George Dearing dot com

 With so much information flowing, do you know if your content/ information is truly being absorbed? Can you approximately measure it?

Social features accompanying products: does friending and following add measurable ($) value to your product – or is it a distraction to customers and to your organization in serving them?

Should a company hire someone purely for the role of ’social media’, unless it’s based on a real business need? Is their role to respond to customers’ inquiries or concerns, or is it just to add 100 or 1,000 more friends or followers whose value they can’t measure in dollars?

Are social networks nothing more than echo chambers where everyone is shouting to be heard.

Not every product needs to be social (via a marketing technique), nor adopt social features (via product features on a website); they may make sense for certain intrinsically conversational brands with differentiated, valuable content. But not for the sake of checking a box and ‘being social’.

The need for metrics: Like the banner ads of the early 2000s, social media marketing, social features and even game mechanics metrics need to evolve to eventually allow for more precise, targeted measures – and direct attribution to sales. Or brands will patience investing in a medium or tactic they can’t measure.

Other key findings include:

• Tech Takes All: Technology brands demonstrated their pervasiveness in our daily lives.  Google leads as the Most Valuable Global Brand worth $114 billion. IBM was second at $86 billion, an increase of 30 percent. In third place, Apple's brand value grew by 32 percent and is now worth $83 billion, Microsoft was fourth with a value of $76 billion.
• Social Media in your Face(book): Facebook, the popular social networking site, entered the technology sector ranking for the first year with a brand value of $5.5 billion.  Use of social media was a key trend across many of the successful brands this year, for example, HSBC's highly successful Expat Explorer online community.
• All the BRICs in the Wall: The first Indian brand, ICICI Bank, enters the Top 100 at number 45. This is the first year that all members of the BRICs have been represented with new entrants from China, Russia and Brazil.
• Banking on Brands: Taking the BrandZ Top 100 as a portfolio and comparing it to the S&P 500 over the last five years reveals that $1000 invested in the BrandZ Portfolio in 2006 would now be worth $1185 compared to $885 invested in the S&P 500, proving that strong brands outperform the stock market.
• Strong Brands Bounce Back Higher: Brands such as Samsung, the highest riser with an 80 percent growth in Brand Value, and Starbucks with an increase of 17 percent are evidence that businesses with strong brands are able to recover from adversity faster.

They will discuss how brands need to be connected and live in an age of networks. Alisa Leonard-Hansen, senior social media evangelist, will also contribute to the panel "The Synaptic Web: Real-time is just the Beginning," on Saturday, March 13 at 3 p.m. at the Social Media Club House @ SXSW.

Dwell compiled a visual so that brand representative could see, clearly, how the top 50 companies named by the surveyed group compete against one another. The size of the text in the following word cloud connotes its ranking:

"Also, as was mentioned before, while this group lists sustainability as a concern, many don't often buy sustainable products." [c'mon people]

General Mills is also taking a more serious look at boomers' children, millennials, which it defines as those aged 16 to 33 -- all 75 million of them. "This generation is very home and family oriented," Mr. Friendly said. "They're also completely at ease with technology." He added that many of them don't remember life without PCs, ATMs, or cellphones. The company is working hard to connect with this group virtually, with an iPhone app, blogging with Betty Crocker, or following Nature Valley on Twitter.

It is every marketer's task to seek out its product's emotional touch points and figure out ways to strengthen, enhance and deliver those assets with authority. This is when design strengthens the brand and reveals smart, deliberate purpose.