On The Role of the Brand in Social Media Marketing

I was just reading The Role of the Brand in Social Media Marketing from Search Engine Watch.

He lists seven tactics marketers can use to build their brand in Social Media:

1. Boost the Fun Factor – Find out what social sites your customers and influencers frequent, and help them accomplish something new there. This does not mean inserting your brand as a social media billboard. It may mean offering an application that entertains or informs, or starting and growing a community based around your customers’ areas of interest. Caveat: Start it, facilitate it, but don’t try to control it.

2. See the Forest and the Trees – Pay attention to the smaller, niche social network sites, where people are gathering around their areas of interest and hobbies. Brand opportunities around these newer micro-social sites will increase as they begin competing and winning attention from the large, noisy social sites.

3. Widgets are Welcome – Incorporate a widget into your next online marketing program. Widgets are portable applets that appear on blogs, Web sites, and social networking sites. These self-contained applications allow page owners to personalize their sites quickly and easily. At the same time, widgets allow you to engage your audience with compelling content while also strategically and subtly branding your company or product.

4. Conversation is King – If you develop an application for use in social networks, or if you build a custom network, enable seamless conversations using the tools that users are familiar with. Promoting text conversation among participants is one thing, but also facilitating conversations using video and audio can help boost interactivity and brand resonance. Also give them a way to connect back to you by subscribing to a custom feed and giving them direct access to someone internally.

5. Engage – Find something that appeals to customers at an experiential level. Once upon a time, you built it and they came. Nowadays, they won’t show up unless you effectively engage them. Show your customers that you thought about them at a human level and not as simply “users.” This will impact every approach you take and will force the personalization for target demographics regardless of the tools you use to reach them.

6. Research and Listen – What is appealing to the people you want to reach? The only way to learn about their preferences and what they will or won’t embrace is to monitor their activity, as well as the culture of the community you wish to reach and create. By observing, you’ll uncover not only the ideas to build or deploy relevant tools, services or campaigns, but also the methods and strategies for creating genuine excitement and participation.

7. Don’t Go It Alone – Making the wrong move in the social media space can do more damage than not participating at all. Look to technology, marketing, and strategic business partners to create an effective and appropriate presence on the social web.

And he closes with the advice:

Remember that your brand influencers are online to connect with people who care about the things they care about. They are there to make meaning, not to be broadcast to. They are there to participate and create, not to be advertised to. The more your brand can assist people in connecting with others online to create or share something new, the more favorably you will be received in these new and influential social circles.

I think that there is a critical point he missed here: the way to get people to promote your brand in the social media space is to realize that, in social media, each person s their own brand and a critical part of social media is personal brand building. Each person builds his or her own brand to attract people that are interested in the things and ideas he or she is interested in. in he social media space, the brands you associate yourself with are much like the clothes you wear on the street of the beer you order in a bar: it’s a statement about who you are.

If a brand can make a statement about who a person is, what they care about, then they will want to be associate with the brand. Geeks associate themselves with Apple and promote Apple because it’s a statement about who they are. Photographers associate with Nikon or Canon because it defines who they are.

Does your brand define a person? Does their association with your brand help a person promote their brand? Is your brand make a statement that promotes something people care passionately about?

Maintaining the Image of Exclusivity: Invite Only Ecommerce

Interesting article on Forbes.com. High-end fashion companies are maintaining the air of exclusivity that high-price brands covet by making their websites & sales “invitation only.”

Lonely Planet’s Haystack: Hotel Booking Site Done Right

Lonely Planet just launched a new hotel booking website haystack.lonelyplanet.com

.

I like it. Only select hotels. Concise, pithy, authoritative reviews from a brand you trust. Useful “Author’s Tips” relevant to the neighborhood. User reviews and ratings. Nice maps and Getting There directions. What a fantastic mix.

But why is this such a great combination?

There are only great hotels. At least that’s what Lonely Planet promises–they announce that they only put the hotels they think are great on the site.

The reviews are authoritative–it comes from a source I trust. I trust the LP brand and that they pick authors that tell-it-like-it-is. By frontinng their authors and their reviews, they are putting the LP brand reputation on the line when I book through their site. I trust that they are not going to damage their brand trying to sell a crappy room and make a $2 commission. So I am willing to put my trust behind what they reccommend.

They take user input in the form of reviews and ratings. User input is valuable. Authors are usally right–but not always. Also, things change and the last guy visitng the hotel can give valuable feedback on it’s current state.

My gut feeling is that if I book a hotel via this site, I won’t be disappointed. That’s the power of the LP brand.

That’s a powerful sales tool!

If I were a hotel booking website, i would want to be partnering with these guys. Leverage their brand and increase your sales.