marketing – Page 99 – Andy writes!

1. Google tops the list of the world’s most valuable brands, according to a report from BrandFinance. Google’s brand value of $44.3 billion puts it just ahead of No. 2 brand Microsoft, which is valued at $42.8 billion. Coca Cola has dropped out of the top 10 for the first time since the rankings began, and Nokia lost the most brand value ($9.9 billion). Prediction: Next year, Facebook (now No. 385) will crack the top 50.

2. Conan takes on Rebecca Black with ‘Thursday’ video. He claims Rebecca ripped off his idea. (Hat tip to @clairefaucett for the link.) I know it’s a day late (or maybe six days early), but here it is.

http://i.cdn.turner.com/tegwebapps/tbs/tbs-www/cvp/teamcoco_432x243_embed.swf?context=teamcoco_embed_offsite&videoId=246585

3. The state of higher ed video. Results from the latest .eduGuru survey.

4. A mobile social network for the post-privacy world. Created by Lala co-founder Bill Nguyen, Color is a smartphone app that, the Huffington Post says, “allows you to be virtually all-seeing” and “combines a unique everything-is-public-to-everyone privacy policy with Twitter’s real-time information stream and the photo-and-video-based voyeurism of Facebook.” It is also “a social network for a post-privacy world: anything shared to Color is instantly visible to anyone in any place at any time.”

5. And this is why I do the Friday Five: Persistence and promotion are the keys to blog growth, according to this report from HubSpot. The takeaway: “bloggers shouldn’t lose faith – in fact they should have a little patience and be persistent in their blogging effort.” They also should promote their blog with “small but consistent messages.” (Thanks to @cksyme for sharing this gem.)

Happy Weekend!

A couple of recent items in my Twitter stream showcased some really bad PR moves by a couple of companies. So let’s read, watch and learn.

Exhibit A: Insurance company behaves like insurance company, voids incredible charity hockey shot. Deadspin reports (with accompanying video):

Richard Marsh was randomly selected from the crowd at an Indiana Ice home game last Saturday. His challenge: to hit a hockey puck, which is about three inches wide, the length of the rink and into a target slightly larger than three inches wide. AllState Insurance, the promotion’s sponsors, pledged to donate $50,000 to St. Vincent’s Cardiovascular of Indiana and the American Heart Association in the extremely unlikely event that someone would make the shot. But Marsh did, the crowd went wild, and then a third-party insurance company covering the event fulfilled the prevailing sense that insurance companies are mostly awful by refusing to pay the charity bill — because Marsh wasn’t standing behind the far goal line.

The “you’re in good hands” insurance company ought to be put in the penalty box for that one. Thanks to David Meerman Scott (@dmscott) for pointing this out as a “Real Time Marketing study in a negative way.”)

Exhibit B: Dell Promotional Stunt Goes Terribly Wrong.

An in-house promotional stunt at Dell campus in Round Rock, Texas completely backfired yesterday as cops responded to numerous 911 calls reporting that a masked gunman was inside the computer giant’s offices. Clad completely in black, the biker-looking bloke was carrying two metallic objects and telling people on the campus’s sales floor to “go to the lobby.”

Well, it turns out that a sales manager set up the stunt as an internal promotional event to celebrate the release of the new Dell Streak tablet, and the “gunman” wasn’t actually carrying any weapons at all, just simply urging folks to head to the lobby for the Streak unveiling. Too bad police didn’t find the funny in it all as they arrested the masked man, Bryan Chester, and his supervisor, Daniel Rawson, and both face misdemeanor charges of interfering with public duties and deadly conduct. We concur with a tipster who says that sometimes, corporate folks should just leave it to the professionals.

Hat tip to Bob LeDrew (@bobledrew) for this gem.

Category: marketing

Really bad (and dumb) PR