Social Media Marketing 101: Brand Management

As we enter the fourth week in our Social Media Marketing 101 series, we’ve already outlined a lot of the basic details necessary for developing an effective social media marketing strategy. Now that you know who you are, what you do and the right keywords to use to describe your brand/company/product, as well as the appropriate goals you hope to achieve with and for your customers, it’s time to figure out a way to manage it all.

My Brand, Your Brand, Our Brand

When we talk about brand management, we’re talking about managing the tangible and intangible characteristics of your brand. By now, you've developed a brand identity, which your goals help to support and sustain. However, once your product/service/company enters the marketplace, it’s noticeably harder to control how that brand is perceived by others.

But losing control shouldn’t be viewed as a detriment, but rather an asset. If you’re truly dedicated to providing a quality customer experience, you need to trust them with your brand. Brand management is less about holding your brand’s hand out in the world, and more about listening and learning from your customers’ experience to guide your brand appropriately away from dangerous situations.

If you uphold a culture of transparency, that is, your product/service/company does what it says it does, your brand will thrive. If it doesn’t, repairing the trust of your customers will take more than clever marketing.

Customer Intelligence, Analysis

First, even though this series is about social media, we’ve yet to talk about specific social media platforms. This is on purpose. Too often, companies dive into a platform without a plan because they think they have to be there. The right platform is determined more by who your customers are, how they share information and where they feel comfortable. To effectively choose the right platform, there is a lot of work organizations need to do to figure out who they are, what they do and what purpose they serve. 

Secondly, brand management facilitates your search for the right marketing platform by allowing you to perform a little reconnaissance. When you Google your brand, what do you see? Where are people talking about you or your industry? What are they saying about you? Better yet, what aren’t they saying about you? By taking the time to discover and listen, you can help distinguish pain points among your perceived or prospective audience.

Though Google is a good start, it goes only so far. What can you use to set up effective monitoring and management of your brand? Here are a few recommendations:

• Google Alerts: It’s a simple task. You can set up alerts about your company/product/service/brand so that you’re emailed whenever they appear online. You can also set up alerts of keywords or industry terminology.

• Social Mention: While there are individual tools that you can set up for specific forums, like BackType for comments or Technorati for blogs, Social Mention does a pretty good job in capturing your brand across most, if not all mediums. It’s also effective in isolated relevant keywords and measuring your brand’s impact online.

• Twitter Search: Tweeters don’t necessarily use hashtags or handles when they talk about your or your brand. Submitting Twitter searches by your product/service/company name may prove more fruitful than relying on mention notifications and will allow you to keep better informed and in-tune to your users’ conversations and experiences.

Invest in the Rights Tools, Right People

These are great tools for starting out, but for larger companies with a more diverse audience, it’s more likely you’re going to invest in larger, more comprehensive tools (read: not free). Social media, while free to use, isn’t without investment of time, money and resources. The time you invest in listening, monitoring and managing will be a reflection of how much your organization values its customers. Most companies have integrated various components into their employee’s roles and responsibilities. But like everything your company does, it shouldn’t be the sole responsibility of just one or two people. In many ways, brand management is a lot like knowledge management.

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Tags: brand management, content strategy, customer experience, empowered employee, knowledge management, need to share, social business, social listening, social media, social media marketing, social media marketing 101, social media monitoring, transparency, web engagement, wem

As we enter the fourth week in our Social Media Marketing 101 series, we’ve already outlined a lot of the basic details necessary for developing an effective social media marketing strategy. Now that you know who you are, what you do and the right keywords to use to describe your brand/company/product, as well as the appropriate goals you hope to achieve with and for your customers, it’s time to figure out a way to manage it all.