Brand Strategy

Remember when you got started on Facebook? There was that phase a few months into it where every high-school friend was suddenly back on your radar, whether or not there as any reason to have remembered them in the first place. Waves of old and new faces would wash up on the shore of your in-box. Some of us indiscriminately accepted all. Some others took more time to approve or maybe ignore some of the more hinky ones.

Social Networks right now are merely dumps of nearly infinite connections, powered by XML and RSS. If the robot even thinks there’s a connection, it is programmed to go ahead and make it, hoping that you, the human, will sort it out later.

Brands have long sought to associate themselves with celebrities in the hope that some of the latter’s mojo would rub off on the former. The reasoning might go that if you love William Shatner and he says he loves our cola then you should love it too! Of course, the realities of marketing and advertising make that calculation much more complex and it’s sometimes that you want to associate your brand with the emotions that celebrity stirs and that cuts both ways, often with unpredictable results.

The New Group President, Steve Marshall, and Digital Strategist, Tom Bennett, will be speaking at a Linfield College Alumni Luncheon at The Westin in Portland this coming Wednesday the 11th. Steve, a Linfield College Graduate, is a 20+ year international marketing veteran. Tom is a 20+ year marketing veteran and TNG's own social media guru. 

Not every interaction or engagement with your brand by consumers has equal value. Especially if your goals are to influence consideration of your brand or ignite word of mouth sharing about your products.

So do you have a schema for measuring engagement with your brand across online social channels? If so, how have you determined which actions and points of interaction are the most valuable? Which get higher weighting than others?

A common question I am asked by clients who are nervous about engaging in Social Media is “What about negative comments or flame wars?” It’s a valid concern. We all know instances where a negative meme picks up steam and spins out of control, leaving the brand scrambling to recover. And that’s where the failure was: if you’re not going to be actively engaged in your social media efforts, then don’t bother. Playing catch up is generally a losing game.