I am sick and tired of marketing geeks touting the beauty of branding, brand building and just spouting branding in any context, especially when the term is used with "internet" or "web" or "digital!" You can't have a conversation today for more than five minutes without some marketing type throwing in a line about brand building!

Branding doesn't work with the net's warp speed - look at some of the leading online brand builders, including a certain big three TV network here in the states and a book seller in Seattle trying to do classic brand extension, from books to barbecues.

We tell our B2B clients to build a revenue-producing online brand by developing a campaign that sells the value of their goods or services! Forget the esoteric, very expensive brand building campaigns that have no measurable impact! Here are my ten "cliff notes" to building an effective B2B Brand Online, B2C coming next article.

1. Do a careful Competitive Web Analysis of your competitors - you can't build a unique brand without knowing the lay of the digital and real-world land! The beauty of the web is that it is a 247/365 resource for analysis and you can find out quite a lot from your competitor's web sites. We've created a comprehensive matrix of 75-200 items to assess when preparing a competitive analysis report for a client.

2. Identify your target audience early on as everything flows from this. You can't conceptualize your creative, graphical imagery, content or what type of online media you want to deploy until you know the size and characteristics of your target audience.

3. Think revenue producing branding - this translates to marketing campaigns that deliver sales (the goal of all good marketing campaigns) by customer acquisition. Meaning, develop messages that speak to your audience. B2B customers typically want referenceable data that addresses their needs. "Our xyz services help you leverage your IT resources by