Chris Brogan

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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).]

What blogs do I pay attention to?

13 October 2008 in Blogroll by Kate | View Comments

I had a good friend ask me for a couple of blogs and publications to read to get up-to-speed on the new media space as she interviews for marketing positions in her last year of business school. I thought I’d share them with everyone while I was at it. Keep in mind, this isn’t my complete list of new media blogs, but the ones I thought would be most helpful for her starting out.

Tara Hunt at Horse, Pig, Cow – Knowledgeable on the field, and focuses a little more on the societal aspects of this (for instance, she’s conducting Hero Camp next week, which I very regrettably can’t go to).
Tom O’Brien at A Human Voice
Adam Cohen at a thousand cuts – He’s a numbers guy by profession (works in SEO) but has great insight all around. Also a really nice guy.
Chris Brogan – He’s very knowledgeable and very well-respected in the field. He writes frequently and is usually on top of the industry.
Zach Hofer-Shall at &. – Does a good job of highlighting the shift between old Web and Web 2.0. And again, a nice guy.
The Collective Intellect Blog
HubSpot’s Blog – Good for numbers and measurement stuff. And they’re pretty light-hearted. Oh, and cool product to boot.
iMedia Connection – Great for everything, they have a ton of industry experts writing for them.
David Armano at Logic & Emotion
Mashable – Good for industry news.
Brian Solis at PR 2.0
Mitch Joel at Twist Image – I like this blog a lot, it’s on top/ahead of things.
Social Media Explorer

I also gave her this blog.

Do you have any to add? Feel free to pass along a link.

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.

Best Practices in Social Media – Part I

9 September 2008 in Explanation by Kate | View Comments

Six Pixels of Separation has called upon Social Media Professionals to come up with a list of best practices. We’re going to have a two-part series on this, with the first of the series being a wider-picture best practice, and the second being a more specific one.

As many people working in this field may know, when you’re trying to convince someone of the benefits of using new media tools, it can sometimes (ok, a lot of the times), be a very difficult process, and can often prove unsuccessful. It could be the marketing department, the CEO, a client (or potential client), or colleagues, but the resistance to using new technology happens all the time; more frequently than we’d hope.

When we make a case for new media, we use one main philosophy: put it in terms the person will understand, based on standards and terms that are already used frequently in the communication and business community.

I’ve found myself in conversations with people in the field, and we talk about community, participation, loving your customer, etc. But we all get that. We all know the importance of these things because we’re immersed in it. It’s a nice little picture of simplicity in our heads.

But it’s not in the heads of those who don’t use these tools, don’t read the blogs we do, still mostly use traditional marketing and communications tactics. These concepts run the risk of sounding fluffy (yes, I’ve been told this), big picture, idealistic, pointless, vague etc.

In addition, we have the problem of measurement to deal with during these conversations. Not only is this big pretty picture hard to grasp conceptually or qualitatively, but there is also a lack of measurement standards. This doesn’t make your argument any more convincing, that’s for sure.

What do we do? We bring the concept as close as possible to what the person understands.

So instead of simply talking about encouraging participation with your customers, and initiating conversation to create communities because this is what people are doing, we’ve found it more effective to use terms and concepts like “brand awareness,” “customer loyalty,” and even “brand equity.” We enhance these already solid and developed concepts with new and modern ideas. We like to think of them as integral “additions” to existing communications programs. It’s much less intimidating and different.

Instead of skirting the issue of measurement by saying things like “well, it’s going to depend on what we decide your goals are,” or “it’ll change with each tool you use,” we save those comments as an afterthought, and we start with presenting them with the combination of both quantitative tools (of which there are plenty) and qualitative data to create a picture. If they have a blog set up as ad hoc playtime in the new media space, talk to them specifically about that tool and what you can do with it. We were talking to a potential client who had just that, and named three or four specific ways we can measure growth and success of their blog, and they looked at us in amazement and said <<wait, really, you can measure all of that? That sounds so easy!>> And he wasn’t just saying it, he truly understood those numbers and translated them into terms he understood better, such as ROI etc.

Bring the discussion as close to home as you can with people who don’t know this space, especially when you’re trying to convince them to dive in.

Chris Brogan, in his Twelve Ways to Sell Social Media to Your Boss, hits on this in a few of his suggestions that offer specific arguments to your boss, specifically #2 and #3.

In his 5 core arguments that can be made for social media, Rohit Bhargava suggests a few ways to gather some specifics to use in your case in arguments #1 and #2.

Dan Heath at Made To Stick also posted recently about using terms that are more human when explaining statistics to someone. The concept is the same: the statistic makes more sense when it’s put in terms that are better understood.

A few other Best Practices goodies brought to you by Zemanta are below.

Short Break until Wednesday.

14 June 2008 in Uncategorized by Kate | View Comments

I’m in Lake Tahoe for a wedding and am going to try and write a post tomorrow, but it may not come until Wednesday.

In the meantime, a few articles for your reading pleasure:

Short and sweet article on brand positioning, on Brand Strategy
Starting a social media strategy, on Chris Brogan’s blog
How to make your website sticky, from the Conversation Agent blog
A few tips on blogger relations, from Diva Marketing
Seeing opportunity in a down market, by Pamela Slim

And for those of you on Twitter, a quick list of some people to follow for conversation on new media and marketing and doing cool things:

Jeremiah Owyang
Chris Abraham
Steve Garfield (he does some great streams on a pretty regular basis)
Laura Fitton
Tara Hunt

Enjoy!

Smart Social Media Marketing: Caleb Elston and Toluu [via Zemanta]
Stephanie Booth Rediscovers Social Media Basics [via Zemanta]

Ways to organize your online life

10 June 2008 in Uncategorized by Kate | View Comments

If you’re anything like me, you get inefficient when things aren’t organized. And if you’re anything like me, the number of networks/groups/randomness that I’m connected to online is huge, and can sometimes feel unwieldy. To me, better organization means more time and more focus of energies. I also know people who shy away from some of the great online tools because it’s “just too much.” What a pity, if only they streamlined it, it could be quite rewarding.

So I’ve devised a few ways that I organize my online life.

Mimic your communities across platforms as much as possible

With all the Twitters and the FriendFeeds and the Facebooks and the this-and-thats, how do you keep up? What I try and do as much as possible is make my communities the same across each platform. Most of them have ways of searching other platforms to see if some of your connections crossover. Remember, if you’re up on new place to be, a lot of them are too (or you’re getting referred to new places by them!). This way you communities are generally the same.

To me, this means I don’t need to be so concerned about keeping everything, everywhere, immediately updated, or that I’m losing large portions of my network in one place, or that. Plus, the developers of “new things” know that there’s a switching cost for users, so they try and make that as easy as possible. This brings me to my next suggestion.

Whenever possible, link your tools or communities together

Most of the tools you’re using offer linking capabilities. Your Twitter will update you Facebook, FriendFeed will post your Diggs (and 34 other “things” you might be using).

This allows you to kill two birds… or three…or ten… in one stone. Why WOULDN’T you do that? Usually this is in the preferences or settings tab.

Read the website of each tool you use

At least in my experience, these “things” can do a whole lot more than I think they can at first. So every time I get a new one, I spend 10 or 20 minutes reading about it, and reading reviews about it, so I have a much better handle of what it’s doing for me. Would you install a microwave without reading what all those darn buttons do? Well, ok, not gunna lie, I do that, but then again, maybe I’m not the most efficient microwaver (touche to myself…. and I don’t use the microwave much).

Have one central place to organize the links

The way I so this is old school. I have a folder on my bookmarks toolbar, labeled simply “Online Tools” (tricky, I know), and I have the links to all the networks or whatever right in there. When you get upwards of ten (which is low for some people!) you forget some sometimes. It makes for a pseudo To Do list. You can figure out the best way to do this on your computer depending on how you use it. The idea is just that there’s one place where their all cataloged and easily accessible.

The last two items I’d like to throw out have less to do with organizing your online life, but how to fit it enjoyably into your “real” life (you know what I mean).

Make your online community into your “real” community as much as possible

Many of the people you connect to online, you’ll know in person. But there may be a lot that you don’t (Twitter makes this very easy!). To make those connections more meaningful, try and meet up offline with as many people as you can, even it’s just for beers at a Tweet-Up (I missed one last night organized in part by Chris Brogan, who I’ve been following on Twitter. It seems that close to 30 people went).

Unplug sometimes Last night, I went unplugged from 6pm onwards, and it was awesome. I read a magazine, made dinner and relaxed and my mind unwound. I highly suggest this to anyone

What tips do you have for organizing yourself online? Please comment below.

Also, I would like to extend this challenge to anyone. I’m only going to give you my Twitter name (just_kate), and see how many different places you can connect to me from (hint: I’ve mentioned a few tools above…..).

Related articles

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7 Key Learnings you should know from the Web Community Forum [via Zemanta]
How Do You Build an Online Community [via Zemanta]
Defining the term: “Online Community” [via Zemanta]

A response to Umair Haque

22 May 2008 in Uncategorized by Kate | View Comments

I wanted to respond to Umair Haque’s blog posting of last night after a night of thinking. There are a few things I’d like to say.

1) I admire Umair and respect his thoughts on where business is going today. It’s something I also feel strongly about, and, for the most part, agree with him on. In fact, one of my own professional goals is to address many of the issues that Umair does in his blogs.

2) That being said, you can read the comments to his post, including mine, on how they people about his recent tone. No need to address further.

Most importantly, however, I’d like to amend my original Tweet/comment, and give Umair a little credit (Twitter doesn’t offer a whole lot of space to do so). He didn’t post his almost immediate response to my Tweet, which was a statement allowing me to feel the way I felt, but also included a question about what it was that was turning me off to his blog. That, combined with his post, led me to the following thoughts on him (keep in mind, I have never met him, although would like to):

“This guy is legit. He expressed himself passionately, held true to his beliefs, but was consequently very open to being received respectfully by the very audience to which he’s communicating. He accepted constructive criticism (and my criticism could very well have not been taken constructively), opened up the floor for more, explained himself, but did not give up what he does feel strongly about. Since the time when I could be a judge of character, this has always gotten a thumb’s up in my book.”

It also made me really think about my own presence. This is what else I came up with:

“Here I am, new to the scene. Sure, I have an MBA and an MA, some might call me bright, but I’m soft. Most of the time, I’m too soft. I read many of the top blogs, from Umair, to Guy K, to Tara, to Pam, to Chris and so on, and I think to myself that I don’t know “it” like they do. I have strong thoughts, but what do I know? Sure again, I’m starting up a company because I want to do something I truly love, but boy I still have a lot of proving to do! I should give Umair more credit than I did. He isn’t afraid to come out and say it. Darnit Kate, maybe you can learn something from him.”

And so, I will. While I do hope that Umair communicates his thoughts in a less abrasive way (I tend to give more credence to passionate, well-communicated, but non-confrontational thoughts…), I also hope that he doesn’t compromise the strength with which he puts those thoughts forward. In other words, keep up the passion, but just change the method.

This is where my own change comes in. I am going to make a personal effort to unsoften myself a bit. To express the passion that I do have about these issues and be confident in the ideas in my head that I know are good ones.

And to end, a personal note to Umair:

I will meet you halfway between these two extremes, perhaps someday in person, but at least here. At that point, I stand true to my comment last night and would like to help….. actually, my new mindset begs another word…. I would like to collaborate…. And get things done, ideas communicated and people on board. Until then, I will kick myself in the butt a little harder. Thank you.

Chris Brogan

Short Break until Wednesday.

Ways to organize your online life

A response to Umair Haque

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Follow Us!

What we’ve been thinking lately

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Old Stuff

Advertising/PR

Business

Entrepreneurship/Small Business

Interesting

Marketing

New Media

Technology