Before the shipwreck of Costa Concordia, Carnival Corp was seeing huge strides in overall sales and Wall Street numbers. Everything was looking up. Today, shares of Carnival have dropped significantly, according to Forbes.com. PRWeek estimates that Carnival will lose more than $90 million in earnings in 2012 due to this event. Here’s what we would have done:

 
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A huge part of public relations and brand marketing is reputation management. IN small terms, that means monitoring social networks, news feeds and blogs for any possible disgruntled consumer or unhappy fan. In big money terms, this means taking a disaster that is truly unimaginable, such as the Costa Concordia shipwreck, from becoming a brand destroying, company crushing event…no small feat.

Brand Risk Taking

Every brand takes risks, but hopefully these risks are calculated and are strategically taken in order to increase brand equity. The Costa Concordia, owned by Carnival Corp, took one huge risk in the name of increasing brand awareness that ultimately has tarnished the brand forever.

 
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Let’s talk brands, as we always do. On Monday, Bloomberg released their 2011 greatest brand rankings, something that we at Quaintise are very keenly watching. As part of Interbrand’s Best Global Brands of 2011, the list includes the most influential, highest value brands in the world. What did they come up with? Take a look.

 
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Yesterday we talked about Facebook’s Edgerank and what it all means. In social media marketing and brand marketing, understanding how to reach your target audience is paramount, so understanding Facebook’s Edgerank should really be second to none. There are hundreds of marketing strategies to remember when marketing to that specific Facebook audience, but above all is taking advantage of Edgerank. So, now that you understand how it works, let’s take a look at how you can use it to your advantage.

Step One – Create an Accessible Facebook Page

Be inviting in everything that you do no Facebook. Remain positive at all times, and encourage interaction both between the brand and the audience, and between the audience themselves. Build your page with less professionalism and more fun…this is Facebook after all. Remember who you are targeting, who your audience is, what gender and how old they are, and build out some tabs just for them.

 
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Facebook’s EdgeRank; it’s either silently killing your social media marketing efforts or making your life very easy. Much like Google, Yahoo and Bing rate websites and rank them based on their overall score (Google uses PageRank), so too does Facebook, ranking all of your Friends and Businesses based on a variety of aspects that contribute to the EdgeRank. In online brand marketing, understanding how EdgeRank works and how to beat it is crucial to getting your brand message seen and heard on the most influential social media outlet in existence.

What is EdgeRank?

EdgeRank is the probability that your status update, post, photo, link or video will show up in a Fan’s ‘News Feed.’ A few months back, Facebook renovated its entire platform, literally taking EdgeRank to the next level.

 
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As we work out way well into 2012, it’s always fun to look back at what others have done in 2011 and base our future marketing plans avoiding every mistake that the others have made. Last week we talked about setting yourself up for marketing success in 2012 with the right outlook, plans and strategy. It’s also useful to look back at what marketing strategies others used in 2011 and how miserably they failed.

Inc.com’s Top 10 Brand Disasters of 2011

At the end of 2011, last week, Inc.com released its top 10 failed marketing disasters of 2011, and we couldn’t agree more. Here are our top 5 brand blunders of 2011 from the Inc.com list:

 
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