Digital Marketing

Empowering BRAND YOU on Your turf, there’s nothing like it.

There is nothing more powerful than having control over your Brand especially when it comes to consumer engagement and interactions.

Now, how does that happen?

Consumers today, have empowered words like ‘LIKE’, ‘SHARE’, ‘Re-Tweet’ beyond imagination.

But this special blog post comes for a very specific reason.

Recently Cadbury & few other Brands got a clear message from social media powerhouse Facebook, that their brands were hosted on nothing more than a rented domain when the social giant took their pages off the site for certain page violations.

Now the power, reach and impact of this social networking site is well known across countries, age groups and Industries. How do we deal with the ‘fan-frenzy’ desires of  brands?

Similarly, majority of the Corporate Moghuls and their Board too these days end up asking one standard question off-late which is, “How do I get more fans?”

I have always shared a core note with them on this, which I thought is due to be shared on a global platform via our Corporate Social Media Marketing Blog from Techdivine Creative Services where we have successfully launched Brand promotions, PR Campaigns, Corporate Branding etc

This is what I have shared with them each time someone says, “I need more fans or followers”:

• How much useful is a teenager to an Industrial Organization?
• How much will “Random Fans & Followers” across sites like Twitter, Facebook etc matter when it comes to measuring your ROI on your campaigns or your Brand value?
• Does having a million fans or thousands of twitter followers cater to your business goals and brand needs?
• How much are you willing to alter your Brands language, style and tone to suit few fans or followers and are you ready for the long term repercussions?

The answer, each time was a simple No, from each experienced corporate professional.

It has to be a NO. Why?

Customer engagement and brand connect has to be happen with proper planning and using appropriate marketing strategies and tools. Its not about having a page on a social site or a twitter account.

Let us take this for example, each time a telecom, credit card or ISP providers call us on our phone we get annoyed and add them to the spam or block lists. Why? because they are entering on our turf during our time schedule.

How is this related to having random fans and followers?

Now every time a user follows “BRAND YOU” just because you followed them or every time a fan joins you because you asked them to through ‘friend suggests’, it’s the same thing all over. Only this time, it would be “Brand You” sharing so called interesting posts, tweets to people who are least interested or not even remotely associated with the message, product or service.

When we say customers engage in brand conversations, the conversations do not necessarily need to be about Your Brand or Product or service, but they need to be of value, quality and depict BRAND YOU at all times.

4 Rules, never to forget:

1. Brand is only as good as the consumer it reaches.
2. If traditional media were to be avoided for new age media sites, then one has less than 50% of market reach possible especially in a country like India. Integrate and collaborate between online and offline media, always, with the right set of words.
3. It doesn’t matter where the consumers are located. The only thing we need to always keep in mind is, speak our BRANDS language and let them connect with us. Never use a Corporate language or a slang style just because you want that consumer to connect. Brands always need to stay focused on what you desire and aspire from your brand to achieve. Clear Goals.
4. Never leave all your eggs in one basket. Core being, never depend on a single platform for reaching out across to your consumers.

Thus multiple platforms, at least one for each medium is a must.

For eg.

• You can have one site that touches base with Bloggers (there are million bloggers and readers today who are looking for information, reviews, news and offers across Blog searches)
• Social Check-ins for users who are on the go (A must today for those in service industry especially Retail, Hospitality etc)
• A single platform for showcasing your creative skills or videos of your Brand messages
• A social book-marking platform wherein your followers consume the resources that you share with them using Url redirects, useful posts, creatives etc.

Your content is the key here. That’s your Corporate IPR ,your very own Intellectual property. Why restrict it to only a third party site? Use it wisely across platforms that are completely under your control, like self-hosted domains for website, Blog, Forum etc

With the power of social connect today, make sure your website has enough new age media tools like FBML, Facebook, Twitter, Blog feeds integration etc to pull the social conversations from your various online platforms to your website pages. Integrate your Facebook, Twitter and Blog conversations on your websites without fail.

Three key advantages:

• One, it becomes a powerful Search engine optimization (SEO) tool
• Two, your content is re-used and has a larger reach.
• And three, in case your social site goes off or the domain has a server crash, there is at least one platform alive and going strong for you keeping the conversations alive.

Always note, the idea is to convey the “BRAND You” message and not alter it by using the users language. Why?

The day a follower or a fan or the social site decides to go offline or communicates on a third party site with his or her own version of constructive random musings of criticism, is the day your fan numbers would too drop at an accelerating pace.

Moreover, having the right fans and followers matters rather than having a million who end up sharing competitors contents in between your comments and pages which might get lost in the social clutter and noise across your third party pages and sites. Brand monitoring here is an equally important function.

Bottom-line:

• The power to make that global “Brand You” conversation a reality is by sharing relevant content, on-time across multiple sites of which you need at least two to three sites completely under your control all the time.
• Having a self-hosted Blog or your own web domain that pulls in feeds and interactions about your brand from across multiple sites not only gives you a larger reach but also control over the message.
• Consumer insights are the most important aspect of any Brand conversation. They not only tell you what they are saying but also where and when. Make sure you make good use of it.

So, what did your Brand tell your customer today?

Share your views on this post, based on your experience across platforms and brands. Would love to hear from you.

You can also Tweet with me @ananthv9 on Twitter.

Thanks

Ananth V

Techdivine Creative Services

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