An excellent example of how to develop a brand entirely by blogging, in this from Mediation Channel, also cross-posted at Infamy or Praise:

Blawg Review, the carnival of legal blogging co-founded by its anonymous editor, highlights the best legal blogging each week…

Over nearly three years, Blawg Review has grown to become a widely-respected brand in the legal end of the blogosphere. Presented each week by a different host, Blawg Review shows readers the many faces of the law, both in the U.S. and across the globe. In the best tradition of law and justice, as an institution it is open for all to participate, bringing well-deserved attention, appreciation, and traffic to the many lawyers, legal academics, law students, legal professionals, and others who blog about legal topics and issues.

Blawg Review has prospered where other carnivals have failed; it has grown in reputation where others have dissolved into infighting. Blawg Review stands tall as a positive and enduring example of what can be accomplished by and among bloggers.

Blawg Review demonstrates how an effective brand strategy makes the site the only logical choice for what it offers.

Go to Blawg Review and take a look for yourself.

As my law professors used to say, it’s a good case study.

The American Bar Association Journal agrees.

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To launch the New Year, watch as cable network Court TV flips the switch to truTV.

The new name is a creation from the laboratory of our sister brand naming group, Igor, who helped the owners of Court TV to get over the hump.

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Blogging is a powerful brand builder. It is a low-cost, high-return tool that can raise a company’s profile and shape it’s reputation.

How best to blog? A report in the New York Times offers a variety of suggestions from successful bloggers, including the story behind Free Money Finance, a blog hosted by Denali, makers of Moose Tracks ice cream.

[More posts about Online Branding | More posts about Online Brand Strategy | More posts about Social Media Brand Strategy | More posts about Blog Strategy | More posts about Brand Management | More posts about Brand Opportunities | More blogs about Online Brand Strategy]

We came across a fascinating column under the same title at Securing Innovation, the blog of IP.com.

Companies are often reluctant to embrace the benefits offered by blogging in finding their brand, as they too easily focus upon the risk of criticism. The reality is the most forward thinking of companies embrace blogging as a communications tool. To use blogs effectively, as with any business endeavor the secret is to have a well thought-out plan to achieve the business objective.

Securing Innovation offers this nugget of wisdom on the topic of blogs and blogging:

Find the conversation. Join it. Contribute to it. “Conversing is how we learn. It’s how we network. It’s how we grow as professionals,” says Kevin O’Keefe, CEO of LexBlog, whose team of experts guided us in the development of our corporate blog, “Blogging is a conversation. Not only do you learn and grow your reputation by joining in, you will not be conspicuous by your absence.”

For any reputable organization reaching out to today’s audiences, failure to blog makes your brand conspicuous by it’s absence.

Conversation, the painting shown above, is the work of British artist Barnaby Menage. You may see other works of the artist at this online gallery.

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How should any organization own the conversation about itself or its product? By paying attention to what people say about you.

One method is to understand and tap into the use of social media.

Social media can be a valuable research tool. For example, organizations can go online for real time conversation and feedback through social networking Web sites.

A report in the Chicago Tribune discusses the opportunity:

For consumers, social media “gives them an opportunity to tell us exactly what they want and what’s important to them in an uninhibited environment,” Andy Markowitz, Kraft’s director of digital media, said in an e-mail.

It also offers consumers the opportunity to tell you what is wrong—inauthentic, irrelevant, unengaging, and highly forgettable—about your product. In today’s environment, social media creates a greater accountability for organizations and their brands than ever before. Again, from the Tribune:

Deborah Schultz, who consults on social media strategies for Procter & Gamble, calls the emerging social practice “conversational marketing.”

While we appreciate the likely unintended reference to our trademark, this own the conversation strategy offers a range of benefits. For the responsible organization, blogs, social networks, and other forms of social media can be made to work for you if your organization understands the benefits of transparency. To be successful at it requires a greater emphasis on finding your brand, truly understanding it, and delivering on your promise every day.

In tapping into social media, be prepared. As with most any effort to build human connection:

“Relationships take time, and they are messy. There is a give and take, and companies have to realize it can take a long time.”

Read more in the Chicago Tribune.

Conversation, the painting shown above, is the work of British artist Barnaby Menage. You may see other works of the artist at this online gallery.

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A blog can be a powerful brand builder.

We brand by blog, as do others.

This story from USA Today discusses another example of an organization relying upon a brand by blog strategy, based upon this business plan:

[S]tart an online news site, fueled by blog reports from her celebrity and influential friends. And have them all work for free, in exchange for using her bully pulpit.

The blog that has become a brand? This one.

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Today’s Wall Street Journal offers this quote about the effects of Google and social media on brand building:

On today’s Web, everything begins with Google — and that’s driving a sea change in how brands are built and succeed. While brands remain vital online, the old top-down model of building them (think of a new magazine launch) is increasingly irrelevant to the Web. Instead, Google’s dominance allows and even encourages brands to be built from the bottom up, with their overall identity far less important than the little slices of themselves returned by Web searches and their position in search rankings.

Unless a company has access to the marketing budget of a Fortune 500, the old top-down model of brand building is irrelevant, period, Web or no, as suggested here. Even with a Fortune 500 budget, the old top-down model is cost inefficient.

Read more of today’s WSJ column, which for you Web history buffs also includes a stroll down memory lane to the failed Pathfinder effort of Time Warner.

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A column from InfoWorld offers tough love to corporate types overly focused on negative reports of their organization posted on blogs or other social media:

Your company shouldn’t just be figuring out how to manage negative media coverage now that social media is here to nail your corporate hide to the wall and make sure you deliver on your brand promise.

Whether a hospital, apparel retailer, or restaurant chain, the reality is organizations have always been the topic of negative statements. The emergence of blogs and other social media applications now permit such negativity to be documented.

What is social media? In contrast to traditional media, social media is any communications format in which users publish the content. In addition to blogs, examples include YouTube (video sharing), Facebook (social networking), Wikipedia (reference), and Flickr (photo sharing).

In today’s culture, social media create a greater accountability for organizations and their brands than ever before.

For the responsible organization, blogs and other forms of social media can be made to work for you if your organization understands the benefits of transparency. To be successful at it requires a greater emphasis on finding your brand, truly understanding it, and delivering on the promise of your brand every day.

As the Business Week cover also suggests, organizations can no longer afford to be brand slackers when it comes to blogs and other social media. To manage your organization’s social media presence — and you will have a presence whether you like it or not — finding and living your brand is the secret.

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The Birla Institute of Technology & Science, otherwise known as BITS Pilani, is among the most highly respected engineering schools in Asia. A recent article in the university alumni magazine, at page 71, identifies this website as among three for recommended brand reading, alongside other authors and sources such as Harvard Business Review and McKinsey Quarterly.

As a demonstration of good brand naming, a big thumbs up to the name of the magazine. What better name for a publication associated with an institute of technology and science than that of the BITS Pilani alumni magazine, Sandpaper.

[More posts about BIPS Pilani | More posts about Pilani, India | More posts about Brand Naming | More posts about University Branding | More posts about Magazine Branding | More blogs about University Branding]

The Los Angeles Times, the second largest metropolitan newspaper in the United States, is owned by the Tribune Company [NYSE:TRB], which also owns other publishing and broadcast media assets, including the Chicago Cubs major league baseball franchise.

Facing competitive pressures, Tribune is attempting to determine how best to unlock the value of its assets to grow the value of the company. At the same time, the L.A. Times is like many daily newspapers facing declining paid circulation figures.

But there is hope. That hope comes in Tribune rethinking how it might own the conversation in the marketplace by demonstrating a unique difference, planting a flag in the sand and standing for that difference. It’s called branding.

This column in the L.A. Times offers a roadmap of how Tribune might rethink the strategy behind the brand known as the L.A. Times, and how that could play into a repositioning of all it’s daily newspaper assets:

Los Angeles is the capital of the increasingly dominant infotainment-media-celebrity complex. Broaden your scope to California generally and you can throw in high technology as well. The L.A. Times should be the diary of this capital.

We agree, to a point. Rather than standing for three points of difference — as the dairy of the infotainment-media-celebrity complex, California, and the hi-tech industry — the L.A. Times should stand for only one; the entertainment industry. By owning the conversation about the entertainment industry, the L.A. Times becomes the intuitive, reflexive and first answer for those seeking information about the industry, globally. Achieve this and mark an easy to see competitive separation, creating for The Times a sustainable competitive advantage.

As with any effective brand positioning, you must give up something to gain market share. Exit the role of a traditional metropolitan paper. Leave that lower margin role to others, focusing instead on becoming THE media authority of the entertainment industry, anywhere in the world. To implement this brand strategy, the L.A. Times should rethink their business operations to align with a vision as the entertainment industry expert.

Yes, rich traditions would disappear with such a brand strategy. Eight years after his death, a sports section today still associated with Pulitzer Prize winning sportswriter Jim Murray would no longer exist. Likewise, terrific Times sections on travel, food, and local news would no longer be as prominent and might altogether vanish.

However, a far greater opportunity would emerge. The opportunity to own a market position in which the Los Angeles Times is capable of demonstrating leadership everyday, to a national and global audience rather than a finite, local one. Such a positioning maps to the strengths of the L.A. Times brand, and how the market associates it with another well known brand, Hollywood.

The Times today stands for a good, even excellent, metropolitan newspaper. The problem with such a positioning is there are many good metropolitan newspapers within metropolitan Los Angeles. Instead, the brand could provide an unforgettable answer to the question, Why Should I Care About You? as, of course, the entertainment industry authority.

Running in the opposite direction of the competition, a perhaps initially uncomfortable strategy, would create a powerful engine for growth of the L.A. Times brand, and increase Tribune shareholder value, while addressing a market need.

Isn’t that the point of effective brand strategy?

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In following the hype over Katie Couric’s jump from NBC’s Today Show to the CBS Evening News, we breathlessly awaited Ms. Couric’s September 5 debut to see what a different evening news broadcast would look and sound like. The results are in, and the answer is nothing, in this from Variety:

Not to be a killjoy, but the most notable aspect of the “CBS Evening News” in Katie Couric’s much-ballyhooed debut Tuesday was that the new news looks quite a lot like the old news.

Indeed, beyond the minor cosmetic changes, the revamped “Evening News” — at least in this long-awaited first view of its work-in-progress format — in most ways mirrored the traditional template, down even to film composer James Horner’s theme, which sounded much like the previous fanfare…

The…intriguing question was whether CBS would make good on early pledges to try to reinvent the wheel, to which the answer is an unqualified “No.” Instead, they have simply put a new and undeniably expensive face behind it.

With Ms. Couric’s arrival, the CBS Evening News misses a rare opportunity to rethink it’s brand. The power of brand differentiation points the way in most any effort to own the conversation within the television news industry, even in today’s popular culture. Rather than, for example, mining their heritage for a unique and authentic story to create competitive advantage, CBS instead plays it safe by mimicking their competition, as demonstrated by the mind-numbing similarity of opening screen graphics:

To stave off audience erosion suffered by every U.S. broadcast network evening
news program, the CBS Evening News must demonstrate rather than explain a difference of relevance to their audience. A solo network anchorwoman, by herself, is not a difference upon which to build a long-term brand promise.

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We talk.

Earlier this year we called out Visa for their new Life Takes Visa campaign.

OMMA Magazine noticed.

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A number of readers commented recently about the USA Network tagline Characters Welcome, such as this one:

I get so annoyed hearing that insipid phrase over and over: “Characters Welcome”. I figured it was supposed to make one feel cool and unique, a real “character” for liking Monk, however it has had the opposite effect on me. I’m not watching USA anymore.

At the time USA Network announced their new brand strategy nearly one year ago, we saw the tagline as part of a promising strategy to differentiate USA from other US cable channels. But thus far, the power that could be generated by this branding falls short.

Here’s why. USA fails to demonstrate to viewers just what this brand position means to the audience it seeks to convert as regular viewers. Is the benefit offered to the viewing audience one of compelling programming content, or is USA Network simply an outlet for viewers to trumpet how they too are characters?

USA seems focused on defining characters as its audience, as these commercials demonstrate. But to the audience, it doesn’t matter why some viewers might explain themselves as characters. What matters instead is a promise that USA Network is worth watching, consistently, due to compelling programming with evocative characters and plotlines.

A tagline by itself is nothing more than an empty slogan. And that is exactly what USA Network has done…pushed the slogan out for public consumption without offering a compelling demonstration of why viewers should care.

While USA Network’s stab at branding is better than the mess at Paxson, it falls far short of the more effective brand position demonstrated by cable channel Bravo. Owned by NBC Universal Cable, which also owns USA Networks, Bravo viewers watch what happens, which puts the focus clearly on where it should be, the programming content.

Those clever brand stewards of Paxson Communications Company [AMEX: PAX] are at it again. A rebrand and name change is being used to shift the focus from the poor financial performance of the company.

First Paxson changed their U.S. television cable network name to i.

i.

Now, Paxson is changing the name of their company to Ion Media Networks.

Paxson’s CEO offers this explanation:

“This new corporate identity mirrors our renewed commitment to find the best utilization and value proposition for our nationwide TV distribution and digital network platforms,” said CEO Brandon Burgess. “The ION MEDIA NETWORKS name highlights three aspects of our vision: our team’s positive energy for building superior value with our assets; our commitment to bringing quality media content to our communities; and our ability to enable multiple networks across our digital broadcast spectrum.”

Uh huh.

The company’s shareholders will be asked to approve the name change at their annual meeting in June 2006.

However, before the shareholders of Paxson/i/ion get worked into a lather to approve this measure in their proxies, they may want to know of other companies with the name ION:

Ion Networks
Ion Industrial
Ion Limited
Ion Exchange
Apricot Ion
Ion
Ion Channel
Ion Film Fest
Gujarat Ion Exchange And Chemicals

They may also want to know the word ion has 243 live trademark registrations or pending applications with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Finally, they may also recall a loss of $188 million on sales of $276.6 million in 2004, and a loss of $72.1 million on sales of $59.4 million during Paxson/i/ion’s last reported quarter; an unfortunate demonstration flying in the face of the CEO’s brand promise of “positive energy for building superior value with our assets.”

But then, when 79.7% of all shares are owned by insiders, the best strategy is not to be among those holding part of the public float.