Brand Identity: Communicating the Heart of Organization:
I’ve lived in a host of cities, from a small college town just outside Salt Lake City, Utah and Rochester, NY to our nation’s capital in Washington, DC and the capital of Country Music in Nashville, TN. Each city I’ve live in has its own personality, identity, and brand. And not surprisingly, each respective city has created an deep imprint on my personality and is reflective of my personality.
Your brand speaks volumes of unsaid things about you as an organization. Your brand in short is your business calling card and your DNA all in one. What does your online brand say about the personality of your organization? Does it say you are real people with real feelings? Or does it sound cold and bureaucratic and look like a brochure?
How Web 2.0 is Changes the Contours of Branding and Business in 2008 and Beyond:
Increasingly the fundamental landscape of digital branding is changing. Social media tools, like blogs , social networking tools, and wikis, empower consumers to co-determine brands. Correspondingly, brands have been given the opportunity to give their brand personality.
Now is increasingly the time to reach out and create a more open and responsive brand. It’s not only best for customer relations and driving product and service innovation, but also organic search engine traffic and business success.
Increasingly Brand Marketers Need to Wake Up:
Online branding is impossible if a) they can’t find you on Google or b) you exist in social communities with them. Social media and search are the proverbial keys to the marketing kingdom in terms of online brands. Experts like John Battelle agree:
To keep building our brands, we have to go where the audience has gone. And every month, according to Comscore, 600 million people visit conversational media sites – foreign lands when it comes to brand marketing. Or ….are they?
Battelle further highlights the sweet spot of exponential online growth:
And that’s showing in the numbers: all the hyper growth in the top 20 sites on the Web is with conversational platform and tools – the very sites which spawn new conversational media brands. “Old School” portals and media sites are growing far less fast (see chart below).
So will brands from small business to the Fortune 500 join the conversation? And will you?
If you have any doubts, check out this video with some of the latest conversational and social media marketing statistics:
Reflections on How Personal and Professional Brands Intersect:
What gives cities unique personalities? What is unique about your personality? About your online business personality? How can you improve the sync between your offline personality and your online brand?
