Last night I had the pleasure of presenting to a group of entrepreneurs at theCorzo Center at the University of the Arts. The topic was “Moving Your Ideas Forward,” where I talked about brand building and what that means to brand success. Connect to presentation here.
What I liked best about the night was the excitement that young entrepreneurs have for their companies. Everything is shiny and new, and the journey is just beginning. I have always loved this time in the lifecycle of a company. It’s all about potential and opportunity. This is where branding begins.
I’ve given this presentation a few times, but added in a new section – defining brand success. One of the important aspects of branding is where you think the brand will ultimately go and how you define success. For some, it’s money, others fame, others just doing good work. As you contemplate your brand and your vision for your company, don’t forget to define how you will measure success and how that contributes to the brand you are building.
Michelle Pujadas
Zer0 to 5ive Founder and Co-CEO
Twitter: @Pujadas
I just finished a whirlwind of 3 “tech” conferences in 4 weeks: EDUCAUSE (higher ed tech), Aspire 2011 (LivePerson’s global summit on customer engagement) and Defrag 2011 (internet innovation around information transformation). Three different conferences, three different vertical markets, three different locations and three different “feels”. But that’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is that all three talked about the same four things and those things weren’t so techy:
- Culture
- Connection
- Collaboration
- Content
It was astounding to me that culture – what many might think of as the least techy thing of all – was so important in so many of the presentations. Why is that? I’m not sure I know, but what I think is that the past few years – fueled by technology – have created a major shift in how we work, learn and engage – and that culturally, we are trying to keep up. Education, application development, customer service – they are all feeling the same impact.
As importantly, in many cases, we weren’t talking about tech at all, but rather content. Content that drove learning, content that created leadership, content that engaged buyers. “The pipes don’t matter!” “The LMS as we know it is dead!” “It’s online and offline – content when and where you want it.”
The best part of all of these conferences for me was that at some level they were all about marketing. Defining what’s important, where the engagement needs to happen, how the engagement needs to happen and how the brand and culture need to be consistent and honest. All of this against a backdrop of incredible speakers who challenged us to be honest, to challenge status quo, to look beyond the obvious. Oh, and that it’s okay to be a Geek.
I can’t give these conferences their full due – literally too much content (!), so check them out yourself with their Twitter hashtags: #EDU11, #defragcon, #Aspire2011.
Michelle Pujadas
Zer0 to 5ive Founder and Co-CEO
Twitter: @Pujadas