branding

Free Your Brand

My favourite quote of the day:

“…Old Spice parent company Proctor & Gamble exhibited incredible bravery in allowing his team to write marketing content in real time, with little to no supervision.”

I love this quote because I think that is the future. Companies must start easing up on the tight controls they’ve historically had over their brand. If you need to control every word that is spoken and written about your brand – forcing writers to submit every word they write for scrutiny, you’re doomed. Not to say you should let writers run wild with your brand, but creativity is so quickly quashed when the pen can only write one of 12 “approved” words to describe a product.

Honest exchange, meaningful engagement and worthy interaction in social media comes when speed (aka: real time) is a part of the equation.

Picture this: someone poses a tough question on Twitter to a company (well, hopefully a *person* with a name and a head shot, representing that company). Two days pass and no one has responded. It’s not because the tweet wasn’t noticed. It’s because the person managing Twitter for that company needs to get approval on the response before they can post it. In the meantime, the person who posted the question has grown increasingly frustrated and is now bad-mouthing the company due to the lack of timely response. It even starts to appear that the company is trying to ignore or dodge the tough question.

It may be the most counter-intuitive to let up on brand control.. but the wild success of the Old Spice online campaign proves that if you’re brave enough, and trust enough, it can pay off in ways you never imagined.

If you disagree – let me hear it.

FYI: the quote came from here.

Erin.

Tags: brand management, branding, engagement, interaction, Social Media

Monitoring your brand on Twitter

A few years ago, consumers started looking at online reviews before buying a product or service. Today, who would buy a TV without first looking at different reviews and then finding the best price in a store nearby?

With the ever increasing presence of social media in our daily life, ordinary people have started to document their shopping experience. For example, if there is a line up in front of a restaurant, someone may write on Twitter: “stuck in front of XXX, my fav restaurant” with his cellphone. It doesn’t have a widespread impact because, unlike reviews, the number of people reading this messages will be limited. However, people that are reading this message will trust the sender and that innocuous cellphone message could have a deeper impact than a typical restaurant review.

Here are a few tricks to search for types of messages similar the cellphone example above. All the examples below are given with a fake brand named MegaBook.

1.    Look for your brand and add “:(” ex: MegaBook :(

2.    Use the “from:Twitterer” with someone famous. For example, if you’re in the social media business, “mashable” is a collective of web critics with a lot of influence. ex: MegaBook from:mashable

3.    Look for your brand with the “near” keyword ex: MegaBook near:Vancouver

4.    Search for unanswered questions for your product with “?” ex: Megabook ?

Finally, what do you do with all these conversations? Being in touch with your customers and engaging in conversations is a must; especially if your customer had a bad experience.

If your customer believes he received a bad service, respond as if you were speaking to him face to face.

1. Apologize. Even if it’s not your fault, the customer thinks it is.

2. Make sure you understand his problem. Reformulate and restate what you understand until you’re both on the same page.

3. Offer either excuses or something special (not necessarily free goods) that will encourage your customer to return.

On the other hand, if your customer was happy with your service, just a quick work to say “thanks for supporting us” is usually more than enough.

Happy new year!

Taotao

eMarketing Strategist

Tags: branding, Marketing Strategy, monitoring social media, Twitter

The Social Media Cart and the Marketing Horse

On Wednesday night, I attended the Ask The Experts event in which Liz Gaige (one of our SheTeam contributors)

Photo credit: woodsy, via stock.xchng

participated. The event’s goal was to give entrepreneurs a chance to get answers to dilemmas regarding branding, marketing, Web development and social media strategy.

As the night came to an end, I found myself reflecting on how the variety of experts in the panel illustrated the process that should optimally happen as a company ventures into Digital Marketing waters:

Marketing

Liz Gaige was the in-house expert in charge of addressing questions about marketing strategy and planning. As she answered questions from the room, I was reminded of how important it is to have a clear perspective on who your target market and product/offering are, before moving further toward branding, Web development, etc. Once you have identified who your target market is, and that it is indeed financially able to sustain your business, you are better equipped to analyze how your offering differs from the competition.

The wisdom that is gathered up until this point can now be transitioned toward the next phase…

…Branding

As Ryan Thompson expounded, branding is much more than a logo. It encompasses the perception you’d like your target market to have about your company, your offering. That impression is partially communicated through your business cards, logo and other collaterals, but it is ultimately about the mental picture that one absorbs about you – before, during and after a visual, online and print conversation.

Defining your brand is a key point in this process, since it dictates the tone of your communications later on, during the implementation of our next two points…

…Web development and social media strategy

Ideally, all the steps above will have taken place before you delve into Web development and social media strategy waters. The information that you have collected through your marketing and branding journey makes up your corporate DNA, upon which your Web development muscle, bones and cartilage can be built upon. How those muscles get put to use is another story.

In order to achieve your goals, should you participate in a sprint or a marathon? A sprint could be likened to an AdWords campaign – which can be implemented quicker, with faster returns, but demanding more energy up front – where as a marathon would be akin to search engine optimization: you’re in it for the long haul.

Is your offering best suited to be presented through a ballet or modern dance? In the realm of social media, LinkedIn is more formal and structured (such as in a ballet), whereas Twitter has a younger, more casual tone.

The bottom line is that there is an order of events that should take place before you even decide if your company should be “tweeting”, or if it should have a new Web site. Going through the marketing and branding stages is integral for a solid Web development campaign, upon which a successful social media strategy can then be built. So make sure that everything happens in the right order, and that your social media cart does not come before your marketing horse.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post, and welcome your questions or comments.

Tags: branding, entrepreneur, LinkedIn, Social Media, strategy, Twitter