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As the principal of Brand Matters, I had the pleasure of developing and moderating a panel of branding experts earlier this year. A wide range of topics was discussed with a focus on branding trends. As you would expect, 'social media' played a large role in our discussion; however, since this was a peer-to-peer roundtable, the discussion played out a little differently from most. With this article, we share a series of excerpts from our panel discussion. In addition, we draw you to the HBR spotlight on social media and branding. It's interesting how much customers and stakeholders expect from brands now compared to twenty years ago, especially how they are conducting themselves as corporate citizens. It's like the curtains have been drawn aside. Brands are being held to a whole lot of things that they weren't necessarily as accountable for in the past such as environmental and employment practices and now social media allows everybody to have an opinion on their actions. Brand perceptions are not always influenced by the person who's most credible, who knows the most, but by the person who is the most vocal and most active in getting their point of view out there.
Debbie Bolton, Interbrand Everybody's grappling with how they build social media into an integrated strategy or plan. I think many are treating it as tactical: "We have to get on Facebook" or "How are we going to deal with Twitter?" So they're thinking about their social media tactics and then trying to back into a strategy. We worked with a client last year and knew social media was important but we really looked at how the strengths and weaknesses of how the various media worked together for overall communications. You need to strategically be going where your customers are. You can't doubt social media potential because they're there. But you have to be clear in terms of what your objectives are, what you're trying to gain and how you fit all your communications together.
Debbie Bolton, Interbrand In communications, we've seen a huge shift from monologue to dialogue. For us, social media provides an unprecedented opportunity to embrace dialogue in a new way. So much of what organizations used to do was to push information out and now it's all about embracing all-way dialogue among many diverse stakeholders. However, we also need to ensure the right training and resources are in place to facilitate dialogue on an ongoing basis. We see many social media efforts that are still pushing out information but not facilitating two-way dialogue. Whether you're trying to build communities, promote a product or service, or respond to customer service issues, you need to integrate social media into your overall communications strategy.
Carolyn Ray, National PR Our panel discussion highlights several of the opportunities and challenges that social media has introduced to strategic brand building. Marketers have more tools at their disposal than ever before and companies are willing to try new things. It is almost like social media is democratizing brands. The increased transparency of brands and the ability of social media tools to broaden influence and engagement has effectively extended the reach and participation of brands.
Patricia McQuillan, Brand Matters Stay Connected with Brand Matters Follow us on Twitter Brand Matters is on Twitter. Follow us for more updates. Join our LinkedIn group We invite you to join Brand Matters' LinkedIn Group and participate in our branding discussions. Upcoming Events The Canadian Marketing Convention will be held in Toronto May 26-27 this year and Brand Matters will be attending. Idea City is always an inspiring event hosted in Toronto, June 15-17. The Advanced Learning Institute, Strategic Internal Communications Conference, will include social media and traditional. Hosted in Toronto, May 16-19.
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