When it comes to the online space, content is indeed King. What you say is the driving force behind the reason people continue to visit your website. The social online world tends to afford its content providers more creativity in the name of sharing, so when it comes to social content, a picture can truly be worth a thousand words. Two online sharing properties are now proving this to be true in branding: Instagram and Pinterest and both are beginning to reap the benefits of popularity in business.

Say Cheese

Instagram has been known as a favorite photo sharing site of iPhone enthusiasts since 2010 allowing people to take a flick, throw on a filter and share through the most popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. With brands looking for ways to “humanize” themselves, various company representatives took to preparing their own close-ups—tagging their product experiences encapsulated in any relevant moment in time—and the relationship has not stopped there.

Recently, luxe brand Tiffany & Co. enlisted the help of photography to go along with an important part of their What Makes Love True campaign. By using relatable, street-style imagery and a specially designed Tiffany’s filter, the blue box and the contents within retain their importance and exclusivity while becoming more reachable and attainable.

Pin the tail on the…

Pinterest is the new site on the social block and has brought the mood board to virtual life. The boards organize your thoughts, dreams, desires, or products for other users to like, share (re-pin) and comment. Simply put up a picture and a short blurb and people are sure to begin engaging with you when they find your pins interesting.

These boards also work as a wonderful way to create and hold contests, gain opinions and, most importantly, begin to build communities online, thus segmenting and organizing your friends, or customers, into customized groups. Retailer Lands’ End used many of these procedures in their Pin It To Win It campaign where users were encouraged to browse the Lands’ End site and create pins of the items they liked the most. This goes to show how a simple conversation that’s firmly ensconced in community building, helps a brand portray their personality—one of the most important qualities to any customer base.

Take Your Pic

What channels you use in your marketing mix, as with any business decision, should be based in your strategy. There are sure to be campaigns where both methods above make sense, times to only use one technique and instances when neither should be used. We should remember that, in business, there is always a social component. Mutual communication is imperative to your business if it deals with anyone besides you.  However, if your business has any sort of inherent visual aspect, your pictures are sure to help and sharing them effectively is important to keep people interested and connected.

In his new book, “I’m Feeling Lucky: Confessions of Google Employee Number 59”, Douglas Edwards, brand manager for the search-giant during its infancy, details his version of Google’s early successes and failures from the perspective of one of the few non-engineers aboard the speeding information train from 1999 to 2005.

Edwards, a career marketing professional that arrived at Google from a stodgy old media newspaper background, offers some surprising and often seemingly counter-intuitive business insights gleaned from his days sparring with co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page over such seemingly mundane issues as the Google Doodle on the website’s homepage.

Here are four business lessons I learned from Google Employee Number 59:

1. The presumptive answer should always be yes..
In his previous marketing role at the San Jose Mercury News, Edwards says he was inoculated with the conviction that bad ideas, “like termites must be exterminated before they could gnaw away at our core business.” If a business proposal didn’t have a guarantee of success reinforced with a five-year projection, it was a bad idea.

“If no one in authority tells you to do it, don’t,” said Edwards. Google’s philosophy was the antithesis of this. The answer was always supposed to be yes. Take initiative and do it.

Takeaway: Stop saying “here’s my concern” and start saying “here’s what you need to do to make that happen.” In order to grow and succeed in any business, concentrating on removing obstacles instead of erecting them is half the battle. In Larry Page’s Rule of Order,  #4 implores: The worst thing you can do is stop someone from doing something by saying, “No. Period.” If you say no, you have to help them find a better way to get it done.

2. Your greatest business expense is opportunity costs..
More than taxes, health insurance or electricity, it is the projects you aren’t launching and the deals you aren’t making that threaten the economic stability your business.

Sergey Brin sent this message to Googlers during weekly company meetings, imploring his staff to redouble their efforts. The notion of opportunity cost plays a crucial part in ensuring that scarce resources (often time) is used efficiently.

Takeaway: If you aren’t moving forward you’re going backward. The basic economic problem is that resources are scarce relative to the purposes to which they can be applied. As a result, choices have to be made about how to use resources. Chose a path and move full-speed in that direction.

3. Sometimes there is value in “wasted” time.
Google’s “20 Percent Time” rule is well-documented. Engineers are more than encouraged to spend one day per week working on projects that aren’t necessarily in their job descriptions. According to Edwards, the concept sprung from Google engineer Paul Bucheit’s tendency to let his mind wander to other engineering conundrums while working on projects.

Bucheit’s wandering led to the development of Google’s second billion-dollar idea: the ad-serving application AdSense. The project was just something he took on himself, and in fact had even been told by project managers to drop it on several occasions.

Takeaway: The 20 Percent Time is now part of Google’s philosophy. While most business can’t afford this type of luxury, managers shouldn’t be so quick to discourage employee’s creative thinking, and even tolerate a bit of tinkering that may not immediately impact the bottom line but could ultimately have a cumulative effect on the business.

4. Insecurity can lead to productivity..
According to Edwards, Google loaded its payroll with only high-achievers not accustomed to going unacknowledged for a job well done, and despite the promise of stock options that ultimately made many of the employees extremely wealthy, most Googlers felt underappreciated. Workers were expected to excel and were seldom told so when they did so. As a result many felt unsure of their own contributions or where they stood in relations to their peers. The desire to “measure up” created a legion of uber-workers willing to put in any amount of time to succeed.

Takeaway: Despite what employee handbooks today often suggest, effusive praise could actually lead to complacency. If you’ve hired the the right staff, a little insecurity about their abilities can fuel the fire to succeed even greater heights.

A demographic analysis just released by comScore gives an in-depth look at who is actually taking part in QR coded ads and who is being left behind. The study analyzed nearly 14.5 million people who scanned at least one QR code in June 2011, making it one of the largest QR studies thus far. While more than 14 million people scanning QR codes sounds like a giant audience, in reality it only represents a little more than 6 percent of the total mobile population.

So, who are these tech-savvy, scan-happy consumers? Turns out that they are primarily young, affluent males who scan codes in printed magazines or newspapers from the convenience of their own home. Overall there were twice as many men as women who had scanned a QR code during June and more than 75% of scanners were age 25 or older. These findings seem to suggest that QR codes might not be the ideal way to reach most retailers’ target market of teen shoppers. For whatever reason, these avid mobile users have not caught on to the scanning trend as quickly as their 20- and 30-something counterparts.

Perhaps the most telling survey insight, though, is where users are taking the time to interact with QR codes. Nearly 40 percent, or about six million people, who said they had recently scanned a QR code had done so in a retail store, which means there is ample opportunity to get shoppers to participate in in-store promotions.  A whopping 58 percent of scans, though, took place in the scanner’s home while only 12.6 percent occurred outside or on public transit. Lesson learned: incorporate QR codes into current print ads so viewers can interact with them when they sit down to read a magazine or newspaper in their free time.

Traffic Signals

Once you have established who you will be able to reach with a QR code and where it is best to do so, the next hurdle is figuring out whether or not traffic coming to your site is qualified. Qualified traffic refers to visitors who are intent on engaging with your site, whether to sign up for a newsletter, enter a contest or make a purchase.

Driving qualified traffic relies both on the location of a QR code and the ad copy that surrounds it. Getting a million people to scan your ad is great, but if none of them actually take part in the contest or promotion being offered it is a huge opportunity being lost. The best QR code campaigns run thus far are ones that offer a distinct incentive for users to participate and lay out easy-to-understand ground rules. These rules are what set a scanner’s expectations before and during their interaction with the brand. By clearly explaining what users will get when they scan your code, you proactively weed out people who aren’t interested in what you’re offering.

Numbers in Action

One recent example of a highly successful campaign came from Verizon. Visitors entering San Francisco Verizon store locations could scan codes on posters, which would take them to a contest entry form. Scanners were then encouraged to share the contest with their friends on Facebook and were told that if any of their friends made a Verizon purchase the original scanner would get a free smartphone. Verizon reported that during the week-long campaign the QR code posters generated $35,000 in revenue and reach 25,000 Facebook fans from an initial $1,000 investment.

Because posters for the promotion were located in physical Verizon stores, the traffic resulting from them was already highly qualified. People walking into a Verizon store are likely to be interested in making a cellphone purchase at some point in the near future, meaning they would be attracted to the potential of winning a free phone. This example illustrates that while in-home ads found in magazines and newspapers may gain more scans, codes placed strategically to capture the most qualified scanners can produce significant returns.

Another more widely discussed QR campaign was launched in South Korea. Grocery store Tesco/Homeplus wanted to increase their market share without taking on the financial burden of opening new locations. Instead, they set up a virtual store display in subway stops where commuters could scan QR codes of various items and have their order shipped to their home at the end of the workday.

The simplicity of this promotion along with the seamless e-commerce integration of mobile shopping carts lead to a huge payback for Tesco. Online sales during the promotion leaped 130 percent, making them the leading online market in South Korea. This online success even translated into an increase in offline sales, moving them to second place in overall grocery sales in their market.

When it comes to parsing social media numbers, however, it’s important to keep all the variables in proper context. Because this wildly popular medium remains in its relative infancy, it’s often hard to contextualize what is actually important and what isn’t.

For example, is it more important for a brand to have 30,000 Facebook fans or 1,000 hardcore Twitter followers? Of course, the answer may depend on particular business goals, but the point is that it can be easy to get hung up on all those readily available metrics.

And when it comes to Twitter these numbers border on the astronomical. After all, the platform favors quick bursts of information over lengthy contextual content.

Still, the numbers are telling us a story and it’s how you chose to leverage these statistics that is important. If you knew that the best time of the day to get re-tweeed is 5PM (apparently this is true), you’d likely start doing some testing of your own to maximize your efforts and nail down some re-tweets for your latest release.

It’s a well-worn fact that marketers love stats. So with that in mind I’ve compiled a bunch of alleged facts about Twitter from a combination of sources.  (All sources are in parenthesis)

Tweets and Twitterers

• 200 million Twitter users (Twitter)
• 450,000 new Twitter accounts open per day, or  5.2 every second (Twitter)
• There are 1 billion new Tweets posted every week = nearly up to 180 million per day = 138,888 every minute = 1650 per second (Twitter)
• Just 5% of users create 75% of the content (Touch Agency)
• 52% users update Twitter status daily (Pew Research Center)
• 24% of users check twitter several times a day (Pew Research Center)
• 5pm is the best time to get re-tweeted (marketing scientist Dan Zarrella)

Twitter Usage

• 200 million Tweets go out per day (Twitter)
• A billion Tweets are sent every five days (Twitter)
• 40% of tweets come from mobile devices (Twitter)
• 50% use Twitter on more than one platform nearly. a 200% increase over last year (Twitter)
• 182% increase in users over this time last year (Twitter)
• 18,000 search queries every second (Twitter)
• 10% of Twitter accounts follow more than 50 people (Silicon Alley Insider)*
• Only half of Twitters’ registered accounts follow 2 or more people (Silicon Alley Insider)
• 1.5 Million Twitter uses follow more than 500 people (Silicon Alley Insider)
• 75% of Traffic comes from outside Twitter (Twitter)
• More than 1,000,000 apps that work with Twitter (Twitter)

Twitter User Demographics

• 8% percent of American adults who use the internet are Twitter user (Pew Research Center)
• 70% account are outside the US (Touch Agency)
• 46% of users are male (Ad Age)
• 54% of users are female (Ad Age)
• 41.5% of Twitters users are 18-29(Touch Agency)
• 42.3% are 30-49(Touch Agency)
• 13.7 are 50-64(Touch Agency)
• 2.6% are 65 and over (Touch Agency)
• 11% of UK online population are on Twitter(Touch Agency)

Twitter and Brands

• 30% of Twitter users have household income of over $100,000 (Business Insider)
• Estimates suggest between 20% and 40% of Twitter users follow at least one brand (Touch Agency)
• 75% of users are more likely to purchase from a brand they follow (Touch Agency)
• 67% are likely to recommend a brand they follow (Touch Agency)
• 3 million questions are asked on Twitter every month (InBoxQ)
• 80% of customer services Tweets are negative or critical (InBoxQ)
• It costs $120,000 each day for a promotional Tweet (Twitter)
• 67% of Asia-Pacific companies have Twitter accounts, showing a dramatic rise from only 40% in 2010; follower numbers quadrupled from last year (Burson-Marsteller)
• 83% of European companies now have Twitter accounts, up from 71% in 2010; follower numbers more than tripled (Burson-Marsteller)
• US companies with Twitter accounts remained at 72% (no change from last year), but number of followers per account more than doubled(Burson-Marsteller
• 1,000,000 people view Tweets about customer service each week (Twitter)
• Twitter valuation is estimated at about $8 billion

*Silicon Alley Insider’s source is someone with full access to Twitter’s API.

As a former Chairman and CEO of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, Roman presided over some of the world’s biggest advertising campaigns in his 26 years with the powerhouse firm and  has penned three seminal industry standards: How to Advertise,  Writing That Works, and The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern Advertising.

Roman is the closest real-life example of the now fetishized golden age of advertising ala Don Draper and television’s Mad Men,  but he doesn’t waste time being sentimental about his experiences. In fact, the octogenarian says the business of advertising is about business. It’s not about entertaining, or winning awards or creating the cleverest ad.  It’s about helping your client sell.

“No sale, no commission. No commission, no eat,” said Roman, quoting a well-known axiom of his old boss  Ogilvy. “The purpose of advertising is to sell.”

At Ogilvy & Mather, he helped build  business of major clients including American Express, Unilever, Kimberly-Clark and General Foods, and grew Ogilvy& Mather’s global network and creative reputation.

“Some of the things I learned working with clients and building client relationships and managing client relationships, I found applied to other business,” said Roman.

He recently stopped by our offices to impart some  invaluable advice about succeeding in business, influencing clients and winning new friends.

These are Kenneth Roman’s 10 Commandments of Account Management.

10 Commandments of Account Management

I. Select your clients carefully. It’s imperative to know which clients you want to work for, says Roman. Follow these three guiding principles when making that important decision:

• Find products or services you believe you can market and advertise sensibly.
• Make sure these are people you want to work with. Nobody wants to deal with bullies or unpleasant people.
• They must be people who want you to make a fair profit over time.

If these three things aren’t present, sooner or later you’ll be fired anyway. Create a target list of companies you’d like to work with and develop 10 to 15 clients that would change your company.

II. Treat your client as your best new business prospect. Year after year at Ogilvy & Mather, executives discovered that approximately 60 percent of new business came from either current clients, or through them. A good client will find a way to get you more assignments or pass your services alone to another diversion or company. If you have done a great job they are going to give you more business in more places.

III.  Take a proprietary interest in the health of your clients business. Once you’ve decided to work with someone treat their business as your own. If you see, say something! Make suggestions and feel free to offer views. “I want you to have a successful business, and if I’m associated with that you will grow and I will grow,” says Roman.

IV.  Get agreement on strategy. Before you get into specifics hash out the strategy. Who are you trying to reach, what is it about this target audience you should know? Do your homework and think about what it is you are trying to accomplish for you client. Put in writing. This will provide a basis on how to manage a relationship when you don’t always agree because you won’t always agree.

V.  Give clients ideas that they didn’t ask for.Show some initiative. Offer one new idea per month. “At the end of the year you’ve given the clients at least a dozen ideas they didn’t ask for,” says Roman. It worked for Ogilvy and will likely work for you.  Your competition isn’t doing this.

VI. Build bridges at multiple levels. There is danger in limiting your contacts. When one person on either side of the relationship changes, the whole relationship with the company could change. That’s how you lose business. Bonus point: Pay attention to the junior people. Take the trouble to talk to them. Not only will you learn more about the company from a different angle, one day these guys will be the bosses.

VII.  Listen. Clients really get angry when you don’t listen. Ask questions before offering opinions. Take notes. Put it in writing. But know this: Once you agree to something you absolutely, positively must deliver.

VIII. Treat the client’s money as your own. Spend their money as careful as you would your own. Put the client’s interest first and take a long term view. You will be rewarded.

IX.  Deal with issues not people. When you have problem with somebody do not comment on people- deal with issues. Don’t make it a people issue make it an issue.

X.  Make friends with your clients. It’s very hard to fire a friend.

And finally a guiding principal to do business by: You win new business on creative ideas and lose it on relationships. You lose business because something has changed and the client doesn’t trust you any more to solve their problems. They don’t trust you to fix ii. They instead say “we want fresh approach in our creative or say that want a fresh approach for a new product.” You must continually build and grow business relationships.

Even the most successful companies need to adjust with changing markets, and sometimes that means rebranding in order to breathe new life into an operation.

For example, consider computer technology giant Oracle Corporation. The Silicon Valley-based multinational went through three different name changes and rebranding efforts over the course of three decades before landing on a winner in 1995. Ever heard of a company called Back Rub? That’d be Google. “Let me Back Rub that” just didn’t cut it for the long haul.

Of course, your small business doesn’t have the type of resources of an Oracle (or Google), but that doesn’t mean you can’t be Oracle-like in your rebranding decisions.

Making your business appear fresh is a great way for attracting new customers. However, renaming is only part of an overall brand strategy for both products and services that encompasses not only changing your identity across multiple platforms, but also determining who you are and what story you want to tell.

Developing an overall plan.

The name change. Secure your brand name on various platforms. The first step is to make sure that your brand name is unique and that you can secure your brand name across a variety of social media websites. For example, if you are Bill and Bob’s Bike Shop in Queens, N.Y. consider using a name like “BillBobBikes”. Many social media sites do not allow usernames that are longer than 15 characters.  A great website for finding out if you can acquire usernames is Knowem.com.

Set metrics to determine what exactly your goals are. Are you looking to make sales, get people to sign-up to a newsletter, download a catalog, etc.? Small business owners should be aware that most visits obtained through social media will not have a high conversion rate (percentage of visitors who make a purchase or request a consultation). However, you should gauge how well you’re doing by taking a baseline count of your Twitter followers, Facebook fans, LinkedIn group members, and any other form of social you decide to employ. This way you can measure the success of your efforts.

Install Google Analytics on your website to determine where visitors are coming from and monitor your highest traffic sources. Tools such as Bit.ly can measure clicks on your links and Facebook Insights measures activity on your Facebook.

Use promotions to offer discounts to your customers through social media, and measure redemption rates based on that feedback. The more you try different test patterns, the faster you’ll recognize what’s working and what’s not. Soon you’ll understand where it is best to focus your attention.

Define a brand voice/story. What exactly is this brand about? What is your mission, your culture, and core values? To begin understanding this, a small business owner must ask themselves, “What is my company known for and what do I want it to be known for?” Use this to set communication guidelines. Find out what people on the Internet already know about your company, and then fill in the gaps to complete the picture that you want them to have of your brand.

Find your potential customers online. As a small business, it’s important to identify specific online communities that are relevant – both geographically and topically. Using the same example of Bill and Bob’s – I would find where people in Queens are talking about cycling-related topics.

Here are a couple examples:

a. Cycle Astoria – a group for people in Astoria, Queens to talk about everything related to cycling.
b. Relevant Meetup Groups.
c. To find more, simple search on Google for things such as “cycling queens,” “cycling blog queens,” “cycling forum queens,” etc.

Create rules of engagement. Decide how you will approach each community and what exactly you will do. Perhaps as the owner of a bike shop, you should start your own meet up and/or join others. Give “Why Leave Astoria” members a special discount and answer their questions without being overly self-promotional and respecting the group’s members.

Executing your plan.

Become an “Agent of Trust.” There is an excellent book by Chris Brogan who is also a contributor on Open Forum called Trust Agent that makes a very good case for becoming a trust-worthy member of any community. To summarize, he says to first setup tools to monitor the conversation, and then respond with helpful comments and links. It’s helpful to have a “home base” such as a blog to post relevant content to so that users have a place to come back to.

Engage your audience – and not just for promotions. For every five to 10 responses to conversations regarding a topic of interest, only one should be self-promotional. Always create new content that is interesting to your target audience. The point is to keep them engaged in a conversation with you and to continually build trust.

Identify influencers. In any community there are always those who make up a great number of the contributions. Identify those individuals and figure out how to best get them to do the broadcasting for you.

Assessment of results.

Wait at least two to three months before deciding whether something is working. Keep in mind that it’s important to have a consistent voice and repeat messages to be heard above all of the “noise” in social media. Make sure that your website is fitted to track all results and that your employees are gathering data from customers to find out how they found your business.

Check out these other famous rebranding efforts:

Quantum Computer Services – AOL
Bearing Point – KPMG
Diet Deluxe – Healthy Choice
Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation – IBM
Lucky Chemical Industrial Corp – LG
Marafuku Company – Nintendo
Brad’s Drink – Pepsi-Cola
Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web – Yahoo

Blue Fountain Media is participating in the program as a “changent,” so if you were looking for something to click philanthropically, look no further:

The initiative program also got Mashable’s attention last week, in advance of its launch today. If you have a blog of your own, you can use this link to apply for your own water widget.
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