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.
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.
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:
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.
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.