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Claim Your Social Media Identity

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I just got and am fiddling with a Droid 2 smartphone and what a smarty it is. I’m truly amazed at the apps and functionality of these babies that work like a laptop and browse with ease. Now that I have both this phone and my Blackberry, there’s no comparison. I’m antsy to upgrade immediately.

Over the weekend, something happened to shock the pants off me – someone phoned me and instead of her photo popping up with her number, the image of another woman popped up (who also has the same name as the caller).  At first I was confused how the woman in the picture got this phone number, and then I realized the caller was really who she was supposed to be, and the woman whose image popped up when the call came through was the “impostor.”

It didn’t take me long to understand how this could happen. The woman with the image is on social media with a BlogSpot blog as well as Twitter account on which she’s active. In fact, through the day, the other woman’s tweets began to cultivate in the contacts list on the Droid for the woman who owns that mobile number.

What to do? I’m open for suggestions on this one, folks, as it’s my job to fix this conundrum. Here’s the social-media-claim-your-identity strategy I’m going to follow (REPEAT: I’m totally open for suggestions on what you’d do, please!):

  • Register the woman’s image on Gravatar. (I wrote about how you do this here.)
  • Set up a Twitter account with that same image and help her with a consistent Twitter strategy.
  • Set up an Open ID with that image, as well.
  • Set up a Disqus account, Friend Feed, Bing, and any other social media sites
  • Join Facebook and set up that account with that same image over her name.
  • Hit LinkedIn and update her profile and make it viewable to the public with the same image.
  • Set up a blog over her name and affix her gravatar with the blog and drive links and traffic to the blog.
  • Update her website, for which she owns the domain for her personal name and every possible extension, with Internet marketing to boost search engine rankings. The site, currently in flash, may need to be rebuilt in a content management system like Drupal so the engines will recognize the content and coding. (I don’t believe the search engines have begun to accept flash sites yet for SEO?)

Beyond this approach, I’m still not sure I can get the caller’s own photo to synch with her mobile number after my phone already has the image of another woman locked in. By actually establishing her presence for the first time and trying to help her claim her social media identity, we’ll be that much closer to fixing the problem.

What do you think people who have the same name as another ought to do when they’re not interested in social media engagement? When something like this occurs, there’s no time for complacency – it’s forced engagement to protect a personal, and in this case, professional brand.

Tell Your Story First

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One of my favorite business publications is Fast Company. I devoured the October 2010 issue and amassed various tear sheets for the to-blog-about pile one of which was “Not So Slick.” This story in the section “NEXT Social Media” is about the BP tweep imposter @BPGlobalPR who took the Twitterosphere for a ride poking fun at BP for its handling and mismanagement of the oil spill crisis.

Leroy Stick, a comedy writer, seized an opportunity to create an outlet for the public’s wrath, launched the faux BP Twitter account and off to the races. As of this writing, Leroy has 186,590 followers with only 493 tweets and 8,148 listed. In the scheme of tweeting, that’s not a ton of content delivery; but, listed on 8K+? That is amazing.

The real corporate account @bp_america, “languished at a tenth of that,” according to Fast Company.

So, what’s the lesson for the day?

Companies cannot control their brand in the age of social media i.e. word-of-mouth marketing, Facebook and Twitter et al.

When you think about the magnitude of that statement, it’s frightening. We’ve seen so many examples of corporations lost in the throes of a defensive game on social media that more often than not has failed.

I’ve written about these stories relating to Nestle, Pampers, Sun Chips, Gap, and BP. Soon after I began to engage on Twitter, Dominos debacle had just occurred (when two pizza makers jokingly blew their noses in the cheese pie captured on video). Watching the corporate giants struggle with word of mouth and social media may bring some laughs, but this hits close to home for any company attempting to promote brand awareness online.

When a brand touches millions of people, there’s no doubt the lightening speed of the Ethernet is uncontrollable. How can a company attempt to control its brand if a crisis erupts?

  • First things first…prior to a crisis, marketing public relations needs to make everything tight – messaging, stories, training of spokespeople, collateral, websites, social networking sites, and regular engagement on social media, etc.
  • In the can should be approved corporate messages that senior leadership can dust off and easily update in the event that social media is the impetus behind the storm.
  • There needs to be a highly strategic social media team in place who can call the shots on the fly 24/7 across all time zones.
  • A pre-approved team of spokespeople need to have the media training to address all types of media at any time of the day; this means bloggers, Twitter chats, Facebookers, LinkedIn groups, and traditional media, too.
  • Accessibility is so critical during a crisis; the more the doors remain closed the more others win an offensive posture. So, be accessible to at least control the message and attempt to manage the brand at the same time. 

I don’t have all the answers; apparently, no one does. Sustainability expert Joel Makower, executive editor of GreenBiz.com said it well in Fast Company, “It really comes down to storytelling—if you don’t tell your story well, someone else will tell it for you.”

Corporations Do Not Understand Social Media

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I just wrote last week about the Frito-Lay Sun Chips packaging debacle here. I was aghast then, and I’m even more agog today about the Gap logo debacle that has made these two Fortune companies laughing stock.

What is happening to corporate America that permits their caving to public social media outcry about a green potato chip bag or a new corporate identity?

After four days of online whipping about its brand identity developed by an agency, Gap has pulled its brand new logo in favor of the old, archaic logo we’ve seen for decades. Blog posts, Facebook and Twitter accounts have been in an uproar about Gap’s newly designed logo. I just saw a post saying proudly, “Twitter responsible for Gap logo demise!”

I’m not doing my research to provide you with all the wonderful statistics on how long the Gap logo has been around, how much money people are wasting, what the comments have been and how many in social media circles, etc. because I don’t care, and I didn’t read the four days worth of posts on this topic. It wasn’t my business to tell Gap its new logo was ugly and stood for nothing.

Where I will spend some time making it my business is these two corporations on the heels of one another making jokes out of themselves while taking social networks for a free ride. The publicity each has garnered, while not positive, could not have been bought by advertisers. Our valuable time thinking about these mistakes was wasted, too.

What’s more shocking, is that it appears RESEARCH IS DEAD. It’s not public relations that’s dead; it’s not customer service that’s dead; it is truly research that’s dead.

Had Gap and Frito-Lay done its research in more than just the typical traditional way (focus groups?) and launched social media contests to vote on the bag or logo Facebookers liked best, then they would be assured of no backlash.

You know the People’s Choice Awards? You know American Idol and how they select the winner? Consumers VOTE – that’s the American way. We vote to garner popular consensus (although the winner doesn’t always win in politics).

So, don’t cry, corporate America, over your lost dollars to develop stupid packaging and branding campaigns if you’re not going to take your stupid packaging and branding campaigns to social media prior to going to market. It’s clear you don’t understand social media; otherwise, you would not be in this predicament, Frito-Lay and Gap, with egg on your faces.

This is an astonishing fail and does not reflect well on any of us in the world of marketing, public relations, advertising, or social media. The dynamic has shifted? Indeed.

Marketing Fair-Trade Quinoa

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(Note to readers: Today’s post is a rambling observation with a nit while sharing and pushing a dotted line to marketing and social media; blink and you might miss the latter!)

Fair Trade Quinoa Farmers in Ecuador (Wikimedia Commons)

I eat quinoa (keen-wah) every day mixed with steel cut oats, ground flax, walnuts and fresh fruit with a dash of almond milk. This fuels my body until well after noon; however, I try to eat before I get hungry to maintain metabolism. (You can learn more about clean eating from my favorite cookbook author Tosca Reno.)

Quinoa is a complete protein grown in the Andes since 3000 B.C. It’s not always easy to find at the grocer, although I buy from Trader Joe’s and recently at Jungle Jim’s in Cincinnati. As a buyer of quinoa for more than a year now, I’m dismayed its price has skyrocketed nearly 50 percent since January.

What’s happening? The classic demand and supply along with Fair Trade and good, solid marketing.

There are now quinoa products coming to our shelves straight from Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru; priced higher to accommodate the world’s farmers in developing nations. The word “organic” is included on the packaging, too.

Remember the berry (true or not true?) and the recent pomegranate craze? These high anti-oxidant berries (blueberries, too) raised consumers’ consciousness about free radicals and anti-oxidants in our diets. How did this happen? With good, solid marketing!

I support fair trade, and I also support our need to eat healthier foods without worry from salmonella, pesticide, and other illness resulting from chemical additives. While I’m not a worrier warrior about this, it nags at the back of my head when thinking of food prep for my family.

Glance back above and note the date I shared with you…3000 B.C. That’s when quinoa began its production as “gold of the Incas” and a sacred food. Why has it taken so long to grace our tables in the North? We can thank fair-trade programs that bring more coffee, cocoa, quinoa and other products to consumers across the globe. We can thank social media and the Internet for making the world smaller to inform us about these products.

While that’s all well and good, it also means we pay more for health-oriented items while junk food costs less. Perhaps, there’s more work to be done by good, solid marketing to switch the balance of the previous statement.

What began here as the germ of a quinoa seed, sprouted into more on fair trade, marketing and price. Interesting to me, and perhaps to you, as well. Thanks for stopping by.

Amplify Brand & Public Relations

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Brand, brand, brand. Yesterday, Elena Kagan fought for her “brand,” as the newspaper headlines stated. Seems everyone is using this word, yet what does it mean? Better yet, what does it mean to you?

Brands resonate. We’re familiar with those we elect to consume in every-day life and those pushed into our space by smart marketers whether we want to engage, or not (i.e. Brittany Spears). (Note: I selected this hyperlink b/c this site popped in a natural search; good job!)

Social media provides the opportunity to amplify a brand. Shout it out there that your company is paying attention, pushing services, values, personality, essence, and promise to the online consuming world.

As a public relations practitioner, I don’t do formal branding. I leave that to those who reside in advertising agencies or marketing departments. The opportunity for public relations to integrate with marketing is now more frequent, and thus public relations blended with brand is a strategy all PR practitioners should consider, hammer down and offer up.

The lines are blurring where public relations stops and marketing begins. I work daily with a marketing team focused on sales and delivering lead-gen programs to sales teams. I contribute to the sales experience with content strategy and ideas that fuel business goals. I wrote a much maligned post awhile back, PR Drives Marketing. I still firmly believe this for a variety of circumstances; yet, we’re all contributing to the same end goal. (Right, Mark W. Schaefer?)

What I don’t do is ensure success of a brand. Public relations promotes it, elevates it, positions it, and puts a human face with personification to it.

What does brand mean to you? And, how do you engage to amplify it?