed, why strong on-page and off-page ranking factors are so messed and interwoven, why we optimized the websites of 3 direct competitors for top3, do we provide a top3 ranking guarantee – you got the idea.

Well, after the last month updates and Google Caffeine grabbing real-time results twice faster, chances are you are not top3 anymore, your competitors grab the most of the leads (don’t worry – they don’t). With only few organic results showing up above the fold of the browsers, recent changes at Google mean top3 rankings are more valuable than ever, and SEOs will have “few” more Christmas projects.

Crawling deeper, it means that we all need a brand new victory plan for 2010, a platform foundations upgrade, regardless whether to launch a new product, rebrand your company and emerge stronger.

So, get your brand moving again and grow on your global top5 ranking mission. Still I have to admit – there are some brand-building elements, where we have to forget about precise control and “the long-term healthy future” – it’s only the clear facts and the very moment of NOW which exists. The key metrics are still the same – Authority, fresh growing Content and relevant Anchor links. Website growth rate is getting very imporant, as well as organic brand growth.

How much of your time does it take, dear Mr. CBO? An hour to set up the platform, 3 hours to train the co-workers, an hour a day for writing, updates and monitoring, permanent linkbait and snippet links stacking /scultping. Brand-building is a process, not an event.

In the end of the day it gives us 3 sweet competitive advantages to outrank and outperform the competitors: top ranking, brand awareness in thousands of web channels and a brand-crisis proof shield.

So, don’t moan – act now! Fish where the fish are, in the muddy postcrisis waters. Only after that can we escape the “unable-to-stop” collective insanity, visiting dozens of global locations, collecting music, wisdom and tribal art, inspired and creative, full of fresh energy, as in the good old school days.

December is always full with tons of professional SEO webinars and seminars, so I’m looking forward to seeing you there or on our InterNations Christmas party!

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Brand Trust

Oh my dear Nielsen,

I do agree that “virtual” and “real” friends are our best brand builders (not only on our birthday), but consumer’s recommendation from known people or strangers is not a form of advertising. You also missed the biggest brand trust builder -  Google’s top5 organic search results (I hope intentionally

Social media is the key for building trust in brands?
Yup, in a few “developed” countries, the rest of the world use it for time killing and enterprise resources wasting activities.

Consumers trust real friends, virtual strangers and brand websites the most? So, I have to start to trust my virtual friends same way like the people I know, right?

Yada yada. It’s like “the law of big numbers” by Mr. Power. You start a spammer’s “social network”, expose thousands of personal emails in their profile URL to Google and than you claim that Quantity is what matters. When you “build your network”, you do some business with 1 in 100 people, good businesses with 1 in 1000 and than “1 in 10000 of those people will become mentor, supporter, helper in your life”.

Well, I really have great ideas sharing and collaboration experience with hundreds of “virtual friends”, but I do care only for real friends I’ve met in personal (most of which started out as online ones .

Do we need a friend/girlfriend in every city?
Nope, just few real friends, who care, dare and move ahead, together eventually.

Just a recent example: When you share your birthday wish (to help few kids from “underdeveloped” countries get a color text-book and attend a school at least for few days) with hundreds of “socially responsible and concerned” western “virtual friends”, you get (accidental, inspirational and spontaneous) response by few “real friends” from your eastern neighborhood?! and zero feedback from them.

Hey Mark, where’s the “friends”-list sanitazing app? Let’s make every day a great one and let’s care about our real friends and Future. Yeah, birthdays, holidays, virtual or real…

THANK YOU FRIENDS for all your phone, facebook, email, twitter and sms birthday messages. I’ll have a small out of town/ traffic/ heat/ smog chill-out party with lot of music, cocktails, fruits and icecream… A big thanks again for all the birthday wishes, everyone!

Do you have virtual friends, who are as good as real ones (without huge exposure in facebook, twitter and other illusions ?

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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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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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