These are the most expensive brands of the year for 2009. No big surprises.. I guess that companies from internet and technology industry will climb up on the ranking and get better and better positions. The first five companies are at the top of the list for many years! Who doesn’t drink Coca-Cola? McDonald’s and Google go higher and higher every year while Toyota and Intel become less popular with a weaker brand name. United States is the leading country in the entire list. What a surprise!

These are the first 10 best brands of 2009:

2009 Rank	2008 Rank	Brand	Country of Origin	Sector	2009 Brand Value ($m)	Change in Brand Value
1	1		United States	Beverages	68,734	3%
2	2		United States	Computer Services	60,211	2%
3	3		United States	Computer Software	56,647	-4%
4	4		United States	Diversified	47,777	-10%
5	5		Finland	Consumer Electronics	34,864	-3%
6	8		United States	Restaurants	32,275	4%
7	10		United States	Internet Services	31,980	25%
8	6		Japan	Automotive	31,330	-8%
9	7		United States	Computer Hardware	30,636	-2%
10	9		United States	Media	28,447	-3%

Click here to view the entire list.

(via InterBrand)

According to many ‘Social Media Gurus’ (if this term exists) you have to build your community in order to be successful! This is not new. The community building happens since the creation of the world. People used to build communities in order to be more powerful and more protected. Some years ago, companies used to build communities through events, exhibitions, sponsorships and many more. Nowadays, the trend is called Social Media. Why? It is easy, inexpensive and with better results. How? It is very easy! You just communicate with your audience and you add value on this communication. Be real and show that you care about them. Make them to trust you! And if you have great products and services, you are a winner! The drawback of this is that many companies (your competitors too) try to do the same and you have to be creative, unique and fast! There are several examples of winners and losers on the game of community building!

Zappos is a clear winner! It is the company that uses Social Media better than everybody else. The culture of Zappos is ‘communicate with the customer and do it well’! Zappos encourages its employees to create Twitter account and tweet! Until now 438 employees use Twitter. There is the ‘What employees are doing right now’ page that shows all the tweets of employees. There is a ‘start’ page that the CEO of Zappos explains to his employees what is Twitter about and how you create an account. Is this amazing? YES! Twitter is a great way to communicate with people and Zappos knows this. For Zappos is not only Twitter. They have 13 blogs, Facebook accounts, YouTube channel and many more. You cannot do anything more than ‘Love Zappos!‘

Dell is another winner. They try to segment the market and create multiple accounts for Twitter and Facebook. Dell has a very organized Community page. They try to communicate with people in as many places as they can. (Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn etc.) Strong brands need strong communities and Dell knows that very well.

Let’s find a loser. Sony can be one of them. Do you see Sony around? No. Sony made many mistakes and some of them are about communications. Sony has a community page but they are not successful because as I mentioned before they were not creative, fast (just started – beta version) and unique. Sony has few Twitter followers, few Facebook fans and unfortunately this is SONY! I am most of my everyday life online and I rarely hear something about Sony. It is their mistake and they have to fix it. (Along with all the other mistakes)

This picture doesn’t mean a lot (Twitter is not the only measurement). I just want to compare the accounts.

What about Apple? Apple is a unique company. It is the company that uses NO Social Media and has one of the strongest and fanatic communities. How? Through their fans. Apple doesn’t have to do anything for this. Apple fans create the Social Media buzz and this is phenomenon. No Twitter, blogs, Facebook, and Videos are owned by Apple.. It is crazy that everybody talks about them without doing anything. Of course Apple has its own way to build its community but this way is unique.

Successful brands build strong communities, offer great products and services and they win!

iPhoto

iPhoto has been updated with two features called “Faces” and “Places.” Faces, as you may have guessed, lets you tag photos by subjects’ faces, similar to what Facebook and Picasa have done. iPhoto makes its best guess as to the identity of a subject based on previous tags and asks for confirmation. Of course, Phil called it “..the best technology we’ve found for face detection.”

Places allows for geotagging of photos. Some cameras and the 3G iPhone will use GPS information to tag photos on longitude and latitude. iPhoto then organizes those photos by location, or “place.” Also, Flickr and Facebook support are built-in. Those without GPS access can retro-tag photos by hand.

Other iPhoto features include enhanced slideshows and travel books.

Source: TUAW

Apple and Microsoft.. How similar and how different they are? The new Microsoft Store (as we say Apple Store) has a logo that is very similar to all Apple products’ logos with two gray shades (picture).

Just be patient! The new Windows 7 are coming with ‘new and innovative’ ideas! (maybe they will include Spotlight, Time machine, Dock and many other NEW features!)

According to TechCrunch’s “multiple (if thin) reports,” Apple may be working on a search engine in the interest of weaning themselves from Google’s teet. Given that Apple defaults to Google search on Mac and iPhone versions of Safari, and given that Google is sort of competition now with Android, the rumors make sense…but given that Apple does not appear to be recruiting search programmers from other companies, and given that you need experienced programmers to build your engine, the rumors don’t make sense. So I guess that all we can conclude is that there’s nothing conclusive yet.

Source: TechCrunch

There is a new application in AppStore. It costs only 99 cents but it can rescue us from many disasters! How many times did we want to have a call from someone in order to leave a place, a meeting or a difficult situation? With the new App Fake Calls, you can create your own fake call and you are done! As you see in the picture, you put the name or the number of the fake caller and the time of the call.

Finally! We are free!

Marketer of the year is Barack Obama according to the Advertising Age. At the annual conference of Marketers and Agencies of US, Obama became the Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008. The second place was for Apple and the third place for the online store Zappos.com.

Obama had 36,1% , Apple 27.3%, Zappos14.1% and Nike 9.4%.

Steve Jobs at Stanford

Here’s the speech Steve Jobs delivered to the graduating class at Stanford in 2005.

“My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “no” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important thing I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

Marketers are excited when they speak about Brand Names and their economic value. According to the latest research, these are the most expensive brand names!

First is Google that costs $86.06 billions, second is General Electric that costs $71.38 billions, then Microsoft with $70.89, billions, Coca-Cola with $58.21 billions,  IBM with $55.34 billions, and Apple with $55.21 billions!