How to Simultaneously Build and Protect Your Social Brand

These three tips can help you build, while at the same time protect, your personal or corporate social brand.

We all know that social media technology and mobile technology move faster than any one person can keep up with. We also know that these advancements in technology provide more personal marketing opportunities for both the individual, personal social brand and the corporate brand. This may be opportunities for you or for your team, your CEO, or your clients. But with digital marketing and social media marketing opportunities, as we know in the world of Google Search, can also come potential reputation problems. So that you can keep a steady online brand growing and at the same time shield yourself for brand equity protection, read the following three tips on how to build, and simultaneously protect, your personal or corporate social brand.

1. Have a Social Brand Plan in Place

Even if you have been growing your own personal online brand or company online brand via social media marketing for many years, checking in to see if you have a real social brand plan in place that you have been actively measuring is smart. A social brand plan can be thought of as similar to a detailed marketing plan. At minimum this social plan should include the following elements:

  • Voice guidelines. In this include guidelines around the language of the voice, the personality of the voice, the temper of the voice.
  • The brand promise. Even an individual CEO’s social brand delivers on some type of promise. What is your promise or your company promise? Whatever a brand says it will deliver it needs to deliver in social as its promise. This can be anything from education to support to freebies and incentives.
  • Content parameters. This article is too short to deliver all the elements of a content marketing plan. However, at minimum, have a plan around what type of content, what style of content, frequency of content, ratio of original to shared/third-party content is needed.
  • Social team and resources agreement. Too many times, companies lose control of their social brand because they have not allotted the right type or frequency of resources to support, grow, and protect the social brand. In the beginning or when re-assessing a social brand, take the time to determine what internal and external resources will contribute to and commit to the success of the social brand development.

2. Have a Social Brand Protection System in Place

Many social media marketing automation, management, and monitoring tools today provide some sense of social brand protection. This is a minimum. Setting up these tools for success means thinking through, first, what search terms support your social brand and then implementing them as, for example, hash tag categories and catch phrases for monitoring any mentions (positive, neutral, and negative).

Setting up Google Alerts of course is a no brainer for targeted keywords that support your social brand or company SEO strategy.

It isn’t enough just to have these tools in place. It is just as important that a human reviews these tools and takes immediate action, with guidelines in place. The social brand protection system should be supported with a well-developed guidelines document that spells out how to respond to anything potentially negative in social about the company brand.

3. Have a Social Brand Weekly Meeting

Supporting my last tip, the best way to continually grow and protect your social brand is to have a weekly team meeting with members of both your internal and external social media marketing teams. This can be as simple as a 30-minute phone call. The key is to prepare effectively for this meeting. Have your social team prepare all necessary analytics and KPI reports. Prepare any questions and plans for the following week around social branding. Like any other marketing program, the marketing of the social brand deserves time, attention, proper investments, and resources.

These are just three of the basic tips about building and protecting a social brand. I hope that you begin to utilize these and comment here or join me on Twitter or LinkedIn to continue the social brand conversation.

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