The Teletransporter a great invention for letting men go to the bar with their mates without having to worry about the girlfriend.

This is an interesting video on why brands need to start engaging in social media conversations. Everyone knows they need as many Brand Advocates as possible, but as always, most brands rarely take any additional action to help create more of them. Things like time, budgets and skill sets always get in the way. But more so now than ever, brands need to make the time to harvest online conversations because increased sales are waiting…

Creating brand advocates can be easier than you think and with social media, that influence is powered 10x, 20x 100x 5000x depending on the size of the advocates network. So just imagine what customers would think when you tweet your frustration about your new mobile phone and then the company, say Vodafone, starts tweeting back with live help… You only have to tweet back once for your entire network to know Vodafone just saved the day for you!

With everybody's (?) favourite celebrity couple allegedly heading for the divorce courts, Katie Price and Peter Andre have randomly become the source of inspiration for the latest Virgin Trains press campaign. The Ad broke last week with the slogan 'We'd get Peter back with Katie faster than a magazine deal'

Inspired!

Its interesting to see so many these days who are keen to damn the brand.

Brand has become a dirty word in many quarters- an exploitative commerical construct, a product of fiendish, manipiulative minds in marketing and marketing services agencies,

aided and added by the pimping research industry.

But brands are no more or no less than 'other peoples' property'.

They dont by defintion belong to the 'hidden persuaders'; they only uniquely exist in a individual's mind, composites of everything they experience, think and feel in connection with the name.

So how can brands be condemned? They are badges of individual perception.

Branding, is  also often accused of being manupulative.

Branding is clearly about how about how you build a discreet and distinctive presence on someones cerebral front lawn.

But criticism of branding practice often relates to the old way of doing it.

You can ask people what they would like and promise to deliver it, and do everything you can to appear like you're it. Old school.

Or you can , as a business, define what it is you are, want to be and how you want to change thre world ( even a small part of it), and then share that with people.

That approach to brand building is far from being manipulative. It much more like being participative.

So maybe we should  stop using brand as a swearword or start putting some money in the swear jar.

 That way, we can fund some good causes; like brands who have a point of view they want to share with the world.

I'll swear to that.

  Scientists can read your mind. Fact. Not the stuff of science of fiction, but the brain-child of one Dr. David Lewis, a neuropsychologist who fronts a Sussex University-sponsored company, MindLab. Using equipment which monitors electrical activity in the brain, he has been helping big brands grab our attention, and thereby our pounds, politicians to divine our voting preferences, and even the law to establish our guilt or otherwise.

  All very troubling. Computers can now say with 78% accuracy what object a person is looking at, be it a hammer, a pencil or indeed a copy of 1984.

  Nor has the potential of this been lost on neuromarketers, and although the technology is in its infancy, one feels, ethics aside, it will become a key tool in the advertiser's arsenal. Read more here...