The 7 keys to social branding

guest post by Tamsen McMahon

Despite lip-service to two-way communication, branding has often been a one-way effort: we decided what we wanted people to think about our companies and designed marketing and communications that made that happen.

Or so we hoped.

But a brand is the collective impression people gain not only from you and your marketing efforts, but from all of their interactions with you—and the interactions others have as well (newly amplified through social media).

That means we need to look at the process of branding in different way: through a social lens.

Yes, we still need to understand our competitive landscape, our customers, and ourselves. We still need to develop a common set of messages, reinforced visually. We still need to design, sustain, and retool our efforts so who we are and what we stand for remains clear—and compelling—to our customers. But each step now has new implications.

To make our branding efforts truly interactive—truly social—we need to incorporate seven key concepts: insight, identity, resonance, clarity, coherence, relevance, and leverage.

Insight “Know who you are, and what that means.”

All good branding starts with research. Traditionally, that meant looking at the internal and external landscape to determine a company-centric view of the organization and what it stands for.

That's no longer enough. You have to listen to what your customers are saying, too. You have to understand not only what you think you are, but what they think you are and can be, as well as why they really care.

For it’s that combination—what you think AND what they think—that determines your new, social reality.

Identity “Be who you are, become what you want to be.”

Your brand foundation—who you are and want to be as both a company and a brand—is as unique as a fingerprint. What your company exists to do, its main areas of endeavor, and its core values and attributes all combine to create an identity that’s yours alone.

Branding is, of course, the process of articulating that identity in ways people see, understand, and, most importantly, care about enough to pay for. But social media doesn’t allow for the smoke and mirrors. There’s nowhere to hide if what you say doesn’t match up with what actually is.

Knowing yourself, warts and all, gives you not only a strong foundation on which to build your social branding efforts, it leaves you prepared to have the bright light of social media shine on you.

Resonance “Know whom you serve, and why they care.”

Your brand is a chord, made of many different notes. Like sound, your brand (and the communications and interactions that create it) is what carries over time and distance, resonating with some people and not with others.

But your customers aren’t one note. They’re not a gender, or a demographic, or a salary. They’re people. We can’t just turn on the marketing speakers and wait for customers to come.

Social branding means discovering how your customers perceive your brand as part of their brand. It means looking at why they use your products, and how, and then tuning what you do to resonate more strongly.

Clarity “Speak your messages in their language.”

Everyone in this social space is talking at once, and your brand has to rise above the noise. How? By being as clear as a bell, much like a knife striking a glass can be heard throughout a room.

Your message—the encapsulation of who you are, for whom, and why people should care—has to be short... and shareable. Since your message has to survive distribution by people whose choice of words is not controlled by you, including those fans you’re working so hard to resonate with, social branding focuses on boiling down who you are to an “irreducible core.”

How that core is described can, and should, change depending on the audience. Your board speaks a different language about you than do your employees or your customers. That’s why clarity in social branding comes from concept, not content.

Coherence “Look the part, be the part.”

Your visual identity, the visual representation of all your brand is, is a symbol that carries the weight of a thousand words. It’s a combination of elements you can own (your name, logo, tagline, etc.) as well as elements you come to own through focused and repeated use (things like fonts, colors, or approach to imagery). UPS, for instance, doesn't “own” the color brown, but at least in the shipping business, they do.

But the very meaning of "visual identity" has evolved, becoming both more dynamic and more customized to your and your constituents' needs (Google changes its logo almost every day…). Yet this “mass customization” of appearance still has to make sense to your customers, and reinforce their individual impressions of you.

Think of the story where several blind men man touch a different part of an elephant… and totally disagree about what animal they touched. Your customers aren't blind. And you're not in a dark room—quite the opposite. No matter which part of your brand they touch, your customers need to understand that it all adds up to you.

Relevance “Put it together, and put it to work.”

Branding takes a lot of planning, and so does social media. Once upon a time there were only a few channels, so planning was easy: use the available channels, and pump your message out.

But now there are as many channels as people who interact with you (and, potentially, if not planned well, as many impressions of your brand). So planning your social branding efforts includes not only traditional channels, but also new and emerging ones, as well as planning how to structure your non-marketing operations (procurement, delivery, customer service, etc.) to ensure you’re supporting your brand there, too.

What matters now is mattering where it matters to be. And that likely looks very different than it did even three years ago.

Leverage “Own your brand, and keep it healthy.”

Your most important ally in social branding is… your own company. Social branding doesn’t exist in one department, it involves the entire organization—because everyone in your company contributes to the experience your customers have and the impression of your brand that develops as a result.

If our own people don’t support brand, your customers never will, it’s a simple as that. But if they do, well, that’s where the magic lies. That’s why building your brand from the grassroots up (not boardroom down), is so important—it helps ensure that your social branding efforts are credible… and sustainable.

Social branding’s goal is to make every employee, from top to bottom, a brand ambassador. It empowers your customers the same way.

The more connected people feel to you, and the more included they are in the stewardship of your brand, the more powerfully they can leverage their networks on behalf of yours.

Evolution “This is a process, not an event.”

People change, tastes change, tools change. Social branding is—has to be—an iterative process, a cycle that happens over and over again: understanding through to action… and back again.

While these seven elements are key now, it’s likely they, too, will change over time, in direct response to the marketplace it serves.

That is, after all, what social branding is all about.

[image courtesy of Daniele Rossi]

***

Tamsen McMahon specializes in helping people and organizations align strategies in service of change. She joined Sametz Blackstone Associates, a Boston-based brand strategy firm as the Director of Digital and Strategic Initiatives, after over 10 years of client-side experience, most recently as the Director of Development Communications at Harvard Medical School.

Comments

[A Maui Blog]

These are truly 7 Keys - very well said and explained. I will reference this post when I talk to people about social networking and brand (yes, social branding).

Aloha and Mahalo from Maui,
Liza

[Tom Gable]

Great list. I'd suggest adding Consistency and Authenticity. Some brands fail to connect because they don't communicate consistently and also lose their voice -- not sticking to supporting well-defined principles and theories with every message. This creates confusion. What do they really stand for? Keep up the good work.

[Rich Becker]

Tamsen,

Excellent sum up, some of which have been included in my classes for years. There is one thing to consider, however.

Not everyone in advertising always considered branding a one way communication event. Phil Dusenberry, former chairman of BBDO Worldwide, always come to mind.

“Brand is the relationship between a product and its customer,” he said.

Best,
Rich

[Tim Mancuso]

Excellent piece - will no doubt be a great resource and reference. Thanks Tamsen for sharing / posting.

-Tim Mancuso

[Peter Clayton]

This is an excellent list and I find it amazing how many Fortune 500 Companies remain in the dark ages (around 2006) regarding social media and their brand. PR Departments still think they can somehow "control the message." Huh? Have you heard about Twitter? The message has become real time. I have a career and leadership podcast (TotalPicture Radio www.totalpicture.com). We've all heard of the resume "black hole." Believe me, it's real. Especially with the cuts to HR and recruiting departments. It's the #1 complaint of job seekers. Do you really want your customers spending a half-hour cutting and pasting their resume into your "career portal" and then never hearing anything? Ever?
Is it really necessary to block your employees from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook? (Somewhere around 45% of large corporations do). And how many companies still have a policy of not allowing their employees to blog? "We're working on guidelines to allow our employees to blog. We're a publicly traded company and have compliance issues we must address." Have you ever heard that one? Google "IBM Social Media Guidelines" there you go. Get real.

[Tamsen McMahon (@tamadear)]

Thanks, all, for your comments!

Liza: Aloha and Mahalo to you, too! I spent some of my earliest years in Hawaii (my father was in the Navy), so glad I could give back in some small way.

Tom: Consistency is absolutely a key part of all of this--you can't establish coherence without it, otherwise things just don't make sense. The key with effective branding, especially in this age, is to make sure it can adapt in a way that makes sense. Great branding is about building a framework, not a prison.

Authenticity is a bit of a bugaboo of mine. As a concept, it gets misused a lot (often where people are really asking for integrity, transparency, or credibility). People and organizations are what they are and can't be otherwise. So even if they're acting unethically, or opaquely, they are still acting authentically. That's why I choose to use the concept of "identity" instead...to me, that's more about understanding who or what you *really* are, and the rest of the steps of branding build off that.

Rich: I agree there have always been folks who have truly understood that the best branding is actually empathic, where the company is able to see itself from its customers' perspective. For many, many more, however, the rise of social media and its empowering of consumers to have their voices heard, has revealed that a lot of supposedly two-way efforts were in fact thinly veiled campaigns to push a message out.

Tim: Thanks so much!

Peter: I like to define social media as the fusion of technology and human behavior. In other words, people will always behave like people--they always did and always will talk about the companies they work for--but now they have new tools with which to do it, and with which the companies can actually see and hear the conversations. I don't believe the "No! policy" approach can last forever...human nature is too strong. ;)

[Q.Rafiq]

simply brilliant. A very useful resource. thanks for sharing

[LouAnn]

Great overview really enjoyed it and look forward to sharing it as a resource. Thanks for putting it together

[Dr. Kelly Page]

This is a ood list of key elements to consider in social branding. However one thing that could also be included is 'real, in real time and making a real impact'. Traditionally marketers and brand managers have not engaged in real conversations with their communities or markets, have been limited in the 'real time' communications they can have with their brands communities (and their attitude to these brand communications as evidence by the rise in off-shore customer service operations) and are also limited in the real impact they can have on the lives and attitudes of the community surrounding a brand. So being real is a very important element to consider in the evolving space of building social brand equity.

Here is an example of how a community of music consumers engaged in real time, in real conversation/WOM and had a real impact on the sales of one music single in the UK, and in turn showed a huge flaw in the marketing and a gap in social brand equity of global music franchise - Simon Cowells - x-factor - it's not real.

http://caseinsights.com/index.php/2010/01/01/rage-against-the-x-factor/

But great post!
Kelly
:-)

[Tamsen McMahon (@tamadear)]

Kelly: I agree, and consider "being real" as a critical part of Identity. You can't fake a fingerprint, and you can't fake Identity either, at least not over the long haul. As I said, social media doesn't tolerate smoke and mirrors.

Your points on real-time are well-taken, and are an excellent addition to the idea of Leverage, of keeping your brand healthy.

[Webxiom Framework]

Thanks. Great time spend to reading and write this comment. http://www.Webxiom.com opinion is to target messages to the interested audience and create successful Social Media Visitor Optimization that trust the Social Media Brand. It is bad to see how Business uses the social media this days to throw links and human energy to build useless targeted messages. For example: http://blog.webxiom.com gets about 50 useless messages a day that we delete all the time, because they are not connected to our audience.

Thanks again to http://www.conversationagent.com/ and Happy New Year to everyone.

[Financial Samurai]

Love this consultancy speak. I definitely want to be a consultant once I retire. Thanks for the post!

[Michael Klein]

You mentioned it in your comment responses, but I think that importance of credibility can't be underestimated.

Organizations really need to understand that they can't make lavish claims that aren't supported by proof/action. It's too easy to get 'called out' and nothing starts a twitterstorm like a BS claim.

You have to walk-the-walk before you can talk-the-talk so to speak.

[Daniele Rossi]

That's my photo! I mean, I took that photo ;) And very fitting - that was taken during PodCamp Montréal last year.

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Websicom - I left that comment there as a lesson for us all.

@Financial Samurai - that must have been written in code.

@Michael - proof/action work.

@Daniele - at it's properly attributed, I hope. I just loved how she looked like Amelie. Having met Tamsen at the Inbound Marketing Summit and then Web 2.0 Expo, it felt like a genuine shot of her. Thank you for doing such a good job with it!