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SXSW: Building Your Brand with Web 2.0 Tools

14 March 2009 in Conferences & Events, Random Thoughts by Kate | View Comments

“Getting attention for your brand (personal or company) is easier than ever thanks to the ole’ interweb but doing it with “zing” is still key to building a following. Learn and ask question from the people who have built brands and careers by doing it with “zing”.”

Panelists

CC Chapman, Partner, Advance Guard
Saul Colt, Head of Magic, Freshbooks
Dave Delaney, Blogger
Loic Le Meur, Founder & CEO, Seesmic
Chris Brogan, Pirate, New Marketing Labs

Colt: Building your brand is that much easier now. People will learn more about you than they will from your resume.
Chapman: People are scared about web 2.0, that you can talk about anything across all channels.

[Pause for horsing around by panelists]

Question: How do you balance?
Loic: Personal aspect if very important, it shows you as you really are. I want to see there faces
Delaney: Like in Twitter, it’s really hard to BS in 140 or less. You can get an idea of what people are about pretty quickly, it’s hard to BS.
Colt: I’ve decided what my brand is, and it’s genuine with my personality. I’m the world’s smartest marketer with a little bit of creepy. If I’m using this tool to find clients or work, these people will jave to work with me, so why not show them who I am.

Question: How did you guys start your brand?

Chapman: I started out blogging. I just started reading and treated it as my own personal journal. Whatever you’re passionate about, just go with it.
Delaney: Twitter is a great way to build a brand and interact with your audience.
Loic: Answer every single piece of feedback, especially when it’s negative.
Delaney: I won’t answer all feedback about our products.
Colt: I’m of the belief that you should answer everything, except when it’s super super negative, you can never get rid of all the negativity, and at some point you need to figure out when you should just opt out of a conversation.
Chapman: If you’re on Twitter, you need to be a brand that is ready to talk about yourself, and handle the negativity. Some brand are just plain not ready for that.

Question: How far do you do in helping companies figure out their plan? Do you Tweet for them?

Brogan: Hell no.
Chapman: Kick the person out of the nest, they have to learn to do it on their own. Teach them, and then hold their hand at first.
Delaney: Don’t drive the car.

Question: Where do you focus your energies if you’re supposed to handle all the social media “stuff” for a brand?

Colt: figure out what one is the most successful, and spend 80% of your time on that platform.

Question: Would you launch generally or go in stealth mode? When you go with a name, should you go with the Double “O”…. Google, Yahoo….?

Loic: Launch as soon as you can, and be open, build it and share it in public.

Question: What do you think about the fact that social media might not be for everyone?

Colt: Social media is a tool.
Brogan: Do you have to use social media all the time? Hell no. Where’s your customer, and where’s the needle moving? Does something happen when you do it?

Question: What about using social media to brand locally?

Delaney: Getting everyone together around a small event is a good way of solidifying a social media strategy.
Brogan: It’s cheap and free, you just need sweat equity. BrightKite is great for location-based. If in your area, there aren’t enough people online, it might not be the right thing for you. But there are a lot of opportunities, you can do a lot of the smaller cafe-style conversations, just a few people.
Chapman: Facebook allows you to do targetted ads by location. Get people aware of you, and it’s true word-of-mouth.
Delaney: You could set up a search on Twitter or whatever for your town. When people mention it, just say something back to them.

Question: What about rebranding?

Colt: You still have to worry about your product. You’re empowering people to tell everyone they know about your product, so if it’s bad, it spreads three times quicker than if it’s great. Be careful then with things like WOM.
Brogan: It’s a question you have to ask internally: how much do you want it to suck? And how much do you want people to know that it sucks?
Colt: There’s something to be said about a brand that says that they know it stinks and that they’re working on it. People really like that.
Loic: Lack of transparency is very passe.
Audience: Have the lawyers reference the case of Tylenol, the effects of addressing it or you’re not addressing it.
Loic: I make a point of never saying that my competitors suck.

Question: A lot of brands don’t disclose who’s Tweeting on behalf of them. Is there a best practice there?

Colt: I think it’s really important. People want to be dealing with people, not brands.
Chapman: What happens when someone leaves though? That’s a hard thing to do.
Colt: You can have several people though.
Chapman: How do you handle when those personalities leave?

[UPDATE: Check out Andy Sernovitz's recent case study on Freshbooks and word-of-mouth (WOM).]

New Marketing Summit: Brand and Reputation

14 October 2008 in Conferences & Events by Kate | View Comments

[Check out Anya's wrap up of Session Two - World Wide Rave: Creating triggers that get millions of people to spread your ideas and share your stories]

Session Three: Brand and Reputation

Panelists: Adam Broitman, Director of Strategy and Ringleader of Crayon; Bobbie Carlton, Director of Marketing of Beacon Street Girls; Stacy DeBroff, Founder and CEO of Mom Central

Chris: Comments on the conversational aspect of a blog? What do you do when people say bad things?

Adam: Use those negatives to your advantage, accept it and work with it. Address it when it happens.

Chris: Bobbie, what’s your experience rolling out technology for both tweens and other demographics?

Bobbie: Several different sites, and just try to get tweens to be quiet! We have to be aware of the parents as well, you don’t want them to veto it. The success stories in teenage marketing today are things like webkins or Club Penguin, you have to talk to the kids on a level that they understand and has the “cool factor”, but you get the trust of the parents.

Chris: Stacy, how do you advise brands to get into the waters of moms and children?

Stacy: Understand what’s happening in terms of trends, and speak that language. You can’t isolate your kids from a “world” (internet) that you don’t know. How do we raise awareness with kids? Who are you listening to and responding to? Brands are used to talking down, and they can’t do that any more. Talk about things on customers’ levels.

Chris: Adam, Tyson brands themselves as the number one source of protein in the world. What do you recommend to them?

Adam: Point them to some of the brands using new media now (Richard at Dell, Comcastcares, etc). Then point them at the brands doing a terrible job (British Airways and brands not following people back on Twitter). Social media is a commitment, not a campaign. Commit to providing value.

Chris: Bobbie, with regards to brands, tweens may be the hardest demographic to cater to. What do you advise people who want to get into that demographic?

Bobbie: Beacon Street Girls is mission driven, a mom who wanted to do something positive for tweens. Tweens want to be on a lot of social networks, but they can’t yet legally. Facebook isn’t appropriate yet. We provide them a nice corralled, safe area for them. Parent’s provide the wallet, and kids provide the enthusiasm, and they stick around. Add features that are inline with your brand and keep the experience rich.

Chris: Stacy, Mom Central focuses on blogger outreach. What’s your advice to people who want to do this? And what would you suggest to bloggers to respect brands?

Stacy: There’s a favoring of metatags, linking, etc. Bloggers, by nature, are speaking out of passion in an authentic voice and speaking to an audience that care what you’re writing about. If you have something to say, you can build a platform off of that. Bloggers speak their mind. A lot of brands think they’re in a minefield, what if someone says something bad? Bloggers don’t like to be uninformed solicitation, they get annoyed. Brands are trying to attract bloggers to talk about them and the bloggers are intrigued. Engagement with bloggers is not about driving traffic, but using them to help set the story about your brand, the story will live forever on these search engines. They are a vehicle for brand awareness.

Chris: Adam, about storytelling, what do you advise people in this regard?

Adam: It isn’t necessarily about the specific tools, it’s still about strategy (shocker, we said that a while ago!). Here’s a new channel that we can do a lot of the same things on. In the modern storytelling world, you have to take a distributed web strategy, you can’t expect people to find you. You need to be where they are. Barack Obama is everywhere! Your distributed web strategy should consist of probably 5-10 outposts.

Chris: Bobbie, how do you reach the tweens?

Bobbie: BSG is the real world for tweens. We get the most traffic going to places where teenage girls go. Once they got to our rich world, they stayed. They start with a casual game, and reach us and we offer a very enhanced experience that they stick with. We use other mediums minimally.

Chris: Stacy, where have you found the most success and the least success in connecting to Moms?

Stacy: Brands are talking in places that aren’t populated by people they want to target. You have to talk to influencers and not just moms (experts in the field, websites, bloggers). Think about where the influencers are hanging out. Where do you park yourself and what do you do about it? How are you reaching people and what are you trying to do? The great thing about Twitter is the connectivity: someone connects to you and you get interested in who they are or what they’re about. Find the natural places that moms populate, it’s hard to artificially create that. What tools do they use?

Your Brand: Being Online and Brand Equity

30 September 2008 in Modern Business by Kate | View Comments

Above is a depiction, provided by Brand Channel of the factors that go into a brand’s equity. I could have inserted any number of images, but the general concepts are the same.

I want to talk about brand equity because I don’t feel there has been enough straight forward conversation about what this means in new and social media. We all know that most brand images are effected by their presence online, but I wonder how much real discussion there is with colleagues and, more importantly, with clients about what this means to the bottom line (sidenote: there are still many spaces that aren’t highly visible online, so, for now, we’re talking about industries for which the Web 2.0 space is highly important).

I’ll use just a few of the above factors as examples:

Image and Personality: Several months ago, Chris Brogan had a webinar that was called “Who Really Owns Your Brand?” (I discussed it in-depth here). He and the discussants talked about the changes that occur to your brand image in social media: that customers now have more influence over your brand, and that the amount of control a company has over their image is shifting away from them. A company can decide to either enter this space and influence to some extent where their brand is going, or they can remain in a traditional mindset and “push” brand image on customers. We know where that’s headed…..
Awareness: There are a ton of possible consumer touch points available to companies in the new media space. There are also very attractive opportunities for Word-of-Mouth (WOM). There’s the possibility that customers can bring either positive or negative brand awareness to the table in a high-profile manner. A major way that people become aware of a brand nowadays is online, through friends and in communities. With an increased positive brand awareness comes an increase in brand equity.
Loyalty: Discussion and conversation with your customers (when done properly) breeds loyalty. I don’t need to beat this one to death. Online is where this is taking place. You wouldn’t want to be left out of the conversation of your own brand would you, or left out of the opportunity to develop a relationship with your customers?

These are just some examples, I could break down all of the above further if I wanted to but I think you get where I’m headed.

The main point is that, while we all know these things, I wonder how many of us directly correlate it to brand equity in the monetary sense, especially with clients. This is important, so let me repeat. New/social media and the Web 2.0 space have important effects on the monetary value of your company.

We recently had a potential client who was wondering what the point was of using new media in his marketing program if they were looking to enter IPO stages in less than five years. The company was absolutely a candidate for new media marketing, and its brand image was already being affected positively and negatively in this space.

My argument to him was (not only that the space is moving incredibly fast and five years could make a huge difference), but, almost more importantly: Your brand image IS online right now, and it IS being affected. And that DOES and WILL matter when determining the value of your company. In some cases, it’s not even a matter of going where it’s hot (although that has its advantages!). Your brand is there, you should be there too.

What’s more, the Web 2.0 world is completely visible to anyone who chooses to look, including potential funders or buyers of your company. That information matters. I’ll not deny that measurement of that value in dollar terms is difficult, but many traditional aspects of brand equity are the same. It still applies.

Most funders and buyers are looking to social media to figure out at least part of the value of brands (and if they’re not, they probably should be, because it’s often one of the best indicators of how consumers feel about your brand). It should be considered right along side of sales figures or profitability.

So I encourage people to talk to clients directly not just about the benefits of new media marketing, but also about the necessity to be in the space from a brand management perspective.

Have you discussed this with clients? Do you consider it important? Is it too vague at this stage to be put into monetary terms? Any thoughts are welcome. Below are a few of Zemanta’s thoughts on the issue, as well as a couple of posts I came across.

Some thoughts from Web Marketing Strategies, Trends and Tips.
Customer Think has some advice.

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SXSW: Building Your Brand with Web 2.0 Tools

New Marketing Summit: Brand and Reputation

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Your Brand: Being Online and Brand Equity

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Looking for something?

Old Stuff

Advertising/PR

Business

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