Without creativity, it is not possible to reach an audience. The representation of your brand must be cohesive, aesthetically pleasing and explain what it is you’re trying to tell your audience.

Luckily for brands, there are a lot of ways to get creative with social media. Social media gives you a loud voice and an open creative channel to advertise your company, product or personal brand. There are countless numbers of ways to creatively design your brand across a number of platforms. Be sure to have some fun with design and find creative ways to represent yourself.

Below are some impressive examples of how companies or individuals are using strategic design within various social media platforms:

What are some other creative social media campaigns or profiles you have seen? How important is graphic design for your brand?

• @TweetPages – Custom Twitter Background Designs

Matt Clark representing the TweetPage brand and advertising their services directly on their Twitter background.

• @jakrose – Jason Keath, Founder of @SoFresh – Twitter Background

Jason used creative design to represent his personal brand, as well as creatively notify his followers of his personal website.

• Jessica Claire Photography - Custom-Designed Newsletter by @RibbonsofRed

Newsletters are an excellent source to reach out to your audience in a creative way. Photographer, Jessica Claire, has a unique and well-designed newsletter that fits with her brand.

• Pfizer – Custom-Designed SlideShare Channel

Pfizer utilizes the Pro SlideShare account to have the opportunity to add a custom background design to their channel.

• Campbell’s Soup “Just Scan and Snap” Stickybits Promotion – Custom Facebook Tab

Campbell’s Soup designed a custom Facebook tab that promotes the Stickybits promotion they are currently running on all barcodes of Campbell’s Soup cans in grocery stores. When you scan the barcodes with the Stickybits app, it brings you to the Facebook contest promotion: “Just Scan and Snap.”

The landscape of music has changed. The way we are introduced to music today is completely different than five years ago. More now then ever bands are coming up with innovative ways to introduce their music to fans. Bands have to fight Internet piracy with innovative marketing techniques to grab fans’ attention and encourage them to purchase their music.

The band The National, partnered with the New York Times’ website and Vevo to stream their new album “High Violet”. The result of the bands efforts help them to land the number three spot on the Billboard Top 200 chart after its debut week.

The band Arcade Fire has taken personal musical experience to the next level. Today the band unveiled their partnership with Google. The Chrome Experiment utilizes the newest HTML5 features and is the vision of writer/director Chris Milk. This custom music video experience specifically built for the Google Chrome browsers called “The Wilderness Downtown”, links the song “We Used to Wait” with a deeply personal view of the streets you grew up on. This experiment works by leveraging Google maps, HTML5, an integrated drawing tool and multiple browser windows that move around your screen as you watch your highly personalized music video. It is a bit hard to describe but the theme of childhood slipping away is very prevalent throughout the video as you see your street change, without ruining it.

The overall experience is incredible. It is not only innovative and creative but pushes the technology envelope. Social media allows bands to put their music in the hands of their fans and allow them to create a personalized connection.

This experiment pushes music promotion to new heights. This kind of interactive music experience has turned the traditional music video on its ear in a positive way. I do have to warn you, it is very processor-intense.

Kudos, Arcade Fire you have set the bar. I just hope other bands start to take note.

Learn more about the Chrome Experiments here.

What are your thoughts on Arcade Fire/Google experiment? What artists do you feel are innovative in social media?

Chris is the President/Co-Owner at Spikeball Inc. So what is Spikeball? It is a game that is kinda/sorta like volleyball, but then again not at all. I was introduced to the game a few summers ago and have been hooked ever since.

Spikeball is becoming more and more popular not only on the beaches of California but here in the Midwest, especially Milwaukee and Chicago. While it is mostly played on the beach, Spikeball is adaptable enough to be played on any surface.

Chris Ruder will be live on Comet Radio to discuss his role at Spikeball, their social media strategy, and some of the rules and regulations of the game. We will also be taking questions via Twitter. Please send your questions to @Cometbranding and we will ask Chris live during the show.

To listen to the show, PLEASE CLICK HERE.

The California shoe company, looking to attract the coveted younger demographic, threw caution to the wind when designing a strategy for their new Tubes running shoes.

Instead of taking a traditional launch strategy into the marketplace, K-Swiss decided to take a more aggressive and non-traditional approach to their social media strategy. One not filled with blog posts about the science of the shoes, training videos, or behind the scenes footage. Instead, they embraced the foul-mouthed, egotistical spirit of their pitchman “Kenny Powers” played by actor Danny McBride.

What I love about this campaign is that it is aggressive and brash. Their campaign is all straight forward, no fluff. K-Swiss did not try to change the character of their spokesman, instead they embraced his persona and played it through the campaign.

Led by their Funny Or Die video, which I will warn you it is NSFW (language) and might offend people. Not me, because I think it is funny as @#*!.

To date it has paid off. Their ads posted on YouTube have received more than 170,000 hits, and the link has even been tweeted by Kane West to his 608,822 followers.

Their Facebook “Workout Wingman” application has been so popular it has crashed. They even have an iPhone application Tube Snap, which allows you to take a unique, fisheye lens photo, adding another layer to the overall promotion.

K-Swiss has clearly set its sights, shaking their brand image of the middle-aged country club tennis guy and converting to a more youthful appeal. There are not many brands that would take the risk and play outside their comfort zone.

I applaud their efforts. K-Swiss, you’re f’en in.

What do you think of K-Swiss’ campaign? What would you do differently? What are some of your favorite brands in social media?

On Wednesday, August 11th at 11am Central, Comet Branding Radio will explore the revolutionary smartphone application Taxi Magic with our guest Sanders Partee. CLICK HERE TO LISTEN.

For many of us having cash is a rarity as we expect to do just about everything with the swipe of our credit card. Bring smartphone technology into the mix and we have a whole new world of electronic transactions.

Taxi Magic, RideCharge’s well-known smartphone app, enables users to book, track, charge and expense their taxi trip all from their smart phones. As my fellow smartphone junkies will tell you, we are always looking for new ways to get the most out of our pocketsize computers and Taxi Magic vastly improves the way we should think about riding in a cab.

Taxi Magic was featured in full-page Apple/AT&T iPhone ads in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and The New York Times. Taxi Magic has also been included again and again in best iPhone apps lists from Wired Magazine, CNET, SF Weekly and Business Insider.

Join us Wednesday, August 11 at 11am CST as we interview Sanders Partee on this week’s edition of Comet Radio to discuss his role in expanding the Taxi Magic network to include over 60 taxi fleet partners across major cities, and click-to-call directories covering 4,000 cities and towns in smaller markets. Send your questions to @cometbranding and we will ask Sanders live during the show.

We sure do have some fun.

Shoutworthy is very similar to LinkedIn’s recommendation platform, but it is less intimidating to write recommendations since it is only 140 characters. When creating your Shoutworthy account, you link it directly with your Facebook profile and when writing recommendations it posts directly on the person’s Facebook profile. You may also send a tweet directly to the person’s Twitter handle, with a direct link to the Shoutworthy recommendation page.

Some positives with Shoutworthy:

Short messages make it more likely you’ll receive numerous recommendations.

Those connections that are not active on LinkedIn now have access to an easy-to-use recommendation platform.

Short recommendations include the top keywords of what traits and talents people like most about you.

Although the short messages make it more likely you’ll get a recommendation yourself, it also opens up the possibility of some negative impacts:

The person will write a negative comment about you that can link directly to your Facebook or Twitter account. You can delete the Facebook post on your wall, but you’re unable to delete the person’s tweet.

You have no control over someone recommending you within Shoutworthy. If they are friends with you on Facebook, they are able to link a mention directly to your Facebook profile. So, 1) make sure you’re true friends with your connections on Facebook and 2) you better make sure your Facebook profile photo represents you well and doesn’t embarrass yourself, because it is going to be automatically included on Shoutworthy’s homepage. Once you login to Shoutworthy to update your account, you can change your profile picture HERE.

You can send recommendations to anyone present on Twitter. All you have to do is enter their Twitter handle within your recommendation/mention and it will link to their name. This could potentially cause for negative customer service reviews for brands. Unhappy customers are always looking for various websites to speak their mind. Will Shoutworthy be one of them?

Overall, I think Shoutworthy gives users a quick opportunity to give recognition where needed. What opportunities do you see with Shoutworthy? Do you think Shoutworthy will cause public, negative customer service reviews for companies?

Jason is the founder of the company behind RunKeeper, a mobile fitness platform for runners with over 2 million users. Their flagship iPhone app for GPS tracking was named TIME Magazine’s top iPhone apps of 2009. It is also the leading fitness app for the Android platform.

Jason has over ten years of experience in venture capitalist based companies. Now he has taken a stab at launching his own with RunKeeper.

Jason Jacobs will be live on Comet Radio to discuss his role in the world of fitness, technology, and RunKeeper. We will also be taking questions via Twitter. Please send your questions to @Cometbranding and we will ask Jason live during the show.

To listen to the show, PLEASE CLICK HERE.

Lately, I have been getting very frustrated and ready to delete all of my LinkedIn groups due to the majority of salesy discussion posts clogging my inbox. Even my alumni groups have fallen victim to these off-topic posts.

Being a past group moderator myself, I understand the struggle of not wanting to dissuade people from participating by shaking your finger at them like a disappointed parent while still being secretly pleased—at first—that people are posting anything at all.

I handled this struggle in the past by reaching out to the individual posting off-topic with a gentle reminder of the group’s purpose hoping they would get the hint. I’d also post a discussion reminding members of the posting guidelines.

Unfortunately, these tactics couldn’t dissuade people from posting irrelevant discussions causing me, like many of you, to leave these groups.

Just as I was ready to write a blog about the failings of LinkedIn groups, I got an email from LinkedIn, “New ways to help you moderate groups on LinkedIn: Fighting spam in your groups?”

Group moderators can now flag inappropriate postings? Awesome. Group members now able to flag something as inappropriate with a set number of flags automatically deleting the post? Even better! Thank you LinkedIn!

Let’s hope that group moderators and members utilize these tools and bring LinkedIn back to its rightful place in the world of social networking.

Now that I’m ready to join some new LinkedIn groups, I’d appreciate your recommendations. What groups have you found to be most valuable in the areas of PR/social media and professional development?