How to build a brand online with social networks
There is a school of thought on the Internet that says if you want to build a community for yourself –go out and find the fringers and give them a place to connect to you and each other through your brand. Find the outcasts and unite them. I say NO! No. It’s simple. The popular kids never give tutorials on how to become popular. And they never go out and sit down at the loser nose pickers lunch table and make them their tribe. If you want to be a prom king brand or product on the internet you need to build your clique from the top down with two distinct types of users.
Read also: You Are Not My Friend: Why consumers only want to hang with the prom king
1. The celebrities/influencers
These are people that everybody already knows and respepcts. These are celebrities’ in their industry. The household names. They have the ability by simply mentioning your product/brand/website once in a blog post or using it to influence a large number of people.
2. The evangelists
These are the people that read you, follow you, watch your videos and respect you that will use your product/brand/service and individually convert others to use your product/brand/service through personal testimonials
In this model, you build your community through careful selection of whom you want to use your product or service and speak to them, communicate with them. At the end of the day you only need a few of these types of people. However, the beauty of the model is these few will work to recruit the rest, even the fringers. This is a top down approach to marketing and building a tribe. It is always easiest to make the brand cool from day 1, by making sure your users are cool. On the flip side, it is a lot harder to make the brand cool if your users are geeks. That stigma is hard to break. You build a prom king brand by attracting Prom Kings first.
Case study: Versace Marketing in a Gap World
Consider the Versace Model. In the 90s, Gianni Versace started giving his clothing away to celebrities to walk the red carpet in. By putting 1 dress on Elizabeth Hurley, Hugh Grant’s then supermodel girlfriend, (known as the safety pin dress), he got his brand seen and sought after by millions. It was a cheap and effective method. He simply put his product on the back of an influencer and next thing you know he was caviar in a cream cheese world. On the flip side, you take Gap, in order to market to the masses through more expensive channels with greater reach like print ads and television, they need to appeal in style and price and sell far more product. And at the end of the day they still never achieve the mystique of Versace. That coveted position at the cool kids table. What would you rather be? Versace or Gap? It’s simple – Versace marketing is a more effective and less expensive branding technique, it’s just a matter of learning how to do it properly.
Now I don’t mena to say that Versace was on a shoe string budget at the time they started clothing celebrities, but they knew they were a high end retailer and they knew that it was more cost effective to put a few threads (and this was Versace, so we literally mean “a few”) on the important people than having their advertisements flashed all over TV. It is simply a more effective brand builder to associate yourself with the influencers than to go directly to the masses. So, find ways to connect directly with celebrities within your industry or within the mainstream online and actually get them to use your product/service- you don’t need them to endorse it- just using it will make it cool. The rest will follow like sheep.
Ten Tips to Becoming a Prom King Brand
1. Know where your market can be reached and where they congregate online
This should be obvious to you, but alas most marekters forget to actually seek out the places where the people that use or are most likel to use their brand already congregate online. For example, if you are seeking an 18-24 year old market you might consider MySpace whereas if you seek a slightly older market of 25-34 year olds you might want to try Facebook. Look for fan pages of your products first. If one already exists, great, if not, start one. This gives your customer a place to connect with the brand. You’ll also want employees, management and executives to create personal profiles on these networks because at the end of the day, social media is about people connecting with people not people conencting with brands. So, select 3-5 social networks where you can reach and interact with your market. It is not necessary to be o every social network, it is only necessary to be on the networks where you can reach your customers.
Read also: Building a Popular Social Media Profile: Seven Essential Characteristics
2. Create strong, visible profiles on those networks
Not only do you need to make sure you fill out your profile thoroughly and brand it out with logos and contact info in the the various channels you selelct but you need to make sure people know where and how to find you on the various networks. This is pretty simple, always make sure that you incude links to your profiles on those networks on your blog and other profiles and be proactive, write about how to use those networks and expound the virtues of using them. That way, you can 1. Grow the usership of those networks and 2. Help people connect with you on them. For example at the botton of every single page, you can find links to Nicole’s, Kelly’s and my most popular social network profiles so you can eaily connect with us and we often write about how to use those networks to build more traffic to our social profiles there and get more people to connect with us on those networks.
3. Participate in those networks
Now, here is the ticket, you need to be active on the networks you select. This means you need to friend people, comment on their posts, interact with them and basically do all the stuff you would normally do in real life to build friendships. Seek out people that have similar interests, people who Digg stories about things that make you laugh or engage you, people that tweet about the things you are interested in like sports or music. You don’t have to keep everything on these networks totally professiona and business focused. Cut lose and be a real person that sows your passions, hobbies and interests. For example, I love bodybuilding, football, wine, Ann Coulter, fiscal conservatism and music so I often talk about those things on the various social networks I play with and because of that, I build new friendships daily with people who also like those same things. Hey- everyone here remember the first rule of sociology? People like peple who are like them so be who you are and you will quickly attract other people that think like you and have the same interests.
The trick to becoming a rockstar on any social network is when you first join – keep your submission volume high, comment or reply on other submissions, friend people and vote new stories up! This technique works pretty universally across the board.
4. Use the theory of reciprocity to build relationships and reach goals
One you have a friend netwrk on the various social sites, do what friends do – help one another. If you see some submissions you love and keep voting on particular users junk, then be sure to look out for other new stuff from them. You might even want to mention their shizzle on yoru blog or in your tweets or posted items on Facebook. Also, try actually connecting with them and l tryng to collaborate because 2 or 3 respepcted members of a social network will always draw a crowd. Think “Heathers” only without the draino.
5. Listen to the market and gain intelligence on both those networks and on other networks
Listenng ony network is important – you can’t constantly talk and never listen. It is why God gave us 2 ears and only 1 mouth (although girls also have 2 boobs and 1 mouth – so the logic is a bit sketchy). Remember to listen to your market through tools lke Twitter, Google Reader and Andy Beal’s Trackur. It’s also helpful to keep current with your market by knowing what they are reading and looking at by seeing what is popular on Youtube, Digg, Mashable and Technorati.
6. Create and engage in conversations
7. Build trust and demonstrate integrity
8. Create place where people can connect and follow you, be sure to always clearly show them where else they can find you
9. Measure ROI
Read also: 50 Ways to use Social Media, listed by Objective
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