Does your social media branding back up your digital content?

Welcome to another edition of social business unplugged, practical advice on how to leverage social media for your business. Now, the host of social business unplugged, author of the forthcoming book, maximize your social published by Wiley and founder of windmill networking. Neal Schaffer. Greetings, everybody, and welcome to a another episode of social business unplug. Today I want to talk a little bit about content and branding, I recently had a chance to speak to a group of employees of LinkedIn actually, at a global off site that they were having. And LinkedIn, because 50% of their sales come from HR related enterprise software solutions, talks a lot about employment branding. And it's not just LinkedIn, but really the HR industry is talking about this notion of having a strong corporate brand, as an employer, which then will help you really recruit better talent potentially quicker. And at even a less expensive cost. I'm not going to talk about employment branding, and there are other experts out there that could probably say a lot more a lot better things than I can. But the notion of branding obviously, is popular, it's always been popular in marketing. And in social media, we hear a lot about it as well. We also hear a lot about content. And in fact, content marketing is not the same as social media marketing. But there is definitely an overlap, which anybody who understands both of the concepts can clearly speak to social media represents this conversion of information and communication that I've been talking about for the past few years. And I think it just bears reminding for the topic of this conversation. And with the advent of content marketing, and this notion that companies are sort of at a disadvantage in social media, social media was created for people, not businesses, what are you going to talk about, and for a lot of companies, that turns out to be content, especially those in the b2b field, potential buyers make purchasing decisions based on information and comparing that information. And it's the same for consumer brands as well. We look at reviews on Yelp, when we decide on restaurants, when we look at hotels, maybe go to TripAdvisor for books and other things. We go to Amazon, and so on and so on. So a lot of companies are spewing out a lot of content. And content takes many, many forms. Yes, there's blog posts, there's podcasts, there's videos, there's also photos, there is also things like infographics, there are things like polls, there are questions that you can ask that we see many brands, and people asking on Facebook, which I would consider a type of content, like an engagement question would be the category of content that I would put that in, there's even discussions, beginning of discussion in a LinkedIn group is another type of little bit different than your Facebook type of engagement question. But it nevertheless is another type of content companies can put out the best looking infographics possible, and attract a lot of people to their social media profiles, and even generate new leads and attract a lot of web site traffic just through the art of relevant content and relevant social media channels. But at the end of the day, people do business with people that they like people buy products from companies that make them feel good. And there may come a point where you're providing all this content and social media. But then you need to have a conversation. This is where the notion of branding, it really comes down to you are what you tweet. So obviously, the example of an infographic is a graphic or a blog post. It's should be well branded. And I always talk about branding guidelines needing to add voice for social media and a blog post is really your social voice. What you blog about shouldn't be written in web copy like text, but more of a social voice that is representative of your company's brand and social media. But at the end of the day, it's the social media users that will determine the brand of companies, because they're only going to see limited things of what you post in social media channels, especially on a platform like Twitter, where you only have 140 characters, but even on Facebook, Google Plus what have you, companies aren't posting really long messages. It's not only your choice of words that you use, but it's also on how you engage whether you engage with people that engage with you is one thing, but how you engage with them. So you may want to be considered the thought leader in your industry, and you write the most compelling content. But when people engage with you or your company, they feel that there's a gap, because maybe you don't exhibit the same human skills that others would want to see in you. Perhaps as a company, you want to be open to anybody, but maybe whoever is the community manager or whoever is tweeting on behalf of your company maybe isn't as open or maybe as a little bit more opinionated than If you would want to be on social media, I don't think that there are many companies that have this problem. But I do see it come up. And I see it come up a lot with individual people, of professionals and their personal social media accounts of actually picking sides, picking people that they want to support picking people that they don't want to support. And the language that they bring into social media conversations often represents that, and this is the dangerous pitfall that we have, as professionals and as companies is that we're creating content as part of whatever objective we may have, which is in our own social media strategies. But for a lot of companies, it's lead generation, it's thought leadership, it's building community, what have you. But you have to back up that content with the person with the human side with how you communicate with people in social media. It is the basic human skills. That's just like you're listening to me talk. I'm not a superhuman, I may be very active in social media, and it's something that I do for a living. But if you had a chance to talk to me, and I hope you realize that from listening to all these podcasts, I'm a normal Joe ask Aaron Lee on Twitter, one of my window networking bloggers would talk about were average people, you should be able to pick up a Skype conversation with anyone that you meet on social media, and have a normal conversation. But if how you represent your company and your how you represent yourself and social media, if you're not creating those messages in that fashion, that all can work against you no matter how compelling your content is, it can actually blow up in your face because no one wants to communicate with you. No one wants to talk with you. People feel that you and maybe the company you represent are abrasive or are unsocial, I guess there's a lot of different adjectives I can use there. So the best test for this is have someone that you know, take a look at your tweets, take a look at your company tweets, or your Facebook posts, or your Google Plus posts or what have you. And ask them if you knew nothing about me or my company looking at the conversations that I or my company is having with all these people? How would you describe me? How would you describe my company, you would hope that they would say positive things. And if there's anything that they say that is not aligned with the branding that you want to portray of yourself and your company and social media, you have an issue that you need to deal with, I could go on for minutes, if not hours on the subject, I'm going to stop here. You'll notice by the way, my previous podcast logged in at 17 minutes. And this podcast was originally created to be an eight minute podcast, knowing that we're all busy, you don't have a lot of time. And really this limitation that my Apple iPhone five had, which is you can only email up to eight minutes of a voice recording to anybody. So I limited to eight minutes so that I could get it under the eight minutes and send it to my audio engineer. The interesting thing is since that first several podcasts two weeks ago, I actually changed. And if you follow me on Google Plus, you'll see a very robust conversation in the comments that has enraged a lot of people on both sides of the fence. But I recently changed from an iPhone five to a Samsung Galaxy S four. And this podcast is not about mobile technologies or what have you. But I just want to say that as representative of Android versus iOS, I am not limited by these things. I can record as much as I want. And send as much as I want only limited by the probably 20 megabyte limitation that Google will place on me for sending from Gmail or to another Gmail account, which happens to be what my audio engineer has. So if you're wondering about the power of Android phones and of the Samsung Galaxy S for just that a throw that out there. Anyway, this concludes this podcast, I hope that you found value in it. This podcast is not for me, it's really for you. I come up with topics that come from conversations that I have with clients, or when I speak at conferences, or in the writing of blog posts or books. I really do appreciate your input, please feel free to contact me, Neil, email networking.com If there's anything you'd like to hear, and once again, I really appreciate your ratings on iTunes, and your sharing in social media. And that's it, everybody. Thank you very much for listening and make it a great day. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to another edition of social business unplugged. We appreciate your subscribing to our podcast. Please help us spread the word by sharing it on social media or adding your rating and comments in iTunes. If you would like to appear on the podcast or have content that you would like covered, please contact Neal Schaffer Neal at windmill networking.com Also please subscribe to the windmill networking blog on social media strategy at windmill networking.com Thanks again and make it a great day.