Corporate legend has it that Ranks Hovis McDougall, in a successful effort to shake off a hostile takeover bid by Goodman Fielder Wattie, capitalised its brands in order to improve the structure of its balance sheet. Since then, Brand Valuation as a practice has grown to prominence. Sophisticated valuation methods have been devised and even [...]

The high level principle is that in a network economy, value flows from connectivity. Value is created and shared by all members of a network and economies of scale stem from the size of the network (see full pdf of presentation and outtakes from our podcasting interview).  While transactional exchanges of goods and currency have [...]

VitaminWater launches a new flavour on Facebook. After 6 years of life, Facebook has reached more than 400 million users. As a symbol of “maturity”, the platform offers advertisers 3 new advertising tools: comment, virtual gifts and fan style ads under the name Engagement Ads. General Mills, Adidas and the film “Tropic Thunder” (Dreamworks) have tested it. [...]

A December study by nielsonwire shows the worldwide annual increase of 82 percent of time spent on social network platforms, and an astounding average 5.5 hours per individual per month. When making a global comparison, it was concluded that Australians spent a jawdropping average of 6hours and 52 minutes per month, as an active ‘Socialmedia-ite’. Americans [...]

Have you ever thought about your social media framework? Social media framework aids comprehension of workflow experiences by describing their components, it also optimizes social media workflow in an easier way since a framework may include components that are applicable to them all. Why is it crucial that we care about this? Simply because badly designed [...]

The interaction of consumers and product users are used to amplifying the original marketing message. The presence on the web, social media will be more important than ever. If a product or brand refuses to respond to user demand, the latter will band together to find better options, improve existing ones, tear down existing barriers [...]

No doubts the environment is an area in deep need of crowdsourcing. Here is a great initiative. Our favourite read RWW informed us of Green Watch, a new project aimed at measuring and reporting air pollution status in Paris. By wearing a specifically designed watch the Crowd will be able to report conditions, an extremely [...]

Social media for social good. A good lesson. There have been numerous strong aftershocks since last week’s major earthquake. The Red Cross has estimated that the quake will affect at least 3 million Haitians. “After a magnitude 7.0 earthquake devastated the nation of Haiti, social media became the medium in which everybody spread the word. Dramatic [...]

Dell has pioneered crowdsourcing in its processes since the early days. They are now ready to invest more. Idea Storm has been a great example of crowdsourcing in action. As Dell describes it: “IdeaStorm was created to give a direct voice to our customers and an avenue to have online “brainstorm” sessions to allow you [...]

2009 has been an astonishing year for the growth of Twitter as a marketing channel. Brands have experimented with great results and horrible failures. Here’s a review. The Bad – Habitat. Spamming popular trending topics is not a great idea. Sad results. – Chris Brown. He tried to rebuild his bad reputation using twitter. He [...]