Your Brand, it's not what you make it anymore...

Now don’t get me wrong, brand development is still very important, but there are changes in the marketing world that have decreased a company’s ability to impose their brand on consumers.

In any good brand development process, you should identify your distinctions, positioning, tagline, and visual standards. And if done right, you should work with key stakeholders in your company to launch the new brand internally before going public. Today, this is just the beginning. The most important part of managing your brand is engaging customers and creating loyalty, not pushing your message out and hoping your target audience will act.

As Tony Hsieh (@zappos) , CEO of Zappos, describes, “Branding gets built up by interacting everyday with everyday people.” And he does a great job of it using tools like Twitter, having excellent customer service, and much more. Whether it’s an ad, a customer service call, the firing or hiring of an employee, an article in a trade publication, or something else, every experience with your brand has potential influence over a large audience.

Why? Social media gives a voice to the people who interact with your brand. Although this may be intimidating, it also provides a great opportunity to engage customers, increase loyalty and develop a community of brand evangelists.

When you start managing your brand with social media, make sure you follow these simple rules:

• Listen

This is the most important step. How can you act or be involved in conversation if you don’t know what is being said? There are tools that make this part easy – use them.

• Engage

When appropriate, join in the conversation. This is an opportunity for you to answer questions, thank customers, uncover any issues, and deal with unsatisfied customers.

• Be Human

Customers are tired of dealing with brands. They want to know who they are talking to and form a connection. Social media gives every brand that opportunity.

• Connect

Develop a place for loyal customers to connect with other loyal customers and interact with your brand. A community of supporters allows you to test new ideas, get feedback and up sell/cross sell to a captive community.

As always, don’t jump in blind. Although you lose a lot of control in this medium, you should still have a strategy. If you don’t have a focus or goal for your efforts, your audience will be turned off and tune out.

It’s a lot of things…free is not one of them

Looking through my email today, I was sent an invitation to a webinar on how to reach your customers, engage them and build brand loyalty through social media. That sounded like an interesting topic. Then I read on and something caught my eye. The presenter went on to say the best part about using social media is that it is free. Free?

Working with clients every day, that is a statement I hear from time to time, and it is a big misconception. Social media is lots of things, but free is not one of them. Yes it is true that most social media platforms are free to use, but that is one small part of social media marketing.

Social media is about transparency and engagement. That can’t happen if someone is not actively participating. Unless you are lucky enough to find someone to do it for free (which I doubt), you have costs for your social media efforts.

You need to determine what goals you are trying to achieve with your SM efforts. You need to have a clearly defined strategy for your SM efforts. You need to regularly engage your audience. You need to actively monitor what is being said. You need to review, refine and rework your engagement strategies. All of these things have costs. They may be internal, they may be external, but they are costs.

I’m not saying social media is expensive, it is a very engaging and efficient way to talk with your consumers. What I am saying is that social media is not free, and don’t let anyone tell you differently.

Free at last... to blog anyway

I was watching a webinar earlier this week given by @chrisbaggott. He talked about lots of great industry stuff, but one thing he said really got me thinking. He said “you don’t appoint employees as bloggers, you free employees to blog.”

For some reason, after hearing that quote, I thought back to my childhood. I remember my dad telling me to pick up all the sticks in the yard that had fallen off the trees after a storm. I hated doing that, mostly because I had important playing to do. I also remember being out in the same yard, after a similar storm, but this time my dad started a fire in the fire pit. He didn’t tell me to pick up sticks, but being a kid who loved a campfire, I picked up every possible stick in the yard to throw on the fire. In the end, both memories had the same result, a clean yard, but with very different attitudes toward the time spent picking up.

The same can be said about blogging. Why would you assign a blog to someone that doesn’t want to blog? Their heart won’t be in it, and it will be obvious. On the other hand, if you free your employees to blog, you will be surprised how many great content contributors you will get, and even more surprised at how great the content is when they put their passions into the writing.