Social media demands personality. Yet most companies and brands are uncomfortable with personality. Marketing consultants – like yours truly – have been encouraging them for years to temper personality in favor of staying on message.

If your brand is in social media, you may want to rethink that balance.

Lisa Barone at Outspoken Media wrote a phenomenal post about the problem that causes most brands to commit social media suicide: they act too big and miss the opportunity to connect with users.

“I don’t care how big your brand is,” Barone wrote. “You need to act small because that’s what attracts people.”

Social media is unlike any other media because individual consumers own it. They represent their own interests and have different expectations for the way they interact with brands they support.

Treating social media like any other media is a sure way to waste your time, resources, and money.

Can you fix the big brand personality problem? – Outspoken Media

Related posts:

1. Social media stats for 2011
2. Social Media Examiner
3. Dipping a toe in the social media pool

By Brian Eisenberg

Google and social media have given consumers greater access to information and changed what they expect from the brands they buy.

Waiting For Your Cat To Bark focuses on how brands need to evolve to meet consumers’ new expectations.

Author Brian Eisenberg argues that when media was limited, brands could simply ring their bell enough times and consumers would come running, much like the dogs in Pavlov’s famous experiments. The conditioning worked.

He believes today’s limitless media has caused consumers to act more like cats, who will respond if and only if they feel like there is something in it for them. “Smart merchants know the secret to success is not to make it easier for the seller, but to make it easier for the buyer,” he wrote.

Information is the key to solving the new marketing dilemma. Eisenberg offers a formula called the “persuasion architecture” that answers three key questions:

1. Who are we trying to persuade to take action?
2. What is the action we want someone to take?
3. What does that person need in order to feel confident taking action?

The persuasion model has several steps that anticipate the buyer’s needs and tries to make the right information available at the right time when buyers are ready. We wish he had explained the model in more depth, but that doesn’t detract from the book’s overall impact.

Related posts:

1. Social media suicide
2. Is Your Brand at Risk?
3. Quora

Alterian surveyed 1,000 consumers for its “Your Brand: At Risk or Ready for Growth” report. The findings were interesting but not surprising:

• Nearly 60 percent of consumers feel that companies are primarily interested in selling any product or service to customers rather than selling the product or service that is right for a particular customer.
• Only 9 percent trust companies to act in customers’ best interests.
  About one third of respondents using social media think that companies are genuinely interested in them versus only 16 percent of the overall respondents.
• A mere 5 percent trust advertising and only 8 percent trust in what a company says about itself.
• Only 17 percent of respondents think that companies take note of their feedback. But 75 percent say that “there would be a positive impact from companies taking more time to find out about their needs.”
• More than 80 percent of respondents cited an interest in co-creating products and services. Additionally, 82 percent said that participating in the development of a product or service would increase their likelihood to recommend that company.

The full report is available on the Alterian website.

Related posts:

1. ESPN’s brand leap
2. Time For Trust
3. Report highlights employees’ lack of trust

It’s vacation time. Good books are a staple of any trip to the beach, lake, or mountains. Here are a few books we’re planning to read this summer.

• The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki — Entrepreneur. Advisor. Investor. Kawasaki has done it all. The Art of the Start is his take on creating an entrepreneurial environment inside any company. 
• Personality Not Included by Rohit Bhargava — Bhargava argues that brands must become dynamic personalities to connect fully and meaningfully with their customers. 
• Mastering the Hype Cycle by Jackie Fenn and Mark Raskino — Gartner invented its hype cycle several years ago to explain the rise, fall, and ultimately sustainability of innovation. Fenn and Raskino explain how companies can avoid the typical problems and return more from their investment in innovative products and services.
• The Big Short by Michael Lewis — Lewis has a stellar track record of fascinating stories, from Moneyball to The Blind Side to Liar’s Poker. In his latest book, he takes on the financial crisis in 2007-08 that led to the current recession.

What’s on your summer reading list?

Related posts:

1. Best of What We’re Reading
2. For the record about “off the record”
3. Rules to Break & Laws to Follow

We often hear from prospects that they want to “get our name out there.” They believe that being “out there” will translate into new business.

This is possible if their service or product costs less than $100, because the consequences of a bad decision are minimal. For everything above $100, getting the business’ name out there is important, but it’s only step one in the process of landing a new client.

The better question is, “How do I get people to choose my company?”

It’s also a bigger question.

Prospects make decisions to spend their hard-earned money after they have cleared several other hurdles.  They include:

1. Awareness
2. Introduction
3. Attention
4. Understanding
5. Preference
6. Choice

We will tackle each one of these hurdles — and certain combinations of them — in future issues of the Atkinson Advisor.

Related posts:

1. Making sense of marketing metrics
2. atkinsonpr.com
3. Southwest customer service

Businesses often tout the strength of its team and exult, “Our greatest competitive advantage is our people.” Some experts estimate talent can account for as much as half of a company’s market value.

Yet rarely do you see the people unless you engage with the company.

The equation has flipped thanks to social media. It’s now affordable, practical, and srategic for employees to build a dynamic online presence that connects them with potential customers and existing clients. It’s powerful stuff.

The new equation also raises some interesting marketing challenges that businesses will have to tackle.

• Who controls the content? Right now, marketing departments have complete control of their marketing message. Social media requires giving up some of that control and trusting employees to do the right thing. Social media guidelines are a must for any business.
• What’s the balance of professional insights to personal information? Social media is predicated on personality. Too much business information = pushy sales. Too much personal information = TMI.
• Why invest in employee branding when they could leave? This is a valid concern. Pioneers in the area of employee branding will be able to point to their investment in an employee’s brand as a reason point for staying. Eventually we believe employee branding will be a necessity for attracting and retaining any top talent.

Related posts:

1. Social networking: Business tool or time waster?
2. It’s my business
3. Social media suicide