social media strategy

Sarah Worsham / Oct 15, 2008

Tips for Creating a Memorable Brand

When customers see your logo or hear your name, what do they think and feel? If there isn’t any emotion or attachment to your brand, you’re missing out on an opportunity to connect on an emotional level with your customers. Here’s some tips on how to create a memorable brand:

Figure out what traits you want your brand to be known for.
Create unique images, sounds, looks, etc. that represent your brand traits.
Be consistent.
Provide excellent customer experiences.
Deal fairly with others.
Handle failures transparently.
Connect with your customers.
Listen to your customers.
Be true to yourself.
Have fun.

What’s worked for your brand? Have ideas to add to the list? Please share in the comments below.

(photo by OiMax @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: branding, brand, brand management, social media, social media strategy, internet marketing, online marketing

Sarah Worsham / Oct 2, 2008

Customer Service is the New Marketing – Interview with Get Satisfaction

We’ve been talking a bit about branding and customer service – about how they are inter-related and can impact your overall business. In this interview with Lane Becker, co-founder of Get Satisfaction, he discusses customer service as the new marketing with interviewer Joshua-Michele Ross from O’Reilly:

In the interview, Lane points out that customer service has traditionally been considered “customer-avoidance”. Metrics measure customer service were about treating customers as numbers and closing as many issues as quickly as possible (problem tickets and time on the phone). If customers didn’t like how you treated them, there was little they could do. The Internet has changed that by allowing a disgruntled customer to reach millions of people (as well as satisfied customers). So there is a huge opportunity now for very cheap and powerful marketing through good customer service. Thinking about customer service as part of marketing can help change corporate attitudes and open the doors to meaningful conversations with your customers.

If you have questions for Lane, you can post comments on the original blog post.

What opportunities does your company have for good customer service?

Technorati Tags: customer service, brand, branding, social media, social media strategy, internet marketing, online marketing

Aaron Worsham / Sep 29, 2008

Your customers want your brand as a friend

Cone, Omnicom Group’s strategy arm, released some data from a recent survey measuring brand trust. This research claims that 93% of the 1092 Americans surveyed thought that companies should have a corporate presence on social media. It went further, citing 85% of those surveyed being open to interaction with companies within social media. The demographic breakdown favored young males and weathly individuals, which can be a sweetspot for some marketed brands.

While networks like Facebook and Myspace may be old news for well polished marketing firms representing highly branded labels, this study is suggesting that the time may be right for more conservative consumer industries to follow suit. If your company is consumer driven, tending towards younger male Americans or the affluent population, Cone is recommending you look at social media for your next marketing campaign.

It should be said that the study is a bit self serving, as Cone is a ‘strategy and communications agency’ with a presumed stake in the growth on online Brand Marketing. That doesn’t make the results any less intriguing. One of the best pull quotes I saw was this response from the surveyor to the question of what should Companies be doing in social networks:

Companies should use social networks to solve my problems (43%)

People, it can be really simple. Find out what the top ten customer questions are for sales, the top ten service calls for your product, wrap them up and build them into an interactive Facebook app. Don’t just spit out one line information or a support number either, if the solution could be automated for the customer, take the added steps to do it.

Your customers don’t want you to be their Best Friend Forever. But even one answer to a ‘Hey, can you help me with this’ will make you 10x more valuable than a crate of flying sheep.

photo attributed to b_d_solis @ Flickr CC

Technorati Tags: brand, branding, social media, social media strategy, internet marketing, online marketing

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