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As I mentioned in my last blog post, social media is a great way to help build and develop brands online. However, finding the right type of social media is critical to developing your brand successfully.

Social media is about interaction and dialogue and the conversations your audience have about your brand. It is extremely important you choose a social media site which your audience use and has the key features that you require.  Choosing the most popular social media site may be ineffective if it doesn’t include the features which you need. Also, not every brand is a conversation starter so social media may not be for everyone.

The key things to consider when choosing which social media sites are right for you are:

• Target Audience – It is important to find out which social media sites your target audience use.  By researching the user’s demographics in their profiles on different social media sites, you can find out which social media to target to reach your specific demographic.

If your brand is in a specialist industry it is important to choose a social media site aimed at that niche market as it will help build high quality relationships with the relevant audience.  For example, if you want to develop you restaurant online a popular social media site you may choose to use is: http://www.fohboh.com/

• Choosing relevant content – Make sure your content is relevant to your target audience by looking at the content on the social media sites which your audience use.  If your content is interesting and relevant to your audience they are more likely to join your online brand community.

• Your objectives – Find out what features different social media sites offer and whether they will meet your objectives. If your main objective is to network, you may want to choose a social media site that allows you to send messages and share links with other users and create groups. As social media is used to interact and develop conversations, it is important that this is a key objective.

These important considerations will help you decide which social media site is appropriate to build your brand. Ideally, choose a general social media aimed at a large audience to increase your brand awareness but also focus on a niche site to help build your brand and relationships.

Viral Change is not Tsunami change

Have you been through significant structural change recently? Or implemented new IT systems perhaps? Have you undergone a number of clever strategic initiatives yet something is still stuck?  People aren’t quite doing what they need to?  The culture isn’t where you would like it to be?  Many of the best organisations we work with suffer from a blame culture where fear of failure and silo mentality is rife.  Others see a lack of ownership and an attitude of ‘it’s not my responsibility’.  And many are frustrated with the wasted time in meetings and not being productive and of course, the time it takes to make effective decisions and get things done.

If you are 80 per cent of where you should be – is that good enough? Of course not. That extra 20 per cent (like Pareto said) is difference between ‘also ran’ and blue oceans. Yet traditional management or change management programmes won’t get you there. But Viral Change TM will.

Viral Change is Not a Change Management Programme

Despite having ‘change’ in its title, Viral Change is not a ‘change management programme’. You may be familiar with most organisational change programmes: mechanistic, big, driven from the top, expensive, a big set of complex actions with lots of ‘push’ corporate style internal communications. Well guess what? It doesn’t work.  

‘It’s the old problem of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic! Superficially, one can create the impression of making a lot of changes; but at the base level, nothing of significance may have really changed.’       Morgan, 1993

Remember what Gandhi said: “We need to become the change we want to see in the world.”  It is people who change other people: not processes, not systems, certainly not Village Hall corporate comms meetings! As a spokesperson at Pfizer told Dr Leandro Herrero, pioneer of Viral Change, “Change only happens when people see those around them changing” .

Creating Tipping Points

Viral Change is butterfly change (my words) – in that, like the butterfly effect, small changes at individual level end up having a far-reaching, ripple effect on the larger system. In Viral Change a small set of behaviours is spread, imitated, endorsed by a small network of people and this spreads new ways quickly through influential peer to peer .  The overall effect is sustainable changes created mainly by the internal ‘infection’ of success, and the achievement of tipping points.

Instead of focusing on processes and what is visible and manageable (the traditional linear, left brain approach), Viral Change recognises that the most important ways that change needs to occur cannot be controlled.  This is because an organisation is not a machine, it is a collection of individual human beings: a living system.  And living systems cannot be controlled like machines, not for long-term well being anyway, but rather have to be disturbed with impulses that will cause the system to react and make choices about what to do.

Living Systems Need Disruptions to Initiate Choice

Ever come across the concept of ‘self organising systems’?  Rather than change being driven from the top down, individuals and their individual actions create big change in the system.  This way the system is self organising.  Watch how these starlings roost – it looks like chaos but small behaviours lead to massive system change:

Small impulses in these massive flocks of birds, are interpreted and acted upon by the system and, out of what looks like chaos, a single impluse (ie ‘roost’) initiates massive change that tips the whole system into roost. Viral Change approach directs meaningful impulses into the system to influence large and sustainable changes.  We’ll talk more about those impulses in our next post.

Please comment and contribute to this discussion by posting your own thoughts and comments!

Other posts you might enjoy:

• How to implement Viral Change TM
• Interview with Dr Leandro Herrero about Viral Change TM
• Cultural Change is behavioural change

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.

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

facebook is good for business!

I often get asked by clients about using Facebook for business.  “I know how to use Facebook, I have hundreds of friends and use it all the time,” a client said the other day. “I just can’t get my around using it for business.”

Think of Facebook as a cross between a blog and Twitter, where you can get a database driven real time streaming of user-generated content that allows sharing of links, photos, videos and much more.  Then Facebook is a powerful tool for businesses to build community and collaboration with their audiences. 

Perhaps you are a business which sells to other businesses (B2B) and want to influence end users and have them become part of your community.  Briggs Equipment did this successfully with its ForkLift Heroes Facebook page .Following some research, the materials handling provider realised that if it could engage the end users, the actual drivers of the forklifts that it sells, it could help to reduce damage bills and increase safety in the workplace for its clients. 

So it launched an integrated campaign, using trade and local press and online coverage, with the Facebook page being one of the ways that end users engaged with the brand. Anyone who signed up for the campaign, got a ‘Hero’ pack and you can see some of them wearing their t-shirts on the Facebook site. The hidden benefit of this campaign was that some of the company’s major national account customers took up the campaign as part of their own internal communications, to great success. Fans who join the page post pictures and even videos of their antics with Forklifts and what they are doing to care for them now they have their ‘hero’ packs from Briggs.

Target is a retail company that uses Facebook very successfully with over half a million fans on its page.  It posts useful videos to help people shop, has an interesting college page and encourages open dialogue with its customers through its ‘Review’ page.  It has customised its ‘Tab’ to include disccusions, video and College 09 to make its page more relevant.

A Facebook group may be the better option for you.  SmallbizPod has an active member community and Alex Bellinger, its founder, gains a significant amount of business through Facebook.

Rather than just jumping on the Facebook-for-business  band waggon, because you think it is trendy, you need to consider Facebook as a marketing tool.  And like any marketing campaign, you will need to have a strategy for how you will use your Facebook page. 

Consider the following when you are setting up your business Facebook page:

1. Who is your target audience?  and what are your objectives in trying to engage them?
2. What apps will you use?  Some to include are:
   1. Social RSS or networked blogs so that you can stream your blog and Twitter feeds into your Facebook page.
   2. Video apps – including Facebook’s own which is now pretty good.
3. What is your objective?  How many fans will you consider a ‘success’? How much conversation do you want to happen?
4. How will you promote the page and encourage people to participate?  A Facebook advert can sometimes help but there are many other ways.

Finally, like all social media marketing, you will need to be prepared for a cultural change.  Facebook is about user generated content and letting your audience create copntent and participate with your brand or your company.  So be prepared to loosen the reins on control!