Thinkervine

Branding seeks to increase the customer’s perceived value on your product or services. Marketing campaigns through all different channels (above the line, below or through the line) have always relied on mainly two factors to increase the embrace of the product they advertise: Creating value then let the word-of-mouth game start. And it is well known to all marketers that a satisfied customer earns you 3 others and a dissatisfied one makes you lose 10 more.

Technology has known a disruptive evolution. And a disruptive technology means opportunity and risk. With the appearance of the web platforms and social networks, these rules still apply, though the impact is multiplied by thousands. This is mainly due to the new exposition and virality through which news spread across the web. An upset blogger can, in hours, easily destroy the reputation of your brand or product and force you into a crisis cell to manage this issue. You may well remember the “Failure” Google Bombing against president Bush or the Dave Caroll case with United Airlines. And thing is, word-of-mouth doesn’t remain within the inner friends circle, but as stated Universal McCann, behaviors have evolved, and people started to believe strangers.

To avoid these kind of marketing disasters, it is highly advised to have a proper management of your brand online, at the core of your marketing and PR strategy, and to maintain a reputation in adequation with the standards you’re looking forward off the Internet.

So you’re going to ask: How do I manage my brand online ?

Managing an e-reputation can go from basic operations to a very complex strategy. Whichever the level at which you choose to engage your brand management, there are three points that you will need to address:

• Monitoring
• Engaging the conversation
• Optimizing your web presence

The first step is to monitor your brand and your products, evaluate the perception on the web, what people have to say about it. This search should not be limited to search engines results but to blogs, social networks, video websites, social bookmarking websites, local search sites and forums.

During the monitoring process, you will probably come across dissatisfied customers and customers requiring information on the company or specific products. It is highly advised to engage the conversation, provide additional information. If you encounter a negative review, take the time to understand the reviewer’s point of view, apologize and ask for details on which aspects lead the customer to have an unpleasant experience, ensure that the issue will be addressed. Sometimes, this might lead to the reviewer softening his critic. But at no time should you engage an argument with the customer.

On the other side, you should avoid any posting of a false review or “ad”-comment. Should anyone find out, and usually people do, your brand will lose any credible voice it has gained through your efforts.

You should also think about optimizing your presence. Rather than having a reactive action in order to bury the negative reviews, assert a good positioning of your brand in every media channel you can have a presence in. These channels are pretty much the same as the ones you will be monitoring. You should define KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in order to define whether your brand is gaining in popularity or whether it is diving in the abyss. Having an optimized web presence is structuring factor in gaining loyal consumers.

Identify loyal evangelists, these are your best success channel. One single post by one single person might propel you into the top 10 trends, be it positive or negative. Today Consumer Generated Contents have a major influence on sales and e-commerce. Identify who these people are, what’s their (hi)story with your brand and products, find your allies and create a network. Jeff Bezos (Amazon) said: “We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”. To enhance this experience, you may engage your faithful customers into a community and have them help you build your brand’s image, just the way Lego did with Universe or Starbucks with My Starbucks Idea. The authentic passion for the brand allows you to generate a higher and closer customer engagement, to the point of involving them into your product creation (eg: Pepsi Cans design).

Let your employees be your voice, not just executives. Your employees engagement could be a major ally to your brand. Define employees communication/social media strategy, allow them to share their thoughts on the company and the products. People are willing to follow their postings to get an internal insight on the brand.

On another hand, it is as much important to track the competition and keep up 5 moves ahead to avoid the checkmate.

Brand management is not just about PR, unlike what most companies think. It takes a proactive action from marketing with an alignment with the company’s global strategy. PR should be seen as a vessel to carry out the message.

After a full year of down-turn mode due to the recession, companies are starting to see the light again. There are some emerging trends of business recovery, enterprise strategists and entrepreneurs are re-engaging new projects in hope of transforming opportunities into cash.

Being an Entrepreneur or Intrapreneur almost comes back to the same thing. Come up with a bright idea and convince the audience to get sponsporship. Leading the project development to a productized state. Market the product, build a faithful community of consumers. Manage the product lifecycle, spin-off the business plan and enrich the catalog. Be competitive and be able to have a quick-spin reaction to face competitors.

But what makes a good entrepreneur ? What makes some of them successful and sustainable ? While others have to face failure ?

We are not going to discuss the intrinseque qualities the entrepreneur should behold in order to drive successfully his business. We will rather try to lay down, from a management perspective, what are the good deeds that will lead to a prosperous company.

At the beginning, there was the idea. Then the idea was nurtured, matured, shaped and eventually a product or service came out of it. A market research would then help define the relevance of this idea and how it would be adopted by consumers, which leads to building a solid business model that will eventually convince investors, around a table, to rise funds.

Although this process seems straight-forward, it is rarely the case. First of all, entrepreneurship is scarcely a one-man thing. The entrepreneur needs to define what skills are required in order to  create his inner circle of trustees. The people that will help him through the process, provide him with the appropriate advices and critics, and mentor him. Collaboration is the key word, here. An entrepreneur should not be afraid of involving his friends, family and professionals in order to collect feedback about his product and roadmap thourough the development cycle. This should help him refine the concept until reaching the best-of-the-breed state of release.

An entrepreneur needs to be adaptable. He might come up with a great idea at first but then realize that by the time it comes to the market that it would be outdated or irrelevant. You can take the example of Seesmic, a web 2.0 startup in San Francisco, which started with micro-video blogging and sharing. Recently, its founder, Loic Lemeur, seeing that the market came to a saturation state in addition to changing habits, he decided to give a U-turn to the company and Seesmic relocated around Seesmic Desktop, a tool that allows you to update anf follow Twitter and Facebook status messages. Another example is The Next Big Sound, who realized mid-way that they could come up with better ideas, which they presented to their advisors. This daring move, reinforced the trust from the investors and these guys came out with a genuine concept for signing new musical artists.

For this purpose, the entrepreneur needs to constantly screen his audience, screen the market, aggregate the information and go through a constant decision process. This does not mean he has to turn-ways every dire tides but that eventually it would be about time to come up with the next big idea to reinforce his position on the market. Although processes will help industrialize most of the tasks to handle lean costs, he will still need to be agile enough in order to react to the market.

B2C interaction goes mainly through communication. It is very important for an entrepreneur to endorse his company and his products. Trust in a product and trust in a company go through trust in the person that runs that company. Recently, a study by McKinsey(1) showed a recession in trust in big corporations, due to the lack of transparency and the focus on stakeholder’s interests versus a customer focus organization. The Apple case is good example of how its CEO, Steve Jobs, endorsed every product that was released, demonstrating how this was a break-through product that everyone needed to own. Another example would be the Digg case, where Kevin Rose started a live cast called Diggnation in order to comment the popular stories on Digg. The combination of the platform and the show made a good audience capture in an environment where Digg-like services started to pop-up every week.

The good counter-example of this would really be Facebook. Despite its popularity as a social network, Facebook failed to have a good community management and strong endorsement by its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. This lead to serious crisis management when it came to the privacy terms of service or the recent issues with click fraud. However smart were the moves they have adopted at a later stage, the scars will stick to their skin.

At last, an entrepreneur needs to create an ecosystem around his company. A company should be able to leverage its partnership circle in order to provide by severals means the best customer experience. Reliable partners are key to the success of a young blossom. A partner could either be a managing partner or a business partner (third party service providers).

Managing partnerships is essential in the company’s life. A partner could either be a bliss to the enterprise or a stagnant and dysfunctional strain that needs to be managed on a day to day basis. Due diligence will often help you go through this but before creating a new relationship, you will have to assert the benefits of this relationship. Which value do you get from this new business link ? What are his previous performances and do they serve you right ?

A good knowledge of your partners will not only help you prevent deadlocks but will also allow you leverage at best the capabilities they could bring to you. They will help you assemble this whole set of competencies, services and networks in order to come-up with a valuable service for your customers.

Launching a new project does not only require a bright idea and strong commitment from the entrepreneur, but it is also the right combination of a smart and wise management, risks and taking on the exciting challenges with the appropriate people.

(1) The 10 trends you have to watch – Beinhocker, Davis, Mendonca – Harvard Business Review – July/August 2009 – p. 57