Roger’s presentation is entitled “Brand Control to Major Tom: Increasing your brand’s gravitational pull”:

While the new age of extreme participation and interaction means you no longer have the control you once had of all your brand and communication levers, there is great potential for more engaged prospects, donors, and advocates––and for more learning to advance your development efforts and enterprise. This session will help you to think of your brand as a system; help you to get the most from each component of the system; and provide frameworks and tools to help you to get more out of the communications you can control––and provide the context to influence the ones you can’t.

Eric will be joining forces with longtime Sametz collaborator, Terri Rutter of Harvard Medical School, to present “Donor 3.0. Engaging prospects today and tomorrow”:

New expectations are emerging from disruptions in our economy, changes in our lifestyles, and the new ways we communicate with one another. Understanding how today’s donors are different from those of yesterday—how they live, how they communicate, and what they expect from their actions—will help organizations optimize their efforts to engage and attract these donors and build mutually rewarding relationships with them. In this session, we’ll review initiatives by the Harvard Medical School Office of Resource Development for introducing new models, methods, and tools that organizations must master to connect with prospects and remain good stewards of their donors.

If you’re planning to attend the conference, please come up and say hello — and we’d love to see you at Roger and Eric and Terri’s sessions. For more information on AFPMA 10, including details on registration, location and more, head to their website here.

“Brand Control to Major Tom: The New Rules of Brand Management” explores the challenges that brand managers face in this ‘new age of extreme participation’:

“No, you haven’t lost control. The notion that you can manage your brand by making and distributing messages and materials that you want “out there” is becoming quaint.

Rather, now, monologues need to be replaced by dialogues; formal market research needs to be paired with attentive listening; “advice” is offered round the clock; participation in social media is now table stakes; and customers and prospects who have always trusted friends to help them make decisions often have a huge network they can carry around with them to consult.”

You can find the full text of the article here.

We welcome your comments on the article in the comments below — let us know what you think!

And special thanks to the National Arts Marketing Project for connecting us with your passionate group of constituents!

The “Today’s Tip” column is aimed at helping entrepreneurs and business owners improve the way they run their organizations. Entrepreneurs, academics, and consultants from a diverse range of industries offer practical advice on a variety of topics each business day.

In “Brand Management in the Age of Social Media”, Roger shared a series of steps to help business owners create a successful mosaic brand, even in this era of multilayered, multifaceted communications:

“The notion that you can manage your brand by simply crafting messages onto print and digital materials and then handing them down from headquarters is becoming more outdated every day. Today, monologues need to be replaced by dialogues; formal market research needs to be paired with attentive listening; participation in social media is now both de rigueur and high-stakes; and constituents who before trusted only close friends to help them make decisions now have a huge, portable social network they can call on for round-the-clock consultation.

What you plan and execute from your conference room can be either reinforced or undermined by what you don’t plan and execute. And anyone can create a brouhaha.

How to cope? More important: How to succeed?

Start by thinking of your brand as a mosaic. You place some of the tiles, then the rest are placed by others. Your job is to place enough tiles to control the context of your mosaic so that the brand picture you’ve outlined (and partially filled in) will influence how those extra, external tiles are seen and understood.”

You can read the full article here.

Thanks to Businessweek for the opportunity to connect with your readers—and we look forward to offering them more strategic advice to help them achieve their key business goals in future.