Show Them Who You Are

This week we’re meeting with a new consulting company to listen to some of their marketing dilemmas. They’re excited about a tremendous opportunity with a multi-national manufacturer. Yet despite their impressive backgrounds and early success, the company needs help. They need help organizing their business process and translating their service offerings into tangible, easy-to-understand documentation. They need a way to reach new clients and to present their solutions simply, cohesively, and with memorable impact. Of course, as they’ve come to realize, such feats are not easy to accomplish on their own.

The failure with marketing communications most often occurs when companies fail to develop their brand strategy. An effective business process is not enough to win over new prospects. A company must be able to effectively communicate their basic value propositions and their unique way of doing business. They must, in effect, become “self-aware.”

Corporate Identity

A corporate identity that is “self aware” starts with identifying a company’s core values. This step is often glossed over by ambitious upstarts. “We already know who we are” is the common thinking here. Yet the overuse of stock images and photography is a clear example that companies don’t know who they are. Everyone thinks their company can succeed if they’d just be given the chance. Below are three requirements for building a brand strategy that invests in more than just wishful thinking…

1)    Identity your core values and what differentiates you from your competition.

2)    Communicate your basic value propositions through high-quality imagery, photography, and messaging.

3)    Breathe life into your corporate identity with an integrated online and offline marketing strategy.

In order to build a foundation for you company’s brand, start with the cement. Invest in a marketing partner that can help you envision, create, and reach new opportunities. Invest in the dream of creating the best firm or company in your industry or market niche. Isn’t that why you’re in business in the first place? Of course it is. Yet we cannot do it alone. We need the strategic and tactical help of partners similarly invested in our success.

It’s about community and it’s about passion. It’s about living in real-time and looking at our colleagues with respect and admiration. It’s about participating in the ongoing conversation.

If you’re new to marketing or social media, the cries ring loud and clear: “Get on board! The train is leaving the station, don’t get left behind!” You know you must act, and you’ve waited too long as it is. It’s time to get on, and if you’re really motivated you can still get that first-class ticket.

“But where do I start? What will it cost? And where will I see the results?” Though the answers will vary from company to company, the common denominator is this: Think slim, think smart, and start now.

Before you can bring your new products and services to market, the focus must be to differentiate, to communicate, and to connect. Your messaging and your ideas must be clear, effective and—in an age of shortened attention spans—to the point! Take a look at the following internet statistics from over the past five years:

• “A recent Logitech study revealed that people, on average, have six applications open on their computer at any one time, and the active window switches or a new window opens every 50 seconds.” ~Logitech

• “Users won’t read your text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner. Exhaustive reading is rare, especially when prospective customers are conducting their initial research to compile a shortlist of vendors.” ~Askmepc Webdesign (from “How People Read a Web Page”)

• Users read half (50%) the content on those web pages with 111 words or less. For web pages containing 200+ words, users read only between 20% and 40%. ~from “Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use.” Provided by Jakob Nielsen.

Personal computing, along with marketing, has indeed come a long way. When we think about content today, we know we’re in a numbers game competing for visitors. But content is still king. And he is a thinner king and a slicker king. And like anyone in power, he never takes his throne for granted.

For those who are unfamiliar with Gary Vaynerchuk, I suggest watching this video three times—once to take in the size of his personality, a second time to really listen to what he is saying, and a third to really, really listen to what he is saying.

To make it easier, here are some key points he hits upon about the social media game. For those just getting out of the gate, I’ve added some clarifying points and suggestions…

It turns out that Eli Schulman himself, founder of Eli’s Cheesecake Company, was an avid social networker. Eli kept track of customers’ visits to his restaurant by writing down dates on check stubs. If he saw someone hadn’t stopped in lately, he’d make sure to call and personally invite them back. Eli would be proud to know that today his company forges ahead with an ambitious online marketing strategy, currently exceeding 1200 fans on their Facebook Fan Page and 1800 followers on Twitter.

As the Facebook presentation began, no one really knew what direction it would take. However, its main intent was soon revealed: to inform area professionals of the great benefits in purchasing ad space on Facebook.

The excitement in the eyes of Brad Keown, Midwest Director of Sales at Facebook, bore testimony to the popular social network’s increasingly aggressive pursuit of advertising dollars. What is happening, as you will see, is nothing less than an online ad-space takeover.

Brad outlined some of the key benefits behind “social graphs” and “self-service advertising,” which allow advertisers to include or exclude potential customers based on information extracted from Facebook users’ profile information. Put in plain terms, Facebook deploys crawlers which pull information from your private profile for the express purpose of target marketing. In other words, anything you include in your profile information—basic information, personal interests, etc.—is fair game for advertisers.

The term “organic search” is used to describe how the process works. No individual is browsing through your information. It’s the FB web crawlers that do this. That’s how you get “targeted” ads on the right column of your FB page—essentially ads organically selected by FB robots.

So what’s the big deal? The big deal is that the need to search for products and services online diminishes with the increase in organic search advertising. You no longer need to look for things to buy. Today, products and services find you. The ultimate benefit to businesses has yet to be seen. However, the ease and relatively low cost (at least right now) of deploying “self-service,” custom targeted ads on Facebook is an exciting opportunity for many. The incredible speed at which Facebook has advanced on the social media scene is enough for anyone with a fair amount of common sense to jump on the bandwagon.

Of course, advertising can only get you so far. Without an effective brand image and strong online presence, many companies will fail to attract new customers. The real growth will be achieved by those savvy enough not only to utilize new social media platforms, but by those who understand the importance of successful branding and powerful messaging. It’s a brave new online world, and consumers today are more informed than ever. Develop an authentic brand. Build your presence. Then get in the stream.

I borrow the phrase “The End of Secrecy” from visionary and speaker Tim Sander’s recent blog post, where he reminds us “You can’t hide anymore in the new digital world we live in…this is great news for good people. Secrecy is the ally to evil. Think about the future of business in a transparent world: No bad act gets hidden, no good act goes unnoticed. What does this mean? Same things I’ve been saying since 2002—nice, smart people succeed.”

Nice, smart people succeed. It is certainly a utopian vision. But with an internet so appealing to the masses and the inherent transparency of social media networks, such a vision of a more open and honest internet is a win-win for many passionate small businesses.

Why? Because consumers are smarter than ever. And they’re just plain tired of hard sells and traditional advertising. In short, the digital natives are restless.

But just what is “transparency” and
why is it important?

Transparency in business today means exposing your intentions. It means providing real value first, and it means developing an authentic personal or small-business brand. And today, an internet-oriented “brand” must convey WHO YOU ARE, not what you do.

A couple of weeks ago, we met Steven, our aspiring food critic. Steven isn’t sure where he’ll sell his restaurant reviews and lifestyle commentaries: online, in print, maybe both. What he does know is that in order to succeed as a food critic, he needs an online presence. He needs to take himself and “get branded.”

My recent post, “Brand Myself? Are You Kidding?” takes a hard look at the importance of self-branding in an internet savvy world. In this context, branding isn’t so much an effort to sell as it is an effort to share. For entrepreneurs like Steven, it’s a process of becoming the business he sees himself becoming.

But how do I go about branding myself?

Small-business branding is a birthing process, and it’s never easy to know who you are before you’ve become it! Yet this is exactly what one must do in order to build an entrepreneurial business online. Here are some tips on branding yourself and your business successfully:

• Be authentic. Express yourself in a brand that shows us who you are—your values, your voice, and your vision. If you’re uncertain about these, ask a brand image consultant (like us) to help you develop who you are into who you’re now becoming.

• Provide value up front. This means giving something of real value to your visitors. When someone arrives at your blog, be sure to reward them for finding you. Share with them your personal experiences (lots of value there!), links to interesting places, and other helpful resources.

• Avoid the hard sell. With small business websites, it’s obvious when someone is being obvious. Decades of print and mass media advertising have conditioned us to avoid the hard sell. Remember your readers can walk away with the click of a mouse. Don’t make it easy for them by pitching yourself on your home page.

• Think like a surfer. When creating your content, think about how you surf the internet. Do you enjoy seeing cluttered homepages? When shopping for a product or service, do you find too much content overwhelming? Use your own online experience as a reference point.

Stay tuned for updates on Steven’s brand-building adventure, as well as ideas for new business bloggers.

This video, though admittedly a bit “in your face,” is loaded with statistical information about the social media frontier. It’s certainly a lot of food for thought. Sometimes the numbers fly by so fast you may have to go back, as I did, to fully digest them. But what do these numbers mean? After watching the video, I ask you to consider the following questions:

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. To everyone eager to learn more about Steven’s self-marketing adventure, stay tuned. We’ll be visiting with Steven, our aspiring food critic, later this week.

NYC, Chicago, Denver, San Diego, D.C., Boston.

Contrary to initial suspicions, comments are carrying on in excess of 140 characters. In Chicago, the social media community was well represented by a consortium of tech and media mavericks, designers, entrepreneurs, PR and marketing professionals, and others invested in ideas surrounding social media. Attendees gathered in groups of twos and threes, their excitable banter fittingly matching the exuberance so often found on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Conversations ranged from social media news to business development, to the latest in smartphone applications. What remained consistent, however, was the level of deep interaction so common among Twitterers. After all, it is just this type of open participation that continuously injects the “social” into social media. Several guests showed up with no prior knowledge of the tour, encouraged by friends unable to attend—yet eager to invite others to get out and mingle.

"Tweeting" in real space—Chicago, 8/4/09.

The event also celebrated the launch of Sevans Strategy, a Chicago-based PR and new media consultancy. Sarah Evans, the company’s president, presented a short video highlighting the profound changes occurring in the world of social media. To conclude the evening, some raffle prizes were announced, followed by Mashable COO, Adam Hirsch, inviting everyone to toast their nearest neighbor—a social media gesture of open exchange if there ever was one.

It’s fair to say the social media movement has entered its adolescence, with events like the Twitterup Tour attracting hundreds into small ballrooms across the country. Next year, it may be thousands. Yet unlike adolescent periods marked by an awkward and self-imposed identity crisis, the social media movement today holds its head high, confident in its own self-awareness, more “social” now than ever before.