By Quentin Langley
Out: Brand In: Reputation
The problem with the word 'brand' is that non-professionals think it means your logo, and marketing professionals use it to obscure what they are really talking about. 'Brand' is just another word for reputation, and 'reputation' is a better, clearer, word. To think of your brand as an object, which you own and which you can manage is out-dated, even insofar as it ever made sense in the first place.
Out: Brand management In: Influence
When Leroy Stick, of @bpglobalpr said "FORGET YOUR BRAND. You don't own it, because it literally nothing" that must have seemed pretty scary, especially to people paid $200,000 a year or more to be 'brand managers'. But, he was talking about your reputation. Of course you don't own it, you never did. Your reputation is what other people think about you. You don't own it, and you can't manage it. What you can do is join in the conversation and exercise some influence.
Out: Marketing In: Public Relations
Marketing people have spent too long deceiving themselves about the nature of brands to be much use in the social media conversation. They are hooked on stone age concepts like advertising. They want to broadcast your message instead of engaging in conversation. CIPR has always maintained that your reputation is the "result of what you do, what you say, and what others say about you". Obviously, what you say is the least important of the three. Now that individuals with a grievance against you, who would previously have been isolated, can now aggregate in social media, broadcasting a message just doesn't work any more. Marketing is also much too focussed on customer acquisition and retention. While that is very important, it is also very transactional. PR is about influencing your reputation with all your publics: customers, investors, staff, neighbours, business partners, and politicians & regulators. It is no longer possible to have different messages for those different groups (if it ever was) so marketing needs to be integrated into PR.
Out: Control In: Credibility
You can't have both. You can make your employees say good things about you, but no-one will believe them. You have to encourage honest engagement by your publics, but that is going to mean getting things right, and fostering a climate of trust, or the honest engagement will not reflect very well on you.
Out: Confidentiality In: Transparency
Obviously some things need to be kept confidential for perfectly good, sometimes legally binding, reasons. But the mood is increasingly going to be one of transparency. Openness will be the default setting, and there will need to be good reasons and strict protocols for keeping things secret. Even then, don't count on it working.
Out: Thought Leadership In: Thought Followership
Make what you can sell, don't sell what you can make. The cliché that we have two ears and one mouth, so we should use them in that proportion is very, very, dated. In a conversation with a thousand people, or a million, you will come off as pushy and loud-mouthed if you do that. In the social media conversation, organisations need to listen more and broadcast less. It is not about lecturing, it is about learning. Think of the social media conversation as being about market intelligence, not so much about sales. Go to where your customers are, find out what they are talking about, and participate with humility.
What did I miss?
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