Get your Plan ‘A’ right from the start!©

Get a cup-a-joe and take 8 minutes for a Branding 101 power lesson!

Your logo is THE non-verbal visual representation of your brand when you’re not around to tell the story.©

Color and it’s meaning

The Meaning Of Colour In Marketing infographic by AttwoodDigital.

WordPress – Recommened Popular Plug-ins from WPtemplates.com

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Too Much Coffee Man!

I woke up this morning and read @renagades tweet and it got me thinking about Shannon Wheeler….   Too Much Coffee Man

Too Much Coffee Man

I am most certainly a coffee drinker – it helps me to think.  Nothing grand about it but I sure can relate – on some days, I feel just like this!

Thanks Shannon for your hilarious creation.  For more about Shannon, click here.

When Life Experience Merges with Social Media

“On a typical day, 43% of U.S. adults said they visit sites like Facebook and Twitter, up from 38% a year ago, the survey finds. Among just Internet users ages 50 to 64, social-networking usage on a typical day increased to 32% from 20%. Compared with other online activities, respondents overall said they only use email and search engines more frequently than social networks.”  These are excepts from an article Adult Use of Social Media by Sarah E. Needleman from WSJ Blog.

I have found that many of my women clients, in particular those over the age of 55, are extremely vibrant, funny, gifted, life-experienced, vital, and excited about what is to come. Many of them have worked double and triple-time trying to keep up with technology.   They have found ways of detaching  from years of their paper trails to relying on their computers and clouds to sort and file.  Wow; how commendable.

This is not meant to be a ‘women rule the world’ commentary but it fascinates me to no end that we women keep on trucking, no matter what. This is my way of honoring those who have gone before me that teach me the ‘how to’s’ of life; my mentors.

In Needleman’s article, there are some statistical gems which indicate that adults over the age of 65 are getting more and more on the SM bandwagon.  This is so exciting because it means there is more life and business knowledge coming everyone’s way.

Life experience is truly beginning to infiltrate its way onto the web and I look forward to this emergence.

With PlanABrand’s Cindy Faith Swain, Needing a Plan B Is a Thing of the Past – Noozhawk.com

With PlanABrand’s Cindy Faith Swain, Needing a Plan B Is a Thing of the Past – Noozhawk.com

It’s all about rock ‘n’ roll.

At least it was for Cindy Faith Swain when she came to California in the late 1980s.

Cindy Faith Swain was recently honored by the Santa Barbara Chapter of the Association for Women in Communications as its 2011 Member of the Year. (Alex Kacik / Noozhawk photo)

“I came to California to be a rock ‘n’ roll star,” Faith Swain said. “Then I thought I needed some money and that it would be nice to have a real job with health benefits.”.

Read more…

Kitty Cats and Work Meditation

There is nothing that settles me more than Smidget, my male cat.  He is a tiger; feisty and courageous, has a Siamese cat meow, and is my sweetheart.  He is my purr-furry-meditation blanket that sits on my lap and gives me quiet energy.  Beanie, the one under the blanket is sweet with a loud and steady purr; she is the princess and teaches me how to relax.

I sometimes ask myself how creatures so small and soft can be the Prince and Princess of my heart?  Look at this picture, and it’s clear…

My kitties hang with me in my office.  They nap a lot and look so sweet that I just want to curl up in a ball with them and sleep.  For someone like me with an A type personality, being able to nap in the middle of the day is a big deal.  I could never have done this when I worked at Warner Bros.  The drive for success was on and I had no time for pets.

As a sole-proprietor, I need continual calibration / re-calibration; I have to be the one to harness my own mind.  A 10 minute pow-wow with the kitties on my lap gives me a boost in the day.  Taking a few breaks and allowing myself to quiet my mind and my heart is just what I need to BE present.

Getting out the office to have a lunch or coffee break with a colleague or friend can be difficult.  Pulling myself away from the drone of the computer and creature comforts of the office make going out a daunting task at times.  Brain Exercises are good in moderation however, there are the brain-drains like Sudoku-ville, Scrabble, Words with Friends.  They can be real blood-suckers.

THE POINT:  BALANCE, relax, work, re-calibrate.

For Timely Brain Exercises: http://www.lumosity.com  @lumosity

For cat humor on Facebook:
The World Is Your Litter Box

Follow me on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/PlanABrandTips

Compliments and Rewards

It was an honor and a privilege to receive the award for 2011 Member of the Year from Association for Women in Communications, Santa Barbara chapter. There really is nothing like getting an award to build your personal credibility. I’m so proud to have it hanging on my wall right next to my desk, however, I am always so

quick to discount my accomplishments and “flick the compliments off my shoulder” as my friend and colleague Lois Phillips so eloquently talks about in her book Women Seen and Heard.

I had the opportunity to talk about branding for 10 minutes and provided a hand-out which gives some basic tips.  Noohawk, Santa Barbara’s Online News Service covered the event.

I have always liked sharing information to help people better understand the value of themselves and their brands.  Click here for some basic branding tips.

I would love feedback and to hear some of your ideas on how to brand yourself and your business.

Expectations – Bobby McFerrin

Just ‘stumbledupon’ this.  Bobby McFerrin is clever and his point is so well communicated – We all have expectations.

Jack Dorsey – Using Twitter

I use Twitter daily and it has changed my life; it has put oomph into being a sole-proprietress.

Jack Dorsey, Chairman and Co-Found of Twitter, in this YouTube video (starting at time code 1:09 – below) said “I use Twitter as much as a journal as a broadcasting mechanism.  I can go back and see four years of my life and pinpoint every single development I’ve had in those four years.  Everything has been crystallized into some sort of message that may have been relevant to what I was experiencing and may have just provided some color….”

Since I started Tweeting two years ago, Twitter has helped me:

1. Crystallize my thoughts
2. Promote my business
3. Promote my clients’ businesses
4. Promote those I met and only know on Twitter but have built a ‘trust’ with
5. Learn to collaborate with others that I didn’t know before Twitter
6. Find others with complementary products and services
7. Hone my own social media skills
8. Learn more every day…

I am always trying to find new ways to market by listening and learning from others as well as being ‘ingenuitive.’  I continually learn from the comments of those I ‘follow’ and those they follow; what I do and don’t like; what I do and don’t want to emulate.   Listening to and sharing ideas in a short and sweet dialog of no more than 140 characters gives a solid ‘headline’ snap shot.  If I want to learn more, Tweeters usually include a shortened URL to continue on.  I like to share my knowledge with those who follow me.  I have an attitude of what I can bring to party first.  The ROI generally happens as a result of word/tweet of mouth, and I use Twitter to practice and learn marketing strategies.

Twitter is a for profit site but it has been unclear to me (and apparently to the masses) as to how they make money.  I did some investigating, and what I found is that Twitter has mostly generated revenue opportunities through deals with companies like Google, Yahoo and Bing, who bought the rights to display live Twitter feeds in their web search results. Twitter earned millions of dollars in revenue by selling the rights to publish live tweets on any trending topic. It’s a win-win deal, as it brings more users to Twitter and provides search engine users with live data which ultimately helps the advertisers to decipher and package this information.

Then there is the related concept of created ‘Promoted Accounts’ for advertisers such as Coke, Disney, and Starbucks which will be shown in the ‘Suggestions for you’ section, presented for Twitter users to follow. This advertising model is expected to increase Twitter’s revenues to up to $125 million in 2011 etc.

For a small, entrepreneurial business like mine, I follow this list of regular Twitter tasks:

1. Listen to learn about my market and business practices
2. Listen to learn about competition
3. Listen to learn about things I don’t know about
4. Listen to learn a new hobby or technique
5. Listen to learn about what trending topics TV stations are posting during shows to find out what people watching are talking about to entice advertisers
6. Listen to learn about what people think about ‘issues’
7. Follow live dialog with “#”about topic airing on TV such as news or favorite TV show
8. Incorporate my Tweets with my Blog, my Website, My Facebook Pages

Need help with your Branding, Marketing, Social Media?   Cindy@PlanABrand.com