Chris Brogan: How brands get personal online

Back in early September, Chris Brogan pledged to write a guest post for the first 10 people to buy 10 copies of Six Pixels of Separation, the new business book written by our mutual friend, Mitch Joel. I thought it was a brilliant--and generous--offer by Chris, so I took him up on it. Here's Chris's post:

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By Chris Brogan

Your brand isn't going to fare well in the coming months without a few considerations and adjustments. In some ways, if you think of the old way of marketing and business communication as theater, then this new phase, with social media, is "theater in the round."

By that, business went from "control your message" into "represent the brand." In this new way, brands and companies have gone from being a thing to being a thing that we want to have a human face. If you work for a brand and aren't yet sure how to do that, here are five starter steps.

1) Listen. I can't stress this enough. Use a tool like Radian6 or ScoutLabs or Spiral16 or any of the professional listening tools and start collecting unstructured data about what your customers/clients/prospects/vendors/competitors are talking about. Listen. It's the basis of understanding. But don't stop at collecting the data. Find where it needs to go within the company, and find where you need to go outside the company to find new relationships.

2) Connect. Take your listening information and find the people you need to reach. Connect. Build online social media and social networking profiles and connect. And when I say connect, take what you've learned from your listening and get involved in THEIR stories. Don't talk about you. But then, that's next.

3) Relate. Want to blow away your competitors? Talk about your customers instead of wanting them to talk about you. Talk about what they're into. Talk about how they can succeed. Give them new tools, even if they're not YOUR tools. Equip them.

4) Share. Offer as much as you can give away for free for free. Do it. Your product and service is just as important to sell, but the more you build a relationship with me (the customer) and the more you equip me to do more things, the more you deliver value to what I'm trying to accomplish (that complements your product or service). It's a great opportunity to give me what I want.

5) Apologize. When you're wrong, admit it. This is another human move to blow away your competitors. We don't apologize when we're wrong. I'm still waiting for some apologies. 

This new human approach for brands to do business does yield revenue. Dell made over a million dollars more in their first year of offering bargains via Twitter. The Roger Smith Hotel in Manhattan is showing higher revenues after building a social media outreach program. Customer perception of Comcast customer service has improved greatly since the onset of its social media communications channels.

Where's your hesitation? Get into this theater, practice this new experience, and let's build a relationship-minded method to branding and sales for these coming months.

Chris Brogan is co-author of Trust Agents, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsettling book. He blogs at [ChrisBrogan.com].

Flickr photo also from Chris Brogan.

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