Marketing and branding were about pushing your message to consumers. You sold them what they never knew they wanted.

Marketing used to be all about the product or service.

What made your product unique from anything else on the market? What was the value-add in your version versus a competitor? Did you have the best price or experience for the money?

Branding was all about the image of that product or service.

What perception did you want your customers to have about your company? What did customers feel about consuming what you had to offer?

NOW

Marketing and branding are responses to real-time customer demands and needs. Customers are telling you what they want. You are listening – more than ever – to the consumer, instead of dictating to them what they can or cannot live without.

Marketing is now much more than the product or service.  While people still connect with an object such as a particular coffee brand or airline, it’s not enough to sell how tasteful your peppermint latte is or the extra 6-inches of legroom compared to a competitor.

Likewise, branding is now about customer interaction (not to be confused with customer service), corporate social responsibility, online culture and community, and much more.

Making this shift to social media isn’t an easy move. Wait too long to get on the bandwagon, and you’ve lost your first-mover advantage. Act too fast, and you may not have a well thought-out strategy.

So how do you know whether to jump into the next new web trend? How do you evaluate your presence in that landscape? How do you use the new media tool in such a way that no one else is using it? Thinking outside the box and being innovative with the new media tools will help in setting your company, brand and product apart.

Whether it’s a mobile app, interactive website that has nothing to do with your product and everything about your consumers, there’s definitely a niche that you can create for yourself within your industry that will accomplish the original goals of branding and marketing.

Here are a few new media integration examples that are successful at tying together “new marketing” and “new branding” into the digital customer experience:

Sonicare: Adopt-a-Tooth The Sonicare Facebook application keeps the user engaged over and over again by encouraging good dental hygiene through a “pet” tooth.  Take better care of our “canine” and be privy to special gifts and promotions.

When someone takes action with their pet tooth, it can appear on their friends news feeds, and is always visible on the owner’s profile.

In today’s social network landscape where the popularity of social gaming such as Mafia Wars and Farmville are growing exponentially, it’s smart for a brand to jump into the arena with the right interactive app.

Coke Zero Facial Profiler Coca-cola claims that Coke Zero has been one of the most successful product launches in its history. In the two years since its release, Coke Zero has sold nearly 450 million cases and is available in more than 100 countries. So why not take this success and broad reach to connect your fans online?

That’s exactly what cokezero.com does. The site says nothing about the product except for a wordmark that includes the tagline “Real Coke Taste. Zero Calories.”  Instead, their site is home to the Facial Profiler application, which uses Facebook Connect to troll tagged images of you to help find your look-alike.

The premise? A social experiment: If millions of people like you enjoy Coke Zero, then there surely is another person that looks like you that enjoys Coke Zero.

USAA Mobile App Your new media presence doesn’t always have to be through a web browser. USAA takes personal finance management to a whole new level with their iPhone app. Unique features include:

• Deposit@Mobile — Depositing a check is as simple as snapping a photo.
• ATM Locator — Find the closest ATMs.
• Loan Calculator — Estimate monthly payments on a loan.
• Rental Car Locator — Find the nearest Avis, Budget or Hertz location.
• Accident Checklist — Record accident details to help you file a claim.

Who could have ever imagined that 140 characters could immediately fix a travel mishap with an airline… Or that a college friend would become a “fan” of your service on Facebook and lead you to a handful of new customers?

Now that social media marketing strategies have become the norm ­ – not the exception – how do you continue to set yourself apart?   The answer can lie in the attention that is paid to details and minor tweaks.

These details aren’t about the conversations that you’ve having on Twitter or Facebook.  Rather, they are the many hidden opportunities within your social network and new media pages that you can take to further connect your brand, company or product.  These opportunities can be simple upgrades to your browser or a one-click application install in your social network.

Take Twiter, for example.  The message that you send to your constituents can be delivered beyond your tweets, @replies and direct messages.  By taking advantage of customization options, you can distinguish you brand from the millions of other Twitter pages and avoid drowning in web noise:

• Use your background to create a custom page that integrates your brand, and follows company style guides
• Integrate an avatar (profile icon) that is consistent with your other new media account avatars, whether it’s on Facebook, YouTube or other sites
• Install applications such as Clickable Now and make sure that any images or links connect to your homepage, Facebook fan page, etc.

Check out how we’ve implemented these sample steps into our @INCULINK page!

Similar opportunities exist for Facebook, YouTube, blogs and other new media resources on the web.

So next time you’re on a social media site, think: What else can this page do for me beyond what it was originally meant to do?

Go beyond thinking out of the box for the use of a product.  We suggest you take an introspective look at how you would have designed Twitter had it been your original idea.  Or what functionality you would have added to the Facebook fan page if you could do it your own way…

If you’ve imagined up an idea for new media applications, the solutions are probably already there.  At the very least, you may just find a community that is tackling a similar issue, and the solution will be just around the corner.

For more, see our previous posts:

• Take Advantage of Twitter Real Estate
• Liven Your Twitter with Clickable Now!

Sometimes you just don’t realize what you’ve been missing until you see it live in action.

Twitter, Facebook and other new media sites only allow you to view information streams one profile at a time. But with the help of our customized Web Trend Map, you can now visualize all social media, social network, multimedia, and web technology related news in one stop.

Check out what the most trending topics across all of our New Media resources are at any given time.  Find out how it relates to what we’re talking about at INCULINK… and what Adam and I are talking about individually as well.

Here’s the map at a glance.  Click on the image to view the fully interactive version:

Some tips on navigating our map that is built on the San Francisco grid — partly because we both frequent Frisco, and partly because many new media companies are headquartered there:

• INCULINK is located on Treasure Island. Adam and I are adjacent.
• The central area surrounded by the Marina, North Beach, Golden Gate Bridge, Twin Peaks and Sunset Beach is where you’ll find the Social Networks, Social Media websites and New Media tools.
• Venture northeast to Oakland and flow south to track the chatter amongst the individuals we follow who are constant contributors to the new media conversations.  Experts include Guy Kawasaki, David Pogue of the New York Times, and the Twitter founders.
• Head over to the Wild West, and there you’ll see a much more intimate group of individuals that we consider to be our local peers… folks with whom we bounce ideas and thoughts off of regularly.
• Scroll over each profile to see the latest tweets and links.
• Click on each profile to see their latest feeds and who else in our map network has shared the same news.

The Web Trend Map comes from the folks at Information Architects. iA has produced a Web Trend Map annually for the last four years.  With each version come and go new and old trends, including news sites, new media tools and e-commerce sites.

The topography in the latest version of the map really gives the landscape of the World Wide Web a unique perspective.

Currently the customizable maps are in limited availability, and only tracks Twitter conversations.  At first it seemed lacking because of the inability to feed Facebook, YouTube or other new media feeds into each profile.  But considering that Facebook recently implemented the ability to post its wall feeds to Twitter, and the likes of TwitterFeed supporting other streams, there really is no limitation.  Restricting it to Twitter accounts makes it efficient.

For more details on how a Web Trend Map works, check out iA’s own explanation here.  With fancy words like micro-curator and micro-aggregates, it’s easiest to follow their illustrated tour.

Check out the original Web Trend Map 4 teaser we posted on our tumblr page earlier this year:

Last week, Google Reader became social. Within the Google Reader settings, you can now add send to links, and you can send this information to your various new media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Digg, etc..).

FINALLY this feature exists. They’ve had share and email buttons, but the share feature required you to have friends using Google Reader, and surprisingly, our percentage of friends using it was quite low.

Sidebar: We have integrated Google Reader “share” (the button on the bottom of the Google Reader articles) into Facebook, where sharing an article announces it on our Facebook profiles, but now this is an on demand feature.

Here’s how the new “Send to” feature works:

1. Click on Google Reader Settings in the top right corner

2. Click on the “send to” tab on the far right

3. Check the new media applications you’d like to have the options to send to

4. Go back to the reader. Within each article within the subscriptions at the bottom, you now have the option to send this to various new media feeds

It’s that easy! Remember, if you find an interesting article, email it to us at newsletter@inculink.com to be part of the INCUBEAT weekly newsletter! Subscribe here.

This brainchild – HuffPost’s version of a digital water cooler – debuts today.

As I write this post, the HuffPost’s social news experiment has only 760 users in its community.  But with nearly 1.7 million comments on the site alone last month, the chances are high that the hypothesis – the project will get more interesting as more friends join – will be proven.

News has become an important element of community–something around which we gather, connect, and converse. And we can all become part of the evolution of a story now–expanding it with comments and links to relevant information, adding facts and differing points of views.

As the Semantic Web (aka Web 3.o) begins to really define itself, and interactions on the Web continue to become more and more experiential, it’s important for media outlets, as well as brands and companies to innovate news ways in which to use shared data, such as Facebook Connect or other new media APIs.

HuffPost understands this, and keeps pushing the envelope with the way they report news, the editors they choose to hire, and how they actively involve their community.

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, agrees. “The Huffington Post has led a revolution in how people discover and consume news. With the integration of Facebook Connect, HuffPost Social News is now leading the way to make news even more of a social experience, giving people new ways to share and filter news and current events through their networks of friends on Facebook.”

So What’s Different?

We already see the likes of The New York Times and Mashable providing news on social network sites, so in a sense Social News isn’t “new”.

Likewise, our friends on Facebook “share” their favorite news items on their walls.

So what makes this union of HuffPost and Facebook Connect so innovative?

What is new is the ability to filter out the thousands of fans who comment on a single post, and to see what all of your friends are saying about the latest news posts.  You’ll still be able to see what non-friends say as well, but face it – what’s most important and interesting to you is what your closest friends are saying.

Facebook should take lead from HuffPosts strategy and allow users looking at Page posts to first see what their friends are saying, then the rest of the community.  Post comments simply read chronologically now.  Also, as people reply to each others comments the thread should be easier to follow, much like in Twitter.

To join the HuffPost conversation, and check out what your Facebook friends are reading and saying, join the HuffPost Social News via Facebook Connect.

Want to hear what I’m saying on HuffPosts Social News?  Find me at HuffPost or connect with me on Facebook, and let’s share!

Screenshots:

This is a great free app that helps integrate your social media so you’re updating from one place AND you’re choosing what you want to send to your facebook page so you don’t overwhelm your fans.

Follow the instructions below to integrate your accounts

1. Go to the selective twitter application in facebook

2. Click on Go to Application in the upper left corner

3. Click on the tab “Your Fan Pages” – you must be an administrator on these web pages for your fan page to show up

4. Select the fan page, enter the twitter account and password, and you are ready to go

5. In twitter, make sure that you end each post with #fb that you want to send to facebook

6. And Voila!, your tweet shows up in the status of your fan page (it’s not instant – takes about 2 minutes).

This is a highly useful tool for integrating your social media. If you have any questions, hit us up on twitter or facebook.

Installing and activating your page with Clickable Now is good practice. Your followers, customers, and constituents may be using either browser, and this is just one more step that will help ease the process for people who want to interact with you on the Social Web.

Install the add-on or script into your browser from here, then give Clickable Now access to your Twitter account. Once you do, it’s pretty simple (See the screen shots below):

1. Click on the “New Link” button.
2. Drag the link box to the portion of your sidebar that you’d like hyper-linked.
3. Resize to fit the area to be hyper-linked.
4. Enter the email or Web site information, and choose the highlight color.
5. Save settings.

That’s it! Although this only works on Firefox browsers, and for those who have installed the add-on, it’s a big step forward. We’ve been wanting the Twitter backgrounds to be interactive for a long time.

You can see below what we’ve hyper-linked @INCULINK or on my personal page @SherryMain. We’ve added live links to our logo and URL, personal blogs, personal Twitter accounts, and to our Facebook fan page.

Perhaps one day, HTML will go the way of Photoshop layers and allow us to upload custom HTML backgrounds behind the Twitter feeds. But until then, this will do…

Hat-tip to Todd Defren (@tdefren) of ShiftComm.com.

Whether you are kicking off a full-scale new media communication and social marketing strategy for the first time, or an established organization looking for a fresh new perspective, we can help you capitalize on the rapid growth of online interactivity and the ubiquitous Web.

We’ll help you explore a new media strategy by addressing questions such as:

» What immediate social media application will have the largest impact on my top line?

» How do we build a new media strategy on a shoestring budget?

» How do we build a flexible strategy that can adapt to the ever-changing landscape of the Web?

» How do we integrate the many new media tools to create a seamless, integreated flow?

The web gives you an opportunity to personalize and tailor your marketing message to the individual customer – whether you are placing ads on social networking sites or selling a product or service through blog posts.

And much like traditional communications, digital communications is all about the relationships you create.  But how do you build trustworthy networks and partnerships with the people who are behind avatars and usernames?

How do you add value to the content that you create, and tailor it to new media marketing and communications?

Writing for the web and online content is constantly evolving, and we’ll help you discover the best ways to manage online conversations.

Branding your new media accounts with the same look, feel and message that your company and website exudes, is what will get your customers and audience to make an emotional connection with you.

And online branding in a digital world doesn’t stop with the color palette, logo, wordmark and tagline. It goes way beyond static imagery.

How you tell a story on a video or the theme music for a podcast tells a lot about your brand. How you interact with your fans through the choice words you continuously use will ensure consistent online messaging.

You may have an external brand image, but are you in touch with your internal brand image?