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Companies and their brands need to reach out and speak directly to consumers, to honor their values, and to form meaningful relationships with them. They must become architects of community, consistently demonstrating the values that their customer community expects in exchange for their loyalty and purchases.

In the social business marketplace, brands that hope to build loyal and growing communities do so most effectively when they demonstrate their core values and allow a community to build and engage around it.

Brands must empower their community to be change agents in their own right. To that end, they need to take on a mentoring role. This means the brand provides the tools, techniques and strategies for their customers to become more effective marketers in achieving their own goals.

We have built brands that resonate deeply with our customers. Our strategy to grow these brands is clear, and we have strong teams in place to execute this strategy. That is our formula for success.

Perhaps the most effective way to describe the approach a brand must take is to think of themselves as social cartographers. By that I mean that brands must simultaneously inspire, engage and maintain a series of conversations taking place within certain cultural landscape specific to their business goal.

We now see numerous examples of brands working together to address issues such as environmental degradations, climate control, pollution, poverty and disease.

Just build your brand from day one, man. Your brand is your name, basically. A lot of people don't know that they need to build their brand, your brand is what keeps you moving.

You can totally work with brands. People love seeing that, but you have to build stories. You have to build credibility, and those brands have to really be the perfect fit for yourself.

My husband is in branding. He brands places - cities, institutions.

There's definitely an obstacle in developing a brand for yourself that people can rely on when you're so eclectic.