A recent study from Penn State University indicates 20 percent of all tweets refer to or mentions specific brands or product names.  This presents a new challenge for the keeper of the brand. The growth of social media tools means that brand messages are no longer delivered via a top-down, one-way channel. Instead, constituents are playing a much more active role in shaping a brand’s identity.

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Corey McPherson Nash embarks on the redesign of its own Web site. Follow along as we dig into the early stages of information architecture for the site.

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Blogging for your company can quickly become a trap. CEOs who agree to blog regularly often run out of time or desire. Or you might delegate blogging to a lower-level marketing person who doesn’t really ‘get’ your company. If you follow a few simple rules, your blog can be on the road to success.

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Last week over 50 clients of Corey McPherson Nash gathered to hear Chris Klaehn and Ryan Evans speak on leveraging social media to enhance branding and business goals. Conversation was lively in the room, but it was also lively online. Here are some highlights from the live tweeting that went on during the event:

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Over one hundred clients, friends and staff, past and present, gathered in November at The Decordova Museum & Sculpture Park to help us celebrate twenty-five years as the branding studio of choice for a wide range of leading business, educational, and cultural institutions.

Part of the celebration was this wall-sized looping video highlighting dozens of client projects from across CMN’s history. Enjoy!

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We can get into almost any car and drive away without much trouble. Find the ignition, put the car in gear, grab the steering wheel and go. The readout on the dashboard might be a slightly different color from car to car, but we don’t need much more than a quick look around to get started. We can do this because the controls from one car to the next are very similar. Standardization makes the interface transparent. We drive away without a problem.

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On June 20, I had the opportunity to speak on a panel discussion at the MIT Media Lab entitled “Media Fabrics for Media Makers: Realizing an Expressive Landscape for Digital Dialogues.” My other panel participants came from a wide range of creative backgrounds including feature films, video games, and interactive advertising.

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Who doesn’t know Charles Schulz’s Charlie Brown and Snoopy? We know about Charlie Brown’s yearly disappointment, trying to score even one run on the baseball diamond. We know about Snoopy’s rich fantasy life as a WWI aviator, wooing young women and drinking root beer. These characters are rich and detailed in our mind’s eye, but how did we come to know them? A comic strip only has four small panels, thin black and white lines, just a few short snatches of dialog. Not much to go on.

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When we mention Facebook, LinkedIn, or other social networking platforms in meetings with clients we often hear “Who has the time?”. Indeed, who has the time to maintain a profile, post updates, keep tabs on colleagues when the benefits are so nebulous. There have to be better reasons than altruism for individuals or businesses to participate in online social networks.

Here’s an example of why someone might participate in a social network: A former client wrote an unsolicited recommendation for me on LinkedIn today. When I accepted his recommendation to be displayed on my profile I was immediately presented with a prompt to provide a reciprocal recommendation. I wrote a few sentences about the person right there on the spot.

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The title of Richard Lanham’s new book The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information, got my attention. If anything is a “scarce resource” today, it is mental bandwidth, and Lanham makes a powerful case for how much of our economic and social energy is consumed by the effort to attract attention, as we have moved from being an economy based on “stuff” (substance) to an economy based on “fluff” (style). The core skills in this new economy are no longer the physical sciences, engineering and traditional economics – “The arts and letters now stand at the center.” Every chapter of the book is followed by a section of “background conversations” that serve as hyperlinks or extended footnotes, referencing the books and articles informing and elaborating on the main themes. With a background as a scholar in medieval literature, Lanham’s observations are informed by a deep engagement with Western culture, but the writing is lively and never burdened with excessive erudition.

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