Apparently the financial analysts and institutional buyers who have driven Apple stock down hundreds of billions of dollars over the last half year have not taken the value of the iconic company’s stock into account. According to the latest BrandZ ratings, Apple is once again the most valuable brand in the world, with a calculated value of over $185 billion.

Tech companies did well in general. Counting telecoms, technology companies made up 29 of the top 100 brands in the world.

Those multicolored letters in Google’s logo are not cheap, coming in at number two with a value of $113.7 billion. And though much older, another tech company with letters for a logo ranked number three: IBM’s brand was valued at $112.5 billion. The only other technology company in the top 10 was Microsoft, with an overall brand value of $69.8 billion.

“Despite a more competitive marketplace and other challengers nipping at its heels, Apple’s ability to maintain its no.1 position demonstrates the value that having a strong brand brings to business,” Nick Cooper, a director for the company behind the BrandZ rankings, Millward Brown Optimor, said in a statement. “People still love the brand regardless of its stock price.”

Apple should watch out, though. Its brand value grew just one percent, compared to mobile rival Samsung’s massive 51 percent growth to number 30 in the global rankings at $21 billion.

How did it grow so quickly?

“Samsung fueled its huge increase in brand value by balancing a remarkable period of innovation with growing market share – it spent $1.6 billion more on advertising in the last year,” Cooper said.

The top 100 brands in the world are now worth $2.6 trillion, according to Millward Brown Optimor. The ranking and awards, of course, were created by a brand research company, which might give it some incentive to be generous with the valuations.

The top 10 brands globally:

1. Apple
2. Google
3. IBM
4. McDonald’s
5. Coca-Cola
6. AT&T
7. Microsoft
8. Marlboro
9. Visa
10. China Mobile

See all the data in visual form in this infographic. Open the image in a new window to see more detail.

photo credit: albyantoniazzi via photopin cc

Readers, I think we need to talk. Communication is really important, and I’m just feeling like I need more ways to connect with you.

Good thing investors dumped millions into communications-based companies today. We saw $10 million go to a texting app that competes with companies such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Texting over anything but data is so passé anyway.

On the flip side of communication, Skyword got $6.7 million to communicate your brand through stories. PR through content is wildly popular now-a-days, but do people actually trust what they’re reading?

For more funding news as it happens, subscribe to our Deals Channel feed. You can also follow VentureBeat on Twitter, @venturebeat, to view funding news as it’s published.

Check out more about these companies below:

MessageMe nabs $10M from Greylock, Google, & others to take on WhatsApp

Better watch out, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Hot messaging app MessageMe has just raised $10 million in its first round of funding, the company confirmed today. MessageMe offers iOS and Android apps that send rich messages to friends, family, and groups. The app also lets you share YouTube videos, iTunes tracks, voice recordings, emoticons, and other things you might not share over traditional text messaging. MessageMe has risen quickly in status; it only just raised seed funding about a month ago. At that time, the service said it had one million users. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Skyword takes off with $6.7M for content marketing

Consumers these days expect their favorite brands to tell a story, and Skyword helps them tell it. Skyword has announced closing $6.7 million in growth financing for its content marketing solutions. This Boston-based startup provides agencies, brands, media, and retail customers with a platform to publish content and tools to distribute it effectively. It has a database of more than 20,000 professional writers that publishers can use to recruit and manage freelancers and keep track of workflow. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Doc talking via Shutterstock

This is a guest post by entrepreneur Adam Peterson, CEO of video-sharing platform VipeCloud.

Do startups need a video strategy? I’ve been in and around the “video for business” industry for the last six years and I get asked this question by startups quite often. The answer is always yes.

Video is the most engaging form of online content. But it’s also a highly expensive and time-consuming proposition for startups. So the strategy you take will depend a lot on what stage your company is in.

Here’s a breakdown of what kind of video you’ll want to invest in at each stage:

Pre-funding and pre-launch

There are really only two types of videos a startup at this early of a stage should consider. Most companies this early are going to change their messaging and possibly even direction several times. Taking valuable time or bootstrapping dollars to create a video can be a tough decision to make; however, these two use-cases should qualify:

1. Create a simple screenshot or animation of the problem you are solving and your proposed solution. This will help you tell your own story, and it will help you with customer discovery to validate the problem and your proposed solution with prospective customers or buyers. I would not invest any funds in the first versions of this video. Simply use a screen recorder like Quicktime or Camtasia and run through a PowerPoint presentation, basic animation, or recorded whiteboard drawing.
2. Create a professional looking video if you’re planning to do a crowdfunding campaign. A good-looking video will show your audience that you’re serious about your project. Tim Ferriss discusses the idea of “Minimum Effective Dose” in his blog about how Soma Water raised $100,000 on Kickstarter in 10 days. A professional-looking video is a required “Minimum Effective Dose.” If you’re on a tight budget, don’t worry; there’s an overwhelming number of resources available about how to make good videos. For reference, here’s an article offering tips for how to record a video on a skeleton crew and a series about how to make professional-looking content.

If you’re not one to pick up video editing software quickly and have a few bucks to invest, it might be worth hiring a videographer. A handful of low-budget options exist, including videographer networks like BBN3, Pixelfish, or SmartShoot. If your budget is slightly larger, you might try the animation approach with Ephipheo or AutoDemo. Of course, you might also have a friend of a friend who’s willing to help.

Pre-launch but MVP-demo-ready

Once you have a functional minimum viable product, recording a typical use-case of your product is a great way to validate your problem/solution and even generate pre-launch signups. Dropbox has one of the more recognized success stories doing this. Their waiting list purportedly went from 5,000 to 75,000 overnight after launching their simple screen recording video demo. That said, they took great care to cater to their audience by adding in several easter eggs.

Near this stage, your company might also begin social media and other efforts to generate attention. Videos are expensive and you shouldn’t always promote your own product on social media, yet video is one of the most effective forms of content to generate engagement. So what do you do? Share other people’s videos.

Sharing an interesting, educational, or new video meme with your network will still make you the source of the great content to your audience and thus help you generate attention. For example, you can generate thought leadership by sharing industry- or business-relevant videos like this strategy discussion from the Harvard Business Review, or an interesting TedTalk, or even the new Psy Gentlemen video if you dare. With 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, something should be interesting to your audience.

Launched

If all goes well, you’ll eventually get your product out the door. At this stage it’s almost a requirement to use video. Why? Because your buyers want it. Ninety-five percent of business-to-business (B2B) tech buyers are watching videos. Furthermore, your competitors are more than likely using video, as 87 percent of B2B enterprise marketers and 70 percent of business to consumer marketers use video.

What kind of videos should you make? The first priority should be product overviews. Product demos are more valuable than case studies or white papers for influencing purchase decisions. These overviews can include a high-level product showcase, highlights of key sections, feature releases, and use-case scenarios.

Product videos for customer support and onboarding efforts can also hit two birds with one stone. A quick screen capture can be much faster than typing up support guides, at the same time, the more FAQs you get on video, the more you can automate your support engine. If you check out the Box channel on YouTube (below) it’s clear their video focus is on supporting their existing customers. Zappos has also publicly discussed how videos have increased conversion rates and reduced return rates.

Whether you’re funded or not will really only affect the quality of videos you can produce. Quality is important; however, there are workarounds. For example, if you can’t afford a professional video to represent your brand on your homepage, then put one on your blog. Write an article and embed a “micro-webinar” product overview that’s positioned as something you made quickly like a screencast or a live interview.

What do you do with your videos once you have them?

Everything you possibly can. Videos can be the most expensive sales and marketing assets your company creates, so you should get the most out of them. Here’s what you should consider:

1. Post them to YouTube. Though be careful not to rely too much on the “SEO value.” When a link to your website shows up in a Google search, it brings the searcher to your website or a landing page that’s also on your domain. When a link to your YouTube video shows up in a Google search, it brings the searcher to YouTube. You can turn the in-video ads off; however, ads and distracting promoted videos can still show up within your channel (for instance, click on any of the videos on Box’s channel and you’ll see a featured video ad on the right).
2. Consider private hosting. There are thousands of video hosting options. We offer this at VipeCloud, so does Brightcove, Vimeo, and several others. Note, if you’re going to use Vimeo, you’ll have to upgrade to VimeoPRO as their community guidelines don’t allow videos for commercial use on their free or plus levels.
3. Get everyone to share them, including your sales team, support team, and any evangelists inside and outside your company. The more people distributing your videos, the more value you’ll get. Buyers are looking to build relationships earlier in the process as they look for trusted advisers. Furthermore, your sales teams, support teams, and evangelists build different relationships with buyers than marketing does, and can guide video suggestions as such.

Video is a means to an end. It will soon represent most all of Internet bandwidth and a majority of mobile data. However, your company still needs to solve a real problem for a large market. The exercise of making your first video at an early stage will help you think through the details of the problem you are really solving. Once you’ve chosen your path, video becomes a requirement. Put together a strategy that works for your company, and remember to track if it’s working.

Adam is CEO of VipeCloud and an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at StartX, Stanford’s student startup accelerator. Prior to VipeCloud Adam launched eFaceTime in 2010, integrating video into Cendyn’s eProposal, the hospitality industry’s leading sales proposal software tool used by more than 10,000 hotels and venues worldwide. In 2008 he launched VipePower, an offering that became the leading recruiting and staffing video solution. From 2008 to 2012 he served as the Technology Chair on the board of the Silicon Valley Chapter of the California Staffing Professionals. 

Top image via Shutterstock

Goldy Bardin is a creative director at Organic, Inc.

CES 2013 was full of innovators—all the big names in technology you would expect, plus a host of surprising startups. Their bright minds and smart designs didn’t disappoint, for the most part.

But as I walked the floors, two brands stood out to me: Fujifilm and Polaroid. Both are once-great analog brands that have have had to make the leap to digital. Over the years, both have expanded their core product lines with various consumer electronics, but both brands have declined substantially since their glory days.

So I took a closer look to see how these tried and true brands are keeping pace with the amazing innovation that’s happening in 2013.

Polaroid

I started with Polaroid. As a marketer, I was curious about how they were differentiating themselves from innovative brands like Sony and LG. As I explored their booth, I was intrigued by the archival displays from their past. They truly are a nostalgia brand. I still remember my first Polaroid camera and how fun it was to instantly see the photo I had taken. Edwin Land, Polaroid’s founder and inventor of the instant camera, really understood the value of instant gratification.

At first I was impressed by their new iM1836 Interchangeable Lens connected camera with Android 4.1 “Jelly Bean.” A great idea. But as soon as I picked up the camera it felt, well, cheap. It took a while to start up and getting from screen to screen was glitchy and slow. There was no “instant” anything. And it wasn’t gratifying.

Granted, this was a display model that had been handled by thousands of attendees, but it was a far cry from the Samsung Galaxy Android-enabled camera, which was pleasing to the eye, incredibly fast, and also featured great apps like Best Face. That said, why would I pay for an extra data plan for any connected camera when I could just deck out my phone with the sleek i.am.plus foto.socho?

I also checked out another new device—the Polaroid Kids Tablet. I used to market Leapfrog products, which are really kid-friendly and intuitive, so I was excited to check it out. The design was cute, but definitely skewed toward younger pre-school aged children. It runs on Android Ice Cream Sandwich, so the interface is somewhat intuitive, with icons that kids who can’t read yet can most likely interpret. However, the navigation buttons were small and butted up next to the beveled chassis, so they were hard to reach, even for smaller fingers.  The main features seemed to be indestructability and parental controls. A pretty good idea, but the overall design was a disappointment.

Polaroid has been making quite a few announcements lately, including a new retail strategy that includes Fotobar storefronts where you can print your digital photos. However, as a Creative Director, and someone with affinity for their brand, I wish they would innovate products and develop a marketing strategy that embraced the notion of instant gratification. The iM1836 camera and Kids Tablet seemed like attempts to fill perceived gaps in the market, but didn’t really deliver on the strength of the brand heritage. Success of the Fotobar storefronts remains to be seen.

Fujifilm

As I wandered in the Fujifilm booth, I immediately raised an eyebrow at their Instax line of instant cameras. Super cute, Hello Kitty-like cameras that print instant photos in multi-colored Polaroid-esque frames. I would love to have seen a product like this from Polaroid, but they’ve only recently (and timidly) re-embraced instant cameras with prompting from enthusiasts like The Impossible Project.

I was really interested in how Fujifilm was faring in the transition from film to digital, especially given the recent demise of Kodak. I thought back to my first digital camera—the Fujifilm FinePix 6800Zoom, designed by F.A. Porsche. It’s gorgeous. In fact, although it stopped working many years ago, I’ve still held onto it as a piece of art.

What I found was that Fujifilm really understands their customer and is savvy enough to deliver innovative products that satisfy photography enthusiasts and brand loyalists. Their X100S camera design is reminiscent of a 1960s-era Pentax and when I picked it up, it had some heft to it. But within the retro exterior is some really cool innovation in digital photography, including settings that allow the user to simulate the color of their favorite traditional Fujifilm (e.g., Velvia, Astia, Monochrome, etc.).

Fujifilm knows their customers love the quality of color they get from using their traditional film, so year after year they innovate to capture that Fujifilm-like color in their digital products.

(Random sidenote: Even though I don’t use traditional film cameras anymore, I still save the canisters. Fujifilm canisters are the best for making Alkaseltzer rockets.)

To quote Peter Drucker, “Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.” Polaroid is doing some interesting marketing, but is falling short on innovation. Fujifilm, meanwhile, is quietly innovating but hasn’t done anything noteworthy in terms of consumer marketing (at least in the US).

It will be interesting to follow these two iconic brands in 2013 and see how they navigate the waters of the digital era.

Goldy Bardin is a Creative Director specializing in consumer goods and technology at Organic, Inc.

I’m in Detroit checking out the local startup scene, and one of the standouts is Are You a Human. The company is reinventing something everyone loves to hate: captchas.

Captchas are those annoying hard-to-read letters and numbers that you need to type into a web form before submitting something or accessing a section of a site. They prove, in effect that you are human — and not a automated spider or bot that is just scraping content or generally being a bad boy.

I spoke to cofounders Reid Tatoris and Tyler Paxton today about Are You a Human’s business, revenue model, competition, and startling growth.

The first problem with captchas, says Tatoris, is that people hate them:

“Twenty-five to 35 percent of people leave a site when they see a captcha,” he told me. “It drives people away.”

Sample captcha replacements from Are You a Human.

The second problem is that they’re hard. Because bots are getting smarter at pattern recognition, captchas have gotten so hard that 25 percent of the time, the people who did stay on the site, leave.

Together with those who leave right away, that’s like getting 10 visitors to your front door, turning three of them away without even talking to them, and then turning away another two when they can’t answer a skill-testing question about the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow.

So Are You a Human does something different.

Instead of testing skill, the company lets you play a little game. For example, it might show you a washing machine, a shirt, and a tire and the ask you to do the laundry. Put the shirt in the washing machine and not the tire and it’s a good bet you’re human.

“We make it fun and engaging,” says Tatoris. “In a survey we did, 98 percent of people preferred Are You a Human to a captcha … and in live random testing, people were 40 percent more likely to submit the form.”

Those are big numbers, and they’re important. Because Are You a Human is fighting two massive enemies: Google and free.

Google-owned ReCaptcha owns about 10 percent to 15 percent of the captcha market, and free, open-source solutions are most of the rest. While ReCaptcha is generally regarded as most secure, it’s also the hardest — something I have personal experience with. Freeware tools are big because they’re free, but they vary in terms of both usability and accuracy.

In addition, ad-supported competitors such as Solve Media are also trying to reinvent captchas with a see-this-ad, type-in-the-name-of-the-company model.

But Are You a Human seems to be doing well in spite of all the competition. Launched just last year, the company’s volume is growing fast — 500 percent in just the last two months to 10 million uses on 2,300 sites. That’s 10 times the volume they had when we last talked to the company.

“Our big push now is growing the number of our publishers and the size of our publishers,” Tatoris told me.

And working on monetization.

The eight-person company has multiple product version: a free version that may include branded games, a subscription-supported version that is ad-free, and a subscription version with customized games for any publisher own brand.

The publisher one is perhaps most interesting — Coke could use it to create a minigame around opening the can and drinking the soda, or GM could create a game focused on parking the car. In other words: on-message targeted games specific to a brand. Potentially, pretty powerful stuff.

Are You a Human started in a University of Michigan startup accelerator, Tech Arb, and it has since raised a large seed round of $750,000 from Detroit Venture Partners. The company will soon be raising a series A round.

But only from humans.

photo credit: Ѕolo via photo pin cc

Today’s audiences aren’t automatically sold by celebrity endorsements anymore. Instead, they’re tribal to major online influencers who not only know their industry well but are the ones disrupting it and propelling it forward.

We asked 14 young entrepreneurs about how they identify and leverage major online influencers to help their brand — and whether such a mission is worth all the time, effort and/or funds.

Follow research by relevant names

Lawrence Watkins, @lawrencewatkins, Great Black Speakers

I look for annual lists whose goal is to highlight certain people within a profession. For example, Empact 100 helps me find entrepreneurs to connect with, and The Grio 100 helps me find new speakers for GBS. The best way to leverage the influencers is to offer them something of value. The association with reputable people raised the value of my company and influenced others to be a part of it.

Make use of Muck Rack journalists

Seth Kravitz, @secondcityceo, Technori

Muck Rack is one of the best ways we have found for targeting influential journalists on Twitter and building lists to begin targeting messages to them. Pretty much every major publication is listed there, with nearly all of their writers listed in really simple lists. It’s a huge time saver.

Connect through Yamana by Twtrland

Ben Lang, @benln, EpicLaunch

Yamana by the folks at Twtrland is an excellent product for identifying the right influencers to help your brand. Their trick is finding the best people in your niche, and it definitely shows good results that are useful.

Ditch Klout for Kred Story

Lane Sutton, @lanesutton, Social Media from a Teen

While Klout is controversial for its strange influence algorithm and the scores simply mean a number, Kred Story is a good alternative that actually adds points to influence scores for engagement, amplifications, outreach, audience size, communities, and influential topics. It also adds points for each tweet and message posted and gives a run-by-run breakdown of how your score adds up.

Give and get guest posts

Bhavin Parikh, @bkparikh, Magoosh Test Prep

We’ve looked for opportunities to help major influencers in our space by writing guest content for them. We focus on areas where we are experts. These relationships have helped us gain exposure with their user bases and have helped us rank higher in search results.

Savor popular social sharing aggregates

Eric Corl, @ericcorl, Fundable LLC

One great tool we’ve found are social sharing aggregates like Reddit and Hacker News. When we recently launched a new 3D conversion device, 3-D Vision’s Instant 3-D Converter, we leveraged our relationships with long-time contributors to Reddit — or “Redditors” — to give them a preview of the device and vouch for its capabilities and functionality. The results were outstanding, and coverage snowballed.

Promote them so they promote themselves

Stephanie Kaplan, @stephaniekaplan, Her Campus Media

On Her Campus we’ve done coverage and giveaways of major celebs’ fashion lines, books, etc., and the celebs have promoted our post to their many millions of followers. For example, when we did a giveaway of Snooki’s new book, Snooki tweeted about it, and it sent us a ton of new visitors and entrants.

Diligently stick to all social media

Andrew Schrage, @moneycrashers, Money Crashers Personal Finance

We are actively involved in social media, namely Twitter and Facebook. But we have also started to seek out followers by identifying industry professionals on LinkedIn and inviting them to join our conversations. This has definitely helped our branding on social media websites. We also regularly partake in any questions or interviews asked of us as a way to showcase our expertise.

Test out contextual influence marketing tools

Jesse Davis, @entreprecurious, Entrustet

Influencer marketing is a new focus within social media. Subsequently, it spawned a nascent industry of tools designed to help brands identify key influencers. Most recently, a subcategory of tools, called contextual influence tools have popped up. These tools let brands find influencers based on any subject a brand wants to search. Appinions, Traackr and Soc Metrics are the leaders in the space.

Take your influencer search to Twitter

Natalie MacNeil, @nataliemacneil, She Takes on the World

Many of the relationships I have with major influencers began on Twitter. Start by engaging with their content, retweeting, and participating in conversations they initiate. This puts you on their radar. When the time comes to reach out, make sure you clearly answer the question, “What’s in it for them?” One more thing: Be patient. Relationships aren’t built overnight.

Start an industry interview podcast

Allie Siarto, @allieo, Loudpixel

I learned the power of podcast interviews by accident during my senior year in college. By creating a niche podcast around your industry, you open a door to reach out to and talk with industry influencers. This will give you a chance to learn from the interview and boost your own visibility online. After the interviews, they will typically promote the published podcast to their networks.

Go with good ol’ fashioned giveaways

Peter Nguyen, @peternguyen, Advertiser360

Reach out to big bloggers, YouTube stars, gurus, experts — basically, anyone who’s already captivated an audience — and send out your product. Give it away for free, and hook up their followers with deep discounts. This is a great way to put yourself on the digital map, and it’s a free way to use digital PR.

There is no magic bullet!

Alexandra Levit, @alevit, Inspiration at Work

Uncovering the top influencers in one’s field requires old-fashioned research. Read the trades, go to industry events and, of course, check out Twitter, Facebook, etc. Then, gradually develop a relationship with the influencers by asking questions and citing their content. Do NOT ask an influencer to contribute to your site for free — influencers don’t need your exposure!

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

Image via Jonathan Kos-Read/Flickr

As if the drama surrounding Microsoft’s abandonment of its Metro branding wasn’t silly enough, now it seems Microsoft is taking to task developers who are using ‘Metro’ in their app titles.

A recent revision to Microsoft’s app naming guide for the Windows Store added a key new line: “Make sure your app name doesn’t include the word metro. Apps with a name that includes the word metro will fail certification and won’t be listed in the Windows Store.”

First noticed by the folks at MarkedUp, the new requirement makes it clear that Microsoft wants to distance itself even further from the Metro name, potentially trampling the little goodwill it’s earned so far. Microsoft is believed to have abandoned the Metro branding to avoid a costly trademark dispute with its German partner Metro AG.

We’re hearing that the guidelines to avoid Metro names has been in place since the Windows 8 Release Preview launched in May. Still, that does nothing to answer the more troubling questions these guidelines bring up. We’re still waiting for further details on the matter from Microsoft.

At first glance, it seems like popular apps such as MetroTwit could be in for a world of hurt. And the restriction could cause trouble for other apps that legitimately need to use the word “Metro.” We also expect this requirement to affect Windows Phone apps.

Microsoft still hasn’t fully explained its reasoning for moving away from Metro, and so far, its response to this entire situation has been baffling. Microsoft argued that the Metro name was never really meant for a shipping product, and it still hasn’t given us a legitimate alternative to the Metro branding. We heard last week that it could be either “Windows 8 style” to replace “Metro style,” or “Modern UI.” At this point, we’d just like some clarity already.

Since Microsoft is already confusing developers with its shaky branding, it can’t afford to be so heavy-handed with app requirements so early in the life of the Windows Store.

Update: Microsoft updated the naming guide yesterday to warn not to use trademarked names in app titles. While it’s no longer singling out the use of “Metro,” the fact that “Metro” is also trademarked could be an issue down the line.

Via The Verge

Apple tops the list – compiled by MillwardBrown – of top global brands overall, as well as top technology brands. The Apple brand is valued at a staggering $183 billion. That’s about $500 for every one of the more than 350 million iOS devices sold to date worldwide.

IBM (remember that company?) takes second place with a brand value surpassing $115 billion, and Google takes third at $108 billion. After McDonald’s, the only non-technology company to hit the top five, Microsoft rounds out the top five global brands with a $77 billion valuation. That’s almost half a trillion dollars between the tech giants, and almost $200 billion more than the top four non-technology brands.

Technology companies generally have done well in recent brand rankings. The most interesting data, however, concerns which companies are winning. This year, old-fashioned WalMart outpaced Amazon for the first time in years. Amazon’s brand is worth $34 billion, a nine percent decline from last year; WalMart is $400 million ahead.

And while two years ago Google was the number one global brand, this year it sinks to number three, surpassed again by Apple, and for the first time by IBM. Google lost three percent of its global brand value in the past year, while IBM gained 15 percent.

Microsoft, another technology giant, has traditionally been high in global brand rankings but suffered a two percent drop in the past year. Any significant drops in the coming year will result in Microsoft falling out of the top five, below a surging McDonald’s. In 2012 McDonald’s gained 17 percent in brand value to rank fourth at $95 billion.

Technology winners include Facebook, which gained a huge 74% in global brand value. Facebook was the fastest rising brand among the global 100 leaders, reaching $33 billion. And another technology notable was Baidu, the Chinese search engine which, despite being essentially a single-country service, reached number 25 with a brand valued at $24 billion.

The study highlighted the strategic importance of branding in stark terms: cold hard cash. In a press release accompanying the results, MillwardBrown stated: “While the total return on investment (ROI) for all companies in the S&P500 index was just 2.3%, the BrandZ Portfolio provided a 36.3% ROI, proving that companies with strong brands are able to deliver better value to their shareholders.”

It’s not entirely clear, however, exactly what the brand rankings measure. MillwardBrown looks at publicly available financials, consumer panel data, and consumer research, but details are few. Certainly a core aspect is how a company’s brand affects consumer buying decisions, but more clarity in how brand recognition and general public respect for a brand affect the calculations of monetary value would be appreciated.

Here’s a visual representation of the global brand data:

There are misconceptions about how important branding it is to success, how much work it takes, and the best ways to approach it. But every company, from a fresh-faced tech-startup to Apple, knows good branding can make a product or service.

Branding is how you present your company — your name, imagery, reputation — to the world through logos, ads, marketing materials, websites, apps, and social media. Left-brained business types may see it as simple graphic design, like choosing a logo color, or as a mysterious art. But experts know successful branding is hard and the best results are based on research, facts, and a well thought-out road-map.

We talked to Chris Mayfield, head of the Austin-based company Crispy Design, about how companies of all sizes can get the most out of working with branding professionals. Here are his guidelines for success:

Do your research

The most important work for successful branding takes place before a designer or agency is even hired: research, planning, introspection, and difficult decision making by the client. The worst thing a company can do is go to a design agency without having collected key pieces of information and expect the designers to fill in the blanks.

First, decide exactly what you want to communicate and who you want to communicate to — who is most likely to buy your product? Then, break down what your company does and identify its strengths and weaknesses so you can develop an approach that promotes its former and diminishes its latter.

If you don’t have this level of understanding of your own company, you won’t be able to engage with the agency enough to have their work be beneficial.

Pick a specific goal

Once you’ve done the advanced research, settle on a specific, actionable goal. Instead of saying, “We want to make more money,” try “We want to increase our market share with rural females between 18- and 25-years-old.” A scattershot approach will be less effective than a tightly focused strategy and will make it harder for you to gauge your success.

You can ask your branding agency to suggest a direction, but Mayfield says this is ill-advised. The third-party team you’ve hired to work on branding has only known your company for a short period of time, but you’ve been living and breathing it for years. You have the best understanding of your company and what it is trying to accomplish.

Communicate to your agency exactly what you’re trying to do over the next six months or a year. That way it can completely optimize what it’s trying to do for you.

Don’t be a copycat

A common first instinct it to replicate what a successful company, like Apple, has already done, which is short-sighted and not to anyone’s benefit. Blindly imitating another company’s branding strategy never works out.

“Many small and medium business think it’s like divinity if it was done before,” said Mayfield. “They think Facebook was built by Moses and was without fault.” Just because another company has already “perfected” an approach, doesn’t mean doing the same thing will work again for a different product or service.

Just as ill-advised as copying the big companies is emulating your competitors. Mayfield says this is the antithesis of branding. You want to set yourself apart from competitors. Branding should explain, in tone and visuals, how you’re different from them, not how you’re similar. This is a hard leap for many people.

“For small companies, a risk is exactly what they have to take,” said Mayfield. “This is generally their one chance to do something incredible.”

Embrace technology

Today, there’s no limit to how you can promote a product or service. Technology offers companies incredible opportunities to do things in a whole new way, such as using Facebook to target a very specific demographic. But you must understand the technology (or hire an agency that does) and be willing to go in unexpected directions.

Traditionally, ad agencies just want to make print ads and TV spots, and marketers want to put logos on frisbees and swag. But the landscape is changing; interactive and social media agencies are being added to the mix, and everyone is starting to use technology creatively to reach potential customers.

Take Sweat Leaf Tea. The company believed two things: that anyone who tried its iced tea would try it again, and that people are more likely to want a nice cold drink when it’s hot out. The agencies working on the project decided to geolocate people using an IP sniffer, and cross-reference that info with the average temperature where they were located. If it was above a certain degree, they would offer them free tea.

Social media is the technology that gets all the attention, and while it is an incredibly important part of branding, it’s also not the most complicated. The key to social media is putting in the work and being active in a space. The best social media plans are often the domain of content directors, as they’re the best at promoting their company’s own intellectual prowess.

Keep it simple

Vacuum-company Dyson explains a complicated product clearly. As technologically innovative as the company is, it’s able to communicate quickly and succinctly what its products can do. That simplicity is the cornerstone of a good brand, but can also be applied to the branding process itself.

It’s possible to overwork brands. Take logo design: a smartly designed logo doesn’t try to convey every aspect of a company, just give an impression. Attractive design should come ahead of cramming in literal representations of what the product does, or hunting for the perfect color to make someone want to spend money.

“Colors communicate things like fear, hunger, cold, and danger. They don’t communicate something like trust,” says Mayfield. Symbolism is another equally over-thought element of logo design. Sometimes it works, like when banks try to communicate stability with Grecian pillars. But don’t believe an agency that shows you a shiny object and tells you it communicates synergy. They are just trying to sell you on their design, and that’s a disservice to your company. The focus should be on making the design look contemporary.

Step back and let the agency do its work

If you have done all of the research and strategy work, step back and let the people at the design agency do what you have hired them to do. Don’t try to micro-manage the process. If they don’t do a good job, don’t hire them again. But if you’re constantly derailing their work, you’ll never get the best out of them or the experience.

Image via rishibando/Flickr

The site is credited to a team of four developers who live in New York and Sydney. They call themselves Collector’s Edition, a new-breed entertainment company that seems to craft clever web sites and services. Previously, the group launched a site dedicated to explaining the meaning of the word “Mate” (a Down Under version of the seminal “dude” commercials).

This product gives a whole new meaning to the term “data exhaust”.

“Obviously this is fairly tongue in cheek, but we’re reasonably pleased we monetized Twitter in a way that avoided advertising,” said founder David Gillespie (Are you listening Dick Costolo?). “We all have other jobs, though would obviously like to make it a full-time thing. As you saw, The Meaning Of Mate was the first thing CE did, now this. The direction is still settling, but I think there’s some kind of course to chart around just trying to entertain people. I don’t know where the revenue is, it may very well wind up needing to be funded by brands when the right project comes along. I can’t imagine Kleenex having put their name to Shitter though!”

Update: This thing is spreading faster than Montezuma’s revenge. Prolific angel investor and StockTwits founder Howard Lindzon just declared he wants to invest, on Twitter.

When you really think about it, $35 is cheap for a product that’s nearly perfect performance art in its simultaneous embrace and mocking of our social-media obsessed world.

We caught wind of Shitter first through Tweetdeck, but the always spot on @CBM reached out to say The Next Web got the exclusive.

Photo credit: fredarmitage/Flickr

Apple has long been known for its intense focus on consistent branding and beautiful simplicity.

While today’s Apple event unveiled a couple new improvements to an expected lineup of products, it also revealed a certain sloppiness that was absent from former, Steve Jobs-led launches.

This wasn’t anything major, just a few minor but glaring inconsistencies: Tim Cook going for the “rumpled executive” look in an untucked shirt, the ambiguous naming of the “new iPad,” (not iPad 3 or iPad HD), the use of a truly horrible pun on a new product’s landing page, and finally, the tie-dyed Apple logo at the presentation’s conclusion.

These are not the kinds of things I normally care about. They have nothing to do with hardware and nothing to do with technology.

But Apple’s ethos is about so much more than hardware and technology: It’s supposed to be, as this outsider sees it, about aspiration, dreams, desires, the future, even Utopia. In a word, it’s only 30 percent about the tech and 70 percent about the branding.

Think about the company’s meticulous attention to packaging details, the layout and lighting of its signature stores, the exacting control it maintains over partners and apps, the unwavering emphasis it places on design. And all of that was started and maintained by Steve Jobs.

I’m certainly no Steve Jobs fangirl; I hold the guy in appropriate regard for his many accomplishments and also recognize in him his many human foibles. But love him or hate him, he was a visionary and a perfectionist who would be almost impossible to replace.

I think today’s Apple event shows that perfectionism fraying a bit around the edges. The bad pun, the goofy logo, the weird product name — all of it pointed to a leadership that either didn’t understand or didn’t care about consistency in iconography.

Steve Jobs, and the Apple brand under him, were individually and collectively icons. Jobs was a personality and also a caricature of the personality, with his trademark uniform of black turtlenecks and jeans and his signature phrases: “make a dent in the universe,” “think different,” or even “one more thing.” Like icons from Cary Grant to Lady Gaga, he understood that a certain presentation was what the public expected of him.

Likewise, the Apple brand stood for beauty in simplicity. Devices without a cluster of buttons were the uniform. A narrow selection of elegant fonts were the language. And nomenclature was consistent enough to become one of the most hotly speculated-about features of any launch. Would it be called the iPhone 2? The iTablet? The iPhone 5 or the 4S? The 4GS? Think about how little anyone cares about the name of HTC’s next smartphone or Google’s next bit of software, and you’ll see how important that one small detail of nomenclature was to Apple’s iconic position in the world of tech and consumer brands.

Today’s event and the tiny but glaring inconsistencies bring up the impossible-to-answer question: Would Steve have green-lit that?

No one can say definitively whether “resolutionary” would have passed muster under Jobs. Steve is gone. While fragments of him live on in the company’s website and wording and product design, that likeness is destined to degrade over time.

At some point in the future, it’s within the scope of my own limited imagination to envision Apple products that bear little or no resemblance to anything Steve Jobs created.

Last time Apple was without Jobs, it came out with a lineup of duds. Do you remember Apple’s digital cameras, speakers, or video game consoles? Or how about the company’s Newton PDA? While Apple was cranking out those dogs, Jobs came up with Next (later to become the foundation of OS X) and Pixar.

Today, we saw the first cracks in what will eventually become a wholesale break with the past.  What happens next will depend largely on the company’s ability to lead itself now that its founding leader is gone.

We’re loving the new Facebook Timeline features for personal profiles, and those features (and a few more) are now launching for brand-focused Pages, too.

At Facebook’s headquarters Tuesday, we got a sneak peek of the new Pages, and the new designs amount to a lot more than just a facelift. These Pages are full of features that any social-media manager for an organization will love.

Yes, Pages are getting those big, glossy cover photos and full-width media highlights. But Page admins are also getting messaging capabilities (a first for businesses on Facebook), an all-new dashboard for analytics, and a friends-focused approach to growing an audience.

Timeline recently launched as a new way for people to curate and design their personal profiles, but as Facebook’s designers and developers see it, corporations and other organizations are people, too.

Looking through the eyes of friendship

Facebook design guru Sam Lessin, who captained the Timeline design, said in Tuesday’s show-and-tell session that Timeline “wasn’t ever meant to be just about people, just for humans. It’s a phase shift for the company overall and how we think about identity… We always start with people. We’re Facebook, that’s kind of what we do… and then we do it for other types of organizations that also have a story and want to be able to tell it.”

He continued to say that Facebook Pages will now embrace “the whole concept that organizations have identities, that a nonprofit, a sports team, all have identities that they want to express.”

Lessin said at the launch of Timeline that the new design’s distinctly emotional appeal was intentional, and yesterday, product director Gokul Rajaram reiterated that concept, but with a brand-focused bent.

“We’ve seen that most businesses have a core group of loyalists, but those loyalists also have friends,” he said. “We’ve made it easier for people to connect with a business through the lens of their friends… It’s a much more personalized experience.”

When you go to a Facebook Page now, instead of just seeing a wall of information or updates, you’ll first notice how many friends of yours already like the Page. You’ll also see highlighted activity from your friends that’s relevant to the Page, whether it’s a check-in or a story about the brand.

“You can very quickly see what your friends think about the organization,” Rajaram continued. “Pulling friend activity… is going to be one of the more powerful aspects.”

As Lessin noted, “Friend activity makes things better and leads to higher engagement.” It gives the average Jane or Joe an immediate reason to feel connected to a branded Page, and it starts the storytelling off on a more personal note than before.

Phenomenal cosmic power: the new Admin controls

After highlighted friend activity on Pages, the second-most important aspect of the new Pages is likely going to be the new admin panel. The panel will appear at the top of any Pages you manage, and it will act as a sort of activity snapshot for notifications, post performance and stats, and messaging.

Yes, we said messaging.

Previously, Pages didn’t have the ability to send or receive Facebook messages — an inconsistency that Lessin said troubled the social network’s designers and developers. With the new Pages, admins will be able to respond to messages from everyday users.

Admins won’t be able to proactively send messages, which could quickly lead to Page spam in your Facebook inbox, but the new capability is a welcome tool for continuing user-initiated conversations and responding to questions.

In addition to stats and notifications, admins also now have the ability to cherry pick “pinned posts,” which will appear at the top of the Page’s Timeline for up to seven days.

“A pinned post is a way for the Page to indicate the ‘post of the week,’” said Rajaram. “For example, Livestrong is highlighting a post from two years ago.”

And just like you, the normal Facebook user, Page admins can now select activity to highlight in full-page-width posts with larger images and videos, which Rajaram said will “enable organization to tell their stories in much more engaging ways.”

Also, just like you and me, Page admins will also be able to add “life events” for their organizations. For individuals, a life event might be a child’s birth or a job change; for organizations, it could be a new store opening, an award, a new product launch, or a founding. Basically, it’s all revolving around Facebook’s new approach to creating better profiles through structured data.

These milestones can even take place before the Page was first created. For example, the Manchester United soccer team’s Timeline starts in the 1870s with a full-width black and white photo of athletic-looking dudes with hipster mustaches, a memento of the club’s founding. The Livestrong Timeline begins with a video of Lance Armstrong’s press conference the day he announced to the world he had cancer.

All this data — these stories — are fully curated by Page admins, allowing brands, corporations, nonprofits, and others to have even more control over how their stories are told on Facebook.

Sticking it to the Man: Anti-commercial controls

Interestingly, as much control as Page admins will now have, they won’t be allowed to use their new powers for evil. For example, Facebook isn’t allowing Pages to include calls to action or overtly promotional text in cover photos. Your Page could include a logo or an image of your location or your staff in the cover photo, but it couldn’t say something like “Get 40% off today only” or “See more at our website.”

“The key with cover photos is storytelling and expression,” said Lessin. “We want to create a good experience for everyone, and we think these guidelines really help brands… They’re encouraging people to create engaging content that people want to come back to and create and emotional connection with.”

Rajaram echoed the concept that positive emotion and overt commercialism are opposed forces, saying, “Brands don’t want to be overly promotional; in the long-term, they know it’s a turn-off to people… They want to have a deeper connection.”

If that leaves you feeling all warm and fuzzy, follow the money for a moment: Facebook makes its money from brands buying ads on Facebook. In giving brands a huge bit of new real estate via the cover photo, Facebook stands a chance at losing some of that ad money. Marketers love and live by calls to action, so if calls to action are illegal in Page cover photos but legal in Facebook ads, marketers will still be shelling out for Facebook ads to the tune of billions each year. But let’s get back to the warm and fuzzy part.

“A lot of brands aren’t great storytellers, but the best ones are,” said Lessin, noting that with added friend activity, the new Pages are better at representing “the story of your relationship with the organization. Those types of moments and vignettes are how you associate with the brand.”

The long and winding rollout

The new Facebook Pages will be in preview mode over the next 30 days — a significantly longer preview than the week-long period given individual users. During that month-long period, admins will have ample time to craft, prune, and curate the Timelines and highlighted stories so that the organization’s message is told powerfully and visually.

“We’ve been focused on giving tons of notice,” said Lessin. “It really helps in terms of people understanding what’s coming.”

By Wednesday, March 7, all Pages should have been notified of the preview and curation period. The new designs will be rolled out by March 30.

Top image courtesy of Shutterstock

“The Follow Company button makes it easy for the more than two million brands with LinkedIn company pages to attract new followers and engage with them socially in a uniquely professional context,” Hani Durzy, LinkedIn‘s director of corporate communications, told VentureBeat.

Much like adding a company as your friend on Facebook, clicking the Follow Company button while logged onto LinkedIn enables users to automatically follow the company and check in to see the latest information posted by that company on its official page. Status updates from the company will automatically appear on the follower’s home page, altering them to breaking company news, career opportunities (LinkedIn’s bread and butter), or industry trends.

LinkedIn currently has over two million companies in its network and some large brands have already deployed the Follow Company button, including Starbucks, DonorsChoose, Sony, American Express, and AT&T.

“Most of the 150 million LinkedIn members expect companies to have a presence on LinkedIn, and about 70% of LinkedIn members already follow or would follow companies on the platform,” said Durzy.

Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn wants to see a picture of everything in your closet.

In return, he’ll give you badges and even discounts on clothing brands that you love.

He’s not a creep (as far as I know). Rather, his startup, RNKD (pronounced “ranked”), is gathering information about what brands people are loyal to, and using that data to provide better information to those brands while offering good deals to customers. RNKD enters beta testing today.

“What you have is a better predictor than what you say you want,” said Swinmurn in an interview with VentureBeat (see video above). In other words, you might say you want a nice Brioni suit, but if your closet is full of Mark Ecko T-shirts, the odds are pretty high that your next purchase will be at the mall, not Fifth Avenue.

So if the Mark Ecko company only knew what a loyal fashion victim you were, it could probably get you to buy even more stuff by giving you discounts or early access to new clothing lines.

Enter RNKD. Swinmurn’s goal is to collect as much information about what clothing people actually own, while rewarding them for uploading and tagging photos. Step two is to approach brands with that data and figure out how to make a business out of it, perhaps through advanced data analytics services or through e-commerce offers.

In the meantime, the site can build momentum by getting clothing brands to offer real rewards in exchange for demonstrations of loyalty from RNKD’s customers. You say you’ve got 20 different pairs of Adidas, and the photos to prove it? Adidas may very well want to offer you a coupon for your 21st pair at some point. As the company’s press materials describe it, RNKD is “the first universal loyalty program that creates a direct relationship between you and your favorite brands online.”

RNKD has a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem in that no brands are likely to be interested in the community until it has a critical mass of consumers, yet consumers have no real incentives to open their closets to the world without real benefits. Swinmurn seems unfazed by this. Like FourSquare, RNKD is offering virtual badges as rewards for participation, making uploading into a competitive game. And, he points out, there are many sites where people already share information about what clothing they own, such as WIWT, Nice Kicks, Chictopia and Fashism, to name a few.

As someone who generally wears the same jeans three days in a row and can’t be bothered to shop for shoes more than once or twice a decade, I’m way outside of RNKD’s target market. And I’ll be honest, it seems like a pretty thinly disguised brand marketing scheme. Who is really so loyal to some abstract corporate brand that they’d be willing to share dozens of photos in hopes of getting some evanescent reward that just means you can spend more money on the same stupid corporate invention?

But Swinmurn might onto something, having made one of the most successful online retail operations of the last decade. He then followed it up with Dethrone, a small clothing brand focused on mixed martial arts fashion. Meanwhile, I spent the past twenty years working as a journalist. Clearly, he’s both a better businessman and far cooler than I am, and he’s probably a lot tougher besides, so who am I to say it’s a crazy idea?

Swinmurn, who is less well known than former Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, started Zappos in 1999. He credits sheer, dogged persistence for making the company a success.

“Constant rejection was the only reason it worked,” he said, mentioning as an example the fact that it took seven years before Nike was willing to let Zappos sell its shoes. Only by going to industry trade shows year after year, learning the ropes and facing repeated rejections, was Swinmurn able to get traction for his online shoe business.

Based on that experience, he believes it’s better to build something real, then try to see if people want to buy it. Rather than raise a bunch of money on a speculative business plan, Swinmurn believes in just getting started and building something.

“People want to see something,” he said.

So perhaps, with seven years of dogged persistence, he may be able to build RNKD into something as successful as Zappos.

VentureBeat, however, doesn’t want to lose any opportunities to +1 you. That’s why we’ve provided you a list of Google+ pages for all of our writers (see below).

Reasons to follow us:

1. You want to be in our Circles. Writer Matt Lynley has one for “epic beards.”
2. Hanging out with us is fun — just ask anyone at this year’s MobileBeat.
3. Our posts are insightful and educational. Like this one.
4. You don’t want to miss out on candid office photos like this:

So, follow us, enjoy VentureBeat and get ready for some plus ones. We’ll start with our most active early Google+ adopters:

• Matt Lynley, Lead Writer, GreenBeat
• Sean Ludwig, Staff Writer
• Tom Cheredar, Staff Writer
• Regina Sinsky, Staff Writer

And here’s the rest of our core edit team:

• Matt Marshall, Editor-in-Chief
• Dylan Tweney, Executive Editor
• Dean Takahashi, Lead Writer, GamesBeat
• Devindra Hardawar, Lead Writer, MobileBeat
• Meghan Kelly, Assistant Writer
• Jolie O’Dell, Staff Writer. Jolie’s avoiding Google+ for now, but has some good insight on what Google+ is rolling out for businesses.

New York-based Percolate aggregates your Google Reader and Twitter feeds, highlighting the links that are most likely to be relevant to you. Its interface makes it easy to add short comments or tags to articles as they appear. In addition, Percolate is its own social network, so you can follow people on Percolate and see the tags and comments they’re posting.

“What makes you interesting is what you consume,” says cofounder James Gross, a former executive at online advertising network Federated Media, taking a decidedly consumerist perspective on human nature.

As he explained to VentureBeat, “consumption” online means sharing and commenting on links, and it’s that activity that Percolate wants to make more efficient.

“If you look at most of the social behavior on Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr, most of what people are doing is contextualizing links,” Gross says.

Percolate may sound a bit like yet another Google+, and it’s going to face steep competition from the search giant’s social network, which took less than two weeks to hit 10 million users, despite having only limited availability. In addition, while Percolate’s dashboard is very scannable, it’s hard to see what compelling value it offers as an alternative to, say, a well-selected list of Twitter accounts.

But Gross is unfazed. He and cofounder Noah Brier, who was formerly at ad agency The Barbarian Group, plan to make Percolate stand out through ease of use and readable design.

Plus, it’s not merely a filtering tool: Percolate is also a publishing platform of sorts, enabling people to publish their “likes” and tags in a swift and mobile-friendly way.

The business, they hope, will make money by licensing the Percolate API to big brands, who can use it to publish links more easily to networks like Twitter and Facebook. The company will also provide brands with guidance about which people and accounts to follow in order to discover relevant content. In other words, while it looks like a new social network (and a tiny one at that), Percolate really aims to be a marketing tool for social media-savvy advertisers.

“Percolate is the first workflow tool that takes the consumption angle and the filtering angle and applies it to making it very simple to share,” Gross says.

Percolate has seven employees and is self-funded by the founders. It has four paying customers already, Gross says.

The service is currently invitation-only, but up to 150 VentureBeat readers can register to test out the service with this special Percolate invitation link.

Business owners can hypothetically create a listing on Google+ using a consumer e-mail address. Business details are then filled into profile details, like first and last name, location and interests. But, as Oestlien explained in a video (embedded below) Wednesday, any profile that doesn’t represent an actual person could risk being removed by Google. Facebook has the same policy regarding businesses that create a personal profile on its service.

Oestlien said Google plans to roll out an optimized version of Google+ for businesses and organizations. The business-focused version will include things like rich analytics and the ability to connect that identity to other parts of Google that businesses might use on a daily basis, like AdWords, he said.

The company is testing the business-optimized version of Google+ to select vendors over the next few months, according to Oestlien. Anyone who represents a “non-user entity” (e.g. business, organization, place, team, etc.) and would like to apply for consideration in our limited program can sign up by filling out the Google+ Entity Profile Application.

“We have been watching Google+ take shape over the last week and we’ve seen some really great companies get involved. But frankly we know our product as it stands is not optimally suited to their needs. In fact, it was kind of an awkward moment for us when we asked Ford for his (or was it her?) gender!” Oestlien wrote in a Google+ update.

Judging by the buzz from our earlier coverage of Google+ for paid Google Apps accounts, business owners are probably frothing at the mouth to check out what Google is putting together. However, it’s probably worth noting that all business profiles will get deleted once testing has concluded — meaning you won’t get to port your profile over once the business-focused Google+ officially launches.

Via Search Engine Land

Google intends to rename Picasa “Google Photos” and rename Blogger “Google Blogs,” according to unnamed sources in the report. While YouTube will retain its own branding, other Google products are also likely to be affected.

The rebranding, which Mashable states will take place about six weeks from now, appears to be part of an effort by Google to consolidate its products to focus on its new social platform Google+. The rebranding will coincide with the public launch of the Google+ service in 6 weeks, according to the sources.

Google has rebranded many of its products in the past, including GrandCentral (Google Voice), JotSpot (Google Sites), Writely (Google Docs) and many others. However, unlike most previous efforts, this will be the first time Google has attempted to rebrand a product as popular as Blogger or Picasa.

The rebranding effort would be a natural move on Google’s part, especially since the company is focusing all its efforts on becoming a social product going forward. This strategy is also effective since any portion of Google can be used separately or in conjunction with other Google products, which is something Facebook isn’t set up for.

Not too long ago, I was tickled by an email that read “We’ve been looking at involving a PR firm … and our first thought was ‘That guy with the hair and mustache.” I quickly posted it on Twitter and, in my haste, added a snappy hashtag (#BrandingWorks). What I didn’t realize at the time was I was making the same common mistake I often accuse marketers — even branding experts — of making.

The prospect that sent me that email remembered how I look. I will be the first to admit that a red — okay, rapidly graying — pony tail, full-but-tidy beard and what used to be a curly moustache do tend to set me apart from the average corporate consultant, even in the less-buttoned-down realm of marketing. Based on how I look, he was able to easily remember who I am.

He wasn’t, however, looking for a pony-tailed, bearded guy; he was, in fact, looking for a PR firm. And, because of whatever impression about my abilities as a PR guy that I had left with him during a past engagement, he immediately thought of me.

In that nutshell, then, you have the difference between branding and visual identity, something that, as I mentioned above, many marketers and not a few so-called branding experts often confuse.

The best explanation of branding I have ever heard came from Ram Shriram, an early investor in Google whose pithy and dead-on definition I will never forget. “Branding,” he said, “Is what people think about you when you’re not there.”

That’s exactly what happened with my prospect. In my absence, this chap thinks of me as a good person to turn to for their new PR requirements. That’s my brand to him and, thankfully, it’s both clearly memorable and what I would want it to be in this instance.

How I look, arguably also memorable, is my visual identity. And, while it might contribute to my brand — successfully, if it suggests I’m not a conventional thinker — it ain’t my brand.

Far too often, marketers confuse one with the other, with the result that the so-called branding strategies they develop for their clients are actually little more than graphic standards manuals that explain why the various elements of the company’s visual identity exist and how they’re going to be governed.

Many of these manuals further torque the error by seeking to define the company’s brand, and this is where the exercise becomes even more misguided.

Companies don’t define their brand; the marketplace does that for them. The most any company can do is define a set of brand attributes by which it would like to be known and then do its very best to live up to those attributes, something I call the company’s “brand promise.”

The degree to which the company lives up to its brand promise in every single thing it does is exactly the degree to which it will be branded by the marketplace as it would want to be.

Every founder struggles to find a great name for his or her company. Often it’s the first source of good-natured strife between co-founders. It’s an exhilarating, scary combination of having to decide who you are — what you do, the persona you expose — combined with the technical issues of being memorable, spell-able, and available as a domain name.

For me, the name Smart Bear Software started as a whim, was almost changed for the wrong reasons, and ended up with a punch-line I would never have dreamed of.

The origin of “Smart Bear” is John Irving’s Hotel New Hampshire, a surreal novel in which a “smart bear” plays an important role; near the end we are told repeatedly that “a smart bear makes all the difference.” I chose it because at the time my (then new) wife and I were into John Irving and it was whimsical, fun, and meaningful, albeit just to us.

In other words: I picked the name with utter disregard to marketing or business sensibility.

I’m not saying that’s right or wrong; maybe all it means is that some branding principles, while interesting, aren’t as vital as they first seem.

A few years into Smart Bear I was still toiling away at the compiler when I was approached by an ex-VP of Sales from a company that had IPO’ed. He wanted to partner up — I’m the young geek, he’s the silver-haired, golf-bag-toting, sports-metaphor-slinging salesman.

The full story of that ill-fated misadventure is related here; the relevant detail is that this guy insisted that we change the name of the company:

“Our potential customers — IBM, Intuit, Adobe, Qualcomm — aren’t going to take us seriously with a silly name like ‘Smart Bear’,” he argued. “It sounds like shareware, not enterprise software. Big companies buy from companies with formal names like IBM, CA, BEA, CSC, HP, stuff like that.”

His suggestion? Software Test and Deployment Systems, Inc, which shortens to the unfortunate “STDS.”

Yeah, an acronym already taken by gonorrhea.

(The jokes, though, were almost worth it. Viral marketing! Our invoices flare up every year!)

I got lucky, though. I was all set to pair up with this guy and change the name, but in another example of serendipity being more influential on business success than purposeful action, I happened to receive a hugeamongous purchase order from Intuit, a whopping $50,000.

You know, exactly the kind of order from exactly the kind of company who would never do business with silly old “Smart Bear”. Today, as you can see from the company’s customer list, all the companies he listed are, in fact, customers, and many more besides.

All with a silly name and informal sales.

The VP of Sales’ rationale made sense though, and of course Smart Bear might have been equally successful if named STDS. But once again I learned that maybe the name isn’t as important as either of us thought.

Fast-forward six years to present day. I sold Smart Bear a few years ago to AutomatedQA — a great company with a compatible culture and similar goals where Smart Bear (now as a division) continued to thrive (meaning: more revenue, more profits, bigger-and-badder software, and happy customers).

After making a few other acquisitions and continuing to grow, AutomatedQA is now a large company which in the next few years is on a path to be successful even by a VC’s standards. If you thought “Smart Bear” was too informal before, now it’s even more out of place.

But having all these departments with different names (AutomatedQA, Smart Bear, Pragmatic Software) sucks when you’re trying to build a company which is starting to capitalize by making already-best-of-breed tools work together, especially with customers who we all share. So they decided to rebrand everything under a single name.

But which name? AutomatedQA (the one which was biggest to begin with and clearly a great name)? Smart Bear? Something new? STDS?

So they decided to poll everyone they could find in the software industry — customers and otherwise. They asked positioning questions like:

• Do you have a good or bad immediate impression of this brand?
• Have you heard this name before, and if yes what have you heard?
• If you have experience with this brand, what was that like?

The result? As of July 19th 2010, the entire company has been rebranded Smart Bear.

So what’s in a name? Not as much as some folks say, it appears. At the end of the day, I took away six important lessons from this experience: It’s what you do, not what you call it.

• It’s more effective to do/say something important/valuable than to hope a logo or name will say it for you.
• Being memorable is more important than what they remember.
• First impressions are important, but so are all the other impressions, and the latter can trump the former.
• Your time isn’t well spent fretting about brand (early on).
• You can always change your brand later.