insights and ideas
for elevating your
digital brand presence
In this edition:
Digital Brand Presence and
Early-Stage Entrepreneurs
Brand Personal Labs:
Facebook Pages for Business
Is Your Digital Brand Out of Alignment?
Assessing Your Digital Presence
December 2009
welcome
Welcome to the first issue of Brand Personal Update. Our vision is to make this newsletter a valuable resource for you. We’ll know that has happened when you look forward to receiving it and forward it to your favorite colleagues and clients. Please send us your feedback and ideas—we read everything you send in and will do our best to incorporate your suggestions.
As you enter December and find yourself consumed with year-end activities, be sure to set aside some time to set the table for next year. A planning approach we used at P&G that is still relevant today is the “OGSM” framework: Every business or organization needs a set of objectives (O) that describe, in one or two sentences, what the business or organization is trying to achieve. Each objective should have quantifiable and time-bound goals (G). The goals should be supported by a set of specific strategies (S), and each strategy should have measureable milestones (M) for tracking interim progress.
For example, if we have an objective of entering the China market, we might set a goal of identifying and signing an appropriate partner by June 30 and realizing the first dollar of China market revenue by September 30. The strategies for finding the right partner might include reaching out to our network, meeting with appropriate members of our industry’s trade group for referrals, and engaging a law firm that specializes in contracting with Chinese partners. To finalize the planning by making our progress measurable, we would identify interim steps and key dates and would assign responsibility for each strategy.
If you have questions about this framework or would like to discuss how it might apply to an aspect of your business, please contact us to set up a call.
digital brand presenceAND EARLY-STAGE ENTREPRENEURSEntrepreneurs are, by definition, unique. Entrepreneurs don’t just think outside the proverbial box, sometimes they redefine the box, or they see something outside the box that could fill an empty space inside the box, or they even create a new box altogether. That underlying quality of thinking differently is the starting point for discovering their personal brand. The unique quality of being able to redefine what exists or is possible in a specific market or business also becomes a key element in expressing an entrepreneur’s personal brand. Personal brand and building relationships What’s important about a personal brand for entrepreneurs? To make their ideas and concepts a business reality, entrepreneurs must engage and contract with others: their networks, suppliers, customers, investors, distribution channels, and key employees. For each of those business relationships, the decision maker would be taking a risk in choosing to work with an early-stage entrepreneurial business. To be successful, an entrepreneur has to help the decision maker get past that risk. In fact, in a recent study of successful entrepreneurs reported in the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Quy Huy, professor of strategy at INSEAD in France, and Dr. Christoph Zott, professor of entrepreneurship at IESE in Spain, found that “First and foremost, it’s vital to reassure people that you are personally capable and credible.” A clear and relevant personal brand is the critical tool for establishing the necessary credibility to build these business relationships. Discovering, expressing, and building your personal brand is really an investment in your entrepreneurial success. What is a personal brand? At Brand Personal, we define personal brand as your unique combination of enduring qualities, skills, and experience. To arrive at your personal brand, we coach you to explore and discover • Who are you when you are being your best? • What goals for the future do you want to create now? • What skills and experiences do you bring from your past and present into this future? • What do others who know you well see in your personal brand? The answers to these questions, reflected back by an experienced brand coach, will point to the definition of your personal brand. “Reveal yourself,” Dr. Huy and Dr. Zott recommend. “Entrepreneurs who were successful know how to deploy personal details that will strike a chord with listeners.” Finding and expressing your personal brand At Brand Personal, while encouraging you to remain true to your accomplishments, we take you past the conventional “résumé or CV” box and encourage you to find your unique brand expression. To do this, we explore questions like, • Who do you want to talk to? • What’s important to them? • What’s the meeting point of your uniqueness and the things that are important to the people you are seeking? When you are clear about these answers, you can be specific and relevant in what you say about yourself to establish your credibility in the business relationships you’re pursuing. We invite you to reflect on these questions to discover and express your personal brand, to take your entrepreneurial business farther down the road to the business relationships that are important to your success. And if you would like a partner on that personal brand journey, let’s talk! |
brand personal labsFACEBOOK PAGES FOR BUSINESSWe recently completed our testing of some new features of Facebook that the social media site hopes will appeal to businesses. Our take: Facebook is now open and powerful enough to fill the need for a basic website. However, the slow and unintuitive tools for page building may leave you looking at your watch and scratching your head. Fast and easy setup Facebook now gives businesses the ability to build a customized, dedicated page that is open to anyone on the web regardless of Facebook membership status. Setting up a Facebook page for your business or organization is fast and easy. Start by selecting Create a Page for a celebrity, band or business on Facebook’s home page. Fill in some basic information, upload a logo or photo, and publish your page. You can stop here or make more changes. Customizing the page One of the first things you’ll want to customize is the Wall settings. We prefer to permit commenting and writing on the Wall, but we turn off permission to post links, photos, and videos in order to deter spammers and inappropriate material. A powerful customization feature is the ability to modify the tabs. You can change the order of the tabs by clicking on them and dragging them to the desired location. You can also eliminate tabs—with the exception of the Wall and Info tabs—as well as add new ones. You can even decide which tab will present first when someone goes to your Facebook page. Adding custom applications Facebook pages are capable of handling almost any HTML application. Several pre-built business-related applications are available, and you can also add your own. We selected the free RSS Social application as the engine for a “News” tab that gathers content from an RSS feed. We also added a newsletter sign-up application tab using custom HTML provided by our electronic newsletter vendor. Both applications were up and running in a matter of minutes. Deploying your page Facebook makes it easy to attract fans to your page. With a single click you can invite your friends, and hopefully they’ll invite their friends. Facebook also provides a badge for use on your website or blog. In addition, you can advertise your page on Facebook, a fact that the company reminds you of every time you log in. Page analytics Another powerful feature of Facebook pages is the analytics package that’s included. You get automatic and free access to statistics such as the number of interactions as well as the number of fans—both won and lost. Once you get enough fans and interactions, Facebook will provide data on fan demographics, including age, gender, and geographical location. Examples Many Fortune 500 companies have Facebook pages. To get some ideas for your business or organization, we would suggest taking a look at Wal-Mart (facebook.com/Walmart) and Vanguard (facebook.com/Vanguard) and studying how they use the tabs, the Wall, and the designated landing page. For an example of both good and bad promotional use, check out facebook.com/FanWoody, which has attracted nearly one million fans for the restaurant chain TGI Fridays. The page has made clever use of videos and fan photos, but it also includes a string of angry discussion posts from fans who didn’t get the promised coupon for a free hamburger. The downside Facebook Pages for Business has room for improvement. The first priority should be to improve the speed of the application. The slow speed at which Facebook acknowledges changes and updates pages felt at times like we were back in the dial-up days. A second area for improvement is the user interface. Understanding what is possible and figuring out how to make changes is not intuitive, and the help section doesn’t really live up to its name. Still, we managed to produce two successful pages through trial and error and by finding help through Google searches. Bottom Line Investing in a Facebook page makes sense for any B2C business or organization and could even work for a B2B company that needs a quick and low-cost web presence. Just ensure you have the time and the patience to work with the slow and puzzling interface. Alternatively, hire a developer to build a page for you. |
cheryl sylvester
IS YOUR DIGITAL BRAND OUT OF ALIGNMENT
When a potential business collaborator, employer, or referral encounters you on LinkedIn, your website, or your blog, will they find a digital brand you that’s aligned with your in-person brand? It’s common that they won’t. And yet, alignment between your in-person presence and your on-line presence can make the difference in opening or closing the door to building business relationships.
We’ve seen clients and our own business associates whose digital brand presence was misaligned with their in-person presence. For example, we’ve been invited by business associates to join their network on LinkedIn, only to get to their profile and find that the person we are accustomed to encountering is not a person but rather just a small collection of historical facts. In some cases, the individual was even unrecognizable in the photo. We’ve also seen website bios and blogs misaligned with the in-person presence of an individual.
Here are two key questions to ask yourself about your personal brand in the digital arena:
• Will people’s experience of me in my digital presence align with how they know me in person?
• If someone meets me virtually, then encounters me on the phone or in-person, will they meet the same person?
You can also ask some trusted others for their feedback on how they experience your digital brand and whether it aligns with your in-person brand.
If you discover that your personal brand is out of alignment, then you may want to go deeper and re-align. Of course your digital presence needs to represent your skills and experience factually. But more importantly, your digital brand presence must represent your personal brand in a compelling way in order for potential business associates or employers to be open to want to take the next step to meet you virtually, and then to encounter you in person.
In our Brand Personal coaching process, we work with our clients to step out of the ”résumé box” and on-line templates with a personal brand expression that reflects not only their skills and experience, but also their unique ways of doing things and their unique ways of being—professionally, of course.
Bringing your on-line personal brand in line with your in-person brand may take you a little outside your comfort zone. But when your digital presence stands in for you, you want it to be . . . like you!
michael vermillion
Assessing Your Digital Presence
Before you launch into a digital marketing effort, you should first establish a baseline or starting point for you and your organization. This assessment will not only provide a benchmark for measuring future improvement, but it will also reveal the aspects of your digital brand presence that need the most help.
In conducting a digital brand assessment for our prospective clients, we ask three questions.
Are you findable?
The first check is to search your name and your organization’s name on Google, which is the leading search engine by a wide margin. The Google search will immediately tell how well your digital marketing efforts are working. The search also quantifies the degree of search competition for your name and may turn up some aspects of your digital brand that you would rather have buried. Searching Bing and Yahoo! is also helpful in providing supporting data.
Are you consistent?
A second check is to review your digital profiles for consistency and clarity. Since we establish our digital presence over time, the chance that our LinkedIn and Google profiles may not match the profiles on our blogs or websites is pretty high.
Are you clear and differentiated?
Even if you are findable and consistent, if your target audience doesn’t understand who you are, what you do, and how you do it in a way that is meaningful to them, then your digital brand presence is likely not working for you. Check the various aspects of your digital brand presence—your profiles, blog entries, interviews, Amazon reviews, and tweets—to see if you are clearly communicating your brand in a way that sets you apart from your competition.
Once you have honestly answered these three questions, you will likely have a long list of changes to make. Prioritizing those changes in a way that generates the highest return on effort is the key to establishing a successful digital brand presence.
aboutBRAND PERSONALBrand Personal is a service that works with high-achieving professionals and their organizations to realize their goals by leveraging their personal brand power. It’s like having your own personal coach, branding expert, strategy consultant, and digital marketing agency working together as a team fully dedicated to your professional success. Visit Proven System – Exceptional Results to learn more about our process and success stories. Cheryl SylvesterCheryl Sylvester is the president of Your Brand Coach and a co-founder of Brand Personal, where she has created an approach that is a synergy of high-level brand communications and one:one leadership coaching. A brand communications strategist and certified professional leadership coach, Cheryl has 20+ years of experience working with companies and clients, including McDonald’s, HP, Monsanto, Novell/PlateSpin, BMO, H&K, and Ogilvy. Her love of brands and brand people has created success for her clients and earned her recognition as one of the Profit W100 female business owners in Canada. Michael VermillionMichael Vermillion is the president of Far Hills Media and a co-founder of Brand Personal, where he works with clients who set big goals, have 10% in the bag, and are determined to get to 10x. He has worked at the intersection of technology, brand, and innovation for 25 years and created over $6 billion of market value along the way. Former employers and clients include mega companies like Procter & Gamble, Lilly, Georgia Pacific, RR Donnelley, BellSouth, Dun & Bradstreet, and EDS. Mid-sized, privately owned firms and a venture-backed start-up are also part of his background. SpeakingMichael Vermillion and Cheryl Sylvester, co-founders of Brand Personal, speak on a regular basis on the topics of personal branding, digital marketing and the importance of digital brand presence for professional success. To inquire about availability for your group, please contact us by email. WorkshopsThe Brand Personal team regularly conducts customized Digital Brand Presence workshops for corporations, associations, and conferences. Check out our Corporate Programs page and call 1-800-385-1513 or email us for more details. Contact UsThe best way to contact us via our website. Additional contact information: New York office: 1440 Broadway, 23rd Floor, New York, NY 10018 Toronto office: 550 Eglinton Ave. W. #23008, Toronto, ON M5N 3A8 Main phone number: 1.800.385.1513 (US and Canada) +1 646.308.1440 (Outside US and Canda) |
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