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Brand positioning takes on a new meaning in a Hyper-Social world

by francois gossieaux on 11/10/2009 19:38   2 comments , 2640 views
Categories: Marketing
Tags: branding

brandingtagsmSome pundits will tell you that you should do away with brand messaging and positioning all together, since you cannot control it anyway. Not so fast! People need to know what bucket to put your offering in, and if they can’t, they won’t know how to assign value to what you have to offer. Tivo ended up in that pickle, with consumers not quite sure what category of products to compare the offering with. Was it more like a DVD player or was it more like a computer?

Knowing that a good positioning will impact your revenue and profits, and realizing that you still have a seat at the customer decision making table (it’s just a much more crowded table and your share of voice has significantly been reduced) you need to develop a point of view about your positioning and try to get it co-opted by your tribe. Like in most social interactions, your chances to get someone to adopt your point of view are going to increase if you involve them early on. The more say you give them in the process of co-creating your products and services, and the earlier you get them involved (preferably at the product concept stage) the more they will embrace a shared view of the brand and product positioning. . ... read more >>

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+1 1 vote

Half of bloggers will post about brands they love or hate

by dirkthecow on 10/23/2009 05:08   1 comment , 3191 views
Categories: Social Customer, Blogging
Tags: reputation management, branding
Technorati is carrying on with it's annual State of the Blogosphere report, which it has been drip-feeding out over the week. Day four's results look at how some bloggers make money by selling ads, as well as - of more interest - how they feel about brands.

Unsurprisingly 70% talk about brands on their blogs. Really I would have thought that it would be higher as surely it's almost impossible not to mention brands or products in some shape or form in posts, even incidentally.

Less than one in five (18%) bloggers post product reviews at least once a week but at the same time almost half (46%) say that "I blog about brands that I love or hate." This rises to 55% of so-called part-timers, or casual bloggers.

So the lesson from that is that the scope for sending bloggers your stuff with a request for a review might be limited depending on who you target (some do welcome it).

However, there is potential for proactively establishing a relationship with key bloggers in the hope that they might 'love' your brand...as well as making sure that you don't get on the wrong side of them so that you fall into the 'hate' category and end up having your search engine ...

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Consumers Need to Hear About You via Social Media... then they'll search for your brand

by dirkthecow on 10/08/2009 04:30   2 comments , 2448 views
Categories: Strategy, Marketing
Tags: branding, wom, seo strategy

Despite various stats that cast doubts on the effectiveness of online advertising in general, the one area that is generally held to be a success is paid for search. New research by Comscore and GroupM (via Marketing Charts) now shows that if consumers have had exposure to brands via social media, they are more likely to be receptive to search terms related to brands.

Comscore's results show that consumers that use social media are 1.7x as likely to search with the intention of sifting through a list of brands or products to check out, compared to other web users. Meanwhile 50% of ''social media exposed" surfers searched for product terms every day, compared to 33% of "non exposed surfers."

In all, people exposed to "influenced social" and paid search has 223% heavier search behaviour.

Two stats to throw against that. First of all, Comscore didn't specify whether brand social media engagement was restricted to advertising. I assume not, especially given the statistic that social network ads fail to engage 96% of users.

But on a wider note, it does again show that brand conversation (as opposed to advertising) on social networks works. 20% of tweets are ...

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iSnack 2.0... Kraft Foods Crowdsourcing Boomerangs Down Under

by Daniel Young on 10/07/2009 06:02   0 comments , 2897 views
Categories: Social Customer, Marketing
Tags: branding, kraft, australia branding, isnack 2.0

Kraft today announced that Australians have voted for a name to replace the seriously unpopular and high criticised iSnack 2.0.

Kraft gave customers the opportunity to vote for one of six names in response to the negative publicity.  We’re told that around 10,000 customers voted for Cheesybite, equivalent to 36% of the total vote making it the most popular name -  just pipping ‘none of the above’.

Kraft pollWhat seemed like a good idea to involve its customers in the process of naming a new product has turned into a significant issue for the marketing team and senior management.

On the upside, the fiasco has garnered fantastic exposure for the product and extended the lifespan of the campaign (though not by design).  It seems fairly obvious that the Cheesybite name would have generated far less collumn inches had the iSnack 2.0 debacle been avoided all together.

On the downside, Kraft has lost credibility with the media, the blogging community and other influencers.  But does that matter?  The grocery decision maker would probably have discussed the iSnack 2.0 name as a result of the media coverage. I doubt that the name change will have a negative influence on ... read more >>

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Lessons from AiMA: Big Brands Discuss Social Media

by Dan Greenfield on 10/05/2009 08:59   0 comments , 1882 views
Categories: Strategy
Tags: branding, corporate social media adoption

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Put Comcast, the American Red Cross and AT&T in a room to talk social media, and you are going to get a crowd.  And that’s what happened at last Wednesday’s sold out Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association (AiMA) monthly meeting - Big Brands Discuss Social Media Initiatives.

The verdict:  PR (no ROI!) and logos did not fair well but passion, Twitter and customer support did.   And Facebook got mixed a review.

Those are at least some of the highlights from the Twitter stream of members of the crowd who came to hear the observations of:

- Frank Eliason, Senior Director in National Customer Operations, Comcast @comcastcares

- Mimi Chan, Director of Wireless Youth Marketing, AT&T

- Wendy Harman, Social Media Manager, Red Cross @wharman

- Dave Williams, CEO and Co-Founder, BLiNQ Media’s @blinqmedia

For an excellent summary of the evening check out Josh Martin’s post.

As event organizer Toby Bloomberg pointed out, the three panelist delivered three distinct perspectives: social media as customer service, social media as youth marketing and social media as community/non-profit outreach.

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The crowd size reveals how hungry people ... read more >>

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Creating Memorable Brand Experiences using the Social Web

by Michael Brito on 09/16/2009 04:32   0 comments , 1713 views
Categories: Social Customer, Strategy, Marketing
Tags: branding, customer engagement

The branding guys up on the 6th floor may not agree with me but sometimes it’s the little things you do that can drive influence and delight your customers. It’s these little things that don’t necessarily require a branded microsite overloaded with marketing messages or a cool piece of rich media.  Sometimes it’s as little as listening to the community and acting.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post for Brian Solis’s blog, PR.20 that highlighted the recent study conducted by Charlene Li of the Altimeter group.  The study looked at the top 50 brands and measured their level of engagement on the social web. The study also looked at the financial performance of each brand and the results revealed something very interesting.  The brands that engage with their customers more deeply enjoyed increases in revenue during the reporting period.  A closer examination reveals that the top brands, specifically Dell and Starbucks do an excellent job listening to customer feedback. More importantly, they are taking that feedback and acting on it. And in my opinion, that act alone has created memorable brand experiences for their customers.

CASE STUDY

On a much smaller scale, I ... read more >>

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A Framework for Branding Through Social Media

by Jordan Julien on 09/03/2009 20:51   3 comments , 6986 views
Categories: Marketing
Tags: social media, branding

I suggest there are 5 primary models a brand can use to communicate with its audience via social media. (These models can be applied to other media as well, but some work much better, and are much easier to execute using social media.)

  1. Direct Communication
  2. Communications Catalyst
  3. Cooperative Communication
  4. Participatory Definition
  5. Brand Embodiment


Direct Communication: Occurs when a brand communicates... 

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MIT’s Personas project and owning your brand equity online

by Matt Rhodes on 08/23/2009 13:29   0 comments , 1342 views
Categories: Social Networks
Tags: branding, mit

MIT Logo

Image via Wikipedia

One of the latest projects from the MIT Media Lab is Personas. The concept is simple and the results are impressive. Just input your name and it searches the web for mentions of this name to put it in context. It then analyses each of these instances of your name to build a profile of how the web sees you. Are you more ’sports” or more ‘books’, more ‘military’ or more ‘music’? Of course, if you happen to share your name with other people, your results will be subject to what is perhaps best thought of as ‘noise’. Take a look at my profile below to see what happens (it’s useful to know that I share my name with American Footballers, an artist and a singer in a band).

Matt Rhodes Persona

The main problem that the Personas project faces is the same problem that many of us face online: names are not unique identifiers. There are many many Matt Rhodes in the world, using the Internet and being written about for what they do. To me, the Matt Rhodes who is an American Footballer is ‘noise’. To him, the Matt Rhodes in London who write about social media and marketing is also ‘noise’. We need something cleverer than names to identify people and something cleverer than names to ... read more >>

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Don’t forget about Identity

by Spike Jones on 08/13/2009 08:16   0 comments , 1300 views
Categories: Strategy, Marketing
Tags: branding, identity

I’m talking to you “everyone should be using social media” folks. And I’m tired about talking about social media. So let’s talk about something that’s way, WAY bigger: your identity. Your brand. Who you are and what you believe in as a company. Your culture. All of it - it’s your identity.

Who are you?

Who are you?

And before you can think about the tools, before you get yourself all tool and tactic-ized to death, remember that it has to be rooted in you. Your tone-of-voice. Your attitude. Your language. And be authentic to you. I hate to use Apple as an example (because everybody uses them as an example for everything), but the company that just about everyone strives to be like has just about no presence in social media. Why? Because they are being true to who they are.

If you’re struggling with your identity, then you’re probably struggling with everything else. And the beautiful thing is that once you really know who you are and why you exist, everything else becomes clear as day. How you should engage people. What tools you should use. How you should reframe the conversation. What conversations you should even be participating in.

Everything starts with identity. And if you’re ... read more >>

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Managing Your Brand on Twitter

by Dan Greenfield on 08/06/2009 11:52   1 comment , 2435 views
Categories: Marketing
Tags: branding, twitter

dollar-piles1 twitter3

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Screen Grab from ENGAGEMENTdb Report

Brands are worth billions of dollars to companies, and companies will go to great lengths to protect them offline and online. Type the name of a brand on Google, and your first result is certainly going to be the website of the company who owns it.  The same can’t be said when you search for a brand on Twitter.

No question Twitter is gaining corporate acceptance.  A new Burson-Marsteller and Proof Digital Media analysis found that in 2009, Twitter surpassed blogging as the social media platform of choice — at least among the Fortune 100.  Or take Charlene Li’s ENGAGEMENTdb analysis of the world’s 100 most valuable brands. The most engaged brands like Starbucks, SAP, Toyota and Dell are using it with great success.

At the same time, in searching for the 100 most valuable brands on Twitter, I found roughly 75 percent don’t appear to own the Twitter page that bears their brand name.  And for some of those that do like @thomsonreuters and @amazon, the pages seem generic or worse like @colgate under lock and key. (The words “Welcome to the World of Colgate-Palmolive” don’t seem very welcoming.)

colgate

Take McDonalds ... read more >>

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