The "Bad" – allowing employees to build their own brand at the expense of the company brand
The leading analyst firm Forrester announced last week that their analysts can no longer have stand-alone "off-site" blogs but rather need to blog on Forrester's official blogs. There is a lot of chatter about this decision and Josh Bernoff provided a semi-official response on the popular Groundswell blog. In summary, as an intellectual property company, Forrester believes blogging is an extension of their product which is intellectual property, and which they pay the analysts to create. Therefore it is sub-optimal to have popular analysts build their own brand which they can then easily take with them should they decide to quit Forrester.
I am facing the exact same situation in my company and am struggling with the decision. Should I allow all our field personnel to create their own blogs and market themselves under their own names? Or should I get them to blog on our platform under the company brand? There are pros and cons of each approach but I think I'm coming to the same conclusion as Forrester. These folks are under our employment and as such are paid to promote the company and differentiate us from the competition. The little brand benefit we get from all of their individual promotion is offset by confusion created in the market by 500 different brand voices.
I need to explore a solution in more depth but my initial thought is that we need to create a standard company branded platform from which the field representatives can market themselves. This is the approach that many real estate and financial services firms take. I'm not saying it is perfect but the pros appear to outweigh the cons. Let me know how you dealt with this issue.
The "Good" – applying leadership principles to make your team more effective
I know this is loosely related to B2B marketing, but I read a great article about Colin Powell's leadership principles and thought about how I could apply them to my marketing team.
Here are my 5 favorites out of the 18 lessons in the article. You can find the rest at Chally.com.
Being responsible sometimes pisses people off. My thoughts —
You have to make the hard choices because most people won't. You can't
procrastinate, treat everyone equally or worry about being nice. Doing
that only makes things worse for everyone.
Never neglect details. When everyone's mind is dulled or
distracted the leader must be doubly vigilant. My thoughts — You have
to execute the details or the strategy is worthless.
Vision alone does not equate to success.
You don't know what you can get away with until you try. My
thoughts – In today's hyper competitive market (especially in my space
– online marketing) you can't be timid or sit around waiting for
approvals. Better to try, fail and learn from it than to do nothing. Of
course you need to take measured risks not reckless ones.
If it ain't broke don't fix it is the slogan of the complacent,
the arrogant or the scared. My thoughts — You have to constantly be
trying to improve your strategy, tactics, processes and execution
because the competitors are not standing still.
Plans don't accomplish anything. Theories of management don't
much matter. Endeavors succeed or fail because of the people involved.
Only by attracting the best people will you accomplish great deeds. My
thoughts — You have to have the best people to
get the best results. And you have to create the right environment for
success – that means managing by getting into the trenches, leading by
example, rewarding hard work, innovative thinking and creativity while
weeding out the poor performers (see number 1 above).
The “Good” – proactively managing your reputation with sincerity, clarity and transparency
Thanks to the good folks over at Outspoken Media for their post relating the NBC-Conan-Leno debacle to online reputation management. Read the full post here, but to summarize, Conan won the reputation battle by taking his clear, honest message straight to the audience while Leno kept quiet so no one had any idea about his role/motivations and therefore everyone assumed the worst which was that he was screwing Conan over to get his old time slot back. Outspoken summarizes the 5 key steps that Conan took to protect or even build his reputation:
Control the message by explaining, in simple and honest terms, exactly what happened/ is happening.
Don’t get emotional or look for sympathy. Just state the facts.
Admit any wrongdoing, if applicable.
Show grace and humor.
Offer a resolution or plan of attack for the future to calm fears.
These are terrific lessons for any business handling their own reputation, be it a crisis situation or just responding to negative reviews online.
Now that Conan has some time on his hands maybe he should be Tiger Wood’s personal Reputation Management advisor 😉
I’m not going to do a full reviews here, since honestly I’ve
hated book reports ever since 5th grade.That said, I recommend both books as they are
quick reads with wisdom on how to turn your unique talent/passion into a
business that provides happiness and hopefully some income. While chock full of lessons on how build your
personal brand via social media, the key message I took away is an old fashioned
one that is lost on most people today….work hard!
McLeod’s third chapter is titled “Put the hours in” and
Vaynerchuk devotes a section to “Hustle.”
Per McLeod:“Doing
anything worthwhile takes forever. Ninety percent of what separates successful people and failed people is
time, effort and stamina.”
Per Vaynerchuk:“Too
many people don’t want to swallow the pill of working hard every day….if you’re
making money through social media, you don’t get to work for three hours and
then play Nintendo….That’s lip service to hard work.No one makes a million dollars with minimal
effort unless they win the lottery.”
I know this isn’t exactly a new/original concept, but as a
marketer I see a lot of business/creative people who think they can come up with a great
idea and that is will take off virally via social media.Overnight success is a myth and I like that
these authors don’t go there just to sell more books (see all the authors of
day-trading and real-estate investing books for that).
Check out the books for loads of useful marketing strategies/tactics
for harnessing the power of the social web to build your brand.While
it doesn’t fit into the theme of this post, I absolutely loved Vaynerchuk’s
ninth chapter entitled “the best marketing strategy ever.”It’s one word long:CARE!It’s
so damn simple but so powerful.I need
to give it more thought and bake it into my 2010 marketing plan for my company,
then I’ll write another post.
The "Bad" – not running paid search ads on your business name
I saw this great article in Search Engine Land yesterday which dovetails perfectly with my prior post. While my colleague Nathan Hanks put forth the logical business reasons to "own" your name by bidding on your brand keywords, David Roth gives a semi-scientific way to prove the value. He recommends that you run a test site visits both with and without the PPC ad for your brand name and then determine the cannibalization/lift that is caused by using the text ad. Here's his definition:
“Lift” is the net amount of
traffic that is added to the mix by virtue of the PPC ad.
Cannibalization is the portion of PPC ad traffic that comes at the
expense of the organic link. If you can quantify cannibalization and
lift in any situation, you can then begin to think intelligently about
what to do.
It sounds like the research proves the value since David says he was ecstatic with the results of his test.
When it comes to search engine marketing, bidding on business
category keywords (ex: “Dallas spa”) is a must if you want your
business to show up in a paid ad when someone is looking for your kind
of products or services. But it’s just as important to bid on your
business name keywords (ex: “Sally’s Swanky Spa”). Here are some
reasons why:
It’s your business name – so why pay for it? Because your
competitors are! According to Performics, leading brands only receive
87% of traffic from their business name keyword searches. The remaining
13% are “poached” by competitors!* That’s because they know that when
your customers search for your business, they have an opportunity to
snatch the sale straight out of your hands with a well-worded sponsored
ad. Don’t give them the chance.
Check out Nate's blog for the other important reasons why you should bid on your name.
The "Good" – having a well-thought out plan for when your reputation is damaged online
I saw the article 5 Steps for Successful Social Media Damage Control by Sharlyn Lauby on Mashable the day after I posted my last entry on Managing Your Online Reputation. She covered what I forgot in my post, that managing reputation online is just like managing reputation offline…
"Our goal, of course, hasn’t changed – work to increase the number of
positive comments written about your company, product, or service and
take care of those who have negative experiences. But, how do you make
that happen in the social media world? What steps to you take to keep
negative social media damage to a minimum?"
Here is the abbreviated list she recommends for addressing any reputation crisis. Of course they key to have a well thought out plan/process developed and employees trained well in advance of any issue that occurs.
Monitor social media sites 24/7. My take: you should be doing this already or you've already missed some issues/product/service reviews which might not be crises warranting damage control but are negatively impacting your brand none-the-less.
Respond quickly with a consistent message. My take: just like the offline world, even if you don't have the answer yet at least let me know you care and are working on it.
Reply to the social media world. My take: It's not enough to just address the impacted person(s), you have address the whole community since often people on the sidelines jump into the fray and the last thing you want is a bench-clearing brawl 😉
Educate employees on proper messaging. My take: you need to quickly develop and communicate incident specific messaging to all employees since even though they aren't on the damage control team you need to keep them informed and calm just like customers, and on the chance that they get asked you want them to deliver a consistent message.
Develop a crisis strategy. My take: actually this should be #2 on the list. I suggest you have a pre-identified damage control team that meets immediately once the issue is raised. If necessary, they can then pull in the appropriate experts to better understand the problem and craft the response strategy…what will we say, who will say it, where and when…
The "Ugly" – not realizing that consumers now control your reputation
United Airlines is the latest in a string of corporations who have found out the hard way that the web has shifted power to the consumer. Businesses, large and small, no longer unilaterally control their reputation. Consumers post comments and reviews online about every interaction with a company and typically they are about negative experiences…probably because they only get motivated enough to post when they are really ticked off. Unfortunately for United Airlines, the Sons of Maxwell band had the skill and platform to make this music video about their bad experience that has spread virally. While this one and been written about all over the web, most businesses (especially small businesses) are ignorant of the fact that there are dozens/hundreds of online comments and reviews that comprise their online reputation.
I see this all the time with the small business customers of my company. They spend their precious few marketing dollars on a search or display advertising campaign and wonder why the results weren't as strong as they expected. We advise them to "Google" their business name and sure enough they see some negative comments/reviews that turned off potential customers who researched them before buying. While the consumer now has control, businesses can take steps to manage their reputation online.
1. They can directly address negative reviewers by politely replying online and offering to rectify the issue. This can be dangerous so the reply must be a sincere, well-written apology and offer (never argue with or flame the reviewer – it just looks like sour grapes).
2. They can offset the negative reviews by getting lots of positive reviews from their happy/loyal customers. It's pretty simple to hand customers a flyer or send them an email that says "If you had a good experience with our company please share it on x, y, and z review sites."
3. They can try to push negative reviews down to the 2nd or 3rd page of search results by creating and posting more of their own content (blog, syndicated videos, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) such that it gets indexed on page one by the search engine. Research says that most people don't look past the first page of search results so if they can own the content on that page then consumers might not get down to the negative stuff.
The "Bad" – allowing too many cooks in the kitchen while you are redefining and redesigning your brand
Just a few weeks ago I left Entrust and joined a great VC-backed company called ReachLocal. We are one of the biggest/best local search marketing companies you never heard of. Hence the reason they needed a new VP of marketing. On my 5th day we held a two day brand summit with 20+ execs, salespeople and product experts. It was an excellent way for me to get up to speed on the company strategy, our core values, competitive advantages and persona. As you would imagine the discussion was lively with lots of points/counterpoints but ultimately we locked down a brand pyramid that everyone agreed with.
Wary of design by committee we commissioned a small core creative team to develop the brand concepts with creative and copy points, as well as an updated logo treatment (always a risky thing to do but it really needs it). In just a little over a week we developed 5 concepts, pitched them to the execs, selected the best one and got approval to move forward to execution.
I write this post not to brag about achieving a quality brand makeover so quickly (though it is pretty amazing) but more to say that you don't have to pay an outside agency millions and take 4 months to achieve great results. I'll write another post in a few weeks when we take the site live and you can see for yourself. At the risk of being stupidly obvious, I'll point out that you absolutely cannot allow design by committee — and must shield your creative SWAT team from the interlopers who want to offer their commentary about liking/disliking certain colors. I used the analogy of an award winning chili recipe with all the interlopers and it seemed to work…i.e. if a chef lets each of 20 chili experts add their favorite ingredients the chili is totally ruined. Here's a great video that shows the disastrous consequences if you don't heed this warning.
The "Good" – collecting and assembling hundreds of marketing best practices and lessons learned, then sharing them for free
The good folks at MarketingSherpa just released their 7th annual edition of the 'Wisdom Report'. Quoting their intro, "…this report compiles the shiniest gems of wisdom chosen by Sherpa's editorial team from hundreds of submissions by your colleagues. Many of these words of wisdom are not big-sky ideas. Many are simple and straightforward tips you can plug into your marketing plans right now."
I am honored that they selected one of my submissions on building a simple, inexpensive dashboard to measure PR and Media Relations effectiveness (page 70). I originally wrote about our homegrown dashboard in this post last year. It has been a very useful tool that I would be happy to share so shoot me an email if you'd like a copy.
