Building Your Brand with Web 2.0 Tools

Panel on Build­ing Your Brand with Web 2.0 Tools, with:

• CC Chap­man — The Advance Guard
• Dave Delaney — Grif­fin Technology
• Saul Colt — FreshBooks
• Loic Le Meur — Seesmic
• Chris Bro­gan — New Mar­ket­ing Labs

Get­ting atten­tion for your brand (per­sonal or com­pany) is eas­ier than ever thanks to the ole’ inter­web but doing it with “zing” is still key to build­ing a fol­low­ing. Learn and ask ques­tion from the peo­ple who have built brands and careers by doing it with “zing”

Build­ing a brand is eas­ier than ever before thanks to the inter­net. It’s like broad­cast TV, except every­one has their own show if they want it. The way you com­mu­ni­cate online will tell peo­ple more about you than your resume ever will.

Ques­tion: How should peo­ple man­age and bal­ance per­sonal vs pro­fes­sional life as you brand your­self on Face­book and other plat­forms?

Answer: This ques­tion is most often asked by GenY as they post their col­lege pic­tures online and tran­si­tion to job hunt­ing. Gen­er­ally, you should be “you” online and remain authen­tic and true to yourself.

Ques­tion: What’s the story of how you all started? Did you start from zero?

Answer:

• “Mostly every­body starts out from zero. I started blog­ging … because I wanted to start blog­ging. Just be your­self and do it. If you’re build­ing a brand, you have to fig­ure out what’s right for the brand. For exam­ple, Twit­ter is not right for some brands. It’s a ‘weird, scary feel­ing’ when peo­ple start lis­ten­ing to you … but it’s nice and proves you’re doing some­thing right. Keep doing it.” –CC Chapman
• “When some­one crit­i­cized me, I actu­ally thanked them, say­ing I had learned a lot from the crit­i­cism. We later became friends” –Loic Le Meur
• “You can never ever have the last word on the Inter­net.” –Saul Colt
• “Some brands are just not ready to talk to the con­sumer. They’re just not … and they will fail if they try.” — CC Chapman
• “Be help­ful. Don’t talk about your­self, rather, be help­ful to oth­ers.” –Chris Brogan

Ques­tion: How involved do you get into your clients’ social media strat­egy? Will you tweet on their behalf?

Answer: “Clients need to learn how to do this for them­selves, although they need hand hold­ing and train­ing in the begin­ning. They need to under­stand what a troll is and how to deal with them. But ulti­mately, a client needs to drive their own car.” –CC Chapman

Ques­tion: Where should I focus my energies?

Answer:
“Spend a lit­tle bit of time every­where and fig­ure out what works best for you, and then spend your time there.” –Saul Colt
“If you use Ping.fm, you can broad­cast to many ser­vices at once.” –Loic Le Meur
“If you do the mul­ti­ple one to many thing with Ping.fm, you’re not gen­er­at­ing con­ver­sa­tion.” –Chris Bro­gan

Ques­tion: A lot of star­tups focus on stealth mode. Should they do this? And should star­tups have a dou­ble “O”, like Google?

Answer: “Don’t fear com­pe­ti­tion, share as much as you can, and track the feed­back and online con­ver­sa­tion.” –Loic Le Meur

Ques­tion: (unintelligible)

Answer: “Social media is a mar­ket­ing chan­nel. But we never approached Twit­ter as a mar­ket­ing chan­nel. We see it as a rela­tion­ship chan­nel. Frankly, talk­ing about online invoic­ing is bor­ing, so we talk about other stuff, like movies.” –Saul Colt

Ques­tion: How about build­ing brands in local com­mu­ni­ties, rather than on a national or inter­na­tional level?

Answer:

• “One of the things you can do is to orga­nize local events, like Pod­Camps and Bar­Camps and Geek Break­fasts, to bring peo­ple together and build a com­mu­nity. ” –Dave Delaney
• “Use Twit­ter to have small con­ver­sa­tions and to reach out locally. Twit­ter is like a box of Legos: you build some­thing one piece at a time.” –Chris Brogan
• “If you start speak­ing with peo­ple, they will buy at *your* store … just because they’ve spo­ken with you” –CC Chapman

Ques­tion: What about “re-branding” in an open and trans­par­ent soci­ety, for exam­ple, when a prod­uct sucks?

Answer:

• “Please remem­ber that your legal team is your legal coun­sel: they are not your company’s oper­at­ing offi­cials.” –Chris Brogan
• “Never crit­i­cize your com­peti­tors. Never do it as an indi­vid­ual either.” –Loic Le Meur

Ques­tion: Most of our clients’ bud­gets are dry­ing up, so they are turn­ing to new media. We have two types of clients: those with ideas that suck, and those with no ideas at all. What oppor­tu­ni­ties are there 

Answer: “Seek out Beth Kanter”

Ques­tion: (missed it)

Answer: “Read Shel Holz’s book ‘Tac­ti­cal Trans­parency’” –Chris Bro­gan

Ques­tion: Busi­ness don’t expose who the indi­vid­u­als who are blog­ging or twit­ter­ing on their behalf. What’s the best practice?

Answer:
“Your com­pet­i­tive advan­tage is your per­son­al­ity” –Saul Colt
“The slip­pery slope is con­nect­ing with the per­son and not the brand. What hap­pens when that per­son leaves? For exam­ple, when Scoble left Microsoft — what have they done since then?” –CC Chap­man
“Dell is han­dling it well, with @RichardatDell, @LionelatDell, etc.” –Chris Brogan

SX09-286, cake, sxsw, sxswi, sxsw09, sxswi09, social media, brand, loic le meur, cc chap­man, chris bro­gan, julie had­don, saul colt, rep­u­ta­tion