The Brand Champion

I just started playing around with Trendrr - a new tool that lets you track social and digital media in real time.

Not bad for a free tool.

You can track brands or terms on blogger, twitter, and a host of other digital properties. Plus, you can overlay trends for different sites, and annotate with events or campaigns names to measure impact.

So far, I still like Radian6 better for the "professional" stuff. But Trendrr is hard to beat away from the office.

... to see a lot of brands come out of this recession with new positionings and/or branding.

Just a hunch.

Larry Light (former CMO of McDonalds) wrote a really nice piece entitled “Six Rules for Brand Revitalization”. I wont go through his six steps … you can read the entire article here.

What I like about Larry’s gameplan is that he goes way beyond traditional brand vehicles like ads and visual cues. He stresses the need for the brand to resonate everywhere, raising it up to an experiential level.

Said another way, your employees, retail environment, products, etc need to echo the essence and promise you are telling everyone exists.

In my experience, educating and energizing the employee base is the hardest – and maybe most critical – part of that equation. (BTW - they can often be the most overlooked part of a brand transformation.) As a Brand Champion, you have to explain to each employee group how they affect the overall brand and how they can contribute to success. After all, just one incorrect customer interaction has the ability to tear down millions of dollars worth of nurturing.

Kudos to Larry for a well written piece and for the transformation he led at McDonald’s.

I think TBWA\Chiat\Day did a great job in choosing the background track for the latest What's G Gatorade video. (Those of you that have poured over clips in a never-ending search to find the "perfect one" can appreciate how hard that is to do.)

The rythmic beat they used is not only catchy and memorable, but reflects stadium chants, claps and stomps.

See if you agree.

It seems like social media finds it way into every meeting and event I'm at these days.

More often than not, people seemed excited - and very intimidated - by this latest phenomenon. Excited because of the unlimited (and somewhat untapped) potential it offers. Intimidated because of the light speed this medium is moving at. And with experts creating images like the one the one to the right, its no wonder people don't know where to start.

But its important to remember that social media isn't the be-all end-all of marketing. It's simply another tool in our repertoire. Here are some questions a marketer can ask when developing a social media strategy:

• Do you have a brand communication strategy, essence and positioning? If not, go back and work on one. This should be driving everything you put into market, and that includes anything in the social world. Make that especially in the social world.
• Are you looking to place ads, build relationships, or monitor your brand? What are your goals for using social media? Sites like LinkedIn and Facebook offer targeted options for reaching your audience via banners, text ads and sponsorships. Facebook, Blogger and Twitter let you build relationships with consumers and customers in ways unthought of before. They also let us find out what people think of our brands - in real time.
• Do you have the time and resources? Building relationships takes time - even in the social media world. You need to be able to consistently deliver relevant content and nurture trust.
• Who will own it? Some companies are dedicating entire groups to social media. But most, like mine, seem to be creating matrixed teams.
  
• Which sites match your objectives? Take a look at that picture again. Its impossible to be everywhere in the social world. Plus, half of those sites might not even be here in a year. Choose the few that can help with the objectives you've established and start there.
• How will you measure success? Of course, this should be habit no matter what the project.

I'm sure there are plenty more. Feel free to add to the list.

I attended the ANA Marketing Accountability and Effectiveness Conference last week in NY, and a few things were pretty clear:

• We are all in the same boat - under increasing pressure to prove the value of every dollar we spend
  
• There is still no magic formula. Some marketers use spend to revenue ratios to measure success, and some (like me) use a form of modeling and triangulation (spend, awareness, interaction, revenue, etc). None of them are perfect.
  
• CFO's and marketers are closer. They may not always see eye to eye on what's best, but it was clear from the panel of CFO's they understand our challenges and goals.
• There is still so much that is unmeasurable. With the number of media vehicles available to us increasing daily, it is getting harder and harder to agree on the "right" metrics.
  

The good news buried in all this, is that we are much better off than we were 10 years ago. There are more tools available to us, more targeted media at our disposal, and more communication with internal stakeholders.

Now if we could just figure out that magic formula ...

Today, Omniture released a tool that helps marketers track customer interaction with Facebook. Looks like the tool can:

• provide basic metrics like page views and time spent on the page
• track behaviors such as activities performed and invitations
• measure the correlation between a brand's Facebook page and website
  

If the tool works as advertised, it would help marketers not only measure the value of their efforts, but intelligently tweak and improve their Facebook page and apps for maximum effectiveness.