I gave a presentation on brand building recently and someone asked me about Twitter:  should he be using it or not? I answered his question with one of my own: who are your customers and prospects and how do they communicate?

One of the keys to successful communications is knowing your target customer. How do they get their information? Who influences them? Are they on Twitter, or are they more likely to meet at seminars or read the industry and financial pubs, either online or in hard copy?

What we are seeing is that more and more companies and media are getting on Twitter and making valuable connections. For business people and marketers, Twitter provides a fast action communications channel that can be leveraged for brand — and business — building. However, at the end of the day, I believe that it will take more than 140 characters to “seal the deal;” in the meantime, the rise and excitement around Twitter makes it even more important for companies to re-examine who their customers are and how (and where) they communicate.

(Posted by Michelle Pujadas)

Michelle and I are on the flight back to Philadelphia after facilitating a Chalk Talk to help a new client refine its message. Once again, I was witness to the power of how getting to the right message can inspire and inject excitement into a company.

Like others I’ve been a part of, this Chalk Talk was a definite high. We knew an hour into the session that we were on the right path and that the client knew they were on the right path, too. Even in raw form, you could see how the new message was creating a sense of excitement and possibility and getting them to think bigger about where their brand could go.

That’s the power of having the right message.

If you’re like me, you probably hear or read about a new product every 30 seconds.  I suspect that, also like me, you don’t remember more than a handful of those products.

But if you are the one launching a product to audiences within your own industry, they’ll be sure to stand up and take notice, right? Well unless you just launched the next iPhone, it can be a challenge – a big one!

In the fall of last year, we faced such a challenge with a client in the financial technology sector – CashEdge. Their services enable financial institutions to engage customers in new ways. After launching a couple of products earlier in the year, they wanted to introduce a new, cutting-edge, third-party transfer product before their annual customer conference.

Should we do another product press release and send an html email to our customers? Sure, we could have done that. But we wanted – and quite honestly needed – to tell this story in a new light. The company was at the point in their corporate evolution where their story had changed and this new product really was a compelling example of that change. The challenge – how do we make it compelling to anyone outside of our strategic planning meeting?

We decided to go big – yet simple. This was a great time to do something we’ve been hoping to do for this customer for a while – create a new vision and do a brand refresh. Given their unique position and expertise in the market place we decided to tell the new story in three simple, yet strategic words - “Intelligent Money Movement.”

Of course no story is complete without the pictures so we put our creative team to work and executed a total brand refresh by updating the logo and designing an entirely new website and new collateral to support the new story.

Occasionally we need to resuscitate a brand and reposition it for the changing marketplace. Sometimes going big is exactly what you need to do. Next up…an iPhone designed just for online banking needs? Well, maybe someday.

Posted by Cheri
(Image by borman818 via Flickr licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-2.0 Generic)

Image via Creative Commons courtesy of Tim Boyd www.timboyd.info.

The call came late in the day and I was on deadline for a project. It was a Chicago number – I needed to let it go into voicemail. Twenty minutes later and with my stellar copy sent, I took a listen to the message. Fifteen years in the business and you’re still never quite ready for a call from Tarana Harris, Producer for the Oprah Winfrey show. Heart pounding, palms sweating, jaw planted on my keyboard space bar, I vowed to pull myself together. After all, I KNEW Tarana, right? I’d sent her how many emails over the years? Left her how many VMs?

And so I called her back, enthusiastic but cool. Excited, but level-headed. We needed to get the ClearCount Medical Solutions Smart Sponge System out the door, that day preferably, if we were going to stand a chance for having Oprah’s Dr. Oz talk about the technology on his show about medical errors. I had that emotional moment that any PR-pro with a true love for her client should have, the “No DUH they want to have the SmartSponge System on Oprah. Isn’t it about time?” After all, between 1,000 and 1,500 surgical sponges are left behind in patients each year, causing untold pain, heartache, lawsuits and more – thank god ClearCount is doing something about this, in an easy way that actually has the potential to SAVE hospitals money.

Of course when Tarana and I talked, she was very explicit that there were NO GUARANTEES. They were having a few patient safety technologies shipped (I didn’t ask if any of them were SmartSponge competitors – didn’t want to put any ideas in her head!).

What a great client. ClearCount was exemplary about turning on a dime – in less than 24 hours we had the system shipped, the CEO had reviewed our letter and communications package and emailed it off to Tarana. And now there was only the waiting.

I don’t think it crossed anyone’s mind that the system wouldn’t even get to go through the “visual” test. Tarana had said that they’d have to see how it looked on-screen, on-stage, next to Oprah, etc.

But as the week up to the scheduled taping day transpired, it became clear that the system hadn’t really made it past Tarana’s office. It was a long show, with a big name celebrity, and only a minute or so that was dedicated to technology (something smaller than our technology, but thankfully not a direct competitor). She lets us down gently and spent time explaining what happened. It was a “great looking system,” she said, but they’d never even sight-tested it because as the show’s planning unfolded it just became more clear that there wouldn’t be time. That’s all it was. No time. Our system was an extra that never got filmed.

We heard later in the week, as we worked to have the system shipped home, another company in Pittsburgh with a cool medical device had had a similar experience years ago – only they made it all the way through filming. They heard the footage would be used – but it never showed up on-air. O, to arrive in this manner, and not really arrive!

O, the agony.

But you know, when she calls again (and O she will – that’s how cool our clients are) – O, we will do it all Over again!!!!

Which brings me to some lessons learned:

Lesson #1: I heart Oprah as much as the next guy.

Lesson #2: Relationships are relationships – Tarana will (fingers crossed) remember how accommodating we were, and maybe she’ll introduce us to a new Executive Producer coming on-board.

Lesson #3: There are never any guarantees – until someone 1-degree separated from Oprah has a sponge retained during a surgery (and unfortunately it’s possible), there’s no such thing as a “no-brainer.” That’s why this job is so hard, so exciting, so crazy.

Maybe we should pitch the other O, Ozzie. He’s still crazy, and gory enough to do a video featuring a retained sponge, right?

(Posted by Zer0 to 5ive Principal, Jen Bannan)

How many presentations have you sat through where the speaker droned on reading every word of 12pt text on every slide? Too many to count, I suspect. It’s an all-too-common malady among presenters. Matt Helmke, a senior strategist here at 0to5, is one who is not afflicted with this illness. Recently, Matt produced a slide presentation where he discussed the best practices in presentation design, development and delivery based on Garr Reynold’s seminal book, Presentation Zen. Reynolds is an internationally acclaimed presentation designer and communications expert living in Japan whose clients include many of the Fortune 500. His book combines strong design principles with the tenets of Zen simplicity to help readers develop simpler, more effective presentations. While you can download a PDF of Matt’s presentation, I encourage you to watch and listen to Matt talk about what he learned from Reynold’s book and how you can apply its teachings to your next presentation.