Mike’s Points

Facebook is where most every aspect of my life collides. There, my friends include people from grade school, high school and college; people I worked with at three of the five post-college jobs I’ve had; people who I have met via social media and some I have worked for as a contractor; and my immediate family and extended family like cousins.

My professional and personal lives.

Twitter is similar to Facebook in that the lines are blurred between professional and personal in who I follow and who  follows me.

But, hey, that’s social media, right?

So listen up all you companies: You can’t really have your employees tweeting, facebooking, blogging, etc., just about your company. Personal aspects will naturally flow into those messages.

And that’s a good thing. Sure, go ahead and have guidelines and policies to try to ensure that those tweets are not bashing the food you serve or other potentially negative social media mentions. But, do know and trust that it won’t be all business.

Because life is not all business.

Because life is social.

Because social media is, well, social and, as I just said, it’s life.

Social media is nothing more than a set of tools that, among other benefits, allows companies and organizations to add a very personal touch to their often cold aura. You can enhance your organization’s  brand, reputation, image — whatever — by making it more human.

And, by being more human, yes, it will make mistakes and look bad at times. But, people are forgiving so accept and move on. Ultimately, your organization will be better for it — or it will be if you listen and learn, and help your people be your company.

Okay, rant over. Move on with your day.

Thank you for taking the time to read. Please leave your feedback if it’ll make you feel any better.

-Mike

Image: “red lines” courtesy of Claudio_r at  http://www.flickr.com/photos/28571975@N08/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

A worthwhile ad, slogan, headline, etc., has three key ingredients:

• It has to be memorable.
• It has to easily convey its message — no lag time in understanding it.
• Its message has to have some type of selling aspect to it — influences your purchase decision.

A lot of the Bud Light TV commercials are great — but they’re little more than entertainment. If that’s what Bud Light is trying to achieve — make you think well of its beer — fine. If that’s not Bud Light’s intend, it’s lost on me. If it is, funny beer commercials don’t make me want to buy beer.

If an ad, tagline, etc., easily conveys its message but it does not have a lasting impression, you have to keep seeing it to keep it top-of-mind when you are ready to purchase (assuming the message registers positively with you). But, like many things, repetition causes us to gloss over things. Go numb to the purpose.

Many years ago, a former employer worked with the Toledo Zoo in its marketing communications. Together, LMG and the zoo developed a great line:

Everybody’s zooing it

And, there were other variations (”the newest thing to zoo” and so on).

It was catchy and memorable, and demonstrated the zoo as an action: If you’re going to the zoo, you’re zooing it. It generated a positive, desirable feel to going to the zoo.

It was the basis for many short-term campaigns. For a time, it even became part of Toledo’s pop culture (see #22). And, of course, there was the “everybody’s zooing it” song. (Archive.org is a great site!)

And, though the Toledo Zoo is no longer using the “zooing” it campaign, it still resonates with the Toledo and area community. This picture (right) was taken from my kids’ elementary school.

That’s a sign of a great slogan.

So, while achieving one or two of the three points above is nice, you’ll miss your mark if you can’t achieve all three points. It’s not easy, but it is necessary.

-Mike

A little while ago, I published a post about personal branding versus corporate branding. It was based on a post by Paul Chaney. Later, David Binkowski wrote on a different perspective about it. There’s still a lot of great potential for great discussion about the pros and cons of an employee who blogs at his/her own blog, gets a huge following and that impact on the employer, and on and on and on.

While thinking (again) about it Tuesday morning, it hit me. It’d be fun to take a little test.

Below are lists of well-known bloggers and corporate blogs. For the bloggers, can you name the employer? For the corporate blogs, can you name the blogger (or any, for those with multiple authors)?

Name that employer!

1. Steve Rubel (okay, gotta include some gimmes)
2. Jason Fallis
3. Chris Brogan
4. David Binkowski
5. Kevin Dugan
6. Josh Hallett
7. Paul McEnany
8. Matt Dickman
9. Leo Bottary
10. Robert Scoble (don’t ya still first think MSFT?)

Note: While there are many great female bloggers out there, the ones I’m most familiar with who have their own blog have their own agency or a solo practice. All of the bloggers above work for a company. For the next Name that list, I need to expand my blogger reading list.

Name a blogger!

1. BlogWorks
2. GM FastLane (yeah, that’s a gimme, too)
3. Airfoil Public Relations’ Clear the Air blog
4. Authenticities
5. Randy’s Journal (last name required for this answer )
6. Graco Blog
7. National Association of Manufacturers’ ShopFloor
8. Dell’s Direct2Dell (yeah, should be another gimme!)
   
9. Molson
10. Adobe Blogs (a collection of all Adobe blogs)

So, how’d you do? (Remember, we’re on the honor system here.)

-Mike

(UPDATED 8/13/08 approx. 7:20 a.m.: Revised the headline to reflect new thoughts on the subject had this morning. Original headline was: “When should personal branding take a backseat to corporate branding?” and added some additional points at the bottom.)
Paul Chaney has a great post with even better comments on personal branding. Go over there and read it, if you haven’t already. I’ll wait…

Okay, welcome back!

In your reading, you probably saw what I think is a great summary of the benefits of personal branding — and the problem with personal branding. It was a comment by Chris Brogan:

“[P]ersonal brands are best when used in synergy with an organization that understands them…. I think that Jason Falls is a god amongst men, and if he quits his job tomorrow and joins Jaiku, I’ll leave Twitter in support. “

Personal branding has tremondous benefits to the employer of the person.

Robert Scoble was almost as synonymous with Microsoft (before he left) as Bill Gates is.

Steve Rubel probably brought more recognitiion to CooperKatz while he was building Micro Persuasion than the firm had before (and since?)

But, when each gentleman — and I’m sure many other gentlemen and ladies — left their respective company, they took their personal brand with them. They didn’t “leave” it with their employer. Heck, that personal brand is what made them so valuable.

So, while the employer definitely benefits from the personal branding effect, it loses some of its own business branding when that employee leaves. Just like Brogan said of Jason Falls: “[I]f he quits his job tomorrow and joins Jaiku, I’ll leave Twitter in support.” (I don’t mean to imply that Falls works for Twitter; just meant to show the potential power for a personal brand.)

For a business to be successful in social media — and personalize, put a face on the cold, hard corporate image — it must establish its own blog or other social medium. It’s that simple.

Look at the tried and true Bob Lutz at GM FastLane Blog. Or, the original Randy at Boeing. Or, more recently, look at Dell’s Lionel Menchaca. These are corporate blogs — with a personal front. Not personal blogs that give a by-product benefit to the corporation.

However, when Randy Baseler left Boeing, did “Randy’s Journal” and Boeing have the same perception? Or, did it take some time for the new Randy to establish his — and hopefully enhance Boeing’s — brand?

When Lutz and Menchaca and other corporate bloggers leave their respective employers, how much will the company suffer? That’ll depend on how closely those bloggers are associated with the company, who else is blogging (and their personal brand), and the strength of the corporate brand.

I’m not being critical of either personal branding or definitely not corporate branding. But, companies tend to last a lot longer than individuals do with those companies. Personal branding ultimately benefits the person. Companies should take advantage of that, but don’t be surprised when that person leaves — and there’s a social, personal void.

-Mike

Often, one of the best results from reading blogs is that it spurs other, related thoughts.

The judgement and weight given to how you differentiate your brand and the need for clarity in communication came to mind after reading the Mark Cuban/BlogMaverick post on Branding and Newspapers, a Lesson in How Not to Brand and Market.

He makes several noteworthy points about the value of differentiation in branding. For example:

Never, ever, ever consider something that any literate human being with Internet access can create in under 5 minutes to be a product or service that can in any way differentiate your business.

If you feel that you must offer this product or service as a means of “keeping up” or as a checklist item that you must have for competitive reasons, then do everything possible to brand the product or service in a manner that segregates it from the masses. Perception is reality. If you can leverage your existing brand to create the perception that yours is different from the masses in some meaningful way, then you must do everything you can to do so.

Creating a perceived differentiation can take the form of promoting better execution or quality of the product or service, or it may be something as simple as just branding it with a different name than the mass product or service.

Failure to do so will pull your brand down to that of the masses or elevate the masses to a position of being better able to compete with you.

For the most part, the emotional ties around a brand are what make it a success, a failure or just mediocre. The strengths of the brand are what allows the company to survive a crisis, and what propels the company to continued growth beyond competitors. And, for weak brands that have no emotional ties and rely on other activites like low-end pricing and commoditization, they struggle in times of crisis and the regular, cyclical market downturns.

But, part of that branding is to clearly communicate what’s so different. Educating the market is often unnecessary time and costs spent away from effectively marketing the brand — and communicating what’s so different, so special, so unique, so in-demand about it.

Sure, education plays into the branding process, but it can be an up-hill climb and distracting from the core message.

Just because someone can quickly, easily duplicate the appearance of what you’ve done — copy a blog like the one you have — it doesn’t mean the content and the quality are also copied. A blog is just a platform. The content is what makes it different.

I’ve been working on this post in my head since Friday. Before finishing it Tuesday evening, I checked back on Mark Cuban’s blog. Lo and behold there was a comment on another post that makes my point — and makes it better. It comes from NYTimes Sports Editor Tom Jolly:

[T]he defining difference among all news sources has been whether the reporting is reliable - and that has been the case since the beginning of time. When you need information - real, trustworthy information - you go to the source you believe in, whether they are distributing their content by word of mouth, on a cave wall, via pamphlet, newspaper, magazine or through a digital format.

We call our “real time” news reports “blogs” because it’s a term our readers have become familiar with, but what we do with our blogs is different than, say, Deadspin or BlogMaverick. The convention is popular because of the ease of posting, but that doesn’t mean the content of our postings is the same as other sites that also describes themselves as “blogs,” any more than the content of our newspaper is the same as other newspapers.

As with any branding effort, there are judgment calls in how to proceed. Yes, you need to set your brand apart from others in the marketplace — but you can’t confuse the marketplace with your communication.

There is no right or wrong answer in the process — until you start getting results and you see where you need to better differentiate or more clearly communicate.

–Mike