You are Not Your Brand

Today I attended a presentation at the IABC in Phoenix. The speaker was Paul Dyer, a representative from MarketWire. The presentation was on SEO, Social Media, and the importance of both on an overall marketing strategy. (Though not necessarily on each other, but that's for another time.) While there was a lot of good information, there was one point that absolutely stood out to me: You no longer control your own brand. When you light out into the world of social media, you are essentially opening up yourself to be open to however the public perceives you. Marketing a company in the 21st century will essentially be about letting go of your own brand image, and allowing the world to form its own opinion of it through your actions. Do you want to be perceived as being concerned with children’s health? You can sell all the under 400 calorie kids meals you want, but if you’re McDonald’s you’ll still be thought of as the Church of the Morbidly Obese. Social media removes a great deal of our ability to spin a topic – if there is a reasonable argument or explanation, it can carry water, but a flat-out spin simply will not fly. Just try to start a Myspace page or a create a series of YouTube videos decrying scientists who say smoking causes cancer, and how it really isn’t so bad for you. If you get any comments – because the simplest form of protest in Social Media is being ignored – they will range from, “That’s hilarious!” to “You’re a moron!”

The solution to most, then, is to abstain from social media. It is a rather obvious solution, but it’s also a little pathetic. I could easily make that into a party metaphor: “If I go to the party, there’s a chance people will make fun of me. There’s a chance they may like me, but the risk of getting made fun of is too great. I suppose I’d do better at the party if I stopped yelling at people to buy something from me and actually engaged them in a conversation… Ah, screw it, I’m staying home.” Not to mention the size of that party. Paul cited a statistic (and Paul, if you read this, as I never caught the source you were citing,) that 48 million Americans post to user generated content web sites. So you can’t sit it out, and you can’t control how your brand is perceived. The best you can do is let go, calm down, and rather than bludgeon the public with what you WANT them to think about you, talk to them directly about WHY they feel the way they do about you. "You are not your job,” Tyler Durden warns us. “You are not how much you have in the bank. You are not the contents of your wallet. “You are not your khakis.”

About the Author: Eric Reid

I am the Social Media Services Manager for Off Madison Ave. I've been with the company since 2006, when I was hired to do SEO, and link building in particular. When social networking sites started cropping up, at first I started using them to create backlinks - but they weren't the best for that, given all of the "nofollow" attributes. However, I did see the potential for all of the direct referral traffic they represent. Since then I've been actively pursuing both tactics for clients: Links that can help them for search, and social postings that get them involved in the conversation. It's about the coolest job you could ever get. ;)

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