By Michael Alan Hamlin

Last year was a seismic shift for online branding. Being visible got both easier and harder. Easier because new Web 2.0 tools blossomed—especially Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn—providing powerful new communication channels for communicating and distributing brands. It got harder because so many people are using them—mostly badly—and because for Web 2.0 to be effective, it takes a lot of work, patience, and risk taking.

What are the elements of online branding for this new decade? They include the place, corporation, or personal website; blogs, social media, search engine optimization, search and online brand advertising, and compelling content.

The website

Most companies maintain Web 1.0, brochureware, static websites that provide information and a (mostly unsatisfactory) means for contacting a company. There is little or no reason to ever return after checking out the company once. This is especially true for small and medium companies in the B2B space, in part because development of the website was outsourced and no one has the time or technical skills to keep it regularly updated. Failing to regularly update a website is almost as bad as not having one. Search engines provide low ranks for websites that aren’t regularly updated.

As a result, it’s increasingly common to see companies adding a news room for the occasional news release in the hopes that this somewhat regularly updated information in the form of a press statement or news release will return a better ranking. It probably makes a small difference. One way to fairly simply and quickly improve a website’s page ranking on search engines is to provide at least monthly updates, and then to send a link to the company’s networks every time information is posted to the website. There are a number of ways to do this.

First, provide a RSS feed that customers (and competitors, yes) can use to automatically download the information to a RSS reader or these days, to most e-mail clients and browsers. Non-technical marketing staff can post the information in the news room of the site for a small investment in a simple content management system.

Social networks

Most managers look with considerable disdain on social networks, grimacing at the mention of Twitter, for example, and groaning that they don’t care who someone else is having lunch with. Really? In my view, that could be very useful information. But that’s not the reason social networks are important. Social networks are important because they allow companies and individuals to position themselves as thought leaders and influencers—people who should be listened to.

When information is updated on the company website, sales executives and other managers can use social networks to send links to that information to their social networks. Of course, if the website is updated only once or twice a month, in order to build a presence on a social network, executives and managers are going to have to find something else to post to Twitter, LinkedIn, and/or Facebook. I’m not talking about lunch. To build an online reputation as a company or someone who exerts influence on the industry, executives need to look for information that is going to be useful to their networks, and send links to that information.

This is where RSS feeds and news alerts in search engines become useful. They can provide a heads up on interesting information that will benefit your network. Not every piece of information that comes your way should be automatically forwarded to your network. It’s important that the executive, you, actually read the information, think about it, and make a short comment to go along with the link and update. For example, before I wrote this column, I tweeted, “The Russians are here, but will they come back?” and included a link to a (brilliant) column I had written on Russian tourists in Boracay.

But I sent several more updates with comments on Google, social networks, and the state of journalism and news gathering based on information posted by other members of my networks or contained in news stories and company blogs.

Blogs

I told you that being visible takes work. Nothing comes easy, and there are serious tradeoffs to being visible, but that’s another column. If you or your company are going to be credible as an influencer, you will have to have an opinion.

Blogs are great ways to communicate an opinion or a perspective on industry developments, the economy, or the impact dof emerging technologies on business models, for example. The bottom line is content. You must have compelling content to stay visible and valuable to your network. And you need the tools—and to use them—that I’ve described to get visible.

Possibly Related Posts:

• To Tweet or not to Tweet?
• Why Pinoys Should Care That the Global Financial System Keeps Making the Same Mistakes
• Do Quality Certifications Provide Competitive Advantage?
• Technology trends for 2012 driving workforce innovation
• What Steve Jobs Left Behind at Apple

 Print This Post