Branding today is about creating a brand platform, then dramatize it and start screaming to people – COME ON AND BUY MY PRODUCT. IT’S GREAT. Of course in a slightly creative and modest manner than that. But it very often about traditional advertising in classic media channels.
Branding of tomorrow is about knowing who you are, what your brand stands for and start experimenting with innovation, partnerships, entertainment and above all involving your potential audience as a part of your product development. And note – call them audience, cause the will pay to stay but leave if they don’t like the show.
It’s all about constantly innovating your brand and then making sure you know what people think of your work. Do they like it? Do they hate it. What do they miss, what would they do differently. Speak to them. Learn their language. Once you think you know the formula to success – erase your brain and start all over again. We do not want repetition from brands that lead we want the new stuff, the shit that makes us go wow!
The first step to keeping on top of your game is getting into the conversation. There’s no need to wait even if people aren’t talking about your brand just yet. Get in there and learn!
First step – automize your intelligence information
The key to becoming successful when becoming a brand conversationist is to know…yep, you guessed it, where people who talk about your brand are hanging. Put your ears to the rail and listen for. And remeber that most of these things you can output as a RSS feed into Google Reader or Netvibes. Built a dashboard!
- Google alerts
- Twingly blogsearch
- Twingly microblog search
- Get Satisfaction
- Co-comment, Backtype, Intense debate
- Google analytics
- Have a mint
- More statistics…you can never get to much!
The 59 services you can currently keep track of using Friendfeed.
Get into the discussion
Once you know where people are discussing your products, your brand or anything else related to your mission (cause you have one of those huh). These are the tools you should get accompanied with.
- Twitter & tweetdeck
- Bloggy
- Brightkite
- Jaiku (still not dead)
- Messenger
- Friendfeed
- Co-comment, Backtype, Intense debate
- And don’t forget to get into blogs and comment on subjects relevant to you!
Spread your digital presence
Getting into the conversation is not only about spying on others and then going after the buzz. Your digital presence – website, campaigns, digital events, groups…everything has to go beyond their own sphere and servers. In order to do this you’ve gotta start spreading your information socially. There’s tons of tools but a first must have are these.
- The god of spreading content – SEO (Note, not paid search)
- Ping.fm
- RPC all content that you write to leading aggregators and mashups on your local market.
- Send images to leading photo sites like Flickr and Picasa
- Send videos to leading Video sites like YouTube, Blip, Vimeo and others (See earlier post on this)
- Socially share things with Share This
- Connect your RSS feeds to Twitter, Jaiku, Bloggy, Friendfeed and other social plattforms.
- Constantly create playlists that are killer in your office and spread them on Last.FM and Spotify
- Post book marks on Delicious
- Pixelpipe
- Tarpipe
- Feedburner
- Widgets
- Facebook groups (and others)
- Wikipedia if possible
And more and more and more and more. This goes on forever. But you’ve gotta be everywhere!
Last but not least! Create advertising and communication that matters to people. We want to have fun – as I said earlier this year. You’ve gotta be a clown!
Ok, that’s it for now. I’m aware that I’ve left a couple of question marks in the heads of you guys who don’t know what RPC, RSS etc is. But I don’t have the time to elaborate on that now. I’ll get back to it soon 🙂