7 point digital brand alignment plan

The following outlines a seven point plan which Daemon Digital recommends to any organisation as a starting point to managing their reputation in the digital media:

1. Find out where you stand

What’s being said about your organisation online and by whom? 270,000 users mention Coke in their Facebook profiles and 617,000 have joined groups dedicated to Ugg Boots. 1 in 5 Australian internet users have a Facebook profile and that’s just one social networking site. You cannot manage your organisations’ reputation if you don’t know what’s being said about you.

2. Know your audience

Is your primary audience online and active? Know your audience and understand their current online habits as well as basic demography like age, geography and profession, for example, and then go to them.

3. Trust your people

You cannot harness the participative web if you are not using it internally. You cannot expect your own people to champion the cause if it is new and alien to them. Practice what you preach and encourage your people to blog, share, wiki and network. Trust them to add value to your brand and to your organisation.

4. Get involved and stay engaged

Being actively involved in managing your message and managing your organisation’s reputation using the tools on the participative web can be invaluable to any organisation. Look at the potential and then if you consider it appropriate, get involved and stay engaged.

5. Keep it real

Don’t try and fake it, you will get caught out. Yes, communicate your messages and manage your own agenda, but do it honestly and do it openly.

6. Get to the point

You don’t own the space, make your point move on and let someone else have their turn. Also speak using language that your audience relates to and understands, don’t use technical language or jargon if it doesn’t add value to your point.

7. Measure what you are achieving

If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it and just because it’s new doesn’t mean it should not fall under the same maxim as all of the other communications techniques your organisation employs.

For more information please visit www.daemondigital.com

The participative web

There are within the participative web or web 2.0 a number of phrases that are very quickly becoming mainstream colloquialisms. Interestingly, many of the ‘new’ web 2.0 applications have origins and provenance that stretch back over a decade, for example wiki, or weblog, however, these are still terms that not everyone is comfortable with. On that basis, here is a short yet sweet glossary:

Blogs

A blog (the term is the abridged version of web log) is effectively a small website, more often than not operated by one individual, which includes regularly updated information and commentary on one issue or on a series of related issues.

Mashups

The term used to describe taking content feeds from more than one source simultaneously and combining the feeds, or mashing them up, to create a new and improved application, for example, the combination of BBC News and Google Maps as a mashup to create News Maps.

Podcasting

A podcast is a digital media file which is designed to be downloaded to portable media players (mp3 players for example) or played through a PC. The term podcasting is in effect an amalgam of ‘ipod’ and ‘broadcasting’ and reflects the market dominance of Apple’s ipod in the mp3 portable market.

RSS

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a web feed or channel which takes content in an easily transported form from one web site, or a series of websites, and through an RSS Reader enables a user to access content from multiple locations at one time.

Social networking

Effectively the term which has come to mean a web based application which creates a community from like minded individuals, example of which would include My Space or FaceBook.

Widgets

A web widget is in effect a portable piece of code which can be implemented without the need for additional programming or development input inside another web site. One of the most common examples of a web widget is the Google application implemented on many blogs and smaller websites which links Google advertising to content on the site.

Wikis

A wiki is a web site or series of web pages in which all of the content has been created collaboratively by users of the web site. Wikis are therefore effectively community websites, or can be used as a component within a site to create user developed content, for example a wiki glossary of terms. One of the best known examples of a wiki is the website Wikipedia.

Water cooler conversations

According to a report by Melcrum, an internal communications research and training business, less than one-third of 2,100 corporate communicators that they surveyed felt confident about using social media as part of an integrated communications plan.

Yet, 60% of respondent felt compelled to press ahead with getting started inside their organisations anyway. In the survey, the top perceived benefits for implementing social media tools are improved:

Employee engagement (71%)
Internal collaboration (59%)
Internal community development (51%)
Two-way dialogue with senior executives (42%)

This survey raises a couple of questions namely, given that social media in its widest definition are hardly new media opportunities, why haven’t internal communicators already started to implement strategies containing their use and secondly, if these same communicators are not confident in the use of these tools, how can they be confident that they will improve anything?

A Talent2 survey in Australia found that 40% of respondents got all, that’s all, of their information about the organisation they work for from ‘water cooler’ conversations. Given that organisations are concerned that sponsored use of social media tools could create an atmosphere where controlled messaging is more difficult, it’s good to see that organisations are currently controlling their message so effectively!