REPLAYS: Building and Growing a Brand (Online Workshop)
Saturday, March 2nd
Alexis Ohanian, Founder, Reddit
Laurie Marshall, Founder & Attorney, TradeMarks The Spot
Nina Beckhardt, Founder, The Naming Group

*This is a recorded replay of a previously held live, online workshop.

Your brand is a big part of your business. Learn how you can utilize social media, the perfect name, and growth strategies to build a successful brand and create a community in this workshop.  

Part I: Cultivating an Online Community for your Brand
Social media has been able to break down communication walls and give everyone a digital voice, but what really drives an online community? This session will take you through the planning and strategy process needed to shape and grow your own online community. You’ll walk away with an understanding of how to define an authentic brand voice and image within a community and how to carry out content planning, selection, segmentation, and distribution.

Part 2: Naming and Trademarking: Creating Your Brand’s First Impression
Naming is widely thought to be a purely creative process where people gather at a large table and brainstorm, but anyone who has tried this methodology to develop a brand name has probably found it to be rather ineffective.  During this class, you’ll learn how to name your product or company the right way (hint: it doesn’t start with naming). Equally as important as establishing a name is protecting the trademark. Many small businesses overlook these important steps in creating and securing their brand. This session is intended to demystify the name development and trademark process for small businesses and entrepreneurs.

Part 3: Making Something that People Love
You’ve made something people want, now how to you graduate to creating something people love? This class will provide guidelines for creating an enthusiastic following, examining the cult-like obsession with brands like Apple, as well as the instructor’s own success growing Reddit into the largest yet tightest community online, with 28 million unique visitors a month.  

Student Takeaways:

• Find the best ways to grow your brand.
• Learn how you can create a great name for your company and then trademark that name.
• Effectively market your company on a small budget.

Prerequisites:
None.

Preparation:
None.

Instructor Bio:
Alexis Ohanian is the co-founder of Reddit (now on the Board of Directors) and presently founder of Breadpig. A year after helping launch hipmunk.com (doing all those things to make people love it) in 2010, he's now an advisor. Today he's an active startup advisor and investor (Das Kapital Capital), writing a book, and playing with his cat.

Laurie Marshall is the founder and attorney of TradeMarks The Spot.  She has been a trademark attorney for over 16 years, during which time she worked for several well-known intellectual property firms in NYC.  She also spent ten years as Major League Baseball’s in-house counsel, and is on the advisory board of Big Apple Entrepreneurs.  Laurie speaks regularly about trademarks to entrepreneurs and small business owners at venues such as General Assembly, In Good Company, The Grind, and Green Spaces.  This fall, she will be a venture in residence at the New York Institute of Technology Entrepreneur Center.

Nina Beckhardt founded The Naming Group upon the belief that naming is an all too often neglected opportunity to advance a brand’s vision.  She is obsessed with three things: words, brands, and people.  A self-described creative solutionist, Nina infuses every strategic relationship with her passion for creative branding and helping corporations make smarter choices.  She has led naming projects for Proctor & Gamble, GM, Target, Puma, Capital One, EPSON, Dow Jones, and ConAgra.  Nina has been published nationally, appeared on the Emmy Award-winning TV show “Autoline Detroit”, and has presented on naming innovation at the FutureTrends conference.

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