Ian M Rountree

Copywriter, Project Manager, Digital Marketing

Are you branding too early?

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7 Up - FlickrThe world of personal branding is a big deal lately – everyone wants to be visible, unique in their own not-so-far-from-the-box way, but at the end of the day, differentiation counts for more than global recognition. Branding – in the big picture sense – is better for recognition than differentiation.

Look at a business – in fact, look at many businesses – whose entire customer base resides within a fifty kilometre area. They’re all around you. Corner stores are perfect examples. Go check one out, if you haven’t for a while – the closer to being a prototypical hole in the wall the better.

Look at the merchandising theory in small businesses.

What’s near the front of the store? What’s at the back? What do you walk past to get to the staples, like milk and flour? What’s on their counters – other than lottery tickets, cigarettes (depending on location) and a few small snacks as impulse items?

Is merchandising theory branding? No. It’s merchandising theory. Is a unique set of hours branding? What about the shirt the cashier wears, uniform or not? These are all elements of branding, but they are not The Brand. The ways one business does these things (if, and only if they’re intentional) compared to another is differentiation – but it’s not branding.

Branding is a theoretical promise. It says “this, and this, and all of this I/we am/are – these things are our core, and that’s what we deliver to our clients.”

Is a good blog theme branding? It’s probably closer to merchandising theory, especially if you’re selling services, products, or affiliate items.

Are the posts you publish on your blog branding? Maybe – but I’d guess that even if you plan very far ahead (in the scale of years), you’re still just process-communicating, which isn’t in and of itself branding. It’s a component, but not the entirety of branding.

Is your demeanour on a social network branding? It might be – but it’s far more likely that, unless you’re highly intentional about how you present to others, you’re just being yourself. Transparency and authenticity may be big buzz words these days, but it amounts to Know Thyself – and that’s not branding.

So what, then, is personal branding?

It’s all of these things. All put together. Communicated in a way that’s cohesive, consistent, creative way that clearly differentiates you and your business at a fundamental level from others in your area – whether that’s geographic area, service area, or global business vertical.

The key thing to remember about branding is that it’s a puzzle – the picture only comes together if the pieces fit together cleanly, the message is transmitted clearly, and remains consistent over a long period of time.

Stop worrying about your personal brand. Produce the best work you can, over and over again, and communicate the qualities of that work as a promise to do the same for all future clients.

Image by Kevin Dooley.

Notes from #blogchat – Guest Blogging Bonanza!

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Yeah fly baby fly on FlickrTonight’s #blogchat topic was using other blogs to build your brand and blog presence! I’ve been doing a lot of noodling over guest blogging and community blogging lately – especially given the last few weeks’ worth of twitter chats – so this discussion was exceptionally apropos of that.

Let’s dive in!

Tonight’s chat was co-hosted by Geoff Living. Geoff is an author – whose second edition of Now Is Gone is coming out in 2011 – and an accomplished blogger, among other things.

The first half of the night was focused on a blogger finding opportunity in other blogs than their own, and how we can use guest activity to grow our own home bases.

This link from @LorneDaniel started the night off well – Guest Blogging Benefits and Best Practices (PR20/20)

Geoff used some pretty esoteric examples of guest blogging – for example, he’s a CNN iReport writer, which is interesting. Usually when we think of guest posting, we think of writing for other blogs in our verticals, not for big businesses like CNN.

@MackCollier asked: Why guest post?

Geoff’s responses had to do with promoting nonprofit work, avoiding placing yourself at odds with partners, and needing to establish thought leadership in a hurry. This last piece seems like another esoteric secret, but think about it; if I write primarily about building communities (which will become a major focus of my writing in the coming months), and you write about business development… If we write for each other’s blogs, we can establish a link between the subjects, and make it a no-brainer for our readers to trust the both of us with each others’ subjects.

My question was: Which comes first, asking a guest to post on your blog, or posting on someone else’s?

@MidnightMogul answered – to paraphrase – build a win-win either way, consider whether you need more content or more exposure. We need to learn to avoid the no-give situation as thoroughly as we avoid the no-win situation.

@BillBoorman shared a note about fitting in without blending in, which is a real clincher for guest writing of any kind.

@GeoffLiving shared a tip that many big blogs are built on expert guest content mixed in with regular reporters. (here)

Important question from Mack – does the audience of the blog you want to guest for expand your own audience? Sadly, I missed a lot of the answers to this.

Apparently, 40-50% of Geoff’s pitched stories go to virtual press on other blogs having been sent for review – better than book publishing, worse than we’d have expected.

A note from a few participants; Building relationships through comments is best for individual bloggers – less so for community blogs like Mashable. Comment relationships carry great influence, but little mass credibility.

Another note from many people; Making it known you’re looking for guest bloggers – or are willing to guest blog – is a good way to get out there, better than a direct pitch.

Splitting the difference between writing for yourself and writing for others – @BillBoorman says write for yourself, which is a good ideal as well.

In the second half,Geoff talked about his personal blog and how it has affected his business.

I brought out the #ReadItAll Week challenge – Justin Kownacki didn’t guest post on each others’ blogs, per se, but it was cross-blog promotion none the less, and has been working out well so far. The challenge itself starts tomorrow – so we’ll have that as a case study in the future as well. Here’s my Read It All post, and Justin’s pre-challenge primer.

Of course, @JustinKownacki himself appeared immediately, and made a note that if we’re not blogging about a subject (especially on non-personal blogs) we’re all just sharing miscellanea. If we’re guest-blogging miscellaneously, it gets even muddier, which is a bad thing.

Oh yeah. Provenance and content – again. Sigh.

Rehash and regurgitation isn’t the SEO killer. Verbatim replication withpout the benefit of provenance is. Sheesh! One of these days I’ll be writing a streak on SEO for bloggers, and trust me, provenance will be a big deal in that series. Content strategy will NOT be.

My how we hate the ubiquitous. @BLOGBlokeTips brought up the perspective that ubiquity of our content can be beneficial – which is true. However, be aware; ubiquity lends itself to exhaustion better than scarcity.

Did I miss anything? I’m being silly – I missed things. Share what’s missing, by all means. We’re all ears!

Participants’ List from @KevinLyons – TweepML List of #blogchat Participants for July 18th 2010

Transcript: What the Hashtag Transcript for #blogchat

Image by oddsock.

Boneheaded Business Blunders

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RadioShack is becoming The Shack. Seriously? By choice? What are they thinking?

When Circuit City bought InterTan Canada, and RadioShack forced its Canadian arm – no longer owned by them – to rebrand itself, it became The Source by Circuit City. CC is gone now, and TSbCC is now just The Source, now owned by Bell Canada. It took nearly four years to whittle out the old RadioShack management paradigms and devalue much of the product so that The Source could opperate as a higher-end boutique rather than the bits-and-pieces store it was known for being. Already, in the blognews comments there are worries over where our friends in America will be able to find their soldering irons and Cat5e connecters if The Shack rebrands itself too thoroughly, too fast. They need to be careful doing this, but seeing as the whole thing just ambushed the public, I have a sneaking suspicion they won’t take the four years The Source did to change their stream. Boneheaded.

Even better, Apple – the head honchos of gadget PR – have managed to get themselves into a bind over a gag order they tried to place on a father and daughter after the poor girl’s iPod battery exploded.

Why bother? Lithium Ion batteries have issues. We know this. Apple, clearly, knows this. Sony, of all people, know this very well. Why cover up a story people already know? They’d have been better off replacing the iPod silently, where now there’s flutterings on the web and in the news about less-than-kind service on their part. Did they really need to do this? Boneheaded.

It’s hard to tell whether the media is getting more thorough, or if companies are just getting worse and worse advice. Is this some kind of attempt at lowering the bar so that what used to be good service is now stand-out-excellent?

So many missed opportunities to do wonderful things, at such massive legal expense, sometimes it’s hard to keep up.

Breaking Your Own Brand

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You ever want to break your own brand? Do what Horizon Realty in Chicago did and sue your customers.

According to the Chicago Sun Times, here, twitter user @abonnen (now offline) tweeted “Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay.”
So, because they feel this is wrong, they’re suing her for $50,000 USD.

Let’s examine a few of the many reasons this is just flat out stupid.

The Streisand Effect: A few years ago, someone put an areal shot of Barbara Streisand’s house on their website. Streisand, citing privacy concerns, demanded at law-point it be removed. The result was not that the image disappeared, instead, so many people posted it on their own pages that the image will never disappear. Now, the Streisand effect is what we on the web call something that has the complete opposite of itself. This realty company hoped to prevent bad press. Now, it’s all they’re ever going to get.

Inappropriate Venue: Like it or not, the things you do in social media affect your real life. @abonnen voiced a concern about her building in the wrong place. What hasn’t come out is whether or not she went to her landlord with this concern first. If yes, and Horizon did nothing for her, then yeah, they deserve every ounce of bad press they get, because mold is a serious health concern. If she didn’t, then they deserve compensation because she’s bashed them (legitimately or not, I’m not arguing) publicly, without ever seeking a private solution to her problem.

Not an Appropriate Response: Does Horizon deserve $50k for a tweet that about 20 people would have read when it first came out? I don’t think so. Even less now that they’ve made a fool of themselves by suing @abonnen – at the end of the day, the press from their reaction will get them even more trouble than the original tweet will – and, according to the Sun Times, Horizon hasn’t even asked that the tweet be removed. @abonnen deleted her account, but the tweet was still in the public timeline when last I looked, and the blogosphere has exploded with reactions in every direction to this.

No-Win: Like it or not, @abonnen is going to have a hard time renting an apartment for a while, and Horizon Realty is going to have a very hard time finding new renters for their apartments as well. Horizon has broken their brand by sinking to incredible stupidity and letting their representative, Jeffrey Michal, be quoted as saying they’re a “sue first ask questions later” company in a now-national debate.

How can we prevent this in the future? Stop paying so much attention to bullwe find on the web. Recently people have been fired, have failed to be hired, marriages have ended, and eventually I’m sure wars will be started because of something someone said on social networking sites without paying attention. Who cares? Seriously. Thanks to this, businesses cannot operate efficiently, and your average person has to spend even more time censoring themselves needlessly instead of being productive and feeling good about using services like MySpace and Facebook. It’s hard enough already. This just makes it harder. You’re doing it wrong.