The news is getting out there

Sharedband was officially launched this week with first ISP partner KeConnect and it was well reported in Comms Business, see their news piece. They have decided their product using Sharedband will be called Flexiband - I wonder how many other interesting brands will emerge as others launch their products.

Also picked op on a new blog for small businesses - Alex Bellinger had written a post about the growth in VoIP adoption by SME's and made the point that ADSL bandwidth was going to be an issue for anyone with even a modest number of VoIP users - especially if their office was remote from an exchange - so I got into a brief explanation on how our new service could help solve this problem.

Real Brands Score

As a follow up on my last post on brand virtues I thought it would be fun to think about how these virtues stack up in the real world, so I put together a simple table with some expressions of these virtues or lack thereof so as to score a brand. Try it out on your own or your competitor’s brand or just a famous brand. Simply think about the brand in question – maybe open the website in front of you and ask yourself which of the following expressions are most appropriate to describe the top 10 virtues:

Add the score up, the max score is 50 and minimum 10. Then in only the way women’s magazines can do well I have attempted to draw a few conclusions:

Score 10-19 :

The company responsible for this brand is likely to take your money and disappear, they are to be despised and hopefully customers will run for the hills and it won’t be long before they go bust. The world will be a better place without them.

Score 20-29 :

If you’re responsible for the marketing this brand you’ve got your work cut out. Plenty of challenges ahead, it takes time to alter these perceptions but don’t give up see where you’re marked down and find out why. These virtues are not just about changing the messaging or advertising copy it’s about radically overhauling the brand and company culture.

Score 30-39 :

A pretty good result, few large companies or famous brands will do better than this. But there is no room for complacency. One slip can undo all the value established – it’s better to keep trying to improve the margin so that in the event of bad times customers will stick with the brand.

Score 40-50 :

Check the facts – you could be deluding yourself – if you are the marketing manager try asking some real customers what they think. If the result stands please accept my sincere congratulations on a brilliant result. Your brand is a massive asset to your business. The only bad news is that the effort can never stop and there is only one direction you can go now – so stay ahead and protect your brand - its worth a fortune.

Would anyone be prepared to measure Sharedband for me?

Footnote: Thanks to Steve for coming up with a couple of great expressions and not disappearing up his own ass.

Life or brand virtues

A few months back I wrote a post about the value of Trust. In this post I mentioned that it was in my top 10 virtues for human life and brand value. Ever since I wrote about it I have wondered what else was in my top 10 and did they all apply to brand value as well as being human virtues. Perhaps you may have a view on the order but here is my best stab at the top 10 brand virtues:

1. Empathy
2. Lucidity
3. Trust
4. Quality
5. Wisdom
6. Honesty
7. Powerful
8. Humility
9. Responsibility
10. Organization
    

Did I miss any that are more important than those listed? How does your brand stack up (or even your own personal brand / image)? What do you think your customers or audience would make of these values when it comes to your own brand image?

Do you think it would be fun to score well known brands against each of these factors and reach conclusions as to their brand value as a result?

"Expletive" Cool Technology

Scott Adams of Dilbert fame has got excited about Google alerts in his blog and I agree they are a really useful way of tracking your key interests. He points out how he tracks his own key words “Scott Adams Dilbert” so he can see who is talking about his work and that he’s reasonably likely to read (at least some of the content to get the context).

So I got to wondering if adding a batch of obvious key names, words and links at the end of this post I might grab the attention of a number of prolific bloggers and pundits and tell them about our great new technology.

Sharedband is this really cool patented software technology that aggregates the bandwidth of broadband lines. This is a totally new low cost line bonding solution for the mass market - it uses commodity routers pooled together distributing IP packets across multiple lines.

This gives you much faster internet connection speeds, upstream and downstream, as well as adding greater resilience to your service. Great news if you depend on the internet for your living as do the illustrious bunch below....and many many more besides.

Dennis Howlett AccMan B.L. Ochman Kathy Sierra Creating Passionate Users Hugh MacLeod Gapingvoid Om Malik GigaOm Jackie Danicki Brian Oberkirch Like It Matters Steve Rubel Micro Persuasion Shel Israel Global Neighbourhoods Naked Conversations Neville Hobson Shel Holtz Robert Scoble Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger Seth Godin Seth's Blog David Tebbut Teblog Sam Sethi Vecosys Techmeme Michael Arrington Techcrunch

Declaration: I am Sales & Marketing Director for Sharedband - and yes this an unashamed awareness promotion - unashamed because its great news for every broadband user who wants more than what their getting currently.