Buck Lawrimore

Twitter is hot. No doubt about it. When CNN anchors give their Twitter address so you can follow them online, it has reached the high-level mainstream. Here are 10 top reasons why Twitter is hot:

1. It’s free. Anyone can enjoy it at no cost.
2. It’s easy. Anyone can sign up for their own account at twitter.com and be posting tweets in minutes.
3. It’s fun. You can follow other people - friends and strangers, nadas and gurus, to see what they’re saying and if you don’t like what someone is posting, with a click, you don’t follow them any more.
4. It’s new. Early adopters and social media lovers get a kick out of twitter because it’s new. Lots of people don’t even know what Twitter is all about and think it sounds silly.
5. It sounds silly. Yep somehow this puts it in the same category as Google and Yahoo. Names which start out sound silly seem to capture the public imagination and catch on faster. In time they become respected and admired if they’re good at what they do.
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Marketing evolved mostly in the second half of the 20th Century as an outgrowth of the efforts of large corporations to increase their sales in an organized manner. Although the Internet has had a profound effect on the practice of marketing, it is still as much art as it is science in actual practice. There is no always reliable method for any given business or organization to increase sales, in part because there are so many variables in the dynamic marketplace that cannot be controlled, such as competition, the economy, mass media and other complex systems.

In recent years a new paradigm for understanding complex systems and their dynamics has emerged known as Complexity science, or just complexity for short. I created a simple introduction to “Complexity Made Simple” at http://www.lciweb.com/Complexity.

In this framework, an organization is a complex adaptive system (CAS) seeking to survive and thrive like a living organism in an ecosystem (marketplace). Its ability to survive and thrive depends largely on its abilities to adapt to the constantly changing environment. Thus the role of marketing is to enable the organization to monitor, understand and adapt to the changing environment most effectively. That rarely happens.

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Branding is the topic of a great column by Guy Kawasaki in the September issue of Entrepreneur magazine (pg. 40). Guy says that there are 8 rules to follow for effective branding:

1. Seize the high ground - Base your brand on positive claims such as “making the world a better place” and not negative ones, certainly not in opposition to your competition.
2. Create one message - You can’t have more than one brand message for your company, even it it’s a big one. Keep it short and simple. One message for all.
3. Speak English - Avoid jargon. Use language that your grandmother can understand.
4. Apply the “opposite test” - If your brand claim is something like, “Our software is scalable, fast and easy to use” then that’s the same thing a competitor could say. If there is no “opposite” claim, don’t bother with pablum.
5. Cascade the message - Relay it up and down the organization so everyone knows it, believes it and repeats it.
6. Focus on PR, not advertising - Advertising lacks the credibility of articles in the news media, plus it is very expensive. Use PR for maximum advantage (something we believe in and practice at Charlotte marketing firm Lawrimore Inc.) to build your brand with many audiences believably.
7. Strive for humanness - Speak to your customers as individuals, not part of a market. Be personal and in time you may be rewarded with “my iPod” or “my Harley.”
8. Flow with the go - Ultimately it’s your customers and their perceptions that determines what your brand really means in the marketplace. Don’t go against that flow - capitalize on it and strengthen your brand with the real-world perceptions of customers.

Read more Guy Kawasaki great ideas at his website, Alltop.com.