September, 2007

Online Branding — No Comments
30
Sep 07

How to Track Your Brand in Consumer Generated Media (CGM)

Participating in Consumer Generated Media (CGM) is pivotal to your Shoestring Branding™ strategy. Through clever, responsible and consistent use of CGM like:

• blogs
• forums and discussion groups
• social bookmarking sites
• social networks and
• review sites

you will slowly but surely position yourself as an expert in your niche and build your brand.

As your brand gains mindshare, other people will also use CGM to talk about you. Some will give you positive reviews while others may complain. Either way, listening to what other people have to say about your brand is important not only from a reputation management standpoint, but also because it may open your eyes to ways you can improve your value proposition.

While maintaining a large staff or hiring an expensive PR firm to monitor the buzz around their brands may be common among large corporations, as a small business shoestring marketer you don’t have that luxury. Fortunately, however, you can leverage these powerful web tools freely available to you to track your brand in CGM:

Email Alerts:

You can use Google Alerts to receive email updates of the latest Google results for your choice of query or topic (in this case, your brand name). Signing up for an alert is easy and involves these five short steps:

  1. Go to Goggle Alerts.
  2. Type your brand name in the search box.
  3. Determine the type of media you want to track (I recommend setting it as “comprehensive”so that you can track websites, news sites, blogs, videos and groups).
  4. Choose how often you want to receive the alerts (I recommend once a day), and
  5. Enter your email address.

You can also sign up for a similar service from Yahoo! Alerts.

RSS Feeds:

Instead of using email, you can also subscribe to the RSS feed of the search results page for your brand. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is the technology used to send updated feeds from blogs, search engines and websites to your preferred news reader or agregatior (you can use Bloglines, Google Reader, My Yahoo!, iGoogle, etc.).

To receive RSS feeds for search results related to your brand go to Google or Yahoo! , do a search for your brand and click on the different options: News, Videos, Blogs, etc. Look for the RSS symbol or text link and subscribe.

You can also use RSS to track blog comments in Technorati (the most important blog search engine), and to monitor your brand in the largest social bookmarking services: Delicious and Digg.

Tracking blogs in Technorati:

Go to: http://www.technorati.com/posts/tags/yourbrand ( or if your brand has two words: http://www.technorati.com/posts/tags/your+brand ) and click on the orange RSS icon to subscribe to a feed that will let you know when Technorati detects that a blogger has posted a comment about your brand.

Tracking Social Bookmarking Sites:

  • Delicious: Go to: http://del.icio.us/tag/yourbrand (or if your brand has two words: http://del.icio.us/tag/your+brand ) and click on the orange RSS button at the bottom of the page to subscribe to a feed that will let you know when someone has bookmarked a site tagged with your brand name.
  • Digg: Go to digg.com and search for your brand name. In the results page look for the orange RSS icon to the right of the page, next to the first result.

What else can you track?

The possibilities are endless and limited only by your creativity and availability of time. You can track, among other things:

  • Competitor brands
  • Industry news and trends
  • Consumer reviews of your products in amazon.com
  • Your own name
  • Competitor job postings (sign up for monster.com job search agent to receive them automatically by email)
  • What people are saying about you in social networking sites like mySpace (set up a Google Alert for myspace-specific pages by typing: site:myspace.com yourbrand as the alert search terms).

Online Branding — 7 Comments
27
Sep 07

The Three Biggest Internet Marketing Time Wasters

Buliding a great website / blog / brand takes time and hard work. Unfortunately, many aspiring web entrepreneurs put too much emphasis on these three time-wasting activities:

Changing the layout, colors and general appearance of their site

Designing our website is one of the first steps in our long journey to build a small business brand. Just when we thought we had everything figured out, the little artist in our head keeps second-guessing everything we just did and we start changing colors, moving the position or our logo, changing the font, messing with our navigation options, etc. This is a mistake for two reasons:

  1. Your site will never be perfect. However, if you followed a few basic web design guidelines at the beginning, chances are your site is already good enough and ready to be enhanced with useful, valuable content.
  2. Once you build a strong readership base, constantly changing the appearance of your site will negatively affect your brand. Customers like consistency and familiarity. If as a result of your constant changes customers can’t find what they want or don’t recognize your site you’ll end up losing brand equity.

The best strategy is to make very subtle changes to your site once a year or so. In other words, make your web design changes few and far between and keep your branding consistent.

Believing that Search Engine Optimization is the be-all and end-all of your marketing

Preparing and optimizing our site for the search engines is just one of the many tactics at our disposal to promote and build our brand online. Putting all our eggs in the SEO basket is risky, since search engines keep changing their ranking formulas on a regular basis, and what works today may not work tomorrow.

If we find ourselves spending too much time fiddling with page titles, changing the wording in our headlines or worrying about our keyword density, it is time to stop and ask ourselves if that time wouldn’t be better utilized creating useful content and building a loyal customer / reader base.

If you are just starting out, you may want to check the SEO advice coming straight from the horse’s mouth and read the design and content guidelines of the offered by the the main search engines. You can then read some online tutorials and a few good ebooks on the subject.

I would suggest, however, that you focus on the basics and don’t get tied up by the extremely technical stuff. As with any other topic, the law of diminishing returns applies here, and you don’t want to spend more time chasing Google’s tail than building and improving your site.

Obsessing with Adsense ads and revenue

Unless you run a purely informational site, Google Adsense shouldn’t be a significant part of your business model. If you sell something and are trying to build your brand online, Adsense ads will be a distraction from your core offering, where you can make more money than the few cents per click you would be getting by plastering Adsense code all over your site.

Additionaly, Adsense ads are detrimental to the user experience (especially if placed in the prime areas of the page) and make your site less likely to be linked by others. In the crucial early stages, plastering your site with ads is branding suicide. Your main focus should be in building a loyal following of people who visit your site regularly, subscribe to your feeds and link to you.

Even for more established sites, or sites that are purely informational in nature, some experts suggest to wait until a site can draw around 1,000 visitors per day before placing ads.

In summary, build value first, tell people about it, and tell them to tell their friends. Everything else will fall into place at the right time.

Update: Learn about the fourth big time waster here.

Branding Basics — No Comments
26
Sep 07

The Principles of Character Driven Marketing

Genuine marketing, based on honesty and integrity, is the only kind of marketing that truly engages the hearts and minds of potential customers. The following are the principles of character driven marketing:

  1. Always maintain a genuine attitude of integrity and caring. If you present a false facade of caring for your own gain, customers will eventually see right through it – and through you.
  2. Have unflinching belief in the value and worth of the products or services that you offer, and in your competence to deliver them to the total satisfaction of your customer. If you truly believe in it, so will they.
  3. Strive to know your customers with the same degree of loving care and interest that you know your loved ones.
  4. Be clear in the values and character qualities that you want to communicate to your customers in all your promotional activities.
  5. Preparation is the key to success. Bear in mind the words of Abraham Lincoln….’If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I would spend seven sharpening the axe.
  6. Seek to attract people to you, rather than chasing after them.
  7. Know what marketing strategies personally turn you off, and avoid them at all costs.
  8. Make sure that you love what you do because this passion, or lack thereof, shows through in your marketing.
  9. Take advice from others, but don’t let them advise you against what your gut instinct tells you is right.
  10. Present yourself as a leader, not a follower. If you’re not a leader, why are you in business?
  11. Be aware that acquiring trust means giving of yourself with no expectation of return.
  12. Be a memorable person and communicate your personal principles in the way that you speak and write to your existing or potential customers.
  13. Always remember that building any kind of relationship takes effort. If you can’t be bothered taking the time to get to know your customers as individuals, your customer relationships won’t last long.
  14. Promote your business through specific methods and strategies that reflect the principles, and your genuine intentions to grow your business through caring for your customers.

The Principles of Character Driven Marketing™ were developed by Tamara Lyster, an Ireland-based business copywriter and strategist.

Branding Basics — 10 Comments
25
Sep 07

How to Create a Branded Outlook Email Template

One of my pet peeves is to see people using cheesy Outlook stationary templates with their outbound email. This habit is widespread even among employees of Fortune 500 companies. These templates not only look unprofessional and make messages difficult to read, but they also represent a wasted branding opportunity. Lets look at one example, using one of my “favorite” templates (Citrus Punch):

There are several problems with this message:

  • The texture in the background makes the text difficult to read.
  • The graphic at the bottom looks amateurish and unprofessional.
  • The default font is dated (Times Roman).
  • There is no signature file (branding).

Now let’s look at a few simple ways to make it better:

  • Don’t use any background texture. Black text on a white background works best, since it increases contrast and makes the message more readable.
  • Don’t use any other graphic elements in the background.
  • Choose an adequate font. Simple, sans-serif fonts like Arial or Verdana work best. If you want to use a serif-font use Georgia (it reads well since it was designed specifically for the web).
  • Create a signature file with your logo and company information.

To create your signature file follow this procedure:

  1. Open Microsoft Outlook and click on “Tools” in the top menu
  2. Click “Options”
  3. Click the “Mail Format” tab
  4. Click the “Signatures” button
  5. Click the “New” button
  6. Assign a name to your new signature file. Check “Start with a blank signature” and click “Next”
  7. Choose your font and write your name and job title in the first two rows (you can bold your name)
  8. Leave a blank row and insert a small version of your company logo, by right-clicking on the place where you want to put it, then clicking “Browse” and picking a logo from your hard drive. Use a small and simple .gif version of your logo (no more than 10Kb)
  9. In the next rows include your contact information: company name, address, phone, cell phone, fax, email address, skype or IM username (if you have one) and your website’s URL.
  10. Set your signature file to pop up in new messages as well as in replies and forwards.

That’s it. This is how your outgoing messages should look now:

Quite a difference, isn’t it? As you see, it doesn’t take much to turn your email messages into a powerful branding tool.

Online Branding — 3 Comments
24
Sep 07

How to Choose The Best Domain Name

Choosing a domain name is one of your most important business decisions. There are basically three types of domains:

1. Keyword (generic) domains,

2. Company (branded) domains and

3. Mixed domains

Each has its pros and cons. Let’s examine each one separately.

Keyword (generic) domains:

Keywords are terms that describe what you do. They are also the words people usually type to find companies like yours in the search engines. Keyword domains became popular a few years ago, when the search engines gave great importance to the domain name to rank pages. Thus, domains like ‘boston-web-design-company.com’ or’ loose-weight-in-7-days.com’ became popular.

Those domains are terrible from a branding perspective. Nowadays, they are also losing their search engine appeal, as search engines have improved their algorithms and are giving more importance to other factors, like the number of quality links pointing to your site.

Company (branded) domains:

A branded domain is basically your company name with no other word associated to it. For example, if you own a web design company called Praxis, Inc., your domain name would be praxis.com. Branded domains are usually short, memorable and easy to use in printed materials.

On the other hand, a branded domain doesn’t say what you do. For a large company with deep pockets (think Yahoo! or Apple) that won’t be a problem, but the small business on a budget must think of ways to better leverage their domain name for brand recognition purposes.

And that brings us to the third alternative.

Mixed domains:

This is the option that I recommend for small businesses. To create a mixed domain, you have to combine your company name with a keyword. For example: ‘praxiswebdesign.com’. That will give you the best of both worlds: brand recognition and keyword strength.

Final Tips:

  • If you are just opening a small business, choose your domain name before incorporating your company.
  • By all means, secure a .com domain, since it is the first one that will come to mind to most people. You should also register the other common variations, like .net, .org and .biz, to prevent unscrupulous competitors from benefiting from your brand equity.
  • Registering a domain nowadays costs less than $10/year. Domain names have gotten so cheap that if you haven’t yet made up your mind you can register several of them just to prevent others from snapping them up. You may later let the ones you don’t use expire, sell them or use them to launch other sites.
  • Don’t register your domain name with your hosting company. Though it may be tempting to accept their “free” domain registration offer with your hosting package, they can make you jump through hoops if one day you want to change hosting companies. Instead, register your domain with an accredited domain registrar and point it to your hosting company’s domain name servers.

Branding Basics — No Comments
23
Sep 07

Are You Delivering On Your Brand Promise?

I spend a lot of time on the road, so my travel experiences have become an endless source of branding article ideas. Here’s one of them:

A few months ago I was boarding the courtesy shuttle bus of one of the largest car rental companies in the country, when I sensed the smell of a lit up cigarette inside the bus. To my surprise, the driver was smoking. In a futile attempt to keep out the smoke he had his window half open, which was not letting out the smoke as much as it was letting the 40-degree outside temperature permeate inside the bus. Next to him a huge sign admonished, in menacing red letters: “No Smoking”.

Other people were getting on the bus, visibly annoyed by the cigarette smell while trying to load their heavy luggage, but our driver was too busy finishing his cigarette to help.

Companies spend billions of dollars trying to build their brand: expensive research is conducted to uncover the emotional connotations of their brand colors, cross-functional teams work for months to develop policies-and-procedures manuals the size of a large city’s phone book, marketing budgets the equivalent of a small country’s GDP are spent on Superbowl ads, among other things. However, all it takes is a schmuck in the low end of the value chain to completely ruin the brand experience.

As important as it is to communicate your brand attributes to your customers, it is crucial to communicate them clearly to your employees first, particularly to those who touch the customer on a daily basis. Your employees must internalize and embrace your brand values, and apply them in everything they do. Every activity, from answering the phone to packing a product to handling a customer complain, must be consistent with those values.

Your logo, your colors and your advertising make it easy for customers to remember you, but if you don’t deliver on your brand promise all your customers are going to remember is a bad experience, and that is worse than not being remembered at all. There are some companies that get it, and others that don’t. Which side are you on?

Branding Basics — 2 Comments
22
Sep 07

Beyond Features and Benefits

For years we’ve been told not to talk about features, but benefits, to the point that it has become a marketing cliché. Nowadays, however, benefits are not enough to give products an edge. Making good products is not hard any more. Factories in low cost countries are a dime a dozen, and they can manufacture any product at the quality level of established brands for a fraction of the cost. Private label products are gaining shelf at the expense of branded products at alarming rates.

To be successful brands have to establish an emotional connection with customers that goes beyond features and benefits. What counts is the experience, of which the product is only one of many dimensions. I’ll give you an example:

In Miami, where I live, you can find these small booths where you can have a cup of freshly made espresso coffee, Cuban style. I love to have coffee there. Others do to. Those places are selling an experience. While the coffee (product) is good, and it packs a punch that can keep you on your toes for many hours (benefit), the reason people choose to patronize these places is more powerful: it’s all about character. Imagine this experience:

You approach the coffee booth and are greeted by a lady behind the counter with something like: ‘dime, mi amor’ (akin to the ‘yes hon’ we would hear in the South). Nothing rehearsed, no script here, just a genuine way of saying ‘how may I help you’. She then proceeds to ground your coffee beans on the spot. While you wait, you can feel the aroma of the hot, fresh espresso being brewed. Depending on the day, you may find a couple of elderly patrons in guayaberas having a high-decibel conversation in Spanish. Finally, your coffee is delicately poured into a small, real cup.

All that for a buck, including the tip.

Now, imagine this scenario:

The coffee booths have been taken over by a large franchise chain, the lady behind the counter has been replaced by a reluctant teenager in an awkward-fitting uniform who greets you with a monotone ‘good-morning-sir-welcome-to-McCoffee-may-I-take-your-order-please, and then pours your coffee into a Styrofoam cup.

Same coffee, same benefit, not the same experience…

The brands that will endure success are the ones that, like the little coffee booths in Miami, give their customers a great experience, and are able to do it consistently, time and time again. Are you giving your customers a memorable experience?

Book Reviews / Branding Basics — 2 Comments
20
Sep 07

Book Review: Purple Cow

Purple Cow is a remarkable little book about the current state of marketing. Seth Godin makes the convincing case that selling ordinary products using traditional advertising no longer works.

Ordinary products are easy to make these days, most of us have everything we need, and we’re pretty satisfied with it. No amount of money spent on ads is going to make us change our mind. If customers don’t have the problem you’re trying to solve, they will not even listen. You are invisible.

Instead, Godin argues, smart companies now spend their money in product design, so that they can come up with remarkable products (purple cows) that influential early adopters can then “sell” to other people through word of mouth. In Purple Cow products, the product and the message are one and the same: the product tells a story that people naturally want to share.

Recently, I was sitting next to a friend during lunch and, while we were waiting to be served he pulled out his new iPhone. I couldn’t help but to make a remark about how sleek it looked; he then answered by giving me a passionate demonstration of all of the phone’s features. If I were more of a gadget-head, I would have left the restaurant and go buy one immediately. This is a perfect example of a Purple Cow at work.

How does one make a Purple Cow? Seth doesn’t have the answer, but offers a good suggestion: look for the edges, explore the limits. Find a product that is “too” something for most people, but absolutely irresistible for a small (but big enough to be profitable) group of people, who will in turn evangelize your product to others.

As usual, Seth uses plenty of compelling case studies to make his points, and writes down his takeaways at the end of each chapter, which makes the concepts covered in the book easier to digest. At 160 small-format pages, the book is a quick and entertaining read, ideal for when you have a couple of hours to kill on a plane or airport.

Read More:

Fast Company article about the Purple Cow
Dosh Dosh Purple Cow Review