Social Media Branding For Small Business

Robert Davis

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781631570995
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Publicidad

Social media branding provides the thinking, evidence, and practice to create a road map for practitioners in small businesses to develop and implement their brand in online and of ine communities. It provides a starting point, as one of the biggest issues for small businesses is where to start. Social Media Branding For Small Businesses provides a framework to guide your strategy and implementation. The approach is called the 5-Sources Model. The resources are the have fundamental branding principles that focus on simply outsourcing your brand. Putting the customer back in control while focusing on the community and this group of dedicated customers and other stakeholders. The 5-Sources Model simply says that the social media brand for small businesses needs to play an important role in your customers' functional and emotional existence. It is both the serious and the fun experience of your brand.

CHAPTER 1

Why, What, and How?

Community Reboot

The 5-Sources Model starts with the fundamental question: Where is your brand? Where does it exist? Before I would have said that it exists within your company, with its people and possibly on the shelf or online. It is articulated in a strategy document. We often see your brand in traditional marketing communications. It is part of the vision.

The 5-Sources Model says those days are over. What I like to say is that traditional branding has been rebooted by the community. The days when companies had control over the brand are over because something called “the community” has broken free from its offline cage. Like antimatter, the community and its offline and social media presence have reabsorbed these traditional frameworks and architectures. Like a B grade movie, the community has morphed into an uncontrollable beast. It found online and pushed go or maybe on is a better word.

The community just rebooted business and their primary target has been . . . yes, you guessed it, the brand. Offline, their views were mostly ignored or hidden in market research studies on the brand. Now their input into the brand and its meaning is ubiquitous and in real-time nano-second mode. Multilingual, multidevice, and multichannel. All interlinked with extreme velocity and synchronicity.

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What is the 5-Sources Model?

The community ownership of the brand expressed through the function, emotional, actualization, personal, social and relational.

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The first change on the agenda is the meaning of the brand. Now it is purely from the customers’ perspective. Brand meaning is now owned by the community and we aren’t going back. That community involves many different brand stakeholders and could involve customers, businesses, suppliers, influencers, social interest groups etc¹.

Given the significant change in how we view and think about your brand, the reboot has motivated the creation of a new way of thinking about the brand. The 5-Sources Model. Motivated by the movement of the social community. Let’s go!

First Source: Function—Shared Meaning and Objective

First, the community has reclaimed your brand and its functional role. This is the first source of the 5-Sources Model. Brands were originally designed to be a “short-hand” for their customers: The symbolic device of value. Many have lost their way and are driving internal organizational agendas rather than customer value and experience. Hence, the community now owns your brand in the direction, process and outcomes from a functional perspective.

Any good book on branding should cite Google. What a story! Google is a brand worth nearly $300 billion. It is mammoth and nearly as large as a small country. But, what is strange about the brand is that the brand equity has been built up through almost zero expenditure on the traditional black hole of marketing communications. This is pretty confusing because it directly challenges other valuable brands such as Apple and Walmart.

The key is that the brand is built upon the fundamental basis of Google’s business model. But what is that foundation? Rather obvious, the stakeholder-users. You! Even the search engine result is a function of your measured behavior. Who you are? Where you live? What are your preferences? Some call this big brother or “big data.” The 5-Sources Model sees it as the way the community takes back your brand and controls the functional outcomes. In the case of Google; the brand is functionally driven by the community. What it does, is the community.

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5-Sources Model: Function

Moving to high community brand value and collective brand sourcing: Take the brand away from the internal agenda through a revolutionary DE: VORCE. Stolen toward shared ownership by its collective. A new form of shareholder and value.

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To help enable the functional aspect of the brand in the 5-Sources Model your brand might help to facilitate the following shared activities across the community:

• Material Rewards: Brand as a priority club enables customers to get exclusive access to the material and tangible rewards.

• Problem Solving: Brand as an emergency room focuses on stress free, time and money saving solutions, and enables customers to address problems.

• Information Search: Brand as an information center enables customers to find the required information about your brand, alternatives or expert advice.

• Knowledge: Brand as a search engine and a data center enables customers to manage knowledge about your brand in a convenient way.

• Feedback: Brand as a conference room enables customers to express their opinions directly to your brand.

Second Source: Emotion and Your brand Loves Me

Emotion! This is the second source of the 5-Sources Model. Emotion is centered on the community’s acknowledgment of its community and social self². That it exists off and online. One of the major issues your brand faces here is the lack of congruency or fit between your brand and its image in social media vs. the community image of its stakeholders. This occurs because brands outside the community structure are often run under traditional managerial and control approaches.

When they become involved in social media branding they apply the same model. Sure you can have rules. Digital has always been about netiquette. But brands that operate by control and command in relational community structures just seem disjointed and out of the play and flow of the community and where it wants to take your brand. The lack of fit destroys the emotional connection. Think about whether emotion is a planned outcome of a community’s engagement with a brand? No! It can’t be. Emotion can’t be planned.

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5-Sources Model: Emotion

Moving to high community brand value and collective brand sourcing: Transforming brand emotion from destruction of the fit with the planned direction toward love defined by connection.

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Let’s look at the case of Apple. What I get about Apple is not just their design or great leadership. I think we can find many examples of this across the globe, small and large. What Steve Jobs did understand, apart from his employees and stakeholders in their brand, was brand emotion. So much so because the community simply loves the Apple brand. I think that was the secret. It is not really about the design or Steve himself. You are just an Apple person or not. If you are an Apple person then you are not alone. You are part of a community or what I like to call a subculture. Hence, it is that community and the activities between members that underlie brand emotion. What is true is that emotion will have many different forms and outcomes. Often it will be hedonically for the sake of its existence. Some examples of the role of emotion in the 5-Sources Model could be:

• Curiosity: Brand as an object of curiosity. By holding a curiosity value brand makes customers want to uncover your brand.

• Enjoyment: Brand as a source of enjoyable and exciting experiences that make customers feel happy and satisfied.

• Fantasy: Brand as a form of customer escapism, desired reality and aspirations offering exciting and unusual experiences.

• Entertainment: Brand as a source of entertainment. By giving customers amusement and interest brand makes them enjoy their experiences.

• Privilege/ Recognition: Brand as the source of reassurance that customers are noticed and appreciated by a brand.

• Problem Alleviation: Brand as a source of help given to customers to deal with difficult personal situations.

Third Source: Self-Oriented Actualization

The third source of the 5-Sources Model is the self. Here we move beyond acknowledgment to actualization. We move from your brand in social media defining our shared relationship and emotion (your brand mirrors me and the community)—toward pushing through to, your brand is me. No separation between what your brand is, or should be. It is just me!³.

The state of actualization is at the highest point of value for the community. As you will read later, your brand and its related strategies, tactics, and conversations permeate the individual customer’s own personal relationships on and offline. They become a permanent part of the fabric of what defines a customer from a social media perspective.

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5-Sources Model: Actualisation (SELF)

Moving to high community brand value and collective brand sourcing: Not more about you (the brand) and US (together). Rather, ME. I am the brand and my collective, together we are the SELF. U + US does not exist without ME.

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Facebook has taken actualization to the extreme, as customers can now be defined by their choices across brands in music, movies, and other content. Another example is me, my gardening, and Zoodoo⁴. Zoodoo is essentially compost made from the poo or Zoo animals. Giraffe, zebra, elephant, bison, antelope, llama, rhino, hippo, and camel. I buy it for my vegetable garden and I just bought 10 40-liter bags for this summer’s garden. It arrived today and you know the first things I thought about was sharing this event on Facebook. Crazy! But why? Self actualization and the Zoodoo brand. Taking my experience offline, online into the social media. I want my friends to know through the Zoodoo brand that I am a good, but cool gardener. In essence, not a lot of separation between the brand and me. When you come to my house for dinner, you will know that the vegetables are grown from something very special, not to mention supporting environmental sustainability.

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5-Sour...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgment
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Why, What, and How?
• Chapter 2 The Importance of Social Media Branding
• Chapter 3 Source 1: Functional Social Media Brand
• Chapter 4 Source 2: Emotional Social Media Brand
• Chapter 5 Source 3: Self-Oriented Social Media Brand
• Chapter 6 Source 4: Personal (Social) Media Brand
• Chapter 7 Source 5: Relational Social Media Brand
• Chapter 8 Implementing Social Media Branding
• Chapter 9 Brand Building in Action
• Suggestion Readings
• Index