A Social Media Plan to Ensure Brand Consistency

Branding and Social Media are now intrinsically tied together. In thinking about the importance of your brand and the use of social media channels, we reached out to our friends at MAD Perspectives for some insight. As a result, for the next six weeks, our blogs will discuss the importance of brand and the impact of social media. Thanks to Peggy Dau of MAD Perspectives for her wisdom and contribution! 

Your brand strategy has a unique vision and identity.  You identified this strategy by aligning your brand with your business goals, accounting for both cultural identity and customer knowledge.  As you define a social media plan to support your brand strategy, don’t forget that social media is a means of communication.  It brings with it a high degree of immediacy and interactivity.  It allows you to communicate more directly with your customers.

Social media reinforces a need to be responsible, understandable, reliable and genuine.  This is why a social media plan is so important.  You are serving your customers with the information and content they need.  Here are 6 key components of social media plan that supports your brand.

1. Objectives – What do you want to achieve and how will social media help you fulfill those goals?  How are these objectives related to your business strategy? Are they focused on sales, market awareness, customer service or other core business topics? Defining objectives will help you determine what content is needed and which social platforms to use.

2. Customers – Who are they?  Where are they?  What content do they need or want?  Depending on your customers role (i.e., buyer, influencer, executive, technologist) they will crave different types of content.  Any plan must consider the customer’s need and supply the content needed to the relevant platform and device.

3. Integrate – How will social media support or expand your overall marketing strategy?  Social media is not a stand alone marketing effort.  It must be aligned with other online and offline activities.  An integrated plan will identify resources (people, content and time) needed to achieve your objectives.   Social media can draw attention to events, reinforce messaging, personalize your brand, capture customer insight or input, create stronger customer bonds, manage your reputation and drive sales.  Social media, perhaps more than other forms of marketing, becomes your online voice.  It must reflect your brand and your culture.

4. Metrics – How will you measure success of your social media strategy?  All other aspects of your marketing plan have goals and metrics – social media is no different.  Your metrics must support your objectives and can also be tied to your overall marketing plan.  Early stage metrics are usually related to followers and web traffic.  Later stage metrics can include measures of influence, leads, sales, product development or support.

5. Policy – Who will engage in your brand’s social media efforts?  How will they engage?  A policy can be considered the “rules of engagement”.  It is your opportunity to remind employees on how you want to represent your brand.  It is also the means of communicating your goals for social media.  A critical element of any plan or policy is to determine how your brand will address negative comments.  They are bound to occur and it is important to establish guidelines to help your social media constituents understand how to address them.

6. Engage! – Most importantly interact, share, communicate and respond!  Social media is a customer engagement medium.  Be informative and be informed!

Social Media has the ability to expand and personalize your brand in ways not previously available.  It is an opportunity for all brands, be they consumer or business centric, to communicate frequently and openly.  It is also an opportunity for customers to express their likes or dislikes.  Be prepared for both the positive and the negative.  Understand your brand voice, align your social media efforts with your brand strategy, educate your employees on your goals and engage with your customers like never before!

What’s your perspective?

Brand Strategy

Branding and Social Media are now intrinsically tied together. In thinking about the importance of your brand and the use of social media channels, we reached out to our friends at MAD Perspectives for some insight. As a result, for the next six weeks, our blogs will discuss the importance of brand and the impact of social media. Thanks to Peggy Dau of MAD Perspectives for her wisdom and contribution!

To read the third post ‘Brand Strategy’ please visit MAD Perspective’s blog.

Do Your Social Media Efforts Reflect Your Brand?

Branding and Social Media are now intrinsically tied together. In thinking about the importance of your brand and the use of social media channels, we reached out to our friends at MAD Perspectives for some insight. As a result, for the next six weeks, our blogs will discuss the importance of brand and the impact of social media. Thanks to Peggy Dau of MAD Perspectives for her wisdom and contribution! 

 

With all the hype about social media, we may have forgotten that any social media marketing efforts must be aligned with your brand!  When leveraging the myriad of social media outlets, it is important to keep the core tenants of your brand in mind.  Social media provides you with additional channels through which you can communicate and interact with your target audience.  Social media allows your message to be broadcast and shared widely, globally and freely.

With this openness in mind, what do you need to consider when establishing your social media strategy – particularly as it relates to your brand?  First, don’t forget what your brand is. We reviewed this last week.  Remember, your brand is a promise.  Your use of social media should reinforce that promise and provide a level of transparency and authenticity that invites engagement from your target markets.  How can social media help?

Social media platforms should visually and contextually reflect your brand.  Consistency of logo, color and voice are important.  Of these three, voice is the most critical.  What is the voice of your brand?  Are you fun, knowledgeable, edgy, caring, geeky, innovative?  Understanding your voice should drive how you communicate via your social channels.  For example, if you are innovative, your social communications should provide insight to market trends that your company is addressing, share your opinions on the impact of these trends and how your company will act to influence a shift in the market.

Now that you’ve aligned your social efforts with your brand and discovered your voice, it’s time to ENGAGE!  Do I need to ask why you want to interact with your customers? Engagement with your customers WILL lead to business.  It will lead to greater knowledge about what your customers and prospects are thinking and saying about your brand.  It will help you become proactive instead of reactive.  As you engage, remember what your brand stands for and provide consistency in terms of voice and topic.  While it may be fun to share your thoughts on random topics, you are socializing on behalf of your brand.  Your tweets, Facebook posts, Slideshare presentations or YouTube videos should be relevant to your brand, your company, your products or your industry.

Just in case you are still wondering why you should consider social media as a key aspect of your brand strategy, check out these data points from Forrester Research and Business Week:

• 67 percent of Twitter users who become followers of a brand are more likely to buy that brand’s products
• 60 percent of Facebook users who become a fan of a brand are more likely to recommend that brand to a friend
• 74 percent of consumers are influenced on buying decisions by fellow users after soliciting input via social media

Your brand is your calling card.  Social Media must reinforce your brand.  Think about your brand and your voice before you engage – but definitely ENGAGE!

What’s your perspective?

ABOUT PEGGY DAU

Peggy Dau is the Founder and Managing Partner of MAD Perspectives LLC, a strategy consultancy helping clients optimize their use of social media, streaming media and other emerging technologies to connect, collaborate and communicate.

Brands and Social Media

Branding and Social Media are now intrinsically tied together.  In thinking about the importance of your brand and the use of social media channels, we reached out to our friends at MAD Perspectives for some insight.  As a result, for the next six weeks, our blogs will discuss the importance of brand and the impact of social media. Thanks to Peggy Dau of MAD Perspectives for her wisdom and contribution!

To read the first post ‘Brands – Don’t Make Promises You Can’t Keep!’ please visit MAD Perspective’s blog.

Personal Brands

This weekend prompted considerable debate around the issue of personal brand values in relation to the corporate brand.

The issue at hand was that of Wayne Rooney and his delightful comments upon scoring a hat-trick in 15 minutes to win the game for his club in a Roy of the Rovers style come from behind victory.  How must it feel for Manchester United and its global brand to have its star player (and most highly rewarded) score the winning goal and follow it up with a tirade of foul language into the live camera? 

This is what happens when your business values and the personal values of your employees are not truly aligned.

There are of course some very successful occurrences of brand alignment from the same club.  Were the brands of David Beckham and Manchester United more clearly aligned?  Without doubt we could say that they were … but then of course the star asset has crafted a career outside that of his chosen field and in the end, also the club where he made his name.

Football is not alone in dealing with the fallout when an employee fails to represent the brand in the manner to which you would hope.  There have been recent cases of the Chrysler employee tweeting about the lack of driving skills in Detroit, the very famous Gerald Ratner incident and of course the CEO of domain business ‘Go Daddy’ actually shooting an elephant in front of a live camera (you couldn’t make this up if you tried).

Of course these are high-profile, news worthy cases … but on a more realistic scale the alignment of brand values between your business and employees is a key issue.  How do they answer the phone, greet customers, provide help and support, deal with day-to-day issues and bring the personal experience of the brand into the way you conduct your business?

How you choose to bring your brand values to life through your people is a key element that ultimately creates a great business that people want to engage with. 

If you spend time with your people, recruit in the right manner, treat them as brand advocates and invest in the experience throughout your business then you have a great chance of aligning personal and the business brand values.

More David Beckham than Wayne Rooney.  More Richard Branson than Gerald Ratner.