Branding or Branded…the social platform conundrum August 25, 2011

One of the most challenging issues facing organizations today is the rapidly changing world of branding. Branding has always been a tricky topic and in today’s world of company brands, personal brands and group brands it’s getting increasingly difficult to understand your brand, and even more difficult to try to manage it. Branding was once an endeavour managed only by larger organizations, and it was handled with great care. Every aspect of the brand was managed and controlled, and the power hitters in this space took branding all the way from the public image of the company to the smallest bit of private office decoration. The key concept here is control – they maintained control. Some organizations were more effective than others and prided themselves on their brand management. Consulting companies charged big bucks to provide branding guidance and management and, as is often the case, even legal could get involved in the aggressive defence of the ‘brand’. Over time the notion of branding worked its way from the large organization to increasingly smaller organizations. Some of these brand players were ‘staunch defenders’ and ‘true believers’ of their brand, others were more casual dabblers. In recent years we’ve seen a huge growth in the area of ‘personal brands’ ranging from public personalities and content creators to people we know and work with. Everyone is creating a brand for themselves, or is it in part being created for them? Access to online media, the blogosphere, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. have created several huge challenges to the notion of branding.

First – how can you carefully control your organizational brand when those that represent you can be so very visible with so little control? These days you constantly hear about a hideous act that was pushed out through some social vehicle and did irreparable damage to a company’s image. A more complex, but almost as difficult situation occurs when someone who works for an organization maintains a personal brand that conflicts with the organizational brand – nothing malicious, but it can totally dilute or compromise the overall brand.

Second – make no mistake about it, branding is complex and often requires a subtle and powerful skill set to implement effectively. It is not unusual for someone to believe their brand to be one thing but for the audience that is watching them to perceive them as something totally different. In essence, they weren’t doing an effective job of branding themselves and were instead branded by public opinion – and in most cases it’s not a particularly flattering brand.

So what should you do? You can choose not to participate in any method of online branding, or come up with strict guidelines that control any outreach at all – and I think we are seeing some of that today by many organizations that are on the sidelines watching and waiting for solutions and management tools. However this is a dangerous strategy – because the longer you wait, the more your market is being influenced out from under you by organizations with a higher tolerance for risk. That’s the conundrum – do you take the chance and try to work through the issues of new age branding? Or do you choose to abstain and risk losing your market. Either way you better have a good plan because instead of feeling a sense of pride in the brand you want to project you might instead get branded by the audience your speaking to – and you might not like what you get branded as.