Building brand equity online can take enormous amounts of time, money, and energy. A culmination of online advertising, social media, SEO, and even online PR, big brands want to listen with social media tools to guard their online reputation management.

In this video of Dan Colbey entitled “What physics taught me about marketing” he discusses positioning brands and how one incident can erode much of the brand equity built.

What’s your game plan? Do you have a strategy that takes you past the next year?

How about a social media crisis plan should your brand come under attack?

Positioning and protecting your sweat equity with proper planning can help retain the strength of your brand should it ever find itself in the crosshairs. And if you haven’t come up with one yet, now is the time to start thinking about online branding strategies so that you have a path to follow and measure down the road.

What most advertising agencies and businesses don’t realize is when they build a mini site, they’re giving up some of their brand’s equity by doing so. Links are like an Internet marketing currency of the web, and the equity they build also builds the brand online. Rather than creating mini sites, which can be cool, its of more value in the long term to keep everything on your main site.

First off, even though you could redirect it later, it dilutes the strength compared to any natural links that are deep linked into your site. If you have to have that cool domain for a campaign, you could redirect it. But the best advice is to keep it all on your site for the direct links instead of resorting to redirects.

If the new addition goes a few pages deep, you might also acquire new deep links as well. When it comes to link strategies, it’s all about keeping it natural. And deep links should probably out weigh the ones pointing at the root by at least 3 to 1. There’s no reason a campaign can’t be a sub directory of a mini site, and you can even deviate away from the main design. But it’s strongly advised to have the logo clickable back to the index so visitors can explore the rest of your site deeper.

I had talked to some folks about their site recently, and after examining their other web properties and a little investigating, it seems a few agencies they worked with each had them create new sites for new projects. Now they have some nice sites, but had these all been incorporated into the main one, they’re site authority would be stronger by the sheer volume of the links combined pointing at the main one. Containing within the main site would also probably lead to more stickiness and pageviews, which in this case would help, along with stronger rankings for a variety of phrases.

That’s not to say there isn’t a place for mini sites either. Often there is a need in SEO to build out a network of these in order to improve your inbound links (IBL’s). The advantage being you control the anchor text, and so long as they maintain relevance and a few other things its all good right? Well, yes and no. A surge of low ranking sites without being interwoven into the network or social web is just a bunch of low ranking unauthoritative spam to the search engines, and possibly does little for you. And you also tasked with creating links for all the new sites as well. In the long run, if you don’t do it right, you probably made twice as much work for yourself.

The majority of the time you’ll want to keep your content, campaigns, and mini sites within the framework of your main site. It’s your brand, and you want to create the equity through content and social strategies, not campaign clusters.

Possibly the shortest Internet marketing conference ever, the Influence Project involved 60 speakers for 60 seconds. Some of the speakers included Brian Clark, Guy Kawasaki, Mitch Joel, Muhammad Saleem, Brian Solis and more.  MP3 recording and transcript  available through the above link.

Online branding is a bit different that it’s offline counterpart. The channels (advertising, social media, search) are different and the tools offer more opportunity through interactivity. And whatever channels you use, the real kicker is you can track your successes in near real time and adjust your campaign accordingly.

Remember the days when you might do direct mail or some other offline advertising and would have to wait weeks to tally the results? Tracking your Internet advertising and social media marketing campaigns allow you to see what’s working within hours. But you’re hear asking Why Online Branding?

Using the tools within the channels, not only can you have farther reaching and more targeted campaigns, you can capture better data and do multivariate split testing on your landing pages, copy, design, and creative. Again, in near real-time.

But beyond the control and monitoring potential, you also have lower production costs and better ROI for your campaigns. With most campaigns, you can’t even measure that with offline advertising!

You run your ad in print or outdoors, and unless your call to action includes a special offer with a unique landing page URL or 800 number to call, all you know is what the potential reach is. Like a newspaper or magazine have x readers, or a radio station have x listeners. Even though branding isn’t always about taking action at the time of mention, having the ability to track your campaigns allows you to maximize your spend so you can funnel your budget where online branding will be most effective.

While advertising online let’s you put your brand in front of potential customers on websites with traffic, and social media provides new opportunities, search marketing (both SEO and SEM) can get your brand in front of those customers when they’re in buying mode and searching for a specific topic. Being in the top search results helps create that synergy between your brand and a phrase, and contributes to top of mind awareness. SEO has also proven to provide the best ROI of all online marketing channels.

So when you’re thinking to yourself ‘Why Online Branding’, its hopefully more clear. Better tracking provides improved spending, the changes in advertising can be on the fly to account for improving your campaigns, and a higher level of interactivity also provides more bang for your buck. Marketers keep shifting their budget to online for this reason, and the growth in this channel has outperformed offline marketing options for the last few years. Television advertising might still be king, but the cost to produce and place the ads, along with poor tracking options makes it questionable which is the best choice.

I don’t think you can expect one to replace another, as they reach different segments, but keep in mind that Pepsi skipped their annual mutli million dollar Super Bowl TV ad last year, and put it in online advertising and social media.

Seth Godin on social networking for business – is it valuable?

@Seth

Gary Vaynerchuk on building a personal brand in social media

@garyvee

Note: language warning

Brian Solis on how we’re all connected by ideas

@BrianSolis

Clay Shirky on social media shifts and making history

@cshirky

Valeria Maltoni from Fast Company on people connecting and conversation

@ConversationAge

Mitch Joel discusses the power of social media

@mitchjoel

Chris Brogan on listening in social media

Sarah Evans discusses crowd sourcing and connecting with social media

@prsarahevans

Jeremiah Owyang on the Future of the Social Web

@jowyang

Scott Monty interviewed by David Meerman Scott on social media

@scottmonty @dmscott

Joseph Jaffe interviewed by David Armano

@jaffejuice @armano

And if the “social media thing” is still new for you…

While traditional branding may take decades, online branding has been know to happen in a fraction of the time. The viral convenience of the web allows everyone to tweet, share, post, and more with social media. Facebook fan pages provide an outlet for advocates, forum discussions create a dialogue to engage in, and much of all this happens in real-time.

Brand Strategy 101

It starts with determining your brand’s objectives. Determining just who your brand is, a persona of sorts, creates a foundation and metric to measure by. Is it the best tasting, cheapest, or premium product or service of a category? Once you have an objective, identify who would be your target audience. Selecting a type or demographic works better than the ol’ shotgun approach every time. Targeting also results in better communications and creative that results in better messages, as opposed to trying to appeal all of the people all of the time. Following that, figuring out your brand barriers so you can deal with any issues allows for better marketing. There’s always something; strengths, vulnerabilities, opportunities, threats, political, economic, technological, or social.

A brand is about customer perception, and creating the necessary influence positions the brand in the mind of the consumer. Adding benefits and/or value create brand equity. The assets which provide brand equity in traditional marketing are fairly different than online branding, although there is some overlap. With the traditional way of branding, your strategy may include public relations, advertising, and traditional marketing like pricing strategies, retention plans, and more. Don’t forget your 4 P’s.

Online Branding Essentials

Online branding includes a few key components, those being; display advertising (banners), search marketing (PPC), social media (or SMM, for social media marketing), search engine optimization (SEO), and online reputation management (like online PR meets SEO). Each of these tools can leverage your brand, but when used in combination effectively, its a powerful marketing strategy that can rival traditional marketing.

Online Branding Strategy

The online brand promise, which was conceived while defining the objective, is where the journey begins. It could be anything from convenience or entertainment to selection or value. The important thing to remember is this is your mantra and almost every marketing or branding effort shoud support your brand promise. The promise builds on an experience which helps meet the objective, and build brand equity, if you deliver.

While online branding strategies vary per business, from hotels, clothing, electronics, financials products, entertainment or another vertical, the core of the online branding strategy is still broken down to advertising, social media, seo, and online pr.

Read a summary on reactorr’s online branding services and how it can drive your online marketing efforts.

Online reputation management is more than a public relations issue. With social media and even mobile media, a company is never far from the public eye. It’s not just the brand that’s at stake either, there are the products, and even the executives that are an extension to a brand.

Besides the press and social media, you also want to keep an eye on the search results for your product or brand names in search results. Brand SEO? If someone were to google the name of your product or brand, are you content with what they might see on page one?

For a simple start plan you can do right away, you can keep an idea on news or buzz on your brand starting with Yahoo Alerts and Google Alerts for quick notification. For online reputation management, social media monitoring or online branding tools can provide other signals that could help you put out a fire before it reaches the media and spreads.

Tools for monitoring social media can include Twitscoop or monitter, or more comprehensive options like trackur or radian6.

The recent oil spill disaster is terrible to say the least. It’s also become an interesting example of how brands might (or might not) participate in the discussion, and precautions they can engage in.

BP has been slow to deal with their online reputation management, and while I’m sure they’re busy (or not…), they made a smart move today.

In order to take some control, BP has started a search marketing campaign and is bidding on phrases like “oil spill” or “gulf disaster” in Google and Yahoo.

In the words of a BP spokesperson:

To Make It Easier for People to Find Out More About Our Efforts in the Gulf and Other Ways to Help

It’s been suggested that BP is spending upwards of $10,000 a day to maintain the top spots.

One strategy that public relations prepares for clients in advance for events that can harm a brand or organization is called crisis management. It’s an action plan that allows for a quick response should a situation occur. Borrowing from this concept, we present the Online Crisis Management Plan.

The first step is to create a team to carry out certain tasks. The team should have each others contact info for both home and work, so if there was any kind of crisis, they can maintain communications regardless of where they are. All team members should also have a access to the plan at all times. Such a plan usually includes senior management. The team should have roles defined of what actions are to be taken, and a designated spokesperson to handle media inquiries. The spokesperson should not be the CEO. The purpose of such as plan is to protect the reputation of the brand.

Should an issue come up that requires attention, prepared statements communicated immediately show your company is aware of the situation and provides the greatest opportunity to control events. Having a news release partially prepared in advance is also recommended so that it can be completed and issued as quickly as possible.

Example:

A ___________________ at ____________________ involving __________________ occurred today at ________________ . The incident is under investigation and more information is forthcoming.

Add additional details and the standard boilerplate below.

To be prepared, its important to have pre-conceived possible events and positions taken on each. Some of these might be human error, unauthorized procedures, quality issues, privacy issues, misuse of confidential information and more. It’s also wise to address what things can be mentioned by employees on other sites.

Other materials for online use that can be prepared in advance could include documents like fact sheets in case the media requests them. Having an online media room on your website, even in the simplest form, can alleviate the burden of putting it together when needed most, and time is of the essence.

You might also consider having incident specific websites ready on standby, to be uploaded at a moments notice. These can prove to be excellent tools to prevent or mitigate damage from your online brand.

You might wonder why you wouldn’t just add a section to your existing website. Its recommended that you take fast action, but also distance yourself in some ways. Should someone search your brand or company name in the future when things have cooled down, some of those links could be displayed below the search results for your company. You wouldn’t want to search your company name and find below your listing a series of negative stories from various media outlets and bloggers. Its easier to deal with if you create a site that is a separate url.

Also, like BP did, create accounts for search marketing to drive search results to your minisite for consumers to find out more.

With a search plan in place, social media mayneed to be addressed at sites like youtube, twitter, facebook, and similar places where you might already engage with customers. A social media risk management plan is essential to online reputation management, and focusses on one aspect.

This is far from comprehensive for any kind of Online Crisis Management Plan, but if it happens to sparks some ideas, motivation or direction to draft your own, our work here is done. Hopefully you’ll never need it.

Last but not least, always tell the truth. The goal is to protect reputation, but part of that includes maintaining credibility.

Social Media – Engage with your audience. It all sounds easy, but it mostly falls apart in a week or three. While starting with good intentions, other duties call. Most companies don’t have the luxury of hiring a dedicated social media specialist to manage these things, so it usually gets added to the list of tasks an employee needs to do. The best way to manage it is scheduling a block of time at least once or twice a week. Find the medium that suits you, but also look at where your customers are. It’s also recommended to grab your brand name as a username for the bigger sites like youtube, facebook, twitter, flickr, technorati, ning, delicious, yelp, scribd, and others.

Reputation Management – Staying on top of what you rank for and the conversations around your brand allows you to stay a step ahead, and possibly avoid putting out fires later. If you were to google your brand name, do any of the top ten listings have negative impact? Are you monitoring the dialogue around your brand in social media? If you see negative results in the top 10 listings  when searching for your brand, you’ll want to address it before too many customers come across it.

Search Marketing - If you run an affiliate program and pay for leads, you might consider taking over bids on your brand name in Google Adwords. Why pay more for leads if you own the trademark to your brand name? Run your own campaign for those searching your brand to retain control.

Search Engine Optimization – Companies searching for your brand name obviously know of you already, but what about the ones searching for the products or services your offer? These are targeted prospects, often in buying mode. Many companies make the mistake of not including SEO in their marketing strategy. The game has changed, and those that are late will have to work twice as hard to catch up, probably more. Displaying in search engine results for phrases your customers are looking for is an excellent way to build credibility for your brand. Being synonymous with a phrase strengthens that top of mind awareness and would be comparable to branding on steroids. If you’re a customer and searching for a phrase, research shows 42% click the first listing, and 74% of the results clicked are in the top 5 positions. In a recent study, SEO shows to provide the best ROI over all other forms of online marketing.

Once you’ve identified a potential customer’s needs, characteristics, its time to develop a segmentation strategy.

Here’s some online tools to look into:

Hitwise

Prism Market Segmentation

MSN adlab

Google Insights

Google Trends

Or you can consider outsourcing the entire task.

Also take a look at Forrester’s consumer profile tool below.

“When I was growing up in the industry, let me entertain you, let me make you smile, I’m very versatile, it was one way.”

Advertising was this way for decades, and what may have worked for the last 40 years clearly isn’t as effective these days. A shift like this comes as no surprise. Whether its advertising or just about anything, things change.
Reinhard goes on to describe the way things work now by suggesting…

“Now it’s we’re better together”.

This is a great point as the emergence of social media has had such an impact on brands, possibly one of the largest in recent times. Consumers are tired of being told and now look within their networks or trusted resources or contacts for more impartial views and recommendations.

An interesting point also brought up in the video mentions how when a CEO is really involved with the brand, the brand endures, has integrity, and can sustain the revolving doors of marketing directors.  A great point as with each change in marketing leadership comes someone that scraps direction and previously built equity.

One of the best definitions of a brand I’ve heard was provided during this interview…

A brand is who you are, what you do, why you do it, and how you do it.
One person that has maintained these types of values is Steve jobs of Apple. Over the course of the last 20 years Apple as a brand has probably never strayed far. But one example of branding confusion that comes to mind is McDonald’s. It seems with each new agency they hire (every 2-3 years) there is a different direction in the messaging. For example, they make burgers, they make them fast, and their affordable. But over the years they’ve introduced pizza, ribs, and even salads.

Online branding will take marketing to new heights with the speed at which you can connect with consumers. With social media, search marketing, and Internet advertising a brand can literally grow at sonic speeds compared with the past.

Marketers still seem to overlook the potential of SEO and how it can drive measureable revenue to their online business, yet have adopted to the virtues of social media rather quickly.

Perhaps it’s the inability of the average marketer to truly understand the benefits of how SEO and online branding belong together and how it can help their bottom line.

With paid search marketing results (PPC) accounting for roughly 20% of the clicks in typical search results, that leaves a lot of cash on the table in terms of customer acquisition.

For SEO’s, the following isn’t new information, but it might be of interest to marketers which are less familiar with the practice.
If you try the Google Keyword Tool you can get some insight to the potential of SEO and appearing in natural search results. Depending on the phrase, you can increase your visibility by thousands and more with a properly executed SEO strategy that pushes your site into the top 10 results.

It’s important to note that SEO is similar to branding in one sense. It’s a process and requires a fair amount of time to achieve those top ranking results. Realistic expectations depending on your industry to rise to the top can range from 6 months to several years. One of the keys to increased success in this venture is the quality of your content or offering. By focusing on this aspect, marketers stand to gain advocates, which will assist in the link building process by blogging, tweeting, or linking to your site for you.

You might be thinking tweeting falls under social media, but it’s the content they tweet that should be part of your SEO strategy. Sometimes referred to as link bait, it’s about the creation of quality content that will help to get those links.

Content creation and planning sometimes falls on the shoulders of an SEO, as does PR and many other tasks.  It’s always wise to have an SEO involved in the process but not necessarily depend solely on them to create this sort of material.

The role of SEO is about optimizing a site (for starters), but more important, is to improve the online visibility of said website so that it will rank for phrases that you’re targeting for your business.

When you think about it, there isn’t anything much better than your site showing up in the top listings when a potential customer is in the buying mode and looking for a product or service like one you might offer.


There is more likelihood of them inquiring or purchasing versus presenting banner ads all over. Most web users have banner blindness. Can you recall 3 banners you’ve seen in the last week? Most are lucky to be able to name one they had seen.

There probably isn’t a better way to position your brand online than showing up in the top search results. In the long run, your brand will become synonymous with the phrases you’ve targeted and displaying in those results also provides credibility to your brand’s product or service.

You should note that when you appear in those results, the url in first position will get about 42% of the clicks, while second gets 12%, third gets 9%, and it starts to drop sharply with each position after. And being on page two is like not being found at all.

You can see the entire interview mentioned above here.