Category Archives: making movies

Branding as a concept is hardly new.  Any student of business or advertising can tell you that your brand name and brand recognition are extraordinarily important.  The brand name tells the consumer what to expect and, for better or for worse, the level of trust they will place in a product.  There’s a reason why billions and billions of dollars are spent every year making sure that you know that Coke is the Real Thing or that Frosted Flakes are GRRRRRRRREAT!  Johnson & Johnson?  They’re the family company and I’ve heard that Snickers really satifies your hunger.  The name is the product and the product is the name.

Have you heard of the Mars Bar?  It’s a candy bar.  They have a version in the UK, but the kind I’m talking about is the all American Mars Bar, milk chocolate, nougat, almonds and caramel.  Man I love those!  They’ve been my favorite candy bar for a long time.  I don’t even buy them that often because I will eat all that I see until they are gone.  This is a really good candy bar, but sales were down.  In fact the Mars company, the company for which this candy bar is named after, knew that they had to do something.  It’s a good candy bar, it’s a flagship candy bar so how do you raise sales?  They decided to re-brand this candy bar.  See the Mars company also sells a candy bar that you may have heard of, the Snickers Bar.  The Snickers Bar is one of the top selling candy bars of all time.  One act plays have been written about the Snickers Bar.  Say Snickers in a room full of 6-11 year olds and you will be attacked until you produce the candy.  Thus the ever so tasty Mars Bar was re-named – re-branded – Snickers Almond.  The company took the trust and name recognition of the Snickers Bar – the candy that out sells their own flagship bar – and used that to help boost sales.

It worked.

Most people don’t know the history of Snickers Almond.  I know that a few folks thought that it was a new candy bar when they first got one.  I knew it wasn’t and it was a bit disappointing that this great candy bar that everyone was now enjoying could have been enjoyed just as much but not as many people would give it a chance because of its name, its brand.

But what does all of this mean for people?  What does it have to do with email and social networking?  Quite a bit actually.  Whether you like it or not if you are online you are advertising yourself.

Think about it.

It doesn’t matter if you only have an email address and nothing else, anything you have online represents you to those that might find you on the web – and that could be anyone on Earth.

So what do we, the older generation do?  I feel like we are a bit behind the curve with execution, but ahead of the curve when it comes to content and expression.  Any teenager can tweet right to their Facebook and then post a video about it on YouTube all from their phone.  I need to use my Blackberry to do all those things and, with the exception of  Twitter, really can’t get it done right unless I’m sitting in front of a full fledged computer.  I’m just not culturally accustomed to it.  And from my experience I’m about middle of the road for my age group.  I have some friends that are as savvy as a 13 year old, and some whose grandparents are better online.  Although we may not be able to do as much as the kids, what we can do is take advantage of what we do… do.  My friend Mark is an artist.  He does fine art.  He is looking to branch out and wants to do so online.  He has a website and a Facebook but he wants to try Twitter and see if MySpace can do anything for him.  I know a PR firm who only operates in social media and does a great business advertising their clients only online.  PepsiCo has decided to not advertise on the Super Bowl this year because they are moving to a mostly online advertising model.  Interactive social media is becoming more and more important all the time and even the big companies can’t deny it, which brings me back to the title topic, your brand.

Because being online is now almost a requirement how you allow yourself to be seen is more important than ever…

Hi!  I want to give this next series of blogs a bit of a forward because this is a long blog, or at least it was before I decided to chop it into a few bits.  The idea of a personal brand isn’t new but it has come up a lot lately and so I thought it might be a good idea to really explore the idea.  I’m sure you’ve noticed that I haven’t really kept up with my blog and this entry is part of the reason why.  I’m really hoping and looking forward to the discussions that this subject might spawn.  Enjoy!

I was talking with Rene recently about people, how the mob mentality works and the effect of social media.and then the subject raised again at a friend’s birthday party.  We were talking about social networking and social media and how it has effected our lives and business.  The conversation took an interesting turn when we discussed our ages.  All of us are in our 30’s-40’s, we’re the last generation of people who grew up without the internet in our homes.  For us we’re learning the internet as a tool,  not as a “given”.  We did research for papers when we first found the internet, now you can make friends and can instantly give opinions on just about anything.  Privacy is now marginalized.  People younger than I am don’t necessarily consider privacy the same way as people my age or older do.  It’s a rapidly changing world and the technology isn’t showing any signs of slowing down, but what does that mean for me and people like me?  What does it mean for the younger set and all the children who are being born and growing up in a world that they partially inhabit online?

I’m gonna’ roll back the clock here – to 3rd grade, Mrs. Guazzo’s class and our first trip to the computer lab.  This was 1986 and my family didn’t have a personal computer.  In fact none of my friends at the time had a personal computer, that I remember, except for Tommy Pollard and the only thing we knew how to do on it was play “California Games” which was a collection of beach themed sports, surfing, skate boarding, etc., other than that my trip to the computer lab was the only real encounter I had had with a computer.  I remember hearing my classmates getting excited, “Can we play Oregon Trail?” and murmuring about other things that they had apparently already seen.  There was no Oregon Trail that day, or any day after actually.  Sometimes I feel like I’m the only kid that never actually saw or played the game Oregon Trail and now you can download a pretty advanced version of it to play on your cell phone, but I digress…
We walked into the computer lab, a class room that had tables covered in computers instead of desks, and we were sat in front of our own Apple IIe’s.  Kind of neat, actually, considering that now that classroom must be an actual classroom now and I doubt that class sizes are small enough that each student would get a computer.  Although I remember, even then, times when we had to share two to a computer, but that’s not important right now.  What we did in computer class was practice our computer skills, this included typing (a skill I still haven’t mastered or taken the time to re-learn – although I do type around 60-75 words a minute even with my hunt ‘n peck), turtle shuttle (a game where the “turtle,” the arrow that is on your screen RIGHT NOW, was moved around the screen by typing commands  about how many degrees to rotate and then a numerical value that would equal a certain distance across the screen.  There were maze transparencies that they would tape in front of the screen that we were supposed to navigate.  A line coming out from behind the turtle would show your path and keep you honest.  I really liked that game.  There was also a game where you drove a car and had to run a certain number of errands for your aunt before you ran out of gas.  I liked that game too, but remember thinking how much gas the car we “drove” must have used because you really couldn’t get very far, maybe three blocks, before you needed to refuel.   Not very “green,” but it was the 80’s and we only cared about saving the whales back then – they even made a Star Trek movie about it!

I remember the first Macintosh computers coming to homes.  I remember BBS’s and when my friend Scott came home with a 14.4 bod modem that cost him hundreds of dollars!  I remember when America Online was THE way to get on the internet and how they used to charge you by the hour.  Chat rooms and ICQ.  The beginning of online gaming and when email started to overtake snail mail – and it’s when email became so prevalent that only the smartest of people began to realize what it really meant to have an email address.  That email address was your online persona.  It represented you in the digital world and to those of us that were too young or too shortsighted to see the future it seemed like a fun new fad and not the necessary business tool that it has become.  We had fun monikers, like my first AOL account name chickenshackkid which was the only name I could come up with that wasn’t already taken.  They were alter egos, things that we wanted to be or thought of ourselves in an alternate life.  Mine was the name of a character I had played a few years before I got my address.  I chose it because I wanted the world to know, even if it was in a very obscure way, that I was a working actor – no matter the caliber of the role.  I remember screen names and email addresses like naughtyprincess, cubsfan238, or eric51 all names that identified the owner by how they wanted to be known in the digital world – but many of these names weren’t thought out enough to carry into the “real” world.  And then came the DOTCOM boom and suddenly if you had a business you were trying to figure out how to take it online…