Silicon Valley Brand Forum at Cisco May 14th 2013

May 22, 2013 By Silicon Valley Brand Forum Leave a Comment

Building Brands through Storytelling

Nancy Duarte, Jason Baer, Lou Hoffman and Art Kilinski shared insights and observations with a packed house at Cisco at the Silicon Valley Brand Forum. Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design opened the event with a captivating presentation that covered a wide range of perspectives on storytelling from why it’s necessary to how to do it effectively, including slides of her visual mapping of famous speeches to illustrate measurable elements of storytelling.

Jason Baer from Siegel and Gale moderated the panel discussion. Lou Hoffman offered his insights into the challenges Silicon Valley companies have had using storytelling effectively based on his two decades of experience running a PR agency in the valley. Art Kilinski offered his views on the visual aspect of storytelling and Nancy shared more real client experiences to illustrate her points in the discussion. The audience was fully engaged in the discussion as always, offering questions that reflected the wide range of marketers that attend the forums.

Although Nancy’s slides from the event are not available, you can see a lot of the content from her presentation in her TEDTalk. Set aside 20 minutes and watch the whole thing.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Silicon Valley Brand Forum, Spring 2013

April 24, 2013 By Silicon Valley Brand Forum Leave a Comment

Once Upon a Brand

WHEN:

May 14, 2013

8:30am to Noon PDT

WHERE:

Cisco Blg. 9

260 E. Tasman Drive

San Jose, CA

How brand storytelling creates relevancy, engagement and action for customers

The growth of social media has spawned numerous discussions about how to manage content how to get customers engaged with brands. Storytelling has proven to be the most effective way to get customers to relate to, believe in and interact with a brand.

We’ll define storytelling as it relates to brand building and explore the kinds of stories brands need to tell, from explaining who the corporate brand is to giving relevance to a new product or solution. We’ll also discuss the elements of an effective story and keys to delivering a story, both for companies and individuals.

The morning will begin with a presentation from renowned author and communication expert, Nancy Duarte, who has been featured in Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, Wired, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, LA Times and on CNN. Her firm, Duarte, Inc., is the global leader behind some of the most influential visual messages in business and culture. Resonate, her latest book, spent nearly a year on Amazon’s top 100 business book bestsellers list.

You’ll also hear and interact with a panel of influential branding professionals in a spirited discussion on how their companies are using storytelling to build the brand. The panel will include Nancy Duarte, Lou Hoffman, CEO of The Hoffman Agency, a global PR firm, Art Kilinski, Creative Director at Cisco and Thomase Ranese, Senior Director of Global Marketing Communications at Google. Jason Baer, Group Director, Content at Siegel + Gale, will moderate the panel discussion.

www.svbrandforum.com

Presenter and Panelist
Nancy Duarte, CEO

Duarte Design

Panel Moderator
Jason Baer

Group Director, Content

Siegel+Gale

Panelist
Art Kilinski

Creative Director

Cisco Systems

Panelist
Lou Hoffman, CEO

The Hoffman Agency

Panelist

Thomas Ranese

Senior Director

Global Marketing Comm.

Google

Sponsors:

Silicon Valley Brand Forum Fall 2012 – Measuring Brands in the New Age

October 18, 2012 By Silicon Valley Brand Forum Leave a Comment

Our Most Recent Event:

Measuring Brands in the New Age

Hosted by

The event began with a presentation from Ted Sapountzis in which he shared some of the ways Next Principles has helped clients measure brand in the social media world. He began by talking about the amazing adoption of social media in B2B business and how companies have not managed to take advantage of the opportunities this has created. Ted showed how they have helped a sports equipment company in South America, Marathon, and EMC in North America engage with their customers through social media channels.

The panel discussion that followed was very insightful, as the seasoned marketers talked about balancing the exciting opportunities that have developed in brand measurement in social media with traditional brand practices.

Sponsors:

Filed Under: Event Updates Tagged With: Brand, Brand Forum, Branding, Marketing, measurement, Silicon Valley Brand Forum

Silicon Valley Brand Forum, Fall 2012

October 5, 2012 By Silicon Valley Brand Forum Leave a Comment

The next Silicon Valley Brand Forum will be held at SAP in Palo Alto

November 8, 2012
8:30 am to 12 noon

New Brand Metrics for the Social/Mobile Age

SVBF will discuss the impact of new technology on traditional approaches to brand measurement

Measuring brand equity includes knowing what you want to measure, how to measure it and deriving meaning from what you’ve measured. Brand measurement has evolved dramatically over the past decade. It’s less expensive and it can be measured in real time.
We’ll discuss the impact of new technology on traditional approaches to brand measurement. Are David Aaker’s categories of brand equity – brand loyalty, name awareness, perceived quality, and brand associations – the only categories to measure now? Are there more? Are traditional methods of gathering and analyzing brand data still useful?
Join us for a lively morning with senior brand experts as we discuss the opportunities and challenges in the integration of traditional brand measurement with new analytical tools and methods.

Details and additional information coming soon.

Filed Under: Event Updates

Many Lessons Learned about Brand Engagement in Social Media

May 21, 2012 By Silicon Valley Brand Forum Leave a Comment

On May 15th, 2012, about 80 brand professionals gathered at Xilinx in San Jose to discuss best practices in brand engagement in social media.

Kyra Whitten, senior director of marketing at Xilinx, welcomed the group and talked briefly about the value of social media for Xilinx to engage with their target audiences.

Lorie Loe, CEO of Eccolo Media, followed with a presentation about the effective use of content to engage customers in the “Social Web.” There are 4 key things that really matter according to Loe, when engaging with customers: small things matter, thought leadership matters, brand story matters, and humanness matters. If you would like to download Lorie Loe’s presentation, click here.

Steve Farnsworth, Silicon Valley Brand Forum director and Forbes Top 50 SocialMedia Influencer shared a series of amazing quotes and facts before the break about how social media is changing the way we communicate. The panel discussion, led by Mike Sanchez from Cisco, featured Sandi Meyer from Trend Micro, Katy Keim for Lithium Technologies, and Lorie Loe, and it explored questions like:

What is the difference between brand engagement in social media for B2B companies as opposed to B2C companies?
How do you influence brand perception in communities and the blogoshpere?
What social media platforms are the most effective for brand engagement? Which are the weakest?
And many others, as well as very insightful questions from an audience of seasoned brand managers.

Diane Harrigan created a short video collage of the event that captures the energy and level of information exchange:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxAkNnOPha4

Our next event will take place in the fall, but the conversation can continue in the meantime. Share your thoughts about brand topics worthy of discussion, emerging trends in brand management, or questions that never got answered at the forum last week. You can converse on our Facebook page, Twitter or our LinkedIn group.

Filed Under: Event Updates

Brand Engagement in Social Media

April 20, 2012 By Silicon Valley Brand Forum Leave a Comment

Silicon Valley Brand Forum presentsBrand Engagement in Social Media

Managing the Brand Experience in a Seemingly Unmanageable World

Presenter and Panelist
Lorie Loe, CEOEccolo Media

Panel Moderator
MIke Sanchez,
Brand StrategistCisco Systems

Panelist
Katy Keim, CMOLithium Technologies

Panelist
Sandi Meyer, Sr. Dir., Mktg.TrendMicro

May 15, 2012 | 8:30am – 12:00pmSpend a morning learning about best practices in

Brand Engagement in Social Media

2100 Logic Drive, San Jose, CA

Companies work very hard to maximize the impact of a brand experience. They want to be sure that customers have a positive brand experience at every touchpoint. In the world of social media, where communities are run by people with no allegiance to your brand, brand managers are facing new challenges for managing that experience. We’ll hear from brand leaders who have tackled this challenge, and we’ll get a deeper understanding of managing brands in social media.The Event will begin with a presentation from
Lorie Loe, CEO of Eccolo Media, on the connection between engaging audiences through brand content in social media and building your brand.We’ll also have a panel discussion with a group of brand professionals sharing best practices and challenges from both the client and agency perspective.

Premier Sponsor: Media Sponsor:

Associate Sponsors:

www.svbrandforum.com

Filed Under: Event Updates Tagged With: Brand, Brand Forum, Branding, events, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley Brand Forum

Spring 2012 Silicon Valley Brand Forum

March 22, 2012 By Silicon Valley Brand Forum Leave a Comment

May 15, 2012

8:30 am to 12 pm

The next Silicon Valley Brand Forum will take place at:

Spend a morning learning about best practices in:

Brand Engagement in Social Media

Managing the Brand Experience in a Seemingly
Unmanageable World

The Event will begin with a presentation from Lorie Lowe, CEO of Eccolo Media, on the connection between engaging audiences through brand content in social media and building your brand.

We’ll also have a panel discussion with a group of brand professionals sharing best practices and challenges from both the client and agency perspective.

The Last “Social Media” Conference

March 22, 2012 By Silicon Valley Brand Forum Leave a Comment

I attended B2B Online’s Digital Edge Live conference on March 20th, a full day of insights on trends and best practices in the digital world from executives from the largest companies to small agencies. My head is still spinning with info, but there were a few takeaways that I thought were blogworthy.

Jeremiah Owyang from the Altimeter Group opened the event with a presentation that encouraged us all to approach social media with a methodical growth strategy starting with a solid internal foundation and rising to a holistic model where social media is completely integrated into the organization and everyone is completely informed of the corporate guidelines. Without this approach, he warned, organizations will be entrenched in crisis management, or “social media sanitation.”

An interesting point Jeremiah made that was reiterated throughout the day, is that people will no longer refer to Social Media in 5 to 10 years, as it will be so pervasive that it will just be considered an integral part of all business. We don’t see many people these days referring to themselves as Internet marketers. Your first question would be, “As to what? A non-Internet marketer? How do you do that?” It won’t be long before people will ask social media marketing managers, “What other kind of marketing managers are there?”

Mark Wilson from Sybase had one of the most tweeted data points in his presentation on mobile marketing: There are about 2.5x the amount of mobile phones in the world as there are toothbrushes. The statistic accompanied a wonderful photo of a man with disastrous teeth holding a cell phone to his ear.

Attendees tweeted interesting points throughout the day at #DEliveSF. It was an amazing collection of presenters leaving all of the attendees with lots to think about. And maybe it was the last event that will use the term Social Media so pervasively. Perhaps next time they’ll just call it “communications.”

Filed Under: Brandsights

Know Thyself

March 8, 2012 By Silicon Valley Brand Forum Leave a Comment

from Kevin Heney

I met with a small group of branding folks this week to talk about brand archetypes. Lee Shupp and Helen Firth from Cheskin Added Value led the discussion, as they have done a lot of work understanding how brand archetypes can help companies create a distinct brand character in their space.

It’s based on Jung’s 12 archetypes – The Hero, the Creator, the Innocent, the Ruler, the Sage, Everyman, the Explorer, the Jester, the Caregiver, the Outlaw, the Lover and the Magician. Companies are often a combination of 2 or 3 archetypes. Many companies are hard to associate with a particular archetype, and that’s not a good thing. It usually means they don’t really have a personality.

The process of determining a desired archetype for a company begins with determining which archetypes are appropriate for the market space for that company. After all, Ameriprise would not want to be perceived as The Jester. Then they begin the process of finding the most appropriate archetype for the company that will differentiate them from the competition. It’s a carefully researched process, and Lee pointed out that they also look at the “dark side” of each archetype, the potential negative associations, to be sure they avoid them.

If you’re thinking that brand archetypes is just another way for agency MBAs to suck money out of corporate coffers, consider the alternative. Look at those tired brand attributes inscribed in your brand platform. In case you’ve forgotten about them, I can tell you what they are: Smart, Innovative, Fast-to-market, Bold and Honest. Yeah, we had the same ones at my last company. Understanding your brand archetype will give you a real brand personality to communicate at all your touchpoints. It’s an important step in creating a distinctive and strong brand.

Additional reading:
http://www.added-value.com/source/2011/05/whats-your-archetype/

The Hero and the Outlaw by Carol Pearson and Margaret Mark