More important than an image that comes to mind when one thinks of McDonalds, Nike, or Coke, is the gut feeling they get.  This gut feeling is powerful because people first make decisions with there gut and then justify them their mind. When enough people come to the same gut feeling about your company, product, or service you have achieved “brand”

The same principle for large popular brands apply to small businesses — the cumulative effect of customer interactions with the company, product, or service results in brand.

These interactions are known as touch points and can include your store or place of business, company vehicles, uniforms or clothes, packaging, print materials, human interactions with customer service or salespeople, online experiences, YouTube videos, photos, reviews,  word-of-mouth social discussion, advertising, and more.

Some of these touch points you control directly but others you only have indirect influence over.  You don’t control what your customer tells their best friend but you can certainly influence it by delivering an experience that expresses your company’s values and delivers on your brand promise.

Defining and guiding your brand

Creating brand doesn’t have to be expensive.  Here are some tips to get going in the right direction:

1. Get clear about your values as a company and let your customers know about these (but don’t preach) – are you dedicated to environment, community oriented, offering only top quality, etc.
2. Know who your target customers groups are and what kind of experience they’re looking for – a teen is looking for a different experience then their mom, you may need to influence both of these target groups.  Ask yourself how can you deliver a favorable experience to them both?
3. Craft the experience that you want to give your targets – think about what you want your customers to feel when they experience your business, product, or service an deliver “experiences” that generate this “feeling”.
4. Differentiate the experience of your brand or product from that of your competitors – If you are not #1 or #2 in your category, create a new category by delivering products and experiences that lead to a perception that is typically not associated with the category, and define the product in new terms not associated with the “competitive” category.
5. Deliver the “differentiated” experience at each touch point.

A simple method to measure your brand – the “Mueller Method”

A simple way to check how you are doing is to ask you customers at the end of every face to face or online interaction to write down the first three words that come to mind when they think about there experience today.  Let them know it is anonymous and to be as honest as possible.  Make it easy for them.  Always have pen and paper, or a quick online form that the customer can fill out at the end of each in person or online interaction.  Give a random thank you gift, or discount that they could use on their next visit for filling out the form.  Alternatively just ask and jot the words down yourself.

For a simple analysis, sort these words into 3 categories:

1. Consistent with Brand aspirations
2. Inconsistent with Brand aspirations
3. Neutral

Add up the numbers in each category and create percentages from them.  Plot the numbers on a graph and look for trends.  Also plot on the graph any changes to the way you deliver you experiences and look for correlations to how they affect the gut feeling of your customers.

The simple act of asking your customers this questions tells them that they are important and that you care about what they think.  This too affects their gut feeling about you.

Leave a comment and let me know what you think about this, have you had success with similar efforts, do you have ideas on how to improve on this?

Happy Marketing.

I’ve been following the Social Media ROI discussion for a while and it is great that many are working to make social media a “profession” by encouraging discussions that may eventually affect the creation of standards by which “professionals” are ethically bound. Social media is in its infancy and the process of making it a profession is really just beginning.

It seems that the question of how to measure Social Media efforts is elusive and a critical component that needs to be addressed as Social Media evolves into a profession. Social Media is a disruptive technology that affects numerous industries.  Modern companies have evolved to measure the efforts they put forth and investments made in terms of how much profit or loss those same efforts have generate (ROI). Since Social media disrupts industries and business practices, it is often hard to grasp exactly how social media initiatives perform in respect to ROI.  Additionally, new metrics such as, mentions, blog posts, comments, engagement, etc. have arisen as a way to quantify the effectiveness of social media initiatives in terms of reaching strategic objectives.

This begs a couple questions:

1) how much emphasis should be placed on traditional ROI as opposed to other metrics?

2) How do these metrics give an indication of how social media efforts affect “brand” and how this may in turn affect sales over time?

Olivier Blanchard is probably the most outspoken advocate of measuring ROI for Social Media efforts.  His fervor is largely created by the ease at which anyone can raise a shingle and call themselves a Social media expert and the lack of standardized methods and history to measure expertise against. Olivier seems to believe that in order to engage a company as a Social Media Professional that one should be able to address the question of ROI for social media efforts; ROI in the standard business sense of how much profit or cost savings accrued from a given effort.

Others including Greg Satell find the quest for Social Media ROI to be largely unattainable.  I find both these stances to be a little extreme and the answer for most companies to be somewhere in the middle.

It appears that many businesses are analyzing their social media efforts but are measuring them against desired outcomes rather than in true ROI.  Is this a bad thing?  Is it less valuable than measuring ROI? For some maybe, but perhaps not for those that have a deep understanding of their businesses, who understand how customer interactions at every touchpoint determine the brand, and how changes in brand sentiment affect frequency, reach, and yield.  Perhaps it is because the Social Media component of the overall marketing spend is too small to justify calculating ROI. Perhaps this is because they don’t yet know exactly how to measure ROI from their initiatives and they feel the urgency to be part of the disruption before it disrupts them. Maybe they intend to learn along the way.  At some point the CFO, will scrutinize the efforts and want to maximize financial return and will need to look at ROI to do so. They have a choice at this point to roll Social media initiatives into larger buckets or break them out and calculate ROI individually for each.

Don’t get me wrong, I firmly believe in measuring the as much of the financial impact of your social media efforts as possible and it is definitely possible to measure some of the impact of social media efforts in terms of true ROI. The problem is that is very hard, if not impossible, to measure the long term effect that social media efforts can have on your brand sentiment positive or negative and how this translates to an increase or decrease of sales over time. For instance if you succeed in creating a truly charismatic brand that evokes customer loyalty and diehard evangelists, you will be able to sell more product at higher prices. How would you divide the return among the many activities and facets of your company that worked in concert to achieve this feat? This does not mean that a company should disregard measuring as much of the ROI for social media initiatives as they can, but does mean that the actual ROI, if positive, would likely be greater than what you can measure.

As I said earlier, Social Media is a disruptive technology and behavior that spans numerous corporate silos including, marketing, pr, customer service, HR, R&D, communications and more that will change your corporate culture.  Honestly, even though I believe that true ROI is measurable for well defined social media initiatives and direct marketing initiatives through social media channels, I am skeptical when anyone tells me they can accurately measure the ROI of a broad social media effort that spans numerous corporate silos, and it is exactly these companies, that are fast to move with a well conceived strategy on broad social media efforts, that will be positioned to benefit the most.

I am in complete agreement that “for social media and social technology to really work businesses need to measure its impact, positive and negative”, and this needs to be done with both hard (financial) and soft (trending) measurements. The results need to be compared to benchmarks, and predetermined desired outcomes; from here the strategies, tactics, methods, can be tweaked to achieve better results.

So how should a company begin?

1. Understand that the effective use of social media should and will change your company culture and is a long term commitment to providing value to customers, vendors, employees, and/or partners

2. Define Strategic Objectives

3. Identify the Social Media Platforms are best suited to achieve these objectives

4. Define tactics to be employed to achieve objectives

5. Determine what metrics and actions indicate success in regard to objectives (including but not limited to ROI)

6. Select tools needed to deploy tactics and measure effectiveness

7. Dedicate resources to launching and maintaining initiatives

8. Plot all marketing efforts and results on timelines including social media activities and anything of significance in the competitive landscape.

9. Look for correlations between actions and progress toward strategic objectives

10. Evaluate progress, calculate ROI as best you can, and adjust strategy, tactics, methods as necessary

11. Repeat