Building your personal brand

Chris Brogan, social media expert blogger and speaker in the US, often writes about building your own personal brand in his blog.

He has recently published this excellent, free e-book on the subject and, whilst in the web 2.0 / social media / online world it is something that is perhaps easily understood and related to, in the less-aware offline world of networking amongst business professionals, the same thoughts are valid and have formed the cornerstone of many a business person's networking for years - Chris manages to link the on and offline "rules of engagement" really well.

Many years ago, at a previous company, my boss had several simple mantras that ran through every aspect of his business focus;
He would tell me "people buy people" and
"its not what you know, its who you know"
and, having generated the bulk of his work through personal recommendation for his whole life, would always ask clients "if you are happy with our work, please tell someone else, if not, please tell us!"
It worked.
And he had an impressive, yet simple database of all contacts, clients and prospects that he could easily sift to find a particular person.

I learned early on the value of these words and have always valued my contacts - you just never know when you are going to need a bridge to someone or somewhere, maintaining trust and respect with your network is essential to being able to use those contacts.

Over the years I have stayed tight to those mantras and with the advent of social tools, the whole process is much simpler to put into place and manage.

I can use LinkedIn to manage my business contacts (and now have a clearer idea as to who they can get me in touch with by), Twitter to keep my network up to date on what I am doing, my blog to publish thoughts and insight and garner response from my network and Facebook and other sites to manage personal contacts whilst maintaining a consistent profile across all sites.

Having a clear idea about your personal brand is essential, knowing how to implement it online is the next stage and Chris Brogan's ebook covering strategy and 100 tips on tactical suggestions and ideas should be on everyone's reading list this week. Thanks Chris!

The key things I think anyone should take from it at the very least are:
> Be yourself
> Be honest
> Listen
> Be confident and passionate, but dont brag
> Apologize if you mess up, and be sincere
> Dont try to SELL. Few people like being sold to, but most like buying. Help them to buy.

I hope that my old boss will be pleased that I have developed his ideaology into my own variant:
"Its not (just) what you know, but who, and how you can use it for and with those contacts"

What do you think?

Picture credit Brymo

look after your brand

There's one downside to being involved in the design world, and that is having an unavoidable eye for details..

Give me a menu at a restuarant and I will be mentally cringing at the 7 different typefaces and lack of design consideration that has been given to the main piece of communication between the restaurant and the customer before I can even try and take in the actual offering.

Flyers drop through my door, and I cannot help myself but note how if the vendor had just spent a few moments thinking about their ideal audience and then a few pounds having the communication designed appropriately it might have hit a mark (before I then drop it in the recycling bin)

It will therefore come as no surprise that this typographical abomination caused me to squirm uncomfortably until it had passed out of view. What was interesting on this occasion was that my travelling companion (who by his own admission is to design what Jade Goody is to haute couture) spotted my flinches and acknowledged the heresy that was evident outside the ferry window immediately and required no convincing that this was not good brand portrayal and he too read it as "Norf-olkline" as the font metrics are completely wrong. (it acutally looked worse, if that is possible, outside the lens of my camera as the kerning between the o-l-k is also all wrong)

Norfolkline must be aware that this particular ferry has been "decorated" in such a way, but I am intrigued as to how it came to be so - it surely cannot be down to cost-saving, though I can understand that could be why it has not been corrected since. Maybe there is an opening for a position as Brand Manager!?

Ok, so, in the scheme of things and in comparison to world peace and global warming, this hardly needs a mention, but my point is that, with a small amount of care, the right communication to the contractors doing the painting, or a tiny amount of education as to what the company's brand stands for, this would surely have not happened?! I know that it's not what's on the tin, but what is in it, but we dont buy premium baked beans from a dented, scrawled wrapped can, do we..?

If a company cannot look after their own brand or present their products and services to to the best of their ability, how am I supposed to feel that they will they look after me as a customer?

Talk WITH your consumers - or else!

Whatever size company you are and whoever your customers, clients or consumers are, you have to take note! We, as consumers are fed up with being talked AT, the relentless PUSH process from advertising that results in little or no dialogue whatsoever and certainly is rarely a two-way street.

Those that get it right, and engage with their audience with honesty and integrity, are already showing signs of getting results, and it works no matter the size of your organisation . Who looks after your customers, who REALLY looks after them? Marketers talk about CRM systems and customer DATA, where we are all neatly stored and categorised for the benefit of the supplier..

..but we dont want to be a meaningless number, in fact, we dont want to be categorised - we want to feel valued and er, well, loved! Then we'll come back and buy more of your products and services, tell our friends and recommend you, tell you what it is we love about your products and how you can improve or develop them, all valuable stuff that you will struggle to get accurately through any other means.

Here's a fantastic portrayal of this issue, does it ring any bells with you?

Twitter - misunderstood tool or total twaddle?

Ok, so I am really interested in the whole Social web thing, community building and social networks.
But I've never really GOT the Twitter thing.

I've been intrigued by it, but, having left my Tricenarian years behind last year, and the lack of requests for my twitter-presence, it appears that I either dont have any "cool" friends who use such tools, or that they too are unsure what to do with it!

So, on finding this post last week and reading another viewpoint from a contact I made at a Green Marketing event today, I finally got round to setting up an account to see if i can find a use for it.

To be honest, I was a late entrant to the Facebook "thing" but quickly found appeal and got hooked. It's enabled me to get back in contact, and easily maintain contact with a whole bunch of friends from the "pre-company" years that I thought I would never see or hear from again. (I've never been very brilliant at keeping regular contact with friends who've moved away..) And for that, I thank you Facebook!

So, onto Twitter - The idea is that you can send a text (SMS) to a central point on anything that you are doing, and then your friends and followers can be updated automatically by the same service. AND interact.

It's really easy to setup an account, then validate it to your mobile, and you are ready to go, so I have. And then - well, as I had suspected, having let it trawl through my email addresses, it found ZERO people that I know with accounts on twitter, so I am left able to twitter to myself!

BUT HANG ON! - Then it hit me - Its a micro-blogging tool, one that would enable me for example, to text ideas and thoughts back to a blog, some of which could be worth sharing (!?) but others could be referenced later and written up in full or acted on.

Take, for example, the event I was at today; I met loads of new contacts and made some notes of blogs, website URLs and great ideas - I could have twittered (such messages are called "Tweets") these back to my micro-blog (and via a cunning widget, I suspect pulling them directly onto this blog too) and therefore been contributing to this post hours ago!

Today I had paper and a pen with me, but what if I was in the pub, or at a sporting meeting or similar - I can now whizz ideas and updates, even if they are only really of interest to me, back to my micro-blog, at any time.

And, thinking laterally, say you are a small courier company and want to keep track of your drivers, why not get them to twitter a customer or delivery code / report back on completing a drop-off, or traffic update.. then any potential delays could be co-ordinated for the cost of an SMS, AND all other drivers could receive the update automatically.

I know you can text to multiple recipients, but this sorts it all out for you, AND provides a log of events that a manager or administrator can use (AND more!)

So, although my account setup is still drying, I can already see that there are loads of potential applications already, and that's without trying to find friends to update on my every movement! Thumbsup from me!

Have you used it? what do you think?

Pats on backs

I'm not sure what the correct blog-i-quette is for self promotion, but in this case, I dont care!

Preview has been through a lot of changes and reorganisation over the past 18 months or so, and its all paid off in our new team and the work they've been doing.

To cap it all, I had another look at our 2007 yearbook today, that Martyn Reding (our Creative Director) put together, and it reminded me, it's blimmin great.



If you do nothing else, please take two minutes, pop over to our news page and have a read of THEIR yearbook - its worth it, honest!

Great stuff everyone - thanks, I'm really proud!

Marketing to a niche market

In my other business we make specialist livery and graphics kits for emergency vehicles.

But we have an interesting set of problems to surmount.

We are one of only a handful such specialist companies in the country, and largely, the UK leads the world due to our research and development into acheiving high visibility on our roads. However, our specialism makes for an interesting marketing case:

> There are 3 manufacturers of suitable materials for this work, and we all buy from the same sources at very similar prices.
> There are guidelines as to the designs and layout of the livery we make and we all have to follow them (within reason)
> There is only one method (currently) of manufacture to cut and seal the materials we use - we all use that technology
> There are a finite number of users in the UK in the emergency services, and we all know who those contacts are already

Therefore, the only obvious ways we can differentiate from our competitors is on service or price. Trouble is, clients EXPECT good service and support, or change suppliers, and if you compete on price, well, anyone can cut their prices, cant they - it doesnt actually offer a better product, does it!?

We were a late entrant to the market (and my background gave us none of the advantages or hindrences of legacy information or knowledge) and from day one I saw that service was a key route, but also that our competitors were all parts of bigger organisations, so we were able to offer one unique point - Specialism. I also strove to set up a brand that conveyed all our key attributes consistently and clearly. We have always been free with our technical and legal knowledge; my belief is that if you empower people to understand your offering, they will lean more naturally toward you when they come to purchase - and it's worked so far, through our regular newsletters, thorough website and technical bulletins - we do have a great name for helpful, knowledgable staff and good quality service.

However, thats all great, and we have grown to a point where we are a pain to the other competitors, but we want to gain more market share of the core, relatively static, emergency service business.

The only way I can see to differentiate is to dip back into the bag that got us here in the first place and INNOVATE. We've had some fantastic open days recently that have attained great feedback and we'll be acting on some of that.

The conclusion I have come to this week is to really engage again with our target market and open up opportunities for them to share and discuss the issues they face, so that we can use the feedback to hone our offering. Not just online, though that would be innovative(!), but face to face, over the phone and at exhibitions etc. A truly rounded "Customer First" approach that I think will reveal completely different issues and requirements than just price... we'll see!

If you have any suggestions for how I might approach this, I'd welcome them - it all helps in the mix!

How to engage with your customers?

I've been using a couple of great real-world examples of how brands can learn (yes learn!) from online opinions and engage with communities for everyones greater good, but importantly to gain an increase in both brand perception (and therefore perceived brand value) as well as generate those all important shareholder returns.

The best example of how TO do it was Cadbury, who learned that there was mounting opinion urging them to reinstate the Wispa bar. They listened to the chatter, engaged with the audience and discovered they had a really loyal and approachable customer base that they could use to bounce ideas off and therefore help with product development. They reinstated the Wispa bar, but also used this new channel to converse freely with a wide range of people crossing all demographics. By feeding this marketing information back into product development, they now have a unique opportunity to harness the chatter and build better products that people already want to buy!

On the how NOT TO do it side is HSBC, who, on finding there was a huge gathering of negative opinion regarding their decision to abolish interest free overdrafts on Facebook, eventually agreed to reverse their decision and refund the students. All sounds great, except the way they went about it has been perceived as a cave-in from the giant bank in blogs and forums the world over. Surely not the result the brand and marketing director would have planned!

And today, another example - Facebook have been asked to pull Scrabulous by Scrabble manufacturers Mattel and Hasbro. Now, dont get me wrong, I think copyright is an important and necessary principle, though it is one that continues to generate debate with the advance of the digital media, but here again Mattel / Hasbro appear to have run scared and simply quashed a really popular application (some 600,000 are registered to it) when there must surely have been another way. Now there are "Save Scrabulous" groups appearing all over Facebook and lots of negative sentiment toward the big brands involved.

Come on guys, wake up, listen to your "customers" and put their needs first occasionally!