Managing the online life of your brand is like breathing oxygen; you do it continuously or you won’t survive. Historically, brands were built through TV and print ads. Today, Web 2.0 is the bedrock on which products, image and differentiation are created. Without a strategy that incorporates the live Web as fundamental to branding, and that requires monitoring and managing your brand’s manifestation across the Internet, companies will find it impossible to influence the purchase decision or persuade audiences to participate in their ecosystem.
The rules for marketing products and communicating with target audiences have chanced. Anyone can research your company and products, and more than reading negative customer comments, they can find out if you’re doing harm to the environment, using child labor in a foreign country, or providing poor customer service. Online is where brand perceptions and reality collide, and companies need to be prepared for the fallout.
Today, managing your brand means understanding your audience’s worldview, one that is greatly defined by the online neighborhoods and meeting places they choose to visit. These “vicinities,” whether they are blogs, social networking sites, product comparison sites, or user opinion sites change audience behavior, learning and perceptions. It’s where your customers/prospects find community, belonging, conversation and self expression. Harnessing these core elements of audience behavior will give companies the skills to manage their brands successfully. Marketers must know where people choose to interact and congregate, and what they do and say in order to impact their customers’ experience. Finally, companies can take even more advantage of these networks by recognizing and tapping into the vicinities of their partners, resellers and affiliates in order to broaden their audience interactions.
About Wendi McGowan