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Social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, are increasingly being used by organisations to help build and develop their brand online. Branding is essential for organisations to stand out and develop a superior status.

The brand’s personality must be clearly conveyed so that consumers can relate to the brand as it is the consumer who ultimately creates the brand’s meaning. One key way which social media helps develop the brand personality is by creating a community which allows consumers to affiliate and become part of the brand. By building the brand online, loyal communities are likely to develop with consumers who trust your brand. However, organisations have to ensure they are genuine about communicating the brand’s personality to avoid confusion and so consumers can relate to the brand and feel that it matches their personality.

There are several key things to do to ensure you successfully use social media to build your brand:

• Define your objectives – Define how you want to use social media to develop your brand. Social media will not have long term benefits to your brand if you do not have a clearly defined objective of how you want to position your brand
• Identify your target audience – Once you have determined your target audience, you can choose the appropriate social media sites to reach that audience. You can then create targeted and relevant content for your audience so they will be interested in joining your brand community. For example, if you want to develop a fashion brand online you may want to target a community interested in fashion, such as Fashion Network.
• Networking – By actively networking with other social media users, relationships are more likely to develop with your target audience, who will visit your site and help build your brand.
• Link Building – By including links to relevant sites with a similar or higher status to your own will potentially increase your own status and traffic due to developing a positive association.  By including frequent referrals in your own blog posts, other social media users are likely to reciprocate and refer to you as well. This will ultimately help develop your brand community.
• Monitor your reputation – To make sure you reach your branding objectives in using social media you have to monitor what other social media users are saying about you. This way you ensure you are conveying your intended message and you are creating the right brand image.

By following these key tips, you can use social media to successfully develop your brand online.

1. Agree a simple, discreet set of non-negotiable behaviours: Understand your cultural baseline and where you want to be strategically.  Then, in a series of senior management team workshops, brainstorm which behaviours will get you there.
2. Select your change ‘revolutionaries’ or champions: This requires a tight profile against which to recruit people, the most essential characteristic of which is that these revolutionaries should, like all good revolutionaries, have influence.  At its most potent this influence is informal i.e. not based on power, or position, or status. 
3. Engineer the behind-the-scenes processes: that enable, facilitate, empower and support your change champions. 
4. Let go and harvest the fruits: Let them loose, let them do what they are good at and reap the fruits of their actions. This requires a leadership which is happy to ‘let go’ – and probably the hardest part of viral change given the nature of most ‘leaders’!
5. Reward, reinforce and recognise:  an intelligently constructed reward structure which does not have to be expensive, yet is based on rewarding output not input.  Most often everywhere we reward input – i.e. the amount of time put into a job (leading to the pervasive culture of ‘presenteism’) rather than the quality or creativity of the work.

This looks simple and actually IS simple AND cost effective: in the hands of an expert only.  If Viral Change (TM) is implemented by someone who only thinks they know what they are doing; it will fail. Make sure you use an accredited practitioner.

Other posts you might enjoy:

• Interview with Dr Leandro Herrero – pioneer of Viral Change
• Cultural change = behavioural change

Online video-making

Part One – Planning:

With a rapid increase in the popularity of online video, how can you get your message heard above all others?

As part of a series of blog posts, I will be offering useful tips on how to create effective and successful online videos for your business, from pre to post production.

It is essential that documentary videos take audiences on an emotional or intellectual journey. For the purpose of marketing, your videos need to focus on the latter whilst incorporating the former. They need to inspire your audience to want to find out more about your message and take action.

Getting Good Grounding:

First of all, an effective way to get good grounding of your video is to map it out on a piece of A3 paper and set your objectives (spider diagrams are good for this). It is essential that the following points are thought out thoroughly:

1. Know your audience: It is imperative that you know exactly who your target audience is and your video ideas cater for their needs. Questions you need to think about here are: What does your audience want to know? What do you want your audience to think, feel and do? What benefits will it give them? What is it that you know but your audience does not? What would be their concerns? What would be their likely response?

2. Plan your message: When you have identified a topic area for your video, you need to think about what the initial take home message will be? It needs to be inspiring and informative, something that will make audiences act on what they have seen and heard.

3. Watch your time: Attention spans on the web are limited so keep your videos to approximately 4-5 minutes (pure talking head videos should be no longer than 3 minutes). Make a note of this and keep in mind when storyboarding.

4. Educate your audience, don’t hard sell: Using online video gives companies the opportunity to educate their specific market and audience sector. Videos that instruct, inform and enlighten will have far more impact on audiences. So, think about learning objectives for your video and make a note of them.

5. Structure your video: It is important that your videos have a beginning, middle and end and answer the questions: What? Why? Where? Who? and How?

6. Where will your message be heard?: Most online video sites have sharing and embedding capabilities. You and your video users can share videos with friends, colleagues, customers or clients on other social networking sites like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter. Think about where your videos are going to be hosted and who will have access to them.

Chiefs do Tweet

Everyday I talk to many business people and, whilst they usually have a personal Twitter account, they can’t quite see how it could benefit them as a business tool.

So we need a frame for this; a context within which Twittering as a business makes sense.  Wikinomics and the trend towards mass collaboration in business is already upon us. The rules of this game are openness, sharing, socialising (peering) and acting globally. Marketing is moving towards peer to peer generated conversations (pull) rather than the ‘push’ of mass broadcast campaigns. 

Twitter is fuel for the fire of buzz and collaboration around your business or brand.  But to be successful in the world of ‘Business 2.0′  you need to be ready for a culture shock (perhaps): what matters here is openness, authenticity and transparency.  You have to be prepared to be yourself, and show the person behind your company.

Here are some tips on Twittering for business:

1. Embrace the new rules: make sure your Twitter presence (profile, picture etc) and your tweets show your organisation as non-hierarchical, open and authentic and transparent. Tweet regularly and include a mix of business, but keep it informal, and personal, revealing bits about your unique personality. People buy people, especially those they trust; openness, authenticity and transparency build trust.
2. People to people: Be informal, forget hierarchy. Social media breaks all that gumpf down. Show your personal side in your bio; reveal the person (at least have a photo of yourself).
3. Ask and ye shall recieve: It goes without saying that sharing information will increase your popularity. In fact sharing information and forwarding what you know is the new networking according to Harvard Business. All the best business networkers share to get ahead. You can do this on Twitter by retweeting (RT), sharing links (use URL shorteners such as bit.ly, not tinyurl), and advertising your (interesting) blog posts.  But you can also power up your sharing by asking. Ask your followers for advice, input, questions for research – of course, feel free to offer them little rewards in return!
4. Admit your mistakes: all great samurais do this, and all the best leaders in business. If you get it wrong, admit it
5. Get socialising: get to know your followers and socialise with them. Ask them questions and share their information. Use @, RT’s, direct messages (DM) to engage and you will get more out of your Twitter network.

Many CEOs are Twittering. Twitter is micro-blogging and leads to exponential sharing of information and news in no more than 40 characters – what business leader would not be attracted to that!!Check out the following for some good examples:

• Tim O’Reilly - Chief Exec O’Reilly Media
• Christine Perkett - Chief Exec of PerkettPR
• Michael Hyatt - Chief Exec of Thomas Nelson

Other posts you might like:

• Getting Your Head Around Facebook for Business
• Use the Science of Influence to Leverage your Network on Twitter
• 7 Ways to Use Twitter to Power up your Online PR