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BE THE BIG FISH

step-by-step strategies on how to make your brand stand out among the competition

Opportunities multiply as they are seized.

—SUN TZU

Brand personality has been covered in dozens of marketing and social networking books. However, there seems to be a common area that is missed when determining what your brand personality is or should be. Your focus market will have a difficult time connecting with you if you are all over the place with your online personality.

Determine your brand personality

Split personalities online just don’t seem to work, so before you start posting online and engaging with your target market, take a few moments and complete the Brand Personality Questionnaire in Figure 3.1. Is your brand an individual personality, corporate standalone, corporate personality, or product stand alone? Some examples are:

 

figure 3.1–Brand personality questionnaire

• Oprah (Individual personality). Oprah represents her own brand. No one else stands in the public eye to build and/or represent the Oprah brand. She posts as herself, makes appearances, and writes on behalf of her brand.

• AT&T (Corporate standalone). There is not one set personality representing this brand. For the most part, we do not know who the CEO is for AT&T, let alone any personality behind the brand. It does not post online as an individual, only as a brand.

• Zappos (Corporate personality). CEO Tony Heish is the face of this very large and well-known brand, but he has also included his entire team to engage and represent the brand online. This brand is represented by a main personality supported by team members and supporters.

• Whirlpool (Product standalone). There is no one individual or team that represents this type of brand; the product has a personality of its own. The best way to post online as a product standalone is to provide product demonstrations, facts and statistics, and an inside look at how the product is made, shipped, or was invented.

Put your answers to the personality questionnaire in one sentence. This is the personality you should be portraying online. Even if your brand is conservative, you can still have that come through with fun posts. If you are not yet clear about what your brand’s online personality should be, ask some supportive friends, family, and/or clients/customers. Make sure that you do not try to be someone that you aren’t. Just be you, whether serious, analytical, funny, quick-witted, curious, or playful. People online can see fake from miles away. They sense it by the way you post, the things you share (or don’t share), and how you represent your brand. Nowadays, they will call you out on it, too.

Take risks to stand out

Standing out from your competition has everything to do with how willing you are to take risks, get out of your comfort zone, stand up, and be heard and seen. There is an excellent story that brings to light the benefits of taking a risk. It is a true story about a blind man trying to cross a road. He had been waiting a while at a busy road for someone to offer to guide him across when he felt a tap on his shoulder. “Excuse me,” said the tapper, “I’m blind. Would you mind guiding me across the road?” The first blind man took the arm of the second blind man, and they both crossed the road. The first blind man was the jazz pianist George Shearing. He is quoted (in Bartlett’s Anecdotes) as saying after the event, “What could I do? I took him across and it was the biggest thrill of my life.”

The moral to this story is that there are times when we think we cannot do something, so we do not stretch or take a risk. Being forced to stretch and take a risk can often help us reduce our dependencies on others as well as our own personal safety mechanisms, and discover new excitement and capabilities. What risks can you take to set your brand apart from your competition? Monitor your competition to find gaps and opportunities where you could be taking risks and reaching into areas they are not covering.

Dominos’ recent advertising outreach required the company to step out of its comfort zone and admit that it was wrong, it had screwed up, and it made crappy pizza. It found that people in general did not like its pizza, or Dominos was not their first choice. People only ordered its pizza because of convenience or cost, not because of quality or taste. It aimed to change that through an online and television campaign admitting that they needed to change. This transparency and approach seemed to hit home because its sales increased 14 percent according to Ad Age. The risk here was stepping up out of its comfort zone and being transparent by admitting that Dominos pizza was terrible. It took this message online, and the response was mostly positive. It was a scary step to take, I am sure because it is never easy to admit when you are wrong. It doesn’t feel great, that is, until you come out with it, stand up, be proud, and make it happen. You take a risk walking out your door every morning, so why not take a risk to grow your brand and expand your exposure? Even if it backfires, admit it. At least you tried and you know. Then move on.

Set up competition monitors

With all of the conversations online, how in the world do you monitor what your competition is doing and saying, let alone what your focus market is saying about them or to them online? One of the best ways is to set up monitors through a social media dashboard such as Hootsuite.com. You can set up what are called “streams,” or “columns,” using keywords. A great approach with competition monitoring is to take care of its unhappy customers for them. Use keywords that these upset customers might use about the competition, for example, “not happy with xyz product” or “bad customer service xyz product.” I set these monitors up for a mobile client of mine and within days hundreds of upset customer opportunities came across them. For a quick video on how to set these monitors up, visit the blog for this book: www.socialwavebook.com.

Another way to stay informed is to set up ego searches. Ego searches are keywords or keyword phrase searches for a specific brand, product, or company name. They are a great way to monitor mentions of a competing product. You can automate the setup of ego searches using RSS so anytime a competitor’s product or brand name is mentioned in the news, blogosphere, or print, you receive notification and the details in an RSS feed. If you want to set up an RSS feed, two excellent sites have done most of the work for you: www.feedforall.com/ego-searches.htm and www.rss-tools.com/ego-search-feeds.htm.

If you need to find out exactly who your competition is, go to www.spyfu.com and enter a keyword, company name, or domain. Click the results to view the companies’ top 25 competitors. If any of those websites are using pay per click on Google, you will also be able to obtain a partial list of the ad words they have purchased.

There are also a number of ways to determine who is linking to a competitor. A simple search on Yahoo! Explorer will produce all of the web pages that provide a link to your competitor. You can also check out your own site to see who is linking back to you as well. Now, if you are really web savvy or if you want to be, you can monitor your competitors’ websites to find out when they make any changes. You can do this using a tool like CodeMonitor. CodeMonitor takes a snapshot of a websites’ HTML and notifies you of any changes. The differences in the web pages are highlighted, making it easy to discern what changes occurred. CodeMonitor is a free online tool that can be found at https://polepositionweb.com/roi/codemonitor/index.php.

MarketLeap (www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/) is a great site to monitor the search engine activity of your competitors. It will verify search engine placement based on keywords so you can quickly determine a competitor’s ranking for various phrases in the top search engines. You can also take a sneak peak at its meta tags, that is, text inserted into the source code of a web page that includes keywords that provide information to a search engine about the contents of the page for search engine optimization, by entering its url and checking it out at www.submitexpress.com/analyzer/. Pay particular attention to the header tags that include title, description, and keywords. Are these keywords part of your marketing mix?

Put your customers to work

Yes, it is OK to put your customers and/or clients to work. Often customer- or client-generated content is better than brand-generated content. By taking something as simple as frequently asked questions and turning them into valuable posts, you will not only appease your customers but also answer its questions. In order to encourage customer participation, hold contests to promote the sharing of stories, photos, and videos, and don’t be cheap with the prizes. Take photos at events or tradeshows and post them online. Ask your clients or even new connections to find their photo and tag themselves, an excellent way to get them to “like” your Facebook fan page. Your customers will support you if you ask in a nonintrusive way and get them involved with your branding. They want to feel heard and appreciated. In my experience, people genuinely want to help you, especially if you start the sentence by asking, “I was wondering if you would be willing to help me,” or “ I am hoping that you can help.” You can also make their contributions a monthly blog post topic so customers come to expect it and engage in the outreach.

For my latest business adventure, I am opening a champagne bar in Avila Beach, California (Cuvée Champagne and Delights Bar), and I plan on having iPads or tablets onsite with wifi access. We will encourage customers to Yelp or TripAdvisor about their experience, the food, etc., while they are onsite. If we ask them to do it when they get home, chances are very slim that they will remember, let alone keep the excitement and motivation to complete a review. In addition, if they do complete it onsite, we will offer a free champagne or dessert tasting, something along those yummy lines. They get a delicious treat and we get a scrumptious review. And this is a win-win for both the customer and the brand. If you are going to do something like this onsite, do not depend on the customer’s mobile phone connection. Provide it for them so there are no access or connection issues. Make it as simple as possible for them to write a review about their experience. The more complicated you make it, the less likely they are to actually do it.

I have found that people genuinely like to give me testimonials on video camera whenever I have an event. Yes, it could be due to the fact that we have the camera right in their face and put them on the spot, but, hey, they say it with a smile and their testimonial is golden. Take those videos and post them on your blog. Make sure that you ask the person while recording if you have permission to post on your blog and on the internet; if they say no, then ask them if you can translate the video script into copy and post. You can also create a testimonials section somewhere on that site of yours, and voilà, fresh content. You can see several of mine under the “Book Starr Hall” section at www.starrhall.com.

Send personal replies

When you first send an invite to connect with someone, whether you know them or not, add a personal note into the request. If you do know them, bring up a good or funny memory from the past. If you do not yet know them, quickly browse the information in their profile, and pick out something you can genuinely comment about—a common interest or a post that got your attention. It might even be mention of a mutual connection. If you take the time to add an extra, personal touch, you have a better chance of staying top of mind with them when they read your posts in the newsfeed.

The same applies when you accept a request as well. Wouldn’t it be nice, instead of getting the standard email from LinkedIn that says your connection request has been accepted, you received a quick note that says, “Thank you for the connection. I see you live in LA. I was born and raised there. Look forward to reading your posts.” You don’t just walk up to someone at a meeting or event and not add some form of personable greeting, correct? So why would you do it online? I know what you are thinking, “But Starr, that takes sooooo much time.” To that I reply, “Yes, it does take a bit more time, but you are building relationships here, remember, not numbers.” Also remember that taking this time really helps both people get to know each other just a little bit more. These personal notes can lead to an opportunity or maybe even a referral. Is that worth a few extra minutes of your time here and there? You bet.

Build and seed your network

After you are done reading this book, I don’t want you to just build your network once and then not revisit it for a year or until your sales are declining next spring. You need to constantly be building your network. For those of you who are new or getting ready to launch a new passion business, I suggest that you build your network before you launch your business. I read about a site recently that did just that. Before launching MyWorkButterfly, a site for working moms and moms wanting to return to the workforce, Bradi Nathan and Terry Starr conducted a National Moms Survey on Facebook. The two women pushed the survey out to everyone they knew and asked those people to push it out to everyone they knew. The goal of the survey was to find out what moms would want from a moms social network. The feedback they got from that survey became the playbook for all the content and design of MyWorkButterfly. Sections such as job listings, personalized welcome messages, and even the order of the drop-down menu items came directly from that survey. In addition, those initial survey takers became MyWorkButterfly’s first users and since they could see their voice was heard, they quickly became very supportive of the site. Only three months after launching, MyWorkButterfly claimed 2,000 members and 40,000-plus page views a month with over a six-minute average time on site per visit.

There are dozens of ways that you can reach out to new connections presented in this book. There are several scripts to get you started, beginning on page 89. Make sure you make the scripts your own, again by adding in your brand personality. But no matter how you use them, get out there and connect. Commit to a personal goal to meet x number of new connections every month, a number of people who you can personally get to know and maintain a connection with the ongoing building of your network. You need to set a number you feel will work for you. Whether it is 25 per week or month, the goal has to be set. Without a goal, you will never know when you get to your marketing destination, let alone how.

Every time you have an event, give an onsite training, or provide a webcast online, make sure you have some type of reach-out system in place. Whether you ask them to sign up for the webcast so you can have their contact info or get their cards at an event by offering them access for a limited time to your VIP business-building club, there is always a way to gather their info. Some events can get you hundreds of cards in a matter of minutes. Take them back to the office, use a card scanner that sends them into an Excel document, and then upload them to your email program. Guess what comes next? Your automated yet personalized email is ready to go as soon as those cards are uploaded. The process from your event to email need take no more than 72 hours to turn around and reach out to the connections so you can start to build a relationship. It’s smart to start building immediately, while you are at top of mind. OK, if you get stuck on an airplane, or live in an airport for 72 hours in Denver, Colorado, because of bad weather, with no luggage, the process takes a little bit longer, but you get the point.

Moving onward, once you make that initial reach out, you need to make sure you seed your network. That means you need to stay in touch with your connections. You’ll see how, in Chapter 13, Anchoring Online Relationships, where we talk all about email marketing. Whoo, this is fun, isn’t it! In the interim, let’s talk about how you can be selective with your networking online. This will save you a ton of time when building relationships.

The broker/owner of Platinum Realty Network in Scottsdale, Arizona, Pete Baldwin, was only interested in growing his social network with real estate enthusiasts interested in country clubs, golf, or mountain retreat custom log homes. We began his campaign searching for country club users in Scottsdale, as well as golf trade associations that were on Twitter or Facebook. We mined the lists of people they were following, looking for golf pros, skiing enthusiasts, country club conversations, golf blogs, golf writers, and media outlets. This required a lot of research, clicking through and reading bios of many users. To get followed back to Pete’s network, it was important that we read posts, interacted, and started dialogues. We quickly realized those who chose not to follow Pete back were not interested in interacting with him, so we would “unfollow” those people. It was a lot of hard work, but at the end of three months Pete had set up several cross-marketing projects, set up new client or agent recruitment meetings, attracted two national media writers, four local papers and magazines were interested in having him blog. Today, Pete’s Twitter account @prnarizona has more than 1,500 highly targeted followers.

WIPEOUT

I have no idea what to post online. I always think that no one cares what I have to say, spend ten minutes thinking about what to post, then I do not post anything. What can I do to get me posting more online?

 

WAVE TIP

First of all, do not worry about whether people will care about what you have to say. You need to be you, just as if the person was in front of you. The more you share your personality, the more people connect and remember at a deeper level. People do care what you are eating, where you are at, and where you are going; that is how they connect with you psychologically. Try posting things that you are doing throughout the day with a little humor in it. Ex: “Just mowed the lawn, will now cash in on allowance for doing my son’s job. Momma needs a new pair of shoes!”