Making Marketing Happen Blog
Tips, Tools and Techniques for Making Marketing Happen
Posts Tagged ‘Blogging’Being Brand Ambassadors
When you hear the phrase “Brand Ambassadors,” you may think of a celebrity who become the advertising face of a company, such as Mariah Carey for Jenny Craig, or Ashton Kutcher for Nikon. Or, perhaps you think of the marketing and sales people whose job it is to promote the company’s brand through campaigns they deploy and the interactions they have with customers. Either way, you are right. But these people are not the only Brand Ambassadors that a company has. In this era of social media, people throughout a business are promoting their companies’ brands in ways they may not realize. Employees who are tweeting and blogging about company happenings are de facto spokespeople. The way that people represent themselves on Facebook, especially if they post about work, influences how their Facebook friends view their employers. Merely listing a company on a LinkedIn profile has an impact. Fairly or unfairly, the public’s perceptions about businesses’ brands are influenced by these mediums. Brand perceptions are also shaped by every day interactions that happen between employees and people outside the company. What they say, the tone they use to say it, how responsive they are and the quality of attention they give to customers all impact brand perception. If a customer service representative is not helpful enough, the brand is tarnished. If a delivery person driving a truck with a company’s logo on it cuts someone off, the brand is tarnished. If a CEO falsifies his resume, the brand of the company that hired him is tarnished. A brand’s perception has an endless number of vulnerabilities. That’s why it’s important to train your employees so that they understand the role of Brand Ambassador. Hold a formal brand training class. Educate all employees that they need to embody the brand that they are representing. Make sure everyone internalizes what the brand stands for, including the brand promise, its essence and the benefits that it strives to deliver. Share email and phone protocols with them. Have them acknowledge that when they are wearing company logoed apparel, they are walking billboards for the company and that they shouldn’t act in a way that will damage the brand. Encourage them to embrace the role of Brand Ambassador and to travel wisely.
Posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2012 in Branding, Marketing, Marketing Technique, Social Media | | Permalink
Tags: Best Practices, Blogging, Facebook, Social Media, Twitter Claim Your Blog
If you are a blogger, you want your posts to be read by an audience that is interested in the topics you write about. However, for your blog to be read, first it must be found. A lot of time and resources are spent on SEO for conventional search engines, like Google. Don’t forget that there are also blog search engines, among others, that can route traffic to your site. But they operate differently. To be added to most blog search engines’ directories, you must “claim” your blog or “verify” its ownership. Unfortunately, not all blog search engines use the same authentication process. The following is a brief tutorial on how to set your blog up on some of the top blog search engine directories: Technorati, IceRocket, BlogCatalog and Google Blog Search. Technorati, one of the most popular search engines for blogs, is the reason this post starts off the way it does. The jumble of text and numbers in the first paragraph is actually the claim code that Technorati issued for this blog. After joining and setting up a profile, Technorati asks each blogger to put the blog’s claim code into its feed and at the beginning of a post. It’s to remain there until Technorati checks it and adds the blog to its directory. BlogCatalog gives you one of three ways to demonstrate ownership of your blog. After signing up for a free account and setting up a profile, the blogger is asked to verify ownership by: (1) linking to BlogCatalog from your blog roll, (2) embedding meta tag code in your blog page or (3) adding one of their widgets to your blog. I chose option #2. A member of BlogCatalog’s team is supposed to review and validate each blog that’s been submitted within 24 – 48 hours. The clock has started ticking! IceRocket, on the other hand, uses pings. First you submit your blog’s URL on IceRocket’s home page and then you add a link to the notification section of your blog’s content management system so that each time you author a new post (like this one), IceRocket knows about it and adds it to the directory. Google Blog Search let’s bloggers manually submit their blogs each time there’s an update. This triggers a search engine crawl. But why take the manual route when automation will make your life so much easier? Google Blog Search states that if a blog “publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service, (Google Blog Search) should be able to find and list it.” If your blog is not set up with ping updating service yet, Google has its own for you to use. Ok, let the blog searches begin!
Posted on Monday, September 20th, 2010 in Blogging, Marketing, Marketing Tool | | Permalink
Tags: Acquire, Attract, Best Practices, Blogging |
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