See the clip here, by clicking on “Paul Werth” in the video viewer.

Here are four reasons why:

(1) Brand equity. The Big Ten Conference is the oldest Division I college athletic conference in the United States. It was founded in 1895, was first nicknamed the Big Ten in 1917 and has used that name consistently since 1949. The Big Ten excels in every aspect of brand equity: awareness, loyalty and perceived quality and the innumerable memories and other associations that generations of Big Ten alumni and fans (football or not) hold precious.

(2) Brand confusion. The Big Ten now has 12 schools, the Big 12 has 10 and the Pac-10 has 12. Nebraska is leaving the Big 12 to join the Big Ten, and the Cornhuskers are not pushing for a name change. Imagine the confusion that would result if the conferences changed their name to reflect the number of teams.

(3) Precedent. Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delaney told Stu Durando of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he assumed the Big Ten would change its name in 1990 when the addition of Penn State brought the number of teams to 11. “I was going on that presumption and found out quickly the Big Ten was a name that carried a lot of meaning to a lot of people,” Delaney said. The fact that the conference has had 11 teams for the past decade is proof that the essence of the Big Ten brand has transcended the number of schools involved.

(4) Better options. The Big Ten opted in 1990 to refresh its brand image but not replace it. Al Grivetti, who was a graduate student at Northern Illinois, incorporated the No. 11 into the logo design. It would be quite easy to refresh the logo again with the numeral 12.

Delaney can be commended for a willingness to hear all sides on the issue, but he will ultimately be swayed by what he already knows to be true: the Big Ten Conference is the most powerful brand in collegiate sports, and there would be far more to lose than gain by changing the name.

Paul Werth Associates is bringing its senior-level consulting and integrated marketing communications services to the “Second City” — Chicago.

Senior Vice President and Chicago insider David O’Dowd heads up the new office, located in the world’s largest commercial building and Chicago landmark, 222 Merchandise Mart Plaza.

“We are very excited about our continued growth and the addition of our Chicago office,” says Sandra Harbrecht, President and CEO. “We are seeing strong demand for our results-oriented communications in this vibrant market and plan to build on our strong ties and relationships within the business community to further expand our services and client roster.” Harbrecht plans to make monthly visits to the new office to meet with clients and prospects.

In Chicago as in Columbus, Werth provides a full range of communications services to drive client success:

• Public relations, including strategic planning, thought leadership, crisis communications, reputation management, change management, media relations, social media programs, blogger outreach, spokesperson training, message development, trade show support and community relations.
• Public Affairs, including government relations, lobbying, grassroots communications and engagement, ballot issue campaign management and research.
• Advertising, including creative strategy, brand strategy, corporate identity, advertising campaigns, video production, marketing collateral, direct marketing and word of mouth and viral marketing.
• Interactive Marketing, including analytics-based digital strategy, website/intranet development, microsites, e-commerce solutions, e-mail marketing, SEO, SEM, social media integration, online reputation audits, viral marketing, digital content creation and usability studies.
• Research, including needs assessments, strategy development, creative custom research design, communications audits, market potential/opportunity studies, brand positioning/image studies, advertising and communications testing, customer satisfaction studies, executive interviews and public opinion polling.

We welcome visitors to our new office! Call or e-mail David O’Dowd at dodowd@paulwerth.com or 312-297-1416 or Sandy Harbrecht swh@paulwerth.com or 614-224-8114.

Werth’s logos not only help clients stand out in a cluttered communications landscape, but they’ve also been recognized for industry excellence. Three logos Werth designed will be published in the LogoLounge Master Library Series, Volume 3, Shapes & Symbols, which features exemplary logo design work from around the world.

This volume of the LogoLounge Master Library won’t be available until 2011, but we’re happy to give you a sneak peek, along with our analysis of why these logos stand out.

An elegant logo design may appear deceptively simple. However, effective design requires a multi-layered discovery and development process involving several prototype designs and refinements. At every stage, logos are evaluated for their ability to meet several goals:

1. Clearly identify the company and express its vision
2. Appeal to the target market
3. Differentiate the company from competitors
4. Be aesthetically appealing
5. Be memorable and stand the test of time

These three logos were developed for Columbus-based technology companies that needed new identities to help them stand out from their competitors. These are all combination marks with icons and type treatments that are clean and scalable for the Web. The icons are interesting shapes that can stand alone, while the integrated text is clean and contemporary.

Infosaic Technologies is a full-scale Windows Web hosting and applications development company. Initially developed in a single dimension, the logo evolved into a three-dimensional design that delivers greater impact. The type and color choices push the contemporary feeling.

Best Light Video is a video production house that helps brands develop their online video presence. This more abstract mark takes its influence from the visible light spectrum. From Web to print to video, this logo needed to be adaptable to multiple platforms and has been translated into several variations.

Capital City Radio is an online radio station streaming out an eclectic mix of news, music and original programming. Through the discovery process, we learned the station wanted to focus heavily its Ohio location. As a result, we developed a representational mark, playfully using sound equalization levels to create the state of Ohio. The accompanying text is concise and provides supplemental clarity.

Contact Chief Creative Officer Ken Waldron at 614-224-8114 or kwaldron@paulwerth.com for a consultation about effective logo design for your organization.

This month the National Safe Boating Council kicked off a unique campaign to promote life jacket awareness. The ‘80’s hit song “Safety Dance” was used in a video featuring a young man and woman who appear to be dancing. This “dance” is a metaphor for what they would look like if they were under water without a life jacket struggling to survive. In the end our subjects don a safety jacket and float safely to the surface and off the screen.

The campaign was just recognized by the United States Coast Guard and the United States Department of Homeland Security for outstanding work in the area of Marine Safety.

The promotion, conceived by the Werth Creative team, uses the popular Facebook Connect application. Once you log in and allow access to your Facebook photos, they will fade up behind our subjects as a reminder of the friends you’d leave behind if you choose not to wear a safety jacket this boating season.

In the end, you are encouraged to forward “The Life Jacket Safety Dance” link to friends for a chance to win a Flip MinoHD™ camcorder, with the ultimate goal of spreading the word to as many people as possible about the benefits of wearing a life jacket.

The contest caps off Werth’s second successful year of managing the National Safe Boating Week, Inflatable Life Jacket World Record Day and “Wear It!”campaigns for the National Safe Boating Council.

Werth began national media outreach in February, targeting local media that reach active boaters. To date, the campaign has placed 455 articles and online media hits, reaching a potential audience of more than 106 million. Highlights include:

• AOL DailyFinance
• Forbes.com
• Sacramento Bee
• Atlanta Business Chronicle
• Dallas Business Journal
• Houston Chronicle
• CBS 11 (Dallas, TX)
• WTVF-TV CBS-5 (Nashville, TN)
• WBBH-TV NBC-2 (Fort Myers, FL)
• WFLX FOX-29 (West Palm Beach, FL)
• KFVE MyNetworkTV-5 (Honolulu, HI)

In three words, it’s about your Total Internet Presence, or TIP. This post kicks off a series on the seven elements of Total Internet Presence, a process we apply to make your digital brand more exciting, visible, transparent, accessible and competitive.

Today’s post is about the element of measurability — the yardstick for your online presence. There are some very sophisticated tools for measuring your “worth” on the Web, and most often we refer these as Web analytics.

What are Web analytics?

The Web Analytics Association defines Web analytics as “the objective tracking, collection, measurement, reporting and analysis of quantitative Internet data to optimize websites and web marketing initiatives.”

That sounds very academic, doesn’t it? Bottom line, Web analytics provide answers to a couple of fundamental questions:

• How did visitors find my website?
• What do visitors do once they reach my website?

Why measure?

There’s an old saying, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Taking that a bit further, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. Some specific benefits of using Web analytics are:

• Allowing you to determine if your investment in website visit drivers such as advertising, SEO and social media is paying off. For example, is the company Facebook page really driving visits to the website?
• Providing historical benchmarking. For example, are visits increasing or decreasing?

What to measure?

All of the data in the world are useless if you haven’t established some specific metrics (i.e., measurements of success). Do you know if you’re winning or losing?

Some of the most common website metrics – and the data used to determine if they’re being met – are:

Increase site traffic:

• Total visits
• Unique visitors

Improve site visibility:

• Traffic sources (i.e., search engines and other websites sending visitors to your site)
• Search engine rankings

Improve Site Engagement:

• Average visits per unique visitor
• Average page views per visit
• Site bounce rate
• Return visitors

Increase Conversions:

• White paper downloads
• Contact forms submitted

How do you measure up?

Drop me a note here if you want to look into assessing your company or organization’s measurability. We can discuss the analytics that will best meet your unique needs.

And Google TV will make it happen, according to The Official Google Blog:

“Google TV is a new experience for television that combines the TV that you already know with the freedom and power of the Internet. With Google Chrome built in, you can access all of your favorite websites and easily move between television and the web. This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. Your television is also no longer confined to showing just video. With the entire Internet in your living room, your TV becomes more than a TV — it can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more.”

You will no longer need to imagine a world where you turn on the TV and content is displayed based on your preferences. This is now a place where YouTube, network and cable TV converge, and your website can stream all of them with user-generated comments — in real time!

This announcement got me excited about the possibilities for advertising and content. No doubt that Google will incorporate AdWords, but this will bring interesting ways to distribute brand content. Integrating the Web browser into TV will further user control on how to find, interact with and share content.

As the Internet continues to open up traditionally closed media and channels become more integrated, marketers will need to enhance their strategic approach. Telling a brand’s story that engages an audience will continue to get more complex — because we are creating the medium and the message.

What about your marketing approach today? Is your brand positioned to embrace the convergence of a digital world? What possibilities do you see in the new TV?

What are the latest industry insights into search engine optimization (SEO) and social media optimization (SMO)? Should businesses emphasize SEO, SMO or both?

Werth’s Chief Interactive Officer Bryan Huber and Lightbulb Interactive partner Dave Culbertson dish on how to make the best strategic optimization, based upon your unique business needs. Online pub “E-Commerce Times” just posted an article featuring our own dynamic duo in all things digital — and it’s the top story on their site.

Click here to read more →

• Facebook now has more than 400 million profiles where people spend more than 500 billion minutes per month.
• Twitter reports 55 million tweets … per day.
• Among Americans, six in 10 find their news through both online and offline sources (Pew Research Center).
• Social media isn’t just for teenagers. More than half of visitors to social networking sites are from the 35-64 age group (Nielsen).

Social media success is an art and a science. While some guidelines and best practices exist, the rules are still being written. Werth’s tips will help you to get started without missing a beat.

Social Media Tips

Start Slow

1. Set up a Twitter or Facebook account for yourself as a “sandbox.” You will be more comfortable “playing” with social media for yourself before you start using them for your business. Start posting and commenting on others’ posts. Make sure to listen before you jump into the conversation.
2. Establish your personal business presence on LinkedIn if you do not already have one. This will help you to explore the more “serious” side of social media. Follow the LinkedIn guidelines for making your profile 100 percent complete. Join a few groups and listen in on the conversation. Consider commenting once you are comfortable with the group.
3. Explore the potential of StumbleUpon, Reddit and Digg to help you bookmark Web content of interest to you and your business. Once you begin recommending sources of information, you can begin to influence your potential audience. Getting comfortable with this type of sharing now will make it easier for you to leverage it down the road.

Get It Right

Once you get your feet wet in the social landscape, you can begin to take steps to establish your company’s presence.

1. Set up a page on Facebook for your business. Facebook makes it very easy for companies to use the page functionality to meet their unique needs. Follow the steps for building your page, and you’ll be surprised how quick it is. Every business should have a page – even if it uses no other social media options. Get started here.
2. Generate content that speaks to your customers. Coupons? Giveaways? Contests? Don’t ignore the potential of gimmicks to get customer attention and keep it. The more you share photos and videos, the more your audience will be attracted to your narrative content. Will you be all business, or will you have a sense of humor? Be sure to establish,reinforce and refine your voice.
3. Get blog-worthy. Smart businesses understand the benefits of blogging for their bottom line. Set up a blogging calendar for yourself, with topics and dates for publishing posts. Research keywords that will attract visitors to your blog and communicate your value proposition.
4. Conversation comes from shared content. Sharing content on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube is infectious. It breeds conversations, which bring about more sharing and commenting. Social networking involves publishing your own generated content as well as retweeting or sharing posts from others.
5. Investigate social media management tools like HootSuite, HubSpot and Tweetdeck. A single social media account for your company will take about 10 hours of your time per week. Once you are using multiple social media channels, for yourself individually and for your business, social media management dashboards will be your best friends. You can post simultaneously to multiple accounts, manage multiple users of your accounts and schedule posts in advance.
6. Know the rules of the social mediasphere. Learn and respect social media etiquette. If you post something, be prepared to have a conversation about it. Be online enough to have a presence – at least once a day. Once you are up and running, you should be posting several times per day on each channel.It’s important to be yourself. Never post or comment anonymously.
7. Be everywhere. Digital awareness means social networking and Web pages that are viewable on all common browsers. Also, at a minimum, plan for mobile views (via PDAs such as mobile phones, iPhones and Blackberries) of your Web page. This also means that your offline channels are still being leveraged, based upon how you can best reach your targets.
8. Appreciate that visibility means vulnerability. Social media can create crisis, and they also can solve it. Werth wants its clients to be aware of the possibilities and the pitfalls inherent in social media, to improve their overall communications. Avoid controversial conversations via social media and stay true to your brand to steer clear of crisis.

Need Help?

• Is your social media and overall digital approach making a real impact?
• Do you know how to promote your social presence and grow it?

We can help! Contact Chief Interactive Officer Bryan Huber at 614-224-8114 or bhuber@paulwerth.com.

Werth creative team with Silver Tellys. From left: Pete Potenzini, Ken Waldron and Lena Alidib

Like most people, we love being recognized for doing great work, mostly by our clients, but it’s also nice to win awards in our respective practice areas as well. We enter all sorts of award competitions – PRism, Silver Anvil, ADDYs, Stevies, American Marketing Association just to name a few – some national, some local.

Most recently, we captured 2010 Telly Awards for clients SafeAuto Insurance and the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, while our huber+co. interactive team won two 2010 Ohio Interactive Awards!

• SafeAuto took home two Silver and three Bronze Tellys for Werth’s Justin Case and Michael Redd advertising campaigns.

• The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption won a Silver Telly for Werth’s “Waiting for One Day” public service announcement.

The 31st annual Telly Awards received more than 13,000 entries from all 50 states and five continents. The awards honor the best local, regional and cable television commercials and programs, as well as the finest video and film productions and work created for the Web.

huber + co. team accepts Ohio Interactive Award. From left: Presenter Will Burris of 247 Interactive, Nathan Demick and Bryan Huber of huber + co., Host Johnny DiLoretto from WSYX ABC6

The huber+co. interactive team won 2010 Ohio Interactive Awards for work completed before the firm’s acquisition by Werth. Awards included:

• Best Social/Web Twitter campaign for the TweetMyTime race-marketing engine, which debuted at the Nationwide Better Health Columbus Marathon.

• Best Retail/Ecommerce/Online Marketplace for The Celebration Shoppe website.

The Ohio Interactive Awards were created to bring attention to the outstanding digital and interactive work being done in the state of Ohio. huber + co. interactive was a founding sponsor, and Paul Werth an event sponsor, for the inaugural awards. A panel of marketing industry leaders chose winners based on strategy, execution and results from dozens of entries from across the state.