Twitter first began adding products to the Certified Products list this summer, and we explained the rationale behind the program:

This summer, the developer community has been consumed with the question of which apps using the Twitter API will keep the company’s approval and survive, and which will be shut down for conflicting with Twitter’s interests. Twitter first began to distinguish between apps with its August blog post, laying out its priorities in four quadrants and placing an emphasis on businesses over consumers and analytics over engagement.

The company has been steadily moving to monetize its product and become more brand-friendly this summer, so this support for business-oriented apps make sense.

The new products include companies that let brands manage their Twitter accounts (Shoutlet, Spredfast and Sprout Social), help marketers understand Twitter activity (Adobe Social), help brands create tweets that work with their audience (Percolate and Rallyverse), and help companies measure reactions and activity by users on Twitter (Sysomos, Simply Measured and Visible Technologies).

This summer, Twitter divvied up developers and their apps into four quadrants on a Twitter chart of approval, showing which ones Twitter likes and which ones it will discourage (aka the upper-right quadrant of doom). So the new additions are a good reminder — analytics and marketing apps built for businesses are in a good place.

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Tello started out by developing customer feedback apps for retail businesses, but with the emergence of iOS 6 it changed its focus to Apple’s new digital wallet. It has developed a platform called PassTools, which allows for the easy creation of passes, loyalty cards, tickets and coupons that slide digitally into the iPhone or iPad.

While American Airlines and Walgreens may have the resources to churn out digital boarding passes and loyalty cards, your typical gym or local pizza chain doesn’t, explained Joe Beninato, Tello’s co-founder and until recently its CEO. “We came to the realization that it was very difficult for people who weren’t engineers to build these passes,” Beninato said.

PassTools is capable of generating the tens of thousands of individual boarding passes a day required by an airline or a monthly coupon for a pizzeria, which is why Airship found the technology so appealing, said Urban Airship CMO Brent Hieggelke. Airship can sell passes to the current roster of big brands using its app-based push messaging services, and it can target smaller companies who otherwise have no presence in an app store or even on the mobile web. For a small local business, a loyalty card or coupon may be the only digital presence it needs, Hieggelke said.

The companies, which were brought together by their common investor True Ventures, wouldn’t reveal and financial details of the deal. Urban Airship will keep Tello’s staff of five full-time employees on board in Palo Alto (Airship is based in Portand, Ore.). Before the acquisition, Tello had raised $2.7 million in a Series A round led by Bullpen Capital and True.

Disclosure: Urban Airship and Tello are both backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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The holiday-themed boards will be located on a specific page, at holidays.pinterest.com, and there will be posts from the brands on each day. The company recently began courting businesses with its specific Pinterest for businesses pages, giving them the option of claiming a username and learning about the best ways to use the site to court potential customers.

By adding pins from media celebrities and companies like Starbucks or groups like the NBA, Pinterest is clearly paving the way for monetization opportunities on the site, and showing that Pinterest can be a mainstream platform for major names to promote their brands.

The company recently rolled out secret boards, allowing users to pin in private, and launched Android and iPad apps this past summer. The company is based in San Francisco and allows users to “pin” or mark images to personal boards, liking and comment on images posted by other accounts.

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In time for Halloween and the presidential election, the TechStars-backed startup, which enables companies to track and reward consumers for their engagement across social, mobile and online platforms, mined millions of social data points (primarily from Facebook) to look for connections between brands of chocolate and political parties.

They found that people who like non-premium chocolates, such as Hersheys, Reese’s and M&Ms are more likely to identify themselves as Democrats than those who prefer premium chocolates, such as Nestle, Dove, Ghirardelli and Lindt.

For example, consumers with an expressed preference for Lindt chocolate are 40 percent more likely to be a Republican and those who say they like Hersheys are 70 percent more likely to be a Democrat, CrowdTwist says.

Clearly, this isn’t the kind of data with election-changing implications and the connection between chocolate preferences and political affiliation likely just reflects differences in age. Younger people tend to skew Democrat and CrowdTwist’s data shows that younger consumers seem to prefer less premium (cheaper) brands while older consumers gravitate toward more expensive brands.

But it still provides an amusing reminder for brands that seemingly unrelated streams of social data can be combined to generate potentially helpful insights.

“[We] aggregate data from various disparate sources and give clients the ability to look at the correlations in data that they have not thought of in the past that they can use to not only find new audiences but understand audiences better,” said Adam Trisk, CrowdTwist’s head of marketing.

For example, he said, this sort of information could help brands determine where and when to buy media: Lindt may think about buying spots on Fox News while Hershey may seek ad buys during the  Democratic National Convention.

CrowdTwist, which raised $6 million in Series A funding last September, said it’s doubled its headcount to 25 since the end of 2011 and surpassed its 2011 revenue by August of this year.  Its clients range from television networks, such as Fox (for a campaign for the “X Factor” show), to sports franchises, like the Miami Dolphins and the NFL, to top brands in consumer packaged goods, like Pepsi, to VPG, a maker of wheelchair-accessible vehicles.

While brands have long valued loyalty, CrowdTwist really takes advantage of new platforms, such as social and mobile, to help brands comprehensively track engagement and reward consumers with real experiences and tangible items.

The startup not only gives data-hungry companies a broad picture of their consumers, it helps brands present themselves as a unified whole to consumers who interact with them in physical locations, online, on television and through other mediums.

“Companies think of their various channels in potentially more siloed, cordoned off verticals,” said co-founder and CEO Irving Fain. “But when a customer looks at that brand it’s all the “X Factor,” the Dolphins, etc. We provide the ability to unify customer interactions back to an individual, which brands can use to build better relationships and experiences with customers and fans – that’s what leads to loyalty.”

Image by Kesu via Shutterstock.

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This summer, the developer community has been consumed with the question of which apps using the Twitter API will keep the company’s approval and survive, and which will be shut down for conflicting with Twitter’s interests. Twitter first began to distinguish between apps with its August blog post, laying out its priorities in four quadrants and placing an emphasis on businesses over consumers and analytics over engagement.

“We aim to certify the products and services that make Twitter more valuable to businesses, encourage their use of Twitter, and bring Twitter to new users,” the company notes in its post on the requirements for certified products.

The company has been steadily moving to monetize its product and become more brand-friendly this summer, so this support for business-oriented apps make sense. In the blog post released Wednesday, Twitter explained that right now, certified products can come in one of three categories: engagement products, analytics products, and data reseller products. The company has released guidelines for becoming a certified product, and encourages brands who fit the requirements to apply.

A Twitter spokeswoman said the company believes that the certification will provide those brands with a greater platform for reaching new customers, and those customers a better method for picking the best third-party apps that meet their needs.

The company has launched with 12 partners, including companies Topsy and HootSuite, but said that number can grow as more brands apply and meet the requirements.

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But the company’s newest version, which it released to clients last week, goes beyond the curation of content from other sources to making it easier for brands to tap into their own reserves of digital content. In addition to indexing and tagging brands’ owned content, a few other updates include enhancing the algorithms that recommend the best content, providing extra monitoring and notifications around the performance of posts, and automatic optimizing for the different social platforms.

“The biggest challenge brands have is, ‘what should I be talking about now?,’” said Percolate co-founder James Gross. “It’s not audience acquisition – you can buy followers – and distribution is also taken care of [with Facebook’s reach generator, for example]… The challenge is what content do I create right now.”

To help a brand figure out the kinds of content that it should be sharing, Percolate maps the brand’s “interest graph” against more than six million sources and finds the references, which can include from 500 to 1,500 sources, that are unique to each brand. From there, Percolate’s algorithms consider a number of variables, including recency, popularity, authority and, most recently, keywords, to suggest the different content that a brand’s social editor should share everyday.

The company’s latest update, which more intelligently indexes a brand’s owned content and expands the function to YouTube, Vimeo and Instagram in addition to RSS, Twitter and Facebook, could help brands better adapt to Facebook’s new Timeline-centric pages, which demand more content, including historic content. It could also help brands really take advantage of their collections of videos, ads, images and more (which could go back decades, in the cases of companies like Apple, IBM and GE).

“[This is] a more sophisticated way to allow what people are talking about and the sources they’re talking about to map against content that a brand already owns,” he said.

Social media management platforms like Salesforce’s Buddy Media, Hearsay Social and Wildfire help brands manage their presence on different social media platforms, but Percolate’s big selling point is that it helps brands become better participants in social media by helping them figure out what to say.

In the past year, Percolate, which raised $1.5 million in seed funding, has attracted 25 top-tier clients, including American Express, Samsung and GE, who pay the company’s subscription fee.

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We admit; it's pretty cool.

Apple is almost the coolest brand in the world, according to the latest CoolBrands survey, but the top honor goes to fast cars. Aston Martin ranked as the coolest overall brand, as judged by the U.K.’s marketing and business community, as well as the general public. Apple is number two, and the highest ranking tech company on the list.

Apple beat out rivals BlackBerry (6) and Google (7), as well as Sony’s PlayStation (13) and Nintendo (16). It also beat plenty of other automotive brands with plenty of cultural cache, including Harley-Davidson (3), Ferrari (8) and Maserati (20). Last year, Apple’s sub-brands were broken out and the iPhone came in second, again to Aston Martin.

The high ranking for BlackBerry kind of makes me suspicious of the whole thing, but I suppose outside the bubble of the tech community, RIM’s devices still carry a fair amount of cultural weight. The BlackBerry is still apparently theone smartphone among teens in the U.K., after all.

While coolness is far from a hard-and-fast metric, it must certainly factor into buying decisions. I’ve also speculated that it could be one of the primary factors driving Apple’s enterprise growth in recent years, so to receive this honor based on survey data from the business community and the general public is no small achievement for the Mac maker. I wonder if the soon-to-be-revealed iPhone 5 can help finally vault Apple past Aston Martin in next year’s rankings. Still, hard to beat what was once Bond’s car, no matter how thin or advanced your smartphone.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

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One company that’s a perfect example of how to do Apple-based brand extension right is Wacom. The iPad, arguably, represents a considerable threat to their consumer drawing tablet business. The iPad can’t replicate the pressure sensitivity of Wacom pen tablets, of course, but for users that may otherwise have opted for Wacom’s entry-level Bamboo product, that may not be that much of an issue.

Rather than try to fight encroachment by Apple’s tablet, Wacom has embraced the device, releasing a Wacom-branded Bamboo Stylus for use with the iPad’s capacitive touchscreen. There’s also now a complementary app called Bamboo Paper that furthers the brand and acts as a marketing tool for the Bamboo Stylus.

A similar app called Moleskine is an example of how brands need to be really careful about how they represent themselves in the App Store. Moleskine is the maker of pocket paper notebooks and sketchbooks that take their design from the kind of notebooks used by people like Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway. The app is a digital notebook, but it dilutes the brand rather than serving it by not living up to the quality expectations customer associate with Moleskine.

The lesson is that if you aren’t willing to put any real time or effort into your brand extension, you’re better off not trying it at all. Unless, that is, you opt for something small, pretty and clever instead of something ambitious and useful. For brands that don’t need to worry about whether or not they need to rethink their business model down the road (as Wacom and Moleskine may have to do if consumer tablets catch on and continue adding features), a little goes a long way.

Such is the case for Vipp, whose iconic metal waste bin is a design classic. Vipp wisely recognized that the interests of Mac buyers are closely in line with their target customer base, and so released a tiny app that does just one thing: replaces the OS X trash can in the Dock with a Vipp pedal waste bin. It’s animated, installs and uninstalls with just a single click, and it looks great.

An Apple tie-in is a good way to build a brand, but putting an ugly product or one that doesn’t work well on hardware that excels in both categories will only hurt, not help. Instead, brands that take the time to come up with something clever or useful will be the ones that successfully reach out to the lucrative market segment made up of Apple customers.

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There’s been a lot of talk about “branding” and new media lately, sparked in part by Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten’s recent anti-branding rant, in which the veteran journalist said that branding is “ruining journalism.” But as a number of people have pointed out in response to the WaPo columnist — and as Forbes editor Lewis DVorkin notes in a post today about what he wants his writers to do at the online magazine — branding is now an inescapable part of new media. If journalists are using social media to any extent (which they should be), then they are in the process of becoming a brand whether they like it or not.

Weingarten is the Washington Post’s humor columnist, but his post on branding seemed quite serious, and was based on a letter from a young journalism student who asked him how he had built his “personal brand.” Weingarten responded that the best way to build a brand is to “take a three-foot length of malleable iron and get one end red-hot [and] then apply it vigorously to the buttocks of the instructor who gave you this question” (Steve Buttry of the Journal-Register Co. later found the student in question and posted the research paper she was working on on his blog).

The columnist’s antipathy towards journalists becoming brands — which he said involved writers trying to “market themselves like Cheez Doodles” — appears to stem from the idea that any kind of personal promotion is undignified, and that journalists should instead be spending their time rooting out corruption and so forth. Weingarten said it was a result of the fact that “the media is in a frantic, undignified campaign to economize while at the same time attracting more eyeballs,” and that branding was designed to cater to an age in which “the attribute that is most rewarded is screeching ubiquity, not talent.”

We are slowly redefining our craft so it is no longer a calling but a commodity. From this execrable marketing trend arises the term you ask me about: “branding.”

I hate to be the one to break it to Weingarten, but the journalism business as a whole is becoming a commodity in many ways. But it’s not journalists and media organizations that are redefining it as such, it is the market itself — and the fact that media is becoming something that anyone can do. The tools for publishing and becoming a “media brand” are available to anyone now thanks to blogs and Twitter and Facebook, and that has made the world of media and journalism a lot flatter, as NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd noted in a recent interview with the Poynter Institute.

Is that ultimately a good thing? I think it is, but in any case it is happening whether Gene Weingarten likes it or not. And we have already seen the rise of some incredibly powerful new media brands — including Perez Hilton, who built his own brand into a massive media entity, and others such as Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo and Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos. More recently, we’ve seen Andy Carvin of NPR become a brand by reporting on Twitter about the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East, and New York Times reporter Brian Stelter has also become a brand thanks to his use of Twitter and Tumblr.

In his blog post at Forbes, editor Lewis DVorkin talks about how he is trying to equip writers with a variety of statistical and analytical tools such as Chartbeat that they can use to see what kind of response their writing is getting, because he wants them to build their personal brands. As he puts it, “Pandering for traffic is not brand building. Winning the respect of your audience is.” The reality that DVorkin is acknowledging — and trying to take advantage of — is that as the news becomes more social, and social signals have more of an effect on things like search traffic, a writer’s personal brand is a crucial part of their work.

Weingarten seems to want to make this kind of branding out to be something shameful, but Andy Carvin didn’t become a brand because he tried to pimp his content — he became one because he developed a reputation for high-quality work in reporting and verifying facts about events in the Middle East. A recent research report from IBM concluded that “social network interactions in Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter implicitly define a personal brand.” (PDF link) In other words, what you say and how you behave in these networks determines what your personal brand is. As marketing types like to say, your brand isn’t what you think it is, it’s what others say about you.

The ironic thing about Weingarten’s rant, as Steve Buttry and others have noted, is that the Washington Post columnist himself is a great example of a powerful media brand. He may not want to admit it, and he may not even know how it happened, or have done it deliberately, but he is one nevertheless. Perhaps what he is saying is that he prefers the days when only a small group of columnists and reporters for mainstream media outlets could become brands — but those days are gone, and the sooner we get used to it the better.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Rupert Ganzer and Yan Arief Purwanto

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How the world has changed. When my father was my age, there was nothing more cool or impressive than driving an Aston Martin, toting a Walther PPK and ordering your dry martinis shaken, not stirred. That’s what James Bond did. And Bond was seriously cool.

Bond was the debonair British secret agent who was usually pimped out with all manner of extraordinary (often miniaturized) gadgets. Remember that wristwatch with a tiny, built-in camera? In the ’60s, that sort of gadgetry was wishful thinking — very cool, though.

So it’s kinda poetic, really, that the iPhone — arguably the ultimate multi-purpose high-tech gadget — has secured first place in the annual British CoolBrands Survey, knocking quintessentially cool Aston Martin, Bond’s favored tricked-out car of choice, off the top spot.

The CoolBrands Survey is managed by the Centre for Brand Analysis. Here’s how the CBA describes the survey:

A comprehensive database of the UK’s coolest brands is compiled using a wide range of sources, from sector reports to blogs. From the thousands of brands initially identified, approximately 1,100 brands are short-listed. An independent and voluntary Expert Council scores this list, with members individually awarding each brand a rating from 1-10. Council members are not allowed to score brands with which they have a direct association or are in direct competition to.

So how do you determine the “cool”-ness of a brand? Fear not, the CBA has a set of guidelines to help;

Cool is subjective and personal. Accordingly, voters are not given a definition but are asked to bear in mind the following factors, which research has shown are inherent in a CoolBrand: 1. style 2. innovation 3. originality 4. authenticity 5. desirability 6. uniqueness.

It’s all supremely silly, and I’m skeptical about the “research” they mention so breezily, but still, it’s nice to see the iPhone win. Also in the top 10 are “Apple” and “iPod,” further cementing Apple’s “coolness” — for 2009, at least. It’s interesting to note that, of the top 10 coolest brands, a solid eight of them are rooted firmly in consumer electronics, or the Internet. The remaining two (Bang & Olufsen and PlayStation) are still firmly rooted in the Land of Tech.

Here are the top 10 in full:

1. iPhone
2. Aston Martin
3. Apple
4. iPod
5. Nintendo
6. YouTube
7. BlackBerry
8. Google
9. Bang & Olufsen
10. PlayStation

How would Q have put it?

“Now pay attention, Bond. This is your iPhone. Thirty-two gigabytes maximum storage, capacitive touchscreen interface, full virtual keyboard and 64,000 apps in the online App Store. Of course, it also includes the usual rocket launcher with heat-seeking missiles, and underwater breathing apparatus good for two hours. Try not to break it.”

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