Social Media and Branding — Some simple guidelines
Each connection to a brand, including the social media experience, builds and reinforces the customer's brand experience.
Building relationships with customers through the shared experience of the brand is more and more important. In the social media universe, your brand exists in the flow of conversations you can not control but can participate in and shape. Your brand must respond to a range of comments from customers, non-customers, loyalists and non-loyalists alike. The three biggest social media channels companies are participating in now are blogs, Facebook sites and Twitter.If you're about to put it out there via Tweets or a Facebook Fan Page, play with these guidelines in mind. Remember, these are all pieces of the brand relationship with your customers.
Create Goals That Are Tangible and Realistic to Achieve
Be very clear about what you intend to accomplish. You have to devote time and resources to participate: it's a commitment to generate meaningful blog content or post comments on Facebook or Twitter.
Important Goals:
- gain measurable visibility for a new product launch
- engage customers in customer service relationship
- discover and build loyalty relationships with your brand loyalists out there
With these kind of goals you can begin to increase awareness of your brand and create relationships with customers.
Develop and Manage Messaging Internally Before You Engage
You need to have a very clear idea of what your goals are for responding. That is the internal brand messaging about your products, what's unique about your offering? What are your core values, how do you communicate consistently to your customers and clients about their experience of you? There needs to be some core messaging and positioning developed around what you are all about so customers know you.
Deliver Clear Brand Messages
 We deliver only quality, pure frozen yogurt.
Committed to our customers having a great experience.
We care about the local community and support it.
These are clear value message drivers for brands. Be clear about what yours is and engage from that perspective. This sets expectations and values for customers.
Maintain Key Communication Touchpoints
So now you have blog entries every week, you've launched your Facebook page and you have people following your Tweets about your product or store. How do you maintain these key touchpoints? It's critical you have a regular process behind this and dedicated personnel and staff responding, engaging and building your relationship and you understand when there's issue you must deal with.
Monitor Your Brand Across Multiple Social Platforms
It's essential that you have someone monitoring the social media presence of your brand, particularly if you are a consumer-based brand in a broad market space. You need to know what your customers think, experience and say about you. You may discover online conversations about your brand that you are not part of. There are also tools that allow you to measure your impact compared to others in your category such as TweetScan and TweetDeck, which helps you organize replies and track comments. There are a ton of tools out there so try not to get overwhelmed.
Keep Shaping the Brand Message
Lastly, if you commit to the social media world through a blog, Twitter, Facebook or other options that are out there, engage with customers in a consistent way. They'll come to expect this reliable and affirming experience of your brand.
The key to social networking is realizing brands do not live in static world determined by outbound advertising campaigns. The customers are cheering you or complaining about your brand and other customers or potential customers are listening and learning about your brand. You need to participate and engage them with genuine and concrete messages that build your brand. Now go tweet!
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Licensing Bob Marley
Brand Strategy 
