Simon Whatley » brand

Steps to a Strong Brand

Simon — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 11:08:17 +0000

Social media is relationship and conversation media. At its core is the art of building relationships with others, human-to-human. However, you can’t be everywhere conversing with everyone at the same time. You need to pick your battles. Where you “hang out” digitally, just like any outreach and marketing program, should be driven by where your constituency hangs out.

Define the Objective

Don’t let Nestle’s Facebook Page issues happen to you. Determine how you want to portray your brand socially. You should also develop a plan for engagement in more routine situations. This includes knowing the goals, knowing the business and knowing the voice.

Before beginning anything, the first step is discussing the goals and objectives at the highest level. It may sound simple, but the most important attribute to display here is the ability to listen. Then base the strategy around several big ideas that help solve the challenges unique to each project.

Consider these scenarios: when a blogger raves about your product, how do you turn this goodwill into collaboration that benefits both parties? How do you create customer advocacy programs? How do you internalise and execute on feedback about your, or your competitor’s product? How do you deal with disaffected customers? What about irate bloggers? You need to think through all these scenarios and figure out how you will activate the right resources within the organisation.

Decide Where and What to Monitor

The notion of the social customer should reflect not only your current paying customers, but also potential customers and industry thought leaders. Monitoring can help you figure out where these people are, and therefore what channels are best for you to listen to and engage.

Monitoring is keyword-based, and thus selection of the right keywords is important. At the very least, you should be tracking your company name, brand names, product names, names of key executives, competitor names, competitive product names, industry keywords, and your tagline or most recent marketing efforts (e.g. Did you run a special promotion for St Valentine’s Day, Mother’s day or August Bank Holiday?).

Implement

Even the best plans go unrealised without resources. Implementation is something to think about on the front end. Many people consider social media “free”, but in reality it’s a real commitment and requires a lot of time and attention.

Test and Track

After you implement, you need to make sure you’re paying attention to successes, failures and your brand perception.

Conversations are happening across many channels and social networks all over the world. To make matters even more complicated, the signal-to-noise ratio is not in your favor. This is why your monitoring must be intelligent and actionable. You should be triaging all the social media messages that come across your field of vision, so that you can focus on what’s most important.

Some good tools for keeping track of your brand online include:

The No. 1 Strategy of High-Performance Brands

Simon — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 10:26:40 +0000

Customer wooing styles: People often ask the difference between how a public relation expert goes about wooing customers versus an ad agency, a designer, etc. In his top-selling book Zag: The No. 1 Strategy of High-Performance Brands, Marty Neumeier summarizes the differences in this tongue-in-cheek visualisation.

Launching Yourself as a Freelancer – Publicity

Simon — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:44:05 +0000

In the first part of this series I talked about setting yourself up in business. The next step is to publicise yourself and your skills. At this point, it is helpful to know exactly what line of work you want to be focusing on, since you will need to target your efforts.

In the dim and distant past, the job of publicising yourself was extremely difficult. Can you imagine life without the Internet, mobile telephones and email? How did people ever do business? With the advent of the World Wide Web and in particular search engines and blogging, this all changed and a wealth of opportunity has become available, especially to the freelancer.

But where do you start?

Create a Brand

Creating a brand is a great way to market yourself. This does not have to be the same as your company, and through time you may set up different brands for different sectors or ideas you may have. Brands serve to create associations and therefore, expectations of products you create, so a good brand name is a great way to get recognised in your community.

You can register the brand in the UK, Europe and the US, although the latter requires a US address. It is also not a given that your brand registration will be successful, making it a costly exercise. Careful consideration is what is needed here.

Create an Avatar

Avatars are images or icons that represent you in the online world. They are an extension of your brand. For example, the header of my website is also my favicon and avatar on various online services. It is a great way for people to draw an association between your online presence and you.

Create a Blog

Blogs are a great way to get yourself known and therefore heard amongst your peer group. Your blog should really be an extension of your brand and is a great avenue to showcase your skills, demo example applications, code and designs, or simply give your opinion on a subject.

I use the excellent WordPress blogging application, in a self-hosted environment. You don’t need to do this since there is a hosted version at WordPress.com, or you could use Blogger, another popular blogging platform, provided by Google.

The key to blogging is talk about what you enjoy, don’t just keep it technical. Blogs should be an extension of you, not an avenue for pretentious comment; you’ll soon be found out!

If you go the self-hosted route, you’ll need a domain name, hosting provider and obviously a blog application. I have listed a few below that can get you started.

Domain Names:

Hosting Providers:

Blog Applications:

If going the self-hosted is all too complicated for you or you simply don’t want the hassle that is associated with self-hosting, all is not lost. WordPress.com and Blogger are for you.

Blog Hosting Providers:

Both services take the onus away from the user when it comes to management (backups, plugins etc). At the simplest level, all you need to do is create and publish the content.

Join feed aggregators

To get noticed in the blogosphere, you can’t simply rely on the Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft search engines ranking your site. You will need to alert your peers to the fact that you’ve created some content that is worth reading. You can achieve this with feed aggregators.

Below I list a few that I use:

If you use WordPress, then you’re in luck. WordPress has a service called Ping-o-matic, which updates different search engines when your blog has been updated. You can also add your own services to ping and therefore notify the service of new content.

Comment on Blogs

Commenting on blogs is another great way of getting yourself known as well as offering an opinion. Since comments allow you to include a link back to your website, try and comment as your brand.

One tip, try not to be defamatory towards the blog owner, or others unless you have a strong justification for doing so. It’s all about the karma!

Join Micro-Blogging Services

If blogging is not your thing or you don’t have time to write articles, there are a number of blogging and, more importantly, micro-blogging services available to you that allow you to get your thoughts out into the wide-world.

Such services include the not-always-venerable Twitter, the feature rich Pownce, the new kid on the block Plurk and the blogging service, Tumblr.

Building a following will allow you to announce to your followers important events and ask questions of them.

What’s Next

In the next part of this series, I’ll talk about networking, a natural extension to publicising yourself on the web.

British Standards and Web Compliance

Simon — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 20:23:49 +0000

Following on from the RNIB‘s web accessibility initiatives, web compliance experts Magus Ltd and The British Standards Institute are working together to create a new publically accessible standard (PAS 124) for websites. Web standards govern the effectiveness, function and appearance of a website, and include: brand, legal, accessibility, search engine optimisation (SEO), usability and technical standards.

Websites are increasingly the key communication vehicle for a company, its brand and products. Despite this, research from Magus shows that many of the world’s leading organisations don’t have formal brand and technical standards defined to govern their websites. Even those that do are failing to effectively implement or enforce them, achieving full compliance with less than 20% of their own web standards. The websites of these organisations significantly under-perform or damage the brand as a result.

PAS 124 will help to protect the significant investment organisations are making in their web presence and online brands, by establishing best practice for “defining, implementing and managing organisational web standards”. It will provide a clear framework to help organisations apply standards effectively to significantly improve online performance and protect the integrity of their brands.

More detail can be found on the BSI’s press release.