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What my English teacher taught me about brands and branding

January 20, 2010 By
Teacher picture

What did your teachers teach you about brands and branding? (Image by harrykeely via stock.xchng: http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=view&id=1195959

Some time in elementary school or middle school – I don’t remember exactly when – my English teacher taught us a very basic way to analyze characters in stories. There are four ways we find out about characters, she said:

  1. What they say about themselves.
  2. What they do.
  3. What others say about them.
  4. What others do regarding those characters.

This isn’t university-level literary analysis. But this sort of approach works very well for understanding branding and brands, especially if you think of brands as characters, with personalities and reputations.

The first two ways deal with branding – how companies set out to establish their brand in the marketplace. They do this by talking about themselves (that’s everything from advertising to the way sales people are trained) and by acting.

How brands behave is important, because the old cliché is true – actions speak louder than words. The airline can say it cares about you, the customer, but if your plane is delayed and nobody will tell you why or when you might actually get off the ground, you’re not going to believe that message about caring no matter how many times or how creatively it’s delivered in an ad.

Numbers 3 and 4 deal with brand. The difference between brand and branding is simple: Branding is what companies do to create their brands. Brand is how people experience a company — how they understand and think of the company.

What people say about your brand tells you something about how it’s perceived. When Jeff Jarvis started blogging about his problems with Dell, and others joined him, Dell’s reputation for quality took a hit – because of what its customers were saying.

How people behave also tells you a lot about your brand. If you have the best quality widget, and everybody says it’s the best quality widget, but nobody is buying it, than you know that something else is going on. Maybe it turns out that quality isn’t that important to widget buyers. Or maybe your price is so high compared to the competitors that the quality isn’t enough to justify the extra cost. Your brand might be more than just quality — it might be quality that’s not really worth the price being charged. Understanding the distinction is essential for understanding how your brand affects your sales, or any other critical goals you might have.

What’s all this mean to you? Well, the bottom line is pretty simple. When these four elements are all in agreement, you’re in good shape. But when they’re in conflict, you’ve got a problem. Identifying the source of the conflict can take your brand from weak and ineffective to strong and vital.

Have something to add about brands and branding? Please share it in the comments below.

Filed Under: Online marketing, Personal branding, Public Relations & Marketing Tagged With: ,

The secrets of finding and sharing great content online

January 19, 2010 By
Share key on computer keyboard

What are you sharing? (Image by jzlomek via stock.xchng - http://www.sxc.hu/photo/254271)

One of the primary activities on social media sites is content sharing. Through Facebook, Twitter and other sites, people pass around content they find interesting, entertaining and useful. Content sharing is the fuel for a lot of social media activity. A shared video or blog post can often become the basis for a conversation about that content. If one of your goals online is to build a reputation for expertise in some subject, content sharing is a great way to do that. By sharing links to content about, for example, investing, you position yourself as someone who knows a lot about that topic.

I get a lot of positive comments about the quality and quantity of content I share online. I think it’s been a major factor in the reputation I (think) I’ve built online, as well as the number of followers I have on Twitter (though I am no A-lister — yet). And I think a lot of people are a baffled by how I’m able to consistently share a steady stream of useful, interesting content. So here’s a little tutorial on my “secrets” of effective content sharing.

1. Establish a steady incoming stream of material to review for possible sharing.

Subscribe to blogs and news sites in your niche using an RSS reader such as Google Reader. If you are having trouble finding these sites, check out Alltop. Chances are, it has a pretty good list in your niche.

Subscribe to email newsletters in your niche. Many of the sites you subscribed to will also have email newsletters. Subscribe to those. You may want to use a separate email account (such as a free Yahoo or Gmail account) if you’re worried about your main email inbox being overrun. Some sites will offer more original content via email than they do via RSS.

Blatant self promotion: I offer both an RSS feed and an email subscription — over there on the right side of the page. The email subscription gets you all the blog posts as they’re published, plus additional “bonus” content — extra articles and tips, resource links, free guides and special offers.

Establish Google searches for key terms in your niche. If you have a really broad niche (such as investing or social media or exercise), you may want to keep your search terms narrow and specific, otherwise you’ll get a lot of the same links that you have coming in via the blogs and news sites. If you have a Google account (which I recommend, to access Big G’s many useful and free services), you can get these alerts via email or via RSS feed; choose whichever you find easier to manage.

2. Filter the incoming material for possible sharing.

If you follow the steps above, you will have a lot more material than you’ll actually want to share. Sharing, let’s say, 3-10 useful links a day is good. Sharing 50 will just overwhelm people. Don’t share everything you find. Instead, filter. When you filter — choosing the best content to pass along to your community — you add value.

I recommend filtering in batches, once or twice a day. I usually do this in the morning. What you want to do is pick out the best stuff to share. Here’s my quick-and-dirty two-step algorithm for filtering material quickly.

  1. Look at the headline or summary. Does it appeal to you? Does it seem interesting, entertaining or useful? Does it seem like it would be relevant to your community? Is it new and interesting? If so, click on the link and open that up in a separate tab in your browser.
  2. Once you’ve gotten a bunch of tabs opened up, review the material. Again, apply the criteria form Step 1. Pick the best 3-10 (depending on what you think is the ideal daily number for you and your community). Close the tabs for the links you’re NOT going to share.

3. Automate your sharing.

I automate most of my sharing. I do this because I want to reserve my limited “live” time on social media sites for responding and conversation, not pushing out links. There are lots of tools that allow you to schedule social media updates ahead of time. The one I’m now using that I like best is Hootsuite.

Hootsuite is an online app, so it’s available on any computer I have a web browser open on. There’s also an iPhone app version, though I haven’t tried it yet. In addition to scheduling, Hootsuite will also push updates to Facebook and LinkedIn, two of my other primary social media sites. And Hootsuite will integrate with Ping.fm, which in turn can push updates out to dozens of different social sites an status updates. I also like Hootsuite because it has a built-in URL shortener and has click-through tracking built in — useful for measuring how valuable people are finding your updates.

I usually space out my content sharing updates throughout the day, rather than doing a lot at one time. So, for example, I might schedule one at 9 a.m., another at 10:30 a.m., another at noon, another at 2 p.m. and a final one at 4 p.m. I think this allows me more opportunities to get in front of more people in my community, as different people are checking out social sites at different times during the day. However, if you’ve done this and have had a better experience bunching a lot of updates together, I’d be interested in hearing about it.

4. Check in during the day.

Log in to your social sites periodically during the day to respond to and participate to any conversation or reaction that might spring up around your shared content. This could be as simple as thanking people who are retweeting one of your tweets, to weighing in on a conversation that breaks out on Facebook about a link you’ve shared.

5. Measure your results.

If you’re doing this for primarily personal reasons, this may be less important to you. But if you are using this for any kind of social media marketing activity, you’ll want to measure how effective your content sharing activities are. I would like at three primary measurements here:

  • How many people clicked through your link to actually look at the content? As I mentioned above, one of the reasons I like Hootsuite is that it has this functionality built in. However, other URL shorteners also offer this.
  • How many people shared the content you’re sharing? For example, on Twitter how many people retweeted it? This is a sign that people found your content engaging enough to share with their own communities.
  • How much of a conversation sprung up around your content sharing? How many people responded or made a comment about it? How long did those conversations last (how many back and forths).

Those are my “secrets” to effective content sharing online. What do you think? Do you have more tips on sharing content? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Filed Under: Microblogging, Personal branding, Social media Tagged With: , , ,

Have you done a personal social media audit lately?

January 18, 2010 By

Have you done a social media audit of yourself lately? Maybe you should.

Cleaning supplies

Do your social media profiles need to be cleaned up? (Image by lusi at stock.xchng)

By social media audit, I mean updating all those profiles you have on various social media sites. I started doing this recently, and was surprised to find how much information I had let become out of date — my job title, what town I lived in, etc. In addition to profiles on sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Plaxo, don’t forget your own bio on your blog, if you have one.

Here are five things to do during a social media audit:

1. Update all of your profile information. Have you moved, been promoted, changed employers or had any other changes since you last created that profile? Is there any information that’s out of date that should be deleted? In addition to the usual social networking sites (such as LinkedIn and Twitter), don’t forget to update your online profile in other groups you belong to — professional organizations, alumni associations, etc.

2. Update your profile picture, if you want. You may want to use different pictures on different sites, to highlight different aspects of your personality. Or you may want to use the same picture across all sites for personal branding consistency. It’s up to you, but ask yourself if you need to add or update pictures to any of your social media profiles.

Tip: Keep a profile picture or two in Flickr. That way you have it available to add to any social media profile no matter what computer you are working on (home, work, school or whatever).

3. Get active on sites that you’ve ignored for a while. I’m not suggesting you should be really active on every social media site — there are too many for that. However, if you’ve been neglecting your LinkedIn activity and that’s a part of your plan for personal branding via social media, it’s worth spending some time there. (And making a plan for being there more consistently.)

4. Record all those passwords somewhere. If you’re like me, you have profiles and passwords to lots of different sites. I have a couple of tricks for remembering them all, but too often I have to rely on the “forgot your password” link. Start recording these somewhere (safe). I’m using index cards that are filed alphabetically in a little box I keep on my desk at home. If you’re paranoid about security, you can lock this in a safe. There are many software solutions available for this (Clipperz is very secure, but if you forget your password to the site, you’re screwed).

5. Bookmark all your social media sites in a single folder in your favorites/bookmarks app. I use Google’s Bookmarks tool in the Google Toolbar, so I have access to my favorite web sites anywhere I have an Internet connection. This will give you quicker access to these sites and increase the odds that you keep them up-to-date and active in the future.

Are there other steps you would take to make sure your social media presence is current? Please share your ideas in the comments below.

Filed Under: Career, Networking, Personal branding, Social media Tagged With: ,

Review of Beyond Blogging

January 15, 2010 By

Beyond Blogging: The Secrets to Blogging Success is an ebook (actually two) that sells for $47. It was written by Nathan Hangen and Mike Cliffe Jones, and has been receiving quite a bit of attention in the blogosphere, in large part because it contains profiles of successful, well-known bloggers and online personalities. Their goal is help you understand what made those bloggers successful, and how you might be able to achieve similar results:

Blogging can help you get that book deal you’ve always wanted, and in this book we will show you how it can be done. You can create an empire of big or small money making websites so that you can help people and make money doing what you love. Turn it all on auto-pilot and you’ve figured out how to make a living while spending more time having fun. That’s really the dream, isn’t it? Most of us want to find a way to make money without having to sacrifice personal or family time. We want to be able to take trips, spoil our wife and children, and slow down and enjoy life. We’ll show you how to do that.

The book profiles 15 high profile bloggers, including video blogger and wine merchant Gary Vaynerchuk, world traveler Chris Guillebeau, new media expert Chris Garrett, social media superstar Chris Brogan, the breathtakingly candid career blogger Penelope Trunk, six-figure blogger David Risley, money-maker John Chow, Mashable founder Pete Cashmore, marketer Shama Kabani, young entrepreneur Michael Dunlop, career renegade Jonathan Fields, original problogger Darren Rowse, Internet video star iJustine, self-improvement guru Steve Pavlina and copywriter and master online businessman Brian Clark. I was already very familiar with many of these bloggers before I read the book, but a few of them (especially Kabani and Dunlop) I didn’t know at all. While I had heard of iJustine and Cashmore, I didn’t know the details behind their stories.

These are all people who, one way or another, make a lot of money (and usually their living) from their blogs. Many of these bloggers make money the conventional way — they run ads, have affiliate links and sell content. But some of them (most notably Penelope Trunk) use their blogs as platforms on which they have built non-blogging businesses. The profiles are fairly detailed and lay out how these individuals got started blogging, their successes and failures along the way, and how they ended up making money. The book also includes a series of key lessons derived from those bloggers. A second workbook has forms to help you work through key questions for your own blog.

So, the question is, does it live up to its promise of showing you how to make money and do what you love? Yes, and no. Some people will read this book and say to themselves “I already knew all that.” Others could benefit greatly from it (assuming, of course, that they applied what’s in the book). And many, including myself, fall somewhere in between those extremes.

Who should not buy this book?

It’s not for you if you:

  • Are already deeply familiar with the above-mentioned bloggers and their practices
  • Have already immersed yourself in blogging best practices and have extensively read the advice and tips on sites such as Problogger, Copyblogger and DavidRisley.com
  • Are looking for detailed technical information and step-by-step instructions
  • Are not interested in making your blog into a serious business platform

Who should buy the book?

It is for you if you if you:

  • Are not familiar with these A-lister bloggers and their stories
  • Are new to blogging and haven’t immersed yourself in best practices
  • Are committed to making an investment of time (and maybe some money) in your blog in return for building a real business of some sort
  • Are committed to an “authority blogging” approach — NOT a ‘make money quickly and easily by blogging’ approach

Is it worth buying?

If there’s one place the book falls short, it’s in the ‘here’s how to make money and still have lots of personal and family time.’ Though some probloggers may eventually achieve that goal, the profiles in Beyond Blogging make it clear that most of these folks have worked very, very hard for quite some time to achieve their success. Once they pass certain income levels, they may be able to hire others, set-up some things on autopilot and slow down a bit, but getting there required a lot of time and energy. However, let’s be honest: If this was easy, everyone would be doing it, and no one would be making hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars annually through these online platforms.

But if you are truly interested in building a real business (whether a blogging business or an offline business) using online media, Beyond Blogging is a great primer in the key practices involved in doing that.

If you want a fast-start on the authority-blogging practices — creating authoritative content, building a strong brand and leveraging that over time into an income-producing business — without having to slog through hundreds of individual blog posts and interviews, then this book is for you. There’s lots of good advice and tips that, if implemented seriously, will help you to earn back what you spent on the book, and a lot more.

If you’re interested, here’s my affiliate link: Buy Beyond Blogging. The authors do offer a money-back satisfaction guarantee, so your risk here is pretty low if you’re still not sure but you think it might be for you.

If you’ve read it, please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Filed Under: Blogging, Online marketing, Personal branding, Reviews, Social media Tagged With: , ,

Most useful online marketing posts of 2009

December 23, 2009 By

I wish I could say I’d written a bunch of these, but I didn’t. Nonetheless, Who’s Blogging What, a newsletter that rounds up the best in online marketing, has a great list of online marketing posts. There are 25 posts in each of five categories – social media, search marketing, user experience, email marketing and web analytics.

Want “Tips to Get People to Join Your Facebook Fan Page?” It’s there.

How about “Nine Effective Tips for a Better Landing Page?” It’s there, too.

Or “15 Best Places for Designers to Get Free Stock Photos Online?” Yep, it’s there, also.

And much, much more. For what it’s worth, Who’s Blogging What counts as one of my best finds this year, even though it’s been around for years. It’s one of those ideas that makes me slap my forehead and say ‘why didn’t I think of that.’ I didn’t, but fortunately someone else did.

Check out the list of the most useful online marketing posts of 2009.

Filed Under: Blogging, Content marketing, Microblogging, Online marketing, Personal branding, Resources, SEO, Social media
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