Brand thoughts: Google the chameleon

By Kate Spiers

Isn’t it amazing that the Google logo can be changed, disguised, dressed up, pimped, adorned, unwritten and re-written, and still work?  That’s saying something.  I can’t think of another logo that can get away with that…

True brand elastic in visual terms – stretch it whichever way you like, change it and personalise it temporarily, but it will always spring back. But like a chameleon, it remains true to itself underneath all of that. I loved today’s offer on http://www.google.co.uk:

Why can it be this extraordinary chameleon in brand terms?  Is it because it’s so damn big and ubiquitous? After all, Google isn’t just a brand, it’s a world, a verb and even kind of a way of life…

What do you think?

(un)conventional wisdom: Ian Huckabee

Second in this series of shared wisdom from some of the most interesting people we know comes courtesy of Ian Huckabee of Weejee Media.

Ian is a web marketing strategist and founder of Weejee Media, which specialises in search engine marketing and social media marketing.  But more than that, Ian is a natural communicator, lateral thinker, thought-provoker and wise man*.  Take it way, Ian:

“It’s now proverbial that most people would rather get one good opinion from a friend on social media than thousands from a search engine. What is relevant today is not necessarily what search engines have indexed but the social signals we pick up in real time. Look at the real time results on Google’s search engine results pages. They include a live feed of updates from Twitter, Facebook fan pages and blogs. Content authority is changing. What blogs ushered in during the early 2000s micro-blogs have escorted to center stage today: your opinion.”

*Ian managed to turn around my entire frame of mind last week with a one-line response to an email.  I’d told him my day was a nightmare and I got this in return: “Turn it into a dream”.  We all need friends and collaborators like this.

Thanks to Ian Huckabee