Digiday 

When it comes to digital marketing from a brand perspective, Steven Cook knows his stuff. With top marketing positions at top brands like Samsung, Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola, Cook has seen it all. The 30-year global brand marketer and current CMO of live-music tech firm Fankix.com spoke to Digiday about why the number of Facebook fans doesn’t make the brand, why brands need to experiment, and why the hunt for social media ROI is beside the point.
Read more… 

Infographic: Microsoft employees most active on social media

ragan.com 

There are a lot of articles out there about how active companies are on social media, but what about their employees? Which company’s employees are the most social?

An infographic from Flowtown ranks the largest American companies according to their employees’ activity on social media. The companies with the most socially active employees are:

1. Microsoft

To learn the others click here

In a just released white paper from Covario, reporting on the Facebook health of 100 leading advertisers, Coca-Cola ranked the world’s No. 1 brand, with a following on Facebook of 34 million fans, growing at a monthly rate of nearly 3%, posting seven times a month, each garnering more than 235 comments and nearly 1,750 “likes.”

Learn More…

Marketing Charts

Although beverage brand Coca-Cola is the most valuable global brand of 2011, with a brand value of $71.8 billion, the majority of the 10 most valuable brands are technology firms, according to a ranking from Interbrand. Six of the top 10 brands, including number two IBM ($69.9 billion), are providers of technology products and/or services.

The other technology brands on the list are number three Microsoft, number four Google, number seven Intel, number eight Apple, and number 10 HP. The list also includes a restaurant company (McDonald’s), a diversified company (GE) and a media company (Disney).  Read more

Google has edged out Microsoft as the most valuable brand in the world, while Coca-Cola has dropped out of the top 10 for the first time, according to the BrandFinance Global 500 2011 rankings.

Google’s estimated $44.3 billion brand value as of year-end 2010 pushed it up from #2 in last year’s rankings, while Microsoft’s $42.8 billion pushed it up to second place from a #5 ranking last year. The two tech giants superseded last year’s #1 brand, Wal-Mart ($36.2 billion), now ranked third.

Brand Finance, a leading brand valuation consultancy, calculates brand values using a discounted cash flow technique to discount estimated future royalties at an appropriate discount rate, to arrive at a net present value of the trademark and associated intellectual property. The firm also ranks brands by benchmarking their strength, risk and potential relative to competitors, on a scale ranging from AAA+ to D.

Read More