Branding or Connecting: How About Both?
Tips and examples for using social media platforms for creating brand connections.
Tips and examples for using social media platforms for creating brand connections.
Big brands have woken up to the power of online and are now buying billions of impressions to build and reinforce their brands. So let me propose adding another level of interaction to the mix. Instead of brand impressions, clicks, and actions, let’s encourage and measure “brand connections.” Until recently, about the only way to make a lasting online connection with a target audience was to have them join your e-mail list. E-mail is all well and good. But the explosion and adoption of social media provides marketers and media professionals with opportunities to make genuine and lasting connections with customers and target audiences.
We can now make lifelong connection because people’s profiles and social accounts rarely change. We can embed our client’s brands, content, and messages into the social environments where their target customers congregate. We can enable consumers to make our clients’ brands part of their online identities and help them talk about our brands in a way that our clients want to be talked about. And here is the big part: our online media can add serious octane to this potential. Use online media to encourage brand interactions and connections in the social space and watch the lasting value of your impressions and campaigns go through the roof. Watch the benefit of your impressions turn to valuable lasting connections! Brand marketers should be super greedy about amassing brand connections.
OK, so some quick tips on making this happen:
So here are some links and examples:
Making Brand Connections
OK, please excuse the self-promotion but here is goes. I want to connect to all of you and encourage all of you to share some of our valuable content. So this is simple: I could tell you to visit our site but I would rather we connect forever in the social Web and encourage you to distribute our content. So imagine I am any brand and here is what I am promoting:
These are the kind of things we promote in our e-mail, PR, and advertising and so should more major brands.
Want to see more brands making connections online? Check out Peter Kim’swiki of companies using social media marketing.
Chicklets
So many people still look at these little icons all over the Web and never click on them. Want to see what they do? Click on them and find out. Start with the things you might already have like Facebook. Then, see what happens.
Here are a couple examples of chicklet applications in action:
ShareThis
ShareThis is a free application that has consolidated many of the Web’s chicklets into one neat button so you do not have to clutter up your page with a ton of little buttons.
Now the cool thing is you can actually embed chicklets into your rich media ads using services like Clearspring, which works with PointRoll:
See the gallery, here. I like the Snickers ad with Mr. T. Click on “GRAB IT” to see the chicklets. You will get the idea.
Private Social Communities
One last thing: I know I am leaving out doing your own social community on your site using Ning or other platforms and here’s why. That’s a big topic and my focus in this column is how to leverage existing (and often free) social Web assets and applications that consumers are likely to be already using every day. Setting up social profiles and channels is easy; setting up and populating private online communities is a bigger undertaking.
However, this is not an either or proposition. A company planning to do a private community should do both and draw consumers in from the social media landscape. These people are already online socializing and will be more likely to join your network and share it with like-minded friends. Brands should integrate their private communities with the public social realm as much as possible through applications like Facebook Connect and creative. The communities companies create on their open platforms should be connected to the social world at large as much as possible.