Creating a new brand, User Friendly Thinking
At "Bizzuka Labs," we're creating a new social media marketing brand called User Friendly Thinking. While still in the process of clarifying the brand message, essentially it's a place where "technology and creativity intersect."
We refer to User Friendly Thinking as a "social media" brand, mainly because that's the channel through which it's being deployed.
Currently we offer:
UserFriendlyThinking.com
We're "eating our own dogfood" and have built a multi-blog, multi-author site using our own blog component, which is part of our overall CMS. While it's a work in progress, and certainly not on par with WordPress, Movable Type or WordFrame, we're rather proud of it. For the time being, contributors are members of the Bizzuka staff. We plan to invite outside contributors in the not-too-distant future.
User Friendly Thinking Radio
Every Friday at noon central we interview social media movers-and-shakers. Past guests have included Jason Falls, Ben McConnell, Anita Campbell, Charlene Li, Mack Collier, Toby Bloomberg as well as an assortment of Web designers, developers and our own staff. The show is beginning to catch on too. Last week's episode with Mack was one In the near future our guest will include Wayne Hurlbert, John Jantsch and Michelle Miller among others.
This was a group started by our SVP of Global Sales and Business Development, Charles Lauller. Currently, it numbers some 167 members and growing everyday. We are getting our share of spammers though and figuring out ways to deal with it. We'd like to invite you to join if you're interested.
Plans for the future include a Twitter handle, video channel, Facebook group and online community.
The endgame here is to use UFT as a social media and content marketing "magnet" to introduce Bizzuka to a wider audience, but do so by focusing on the topics of Web design, development, content management and marketing rather than on Bizzuka itself.
As you can see from the UFT site, references to Bizzuka are minimal and non-invasive. We plan to keep it that way. It's "marketing by participation" that will drive the brand, not "hey, over here, look at us!!!!" forms of interruption.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this idea along with any advice you'd care to share. It's an experiment and we can use all the input we can get. Do you think we're on the right track? What suggestions would you have for future development?
