Four Distinct Digital Brand Personalities and How to Execute Them

Choosing your brand’s online personality is perhaps the most important step in developing your business’s social media strategy.  Trying to accomplish too many different goals with social media or wearing too many hats will confuse your followers and dilute your brand’s overall message. Therefore, it is best to pick two or three goals you want to achieve and develop a strong, consistent personality from those goals.

 Your brand’s personality will define your tone, what kind of content you will post, guidelines for sharing, and how you will respond to customers. All subsequent decisions will stem from choosing your brand’s personality, and developing the rest of your strategy will be a piece of cake.

 

So, are you….

 

1. The Thought Leader?                        

Is it your goal to be seen as an authority in your field by your customers and colleagues?  If you want to become the go-to source for information in your industry follow these steps-

1. Consistently keep abreast to the latest industry news and share it before most people know about it

  i.      Set google alerts with industry related keywords

  ii.      Subscribe to online magazines and journals related to your industry. You can subscribe to get a free daily email from most magazines and newspapers (i.e.  NYTimes)

1. Put your own spin on the information by offering your own opinion rom an industry insider’s point of view
2. Start your own blog and share valuable content own blog that is useful and addresses FAQ

 

2. The Content Curator?-

Do you want to be the site your followers check religiously every morning for new and interesting content across the web?

  i.      Post a variety of content from industry news, entertaining posts, and recent events 

  ii.      Skim through many different sources on a daily basis (blogs, other accounts on social media sites, news articles, etc) and select only the best content to share. Your followers will appreciate your selective eye and taste

 iii.      Once again set up a Google RSS reader but pay extra attention to include a variety of well and lesser known blogs

 

3. Buzz Generator –

Is it your goal to generate buzz around your brand or a new line or product?

Take extra care to keep this effort customer-centric.

ii. Offer advice or tips on how to use this particular product or how to maximize your services

iii. Encourage consumer feedback regarding products

iv. Get ideas for new products from consumers

v.      Offer promotions or discounts surrounding the product/line to your followers

vi. Create buzz around a product by sending samples to key influencers or offering a discount to all followers to be redeemed in-store

4. Consumer Advocate –  

Do you want your site to be all about the people? This model is ideal for promoting customer retention and letting your followers know you care

i. Find a unique way to showcase your followers

1. Everyday Oreo changes their profile picture to feature a fan on their birthday
2. Verizon hosts a competition where cool landscape pictures taken with a Verizon mobile phone are used as Verizon’s cover photo

 ii.      Create a community that encourages communities to share with you and with each other. Create incentives and make sharing easy and rewarding

 iii.      Use the site as a customer service platform. Build a reputation where customers know that their concerns (or praises!) will be responded to in a professional, timely manner

 

Does your brand have a unique personality not listed here? Please feel free to share your stories or add to the list!

Pinterest-Friend or Foe to Content Originators?

A few months back when I first started using Pinterest, I came across an amazing summer drink recipe on someone’s website. As a bartending enthusiast I was excited to share this content with my followers and try the drink out myself. Almost immediately I had a couple dozen people repin this post (a testament to the viral nature of the site) and a couple of comments. To my surprise, one of the comments was from the creator of the drink recipe asking me to please remove the pin.

Of course I immediately took the pin down, but as a person who is paid to help businesses spread their content online this request initially baffled me. However, the more I thought about it I realized that this attitude is not all that uncommon among business persons.

In a psychology study it was found that children who had greater self- control were more successful later in life. The researchers measured self-control by giving each child the option to have one piece of chocolate now, or to have two pieces of chocolate in one hour. Our natural instinct may be to choose immediate gratification, however it may be to our benefit to wait.

Common sense tells us to protect our intellectual property. In a typical business relationship, the reward is immediate. Person X performs an action for person Y and immediately receives compensation.
In the online world, the road to compensation is longer and not always guaranteed, but the rewards can be exponentially greater. One way to travel down this road is outlined below.

1.Post free, valuable content online to the public
Your Initial reaction: You may see the investment of your time on something that is not immediately making you money as a waste.
My advice: Don’t be too hasty my friend, plant the seeds and they will grow.

2.Celebrate the replication of your content from person to person (as long as the source of the content is made clear-a reference or link back to your original site is sufficient)
Your initial reaction: This is my intellectual property, I don’t want somebody else benefitting from my work for free
My advice: Thank your lucky stars that people have found the needle in the haystack that is your content and decided that it is worthy to share with their peers. You are one step closer to seeing the benefits of your original action!
End result: Hundreds, maybe thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people that previously had no idea about your service or business now know who you are. If you have left a good impression on them, they will remember you when they need your service in the future. Think of it as fishing with a bomb instead of a single fishing line.
Make the decision today. Do you want to be the kid that receives one piece of chocolate now or the kid that gets two pieces an hour from now?

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