Creating and maintaining a strong brand is critical for successful companies. But the degree to which your company - your entire company - evangelizes and embodies that brand is also critical.

Think about your own company, your mission, and your brand promise. Is your brand promise consistent across all of your marketing communications? Good start. Is it embodied in your products? Better.

Do your employees live it? Every day? In everything they do? Is your brand embedded in your company's DNA?

No brand manager can do that work at his or her desk. Your brand has to be something the entire company lives and dies by.

We've all been in interviews that we know immediately are going to be a waste of our time. Promising candidate on paper, but in a phone screen or in-person meeting, it just doesn't pan out. How do you still make your time as productive as possible?

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has a pretty good idea, detailed here. In a nutshell:

Ask the interview candidate to tell you something you didn't already know. You can qualify the topic, or leave it open.

On many levels, this is a great question. Give it a shot sometime.

You read a lot, and you come across quite a few things you think are worth sharing with colleagues. Marketing ideas, interesting case studies, etc.

You may, in the past, be used to sending those ideas and articles around as "FYI" emails with links directly to the article and/or text from the article itself.

Moving forward, put a link to the article - with a brief summary and analysis - on your blog, and send the blog link to your colleagues.

They'll get access to the same information, and you'll build awareness about your blog at the same time. If your colleagues find what you wrote interesting, or find the primary article you wrote about interesting, they may send it to their own circle of friends and/or colleagues, and all of a sudden far more people are also reading your blog.

Free and effective...

Got a box in the mail last week from Expedia. Inside was a thank you letter for giving them my business, as well as a SearchAlert TSA-approved travel lock.

I'm not used to getting packages from most Internet companies, unless I've specifically ordered something to be delivered. Most Web-based services companies communicate explicitly via email and their Web sites, so it's rare when you get something in the mail - especially a box and gift. I'm not the most frequent Expedia shopper in the world, but the fact that they sent something like this stood out.

Knowing that Expedia measures everything to a T, I'm sure this mailing has already been calculated a success based on the expected increased site usage and loyalty it will generate. Impressive.

When Coca Cola decided to create a unique bottle in 1915, it's charter was to create something that consumers would recognize in the dark. If smashed into pieces, said the now-famous creative brief, each piece of the bottle should still be recognized as Coca Cola. That was a tall order, but 90 years later that bottle is an American icon.

In a piece written more than four years ago but still relevant today, Martin Lindstrom talks about what it means to "Smash Your Web site", to ensure that a consistent brand experience is created throughout. Today, Martin wrote about smashing your vision statement, to make sure it too is relevant.

Think about your entire brand for a moment. Is it smashable? Could you separate the parts of your brand controlled by marketing from that which might be controlled or operated elsewhere in the company, and still recognize your brand?

This all comes back to the urgent need for brand consistency across any organization. Every channel, every touchpoint, every element of your business needs to reflect your brand and your values.

The Harvard Business School Working Knowledge newsletter points out that it's not enough just to speak to your customers - you have to know when to speak to them, with the right message, to increase your ability to get what you want. This is both an opportunity and a threat, depending on the customer context.

Let's say you're able to identify the activity or set of activities that make a customer likely to be interested in joining a loyalty program. There's a specific message you'd send them at that time. Conversely, if a set of activities dictate that a customer may be considering defecting, a different message is in order.

This level of messaging sophistication isn't always easy - and requires a database marketing infrastructure that most companies don't currently have or utilize. But companies such as Harrah's Casino and Expedia know first-hand that the investment pays for itself many times over in increased customer loyalty and lifetime revenue.

How do you make employee training fun? If you're Starbuck's, you make it a game.

Any business with regular touchpoints with customers on the front lines should take a hard look at this and think about how something similar could be incorporated into your own training program. Even companies with call centers (who interact with customers many times daily vs. in the flesh) could benefit from listening to how customers talk, hearing what they're doing, and reacting in a considerate and thoughtful way.

Customers expect you to deliver what they're purchased. When you add a well-placed, contextual comment that shows you really care about the customer, even if it's not at all related to your business relationship, that can go a long way.

A recent article in Direct Magazine questions the professionalism of most blogs. It's premise is that most blogs are poorly-written and self-serving. Bob Bly comments in his own blog on the same article, and tends to agree.

I have great respect for Mr. Bly as a marketer and one of the best direct copywriters in the country, but I think he's wrong here. The whole purpose of the blogosphere is for the average everyman to have an outlet for his or her ideas, feelings, musings or commentary. I believe strongly that there are far more people out there with original ideas worth hearing, than there are good writers. Should some bloggers re-read their work, and perhaps make more liberal use of the spell-check? Yes. Would most bloggers be able to make a living as professional writers or journalists? Probably not. But that's not what this medium is all about.

For every mundane blog about someone's pet ferret, there a seldom-read blog out there with breakthrough ideas, waiting to be heard. Five years ago those ideas might have gone unnoticed, or worse - unspoken. Now they're out there.

This Thanksgiving greeting has to be seen to be believed...

Has Procter & Gamble found the promised land of public relations ROI measurement?

Although interesting to hear, what they haven't yet published is exactly how they calculate the return from PR. I don't expect them to anytime soon - P&G is typically tight-lipped about how they run their business, and anything remotely proprietary. But it definitely has me curious.

Depending on the environment, I've seen PR measured based on pure media impressions, and PR measured based on very direct marketing-oriented response metrics. I feel PR should always be measured somewhere in between. A well-planned, well-executed PR strategy should have plenty of very measurable objectives that directly fuel a company's bottom line. But PR has lasting impact on a marketplace that can and should also be measured - and valued by companies investing in public relations activities.

ROI measurement for PR will continue to be a hot topic. See how others have tackled the issue here, here and here.