Building Your Brand Online..Part 1

Easier said than done right?  Wrong!

Your company, your ideas, your vision! Simple!

Ok – maybe you’re working for someone else’s company and brand, but you will think of it as your own if you have that job, right?!

First of all I would advise you work our where you are at right now.  An audit, if you will.  Take an inventory or your online presence as is and see what other people are saying about you.  There are plenty of social media monitoring services our there for you to take full advantage of, i.e.

1. http://www.howsociable.com/

2. http://www.brandwatch.com/

3. http://hootsuite.com/

It would be good to hear what other programs are working for you?  Any others that you could suggest better for different reasons? Do let us know!

You should also set up Google alerts and Twitter Advanced Searches  so you can see what people are saying about you and your industry.

Do this at least once a year for your business.  Keep them on file so you can track progress.

Then look at your competitors – a similar concept to what we covered in “what can we learn from our competitors” back in November take your ‘mission statement’ and  just as Gok does when he asks a lady to guess their own size get’s his girls naked and asks them to stand, where they think they should be in a line of small to large women!  They ALWAYS get it wrong and think they are worse off than they really are – make sure you know, for sure and you have stats to prove it.

Where are you right now? where do you want to be and where should you be?  You should be able to suss out gaps in the market or highlight that your company is a better choice than the opposition for something.

I would like to point out at this moment, that we are talking about your mission statement ONLINE. So shall we call it your DMS (digital mission statement) so we’re all on the same page!

Once you know what your DMS is, you know what you want to say, where you want to say it, everything is synced (bios, profiles, blogs, social media etc) its time then to build relationships.  As we mentioned last week in “The Age of Digital Branding: Who are You?” you have to listen, interact, and maintain those relationships to build trust.  Trust IS your brand. So treat it with kid gloves and work it baby!

#Brand #businessdevelopment #SocialMedia