We all say it. And we say it like everyone knows what we mean. But I’m always surprised at how differently people think about what a brand is and what it takes to “build it”. Some (by no means all) design shops will tell you that your brand is your logo and tagline, so you’d better invest heavily. Some advertising agencies will tell you it’s how much advertising you have in market. A PR firm will say your brand is what influencers say about you. There’s some truth to each of these perspectives. I believe a brand is the relationship a customer has with a company. And like any relationship you have in your life, it’s defined by the sum total of all the experiences and interactions over time. You can’t craft a brand by writing a mission statement and saying, “We are a company that cares about X.” You need to go be a company that is X. It’s not your logo. It’s all that you are. 

Far-reaching definition, to be sure. But think about some of the strong brands you know. For me, Apple is about well-designed technology. And I feel that way because all the Apple products I experience are functional and powerful enough for what I need them for. They’re intuitive to use, show great attention to detail, feel good in my hands, and garner compliments from my design friends. The Apple employees I know are the most creative, talented folks I have worked with in the past. The company’s stores are innovative, high-tech, and the help is both knowledgeable and super cool. Its marketing is simple, creative and (usually) powerful – (I actually think Apple’s brand advertising in recent years is the LEAST creative/innovative thing about the company in some ways). But it’s all of this that makes Apple = well-designed technology, for me. Its chomped-fruit logo has nothing to do with it. 

Ask anyone about the Zappos brand and they will say Zappos = great service. It’s tagline is not, “We’re all about service.” Zappos = great service because of its liberal returns policy, free shipping in both directions, all the detailed information on its site (“these shoes run a little small / large for the size”), and all the great interactions customers have with its service staff. My husband ordered 3 pairs of shoes from Zappos. None fit or they weren’t quite cool enough, so he sent them all back. He then ordered another 3 pairs of shoes. No keepers again. He wanted to order another batch but wondered if he should be feeling bad about sending back yet another set for full credit. He called customer service and asked if it was really OK. Not only did the customer support person say, “YES, absolutely! That’s what we are here for!” But to thank him for being thoughtful about it, she gave him a $20 gift certificate toward a pair of shoes (if he ever found ones that fit). Again, it’s not good luck that Zappos has support people like that. Zappos actually pays customer support people $1,000 to quit, one week into training. If anyone is NOT totally committed – NOT in it for the long-haul – they’d rather know sooner rather than later. 

Brands are earned through consistent actions and interactions, and once built, they are not easy to change. Microsoft has had a tough time putting out the Zune and trying to suddenly be a hip and cool brand. Yes, there is Xbox, but we customers have too many experiences with Microsoft over many years to suddenly believe it’s hip. It’s like one of the un-cool kids on your block who’ve you known your whole life to be un-cool, suddenly showing up at the senior year grad night party in a sa-weet party suit. Maybe in the movies the guy gets the popular girl that night, but not in real life. That guy better show up at the cool coffee shop every day, show up at more cool parties, and STOP being seen playing D&D on the school lawn at lunch if he’s going to really change his brand. 

So brands are, indeed, BUILT. They are built every day, every time your customer interacts with your product or service – the store, the product, the packaging, the receipt. Your brand is defined by the conversations customers have with your people. It’s defined by your pricing decisions, your policy decisions, your hiring decisions and your training programs. It’s the website, the phone tree, and yes, I guess it’s also that logo on your business card.

On my flight to LA last week, in Spirit (the Southwest Airlines’) Magazine, I read about Arthur Rosenfeld and his random act of kindness in a drive-through line at a Starbucks in Florida. For those of you who missed it, the guy in the car behind Rosenfeld got angry because Rosenfeld hadn’t moved his car forward enough to free up space at the microphone. The guy in back lost it – honking and yelling. Rather than reciprocating the insults, Rosenfeld, a Tai Chi master, calmly told the barista that he wanted to pay for the coffee of the guy behind him. He paid the tab for the honker, which actually set off a spontaneous chain reaction of people paying for the next car’s coffee that lasted throughout the day.

While it’s true that Starbucks promotes angel behavior by encouraging “cheer chains” during the holiday season, Arthur Rosenfeld said that he had never heard of such a promotion. He said he did it to steady himself – to quell his own anger. But it was the unexpectedness and the stark contrast of his action that moved the honker, and the car after and the car after and the car after…

The story made me think on the random acts of kindness that I have encountered, personally. Thank you to the “trail angels” who have left snacks and water out along hiking trails for me to find. Thank you to the man in the green shirt at the airport this weekend who bought us a bottle of water after overhearing my daughter complaining of thirst and me explaining we couldn’t get out of the boarding queue. And on and on…

But Arthur Rosenfeld’s story also made me think about the marketing world, in which we often face angry customers, ranting on their blogs or in emails to customer support. Instead of yelling back, or issuing a cease and desist, or even ignoring the whiners, what if the company did the unexpected? Invite a particularly angry customer to the company headquarters to meet with the product team so that they can properly express their frustrations. Even a personal note sent from a person who matters at the company is unexpected enough (in this day and age) as to potentially turn the angry tide.

That’s what Dell did. It asked the angry Jeff Jarvis to the Dell headquarters to meet with the CEO. And while it wasn’t the meeting by itself that turned Jeff around, but the series of proactive changes that Dell put in place afterward, Jeff Jarvis ended up pretty happy. So tell the lawyers to step down. Tell your own employees to step up and to connect. You never know what might come of it.

Yesterday I wrote about how companies should give things away in order to attract customers and build relationships.

Well, I was looking around for good examples, and today I thought of Nike’s training tools. As an example, Nike got a lot of positive attention a while back for the Nike+ program, where a little sensor you put in your shoe tracks how many miles you run. You can sync your runs with a training program that you put together online. Even without buying the sensor or Nike shoes, however, the site lets you design a training program for yourself with the goal of completing a particular event (5k, 10k, marathon, etc.) or just getting in shape. There’s also Nike SPARQ training, a program to help you “be a better athlete” by improving the “five basic elements of your athleticism.”

All of these incorporate social and community elements. Nike+ for example suggests some playful running challenges like “Democrats vs. Republicans,” and Nike+ and SPARQ can both connect you to groups and events in your area.

Most recently, Nike launched something called the “Breakfast Club” to promote its Jordan line. You start with a self-assessment - or an assessment done by any friends you enlist, and then based on that, you create a workout program for yourself.

Here’s a great interview with Emmanuel Brown of Nike Jordan, talking with social media blogger and podcaster, Jennifer Jones.

Back in my agency life, clients were always asking us to create “viral” campaigns that would get the attention of the digital youth. Our inside joke was that there was a simple three part formula…

• Create a MySpace profile
• Enlist the Black Eyed Peas (they were especially hot at that time)
• Put some videos on YouTube

Then… POOF! it spreads like wildfire.

Even now, reading the latest online pitches from the current lot of would-be gurus, it seems things haven’t changed very much.

The basic pieces of a social marketing campaign today seem to be…

• Create a profile/group on MySpace/Facebook/Twitter/Jaiku
• Launch a blog advertising campaign
• Create a contest that has some viral hooks

This formula is attractive because none of these things necessarily requires much effort on the part of your company. You might get kudos from the Madison Avenue crowd and a few marketing pundits, impressed by your “revolutionary” foray into social media, but the long term rewards from real people will be thin and fleeting unless you do a little more.

Too many social media marketing strategies are still about pushing your brand or your message out to people. The channels are new, but the philosophy is same-old advertising.

I’m personally tired of the whole contest thing. It’s become de rigueur in the web 2.0 world to launch some kind of cheesy campaign where, for example, companies invite people to make their own commercials or slog through a ridiculous scavenger hunt for the chance at a big prize. This doesn’t count as a giveaway because contests like this demand payment (manual labor and/or creativity) in exchange for nothing but a chance at personal glory or tangible rewards.

As the adage goes, you reap what you sow. If you want something from the digital crowd, then think about what you can give them upfront.

What I’m talking about is not all that different from the old concept of a loss-leader. You give away or deeply discount something that will attract people to you, and then you try to deepen the relationship with those people and persuade them to buy more stuff - or simply hope they will. What if Microsoft simply gave away the Xbox for free, knowing that such a move would propel their console market share way past PlayStation? Could the resulting increase in game sales make up for the cost of such a move?

I’m sure Microsoft has already run the numbers on this, so I won’t fantasize about getting a free Xbox, but there are plenty of giveaway ideas that cost almost nothing.

A lot of companies have quite a bit of capital in the form of knowledge. Why not give this away?

Become the expert in your industry. Make your company’s blog the go-to source. Tell secrets. Teach people something cool or valuable. Enable. Entertain.

A while ago, I wrote about Rancho Gordo - a small specialty foods company with a great blog, sharing recipes, gardening advice and commentary on the agriculture industry. There’s also English Cut, the blog of a bespoke saville row tailor. I couldn’t care less about hand-tailored suits, but his blog is wonderfully written and hard to beat for passion and subject-matter expertise.

Some bigger companies get this too. Williams-Sonoma recently launched a redesigned website, and it prominently features their vast archive of recipes. Out of curiosity I checked Geek Squad and found a few self-service resources on their website, but imagine all the things they could give away. Same goes for banks and financial services firms - think of the tools and resources they could offer for free.

So, what could you give away?

In this week’s installment of his ‘Circuits’ column, David Pogue asks, “Are you taking advantage of Web 2.0?” By ‘you’ he means your company, and he describes the response this question got from the attendees at a recent PR conference:

“…within seconds, there were 132 responses on the screen in a huge, scrolling list. ‘Not enough money.’ ‘Don’t understand it.’ ‘No technical resources.’ ‘Not enough manpower.’ ‘No visible return on investment.’ ‘Fear of ridicule.’ ‘Fear of slander.’ ‘Fear of permanence.’ ‘Fear of the public running amok.’”

There are lots of common fears in there, and they’re all reasonable at first glance. Companies are understandably afraid of opening themselves up to ridicule and slander from a public running amok, knowing that all the messy results will live forever, just a Google search away. And they’ve seen some embarrassing failures from companies who’ve tried to embrace the new paradigm - like the Chevy Tahoe debacle, and Wal-Mart’s fake blog (or flog) scandal, to name just two incidents. So the safest bet is to simply stay away from all things Web 2.0.

The problem with this approach, obviously, is that the public is already running amok. That’s what the public does. If they want to slander you, they have YouTube and MySpace and a million other places to do it. Sticking your head in the sand doesn’t make all this stuff go away. It just makes your company look silly - or worse, aloof, uncaring and behind the times - and ultimately more vulnerable to whatever mud they might be slinging.

So if it’s unwise - or unrealistic - to stay out of the fray, then what’s the best strategy for jumping in? The other questions from the PR conference attendees fall into this category. More and more companies have recognized the need to participate, but they don’t know where to focus or how much to invest.

There are lots of success stories. Big companies like Dell and Mariott have generated good will and good press through their forays into Web 2.0, and this has surely translated into dollars. But it still comes down to the question of ROI. If one of the ultimate goals of embracing Web 2.0 is to engender good will, then how do you quantify it? How do you measure success?

Does anyone out there have a story that starts to quantify the actual value of good will?

A few years ago, a friend of mine, Michael, who comes from an upscale family and who was studying the romance literature of Latin America, conducted a unique social experiment. He dressed in simple clothes and set out to panhandle in downtown San Francisco to see how much money he could raise in one day. It took him several hours just to find a free corner that no one kicked him off of (come to find out, most corners in big cities are already “taken” by local panhandlers). But then he began: “Can you spare some change?” People averted their eyes. They looked down. They looked at the sky. They squinted and leaned into their open books as if trying to make out a foreign word. Very few would acknowledge his existence. And because his early actions did not provoke reactions, Michael started to feel like he didn’t exist. He soon found himself lunging toward people, yelling, using profanity. And this was only after about 6 hours on the streets.

I thought of Michael last week when I read BusinessWeek’s article “Consumer Vigilantes”. In it, we hear from some ultra-disgruntled customers who are bashing companies everywhere they can—on existing sites (amazon.com), specially created new sites (comcastmustdie.com) and through more “direct” channels, like 76-year old Mona Shaw who smashed keyboards and phones with a hammer at the Comcast headquarters yelling, “HAVE i GOT your attention NOW?!”

These customers desperately need to be noticed. Their efforts to gain the attention of the companies they seek to connect with have produced no reaction. They’ve tried the phone tree. They’ve tried email. They’ve tried letters to management. They’ve waited patiently (for hours) at headquarters waiting for a manager to appear. All to no avail. And, like Michael during his panhandling experiment, their voices and actions become ever more extreme.

Run away?

In the face of such aggressive consumer vigilante-ism, it’s tempting for us marketers to be afraid—very afraid—and remain safely hidden behind our one-way mirrors. But if we acknowledge that our very own corporate “mass” practices (mass marketing, mass communications, mass-ive cost-cutting) have actually caused much of the anger, then the way forward should feel less scary. We created this problem and we can make it better.

In fact, what struck me in the BusinessWeek article, and in my own life experiences, is how easily people can turn from foe to friend. They rant and kick and scream, “but then someone reached out to me from the company, and now I’m very happy.” Or, “… but then they fixed it, and now my loyalty is very high.”

How could such a small gesture—a simple call or email from a company representative, an inexpensive new part sent out in the mail—result in such a radical about-face? The reason is because it’s SO RARE. It is rare that a customer ever talks to a real person at any of the product companies they give their money to. Think about all the products and you buy and use—your deodorant, your sofa, your cereal, your jacket—how many people have you talked to from these companies?

Go on, engage—it’s OK

It’s time for companies to start talking to customers again, to start building real relationships again, on a mass scale, with help from technology. Customers are out there, on their “corner”, talking away, hoping for some attention, hoping someone will notice. They’re endlessly discussing the products and features they care about, praising and complaining, panning some brands and applauding others (yes, they do this too). It’s OK to jump in to those conversations. Scout Labs conducted a survey (posted out across the blogosphere) and asked the following question:

Do you like it when…you are involved in a conversation with other consumers about a product or service (on a blog or in a forum) and a representative from that company joins in online?

The responses we got:

That’s 70% who say you are welcome, even encouraged, to jump in. But there’s a clear caveat: only real efforts to connect allowed. No spinning.

How to do it well

Marketers are going to have to practice a bit. Many of us are out of touch with real customers in the real world. At some point in our careers we mutated, and now speak marketing-ese, which doesn’t play where we’re going. In this new world, using your real name is essential (gasp!). Typos are just fine (double gasp!). In fact typos get you subliminal brownie points, because it signals to customers that your response was not pre-filtered or canned. Note: those of you who wrote down, “Include a typo” in your notebook page titled, “How to talk to customers”, keep practicing, ‘cause you still don’t quite get it Your customer communication goals should be to educate, explain, connect, ask, listen, and be yourself. If you strive to do these things in your direct communications with customers, you can’t go (far) wrong.

Google does a good job at having conversations. eBay, where I received a crash course in keeping it real, is a pioneer in interacting with its community. Dell’s getting really good. DirecTV does a great job of participating in its influential communities in a very real way, in both official and unofficial capacities. Here’s an older but illuminating exchange between a DirecTV employee and semi-hostile hockey fans complaining about the DirecTV options. In the thread, you see the hardest-core complainers turn into fans, responding to the employee’s openness and candor with statements like, “…thank you so very much for your post clearing up some of the many questions that us hockey fans have. It is great to know that DirecTV cares about us and is trying to improve its Center Ice package.” And of course, myriad startups and small companies are gaining on the big guys thanks to smart products and masterful participation in influential communities online.

You can’t afford not to

Customers just want to be heard. Don’t wait until they work themselves into a frenzy. The line between brand-basher and fanboy may be closer than you think. Look up, make eye contact and jump on in.

We always enjoy a good data visualization, especially when it’s elucidating what we are doing here at Scout Labs! On Wired Magazine this weekend was a infographic of what happens after you hit “Publish” on your blog page. It’s called “The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits - to You”. If you can figure out how to click and hold your mouse down to zoom it and scan around, you’ll see a category called “Data Miners” and I guess that’s partly us — the ones who analyze the blogosphere (and social networks and image-sharing sites and video sharing sites and user reviews) to make sense of it for clients overwhelmed by the sheer volume of it all. But we are also the “Corporations” (yes, “the Suits”), because real people at real companies are using our service to Scout what people love, hate, want, think and feel about their products, brands and services. What we are NOT: an ad network or aggregator trying to sell ads. We figure there are plenty of those out there desperately trying to get ads in front of eyeballs. Inspiring people to build better products and to build stronger relationships with customers sounds much more fun to us.

The other day an analyst asked me about the different ways companies use Scout Labs-why they start using it, and all the ways they end up using it. It got me thinking about the evolution I see when companies decide to use a service to help them tune in to customers across the Internet. In fact, it reminds me Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. In 1943, Abraham Maslow developed his Hierarchy of Needs, a theory to explain human behavior. Maslow suggested that psychological needs are hierarchical, and you can’t move up the pyramid until the underlying psychological needs are met. Many have since challenged his strict hierarchy, pointing out several exceptions to the rule. But as a pop-culture metaphor, it helps describe the various ways companies use Scout Labs.

Here is Scout Labs’ version of the Hierarchy of Needs:

1. Find and fight fires (or CYA)

Many organizations get interested in consumer-generated media ( CGM for short) because they want to find fires – exploding laptops, rants from prominent bloggers, a rumor leak, a copyright violation – and fight them as quickly as possible. This is an absolutely essential use of a service like Scout Labs, and the reason why whatever service you select needs to

• Be real-time (so you can find those fires as they happen).
• Find the fires for you, prioritizing what’s important / worth paying attention to right now.
• Have email alerts built in.
• Help you quickly act mobilize your response.

In this day of highly vocal customers who areconnected to each other real-time and whose seething blog posts about you can show up within the first few results on Google, companies worry about the sheer volume of CGM and their lack of visibility into it. There are huge dollars at stake. Finding and fighting fires is a fundamental reason to Scout the Internet, and one that your organization has to feel comfortable with. This means you need to have confidence not only in the tool you use, but in your team’s judgment and ability to take action in time of threat.

2. Seek out product and marketing feedback

Once an organization gets good at finding and fighting fires, we see them start to listen even more closely to what customers are saying. Rather than only monitoring a few, huge problems and trying to solve them, companies start listening every day for insight they can use to improve products and marketing. What do customers like? What don’t they like? Why don’t they like it? What do people wish we would do differently? Scout Labs makes it easy to answer these questions. When a company evolves to the point where it really listens to customers in this way, we typically see corporate communications /PR, brand managers, product managers, and marketing folks all using Scout Labs together to helpbuild better products, inspired by the voice of the people.

3. Build relationships with customers

Only after a company is a good listener can it jump in and start building relationships with customers. I think of it like a game of jump rope. The customer conversation has its rhythm, pattern and players, and you don’t want to barge right in before getting the lay of the land – you’ll just get all tangled up. (Scout Labs lore: at one point we toyed with the idea of naming the company Double Dutch!) Watch for a while. Learn who the key influencers are. Get a feel for the language, the concerns, the issues. And when you’re ready, jump in. Be part of the conversation. Answer questions, ask questions, inform the best you can.

And if you have a service like Scout Labs that helps you facilitate this engagement – communicate with each other about it. Keep a record of it so that you have organizational memory around it. Track the impact of these customer connections. At that point your organization will be able to build relationships with customers on a mass scale. It’s not easy to evolve to this place. You have to really understand your customers and their communities before you can be welcomed in. AND you have to trust your employees to have these conversations and build these relationships. But if you can get there, the rewards are great.

4. Be a customer-centric organization

The apex for an individual, according to Maslow, is self-actualization –making the most of your abilities and striving to be the best you can be. For an organization that wants to listen to customers, the pinnacle is being a truly customer-centric organization. For a company at this stage of evolution, customers are partners. Listening to customers and engaging with them to build better products and sell more is a strategic priority and part of a company’s culture. Everyone – from the CEO to customer service reps – is tuned in to what customers are talking about, coming up with new, customer-inspired ideas, jumping into conversations to build relationships, and truly innovating.

Being a customer-centric organization is more than a nice-sounding aspiration. We believe it’s a strategic competitive advantage. Whoever listens better, innovates faster, and builds personal relationships with customers wins.

Remember the game “Telephone”? You sit in a circle and one person whispers a phrase or sentence into the ear of the person next to her. That person repeats the message to the person next to him and so on. When the circle is complete, the originator speaks aloud his original message and the last receiver repeats what he heard. Uproarious laughter usually abounds (depending on how much beer is involved). What began as “faster than a heard of turtles” becomes “master of the nerdy girdles”.

The rumor mill is alive and well and operating at lightening speed online as Ford Motor Company found out today. It’s still a bit murky, but it looks as if Ford had an issue with the use of the Ford logo on the Black Mustang Club’s annual calendar and in no time rumors were flying across the BMC community that they were liable to be sued by Ford for taking pictures of the cars that they own.

It looks like Ford, in fact, did “wake up and smell the CGM” and dialed right into the conversation with a spring in their step. With impressive responsiveness, Ford dispelled the unfounded rumors and made clear their policies of trademark protection. Whether founded or unfounded, Bravo to the BMC members for ranting online about their perception of Ford and double Bravo to Ford for listening.

Initial findings from a new study presented at the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) symposium over the weekend validate what we already know about the importance of social media to businesses: It’s important…

Fifty-seven percent of respondents said that social media tools are becoming more valuable to their activities as more customers and influencers use them. Twenty-seven percent reported that social media is a core element of their communications strategy.

But the study, funded by the Institute for Public Relations and Wieck media, also sheds some light on some of the ways and reasons companies are adopting strategies to address social media. The respondents talked about proactive and reactive strategies, and the findings suggest some clear priorities for both.

Respondents reported that the most effective tools for their social media initiatives are currently:

• Blogs
• Online video
• Social networks

Surprising to the researchers was the fact that criteria that measured online engagement for blogs and podcasts were among the least important to the respondents.

However, for online communities and social networks, the top three criteria for evaluating influence do reflect the importance of online engagement:

• Participation level
• Frequency of posting by the community member
• Name recognition of the individual

Furthermore, 51% of those surveyed are formally measuring the effects of their social media initiatives, with a particular interest in how successfully they are engaging with key audiences. They want to understand and, of course, enhance their brand’s reputation (and product awareness, etc.) with those audiences. They want to know how well their own forays into blogging and social video are faring, and they want to know who is writing or commenting about them, how much they are writing and what they’re saying. It’s also interesting to note that near the bottom of the list was traditional media coverage.

This is why it was important for us from the very beginning that our application focus not only on finding and measuring consumer generated content, but also enable companies to engage with the consumers who are generating it.