Blogging and branding

This Day 2 panel at the New Communications Forum was moderated by Elizabeth Albrycht and featured trendspotter Anita Campbell, blogostar Andy Lark, generalist-synthesist- technical-visceral blogger Evelyn Rodriguez, and Mobile Enterprise Alliance director Dan Taylor. Some highlights I noted from a very well-chosen and engaging group of panelists:

- Anita, a "refugee from the corporate world," has hired service providers solely on the basis of their blogs. She gets many messages from PR folks and corporate representatives trying to get her attention because she writes about what they sell. Take-home message: Blogging has shifted the balance of power in branding.

- Evelyn, who has a tech industry background but is now a marketing consultant, uses her blog to build her own personal brand. Her blog "blurs the personal and the professional because it's not about a specific topic. It's for a specific community.

- As a trade association executive, Dan's "job is to sell an agenda." A trade group is a community of interest, but it's nevertheless hard to get community members involved. His blog is "a cost-effective way to put a face on the organization and to become known in his part of the industry."

- Brands exist in people's heads, says Andy. Blogs open conversations about what's going on in people's heads with respect to the brands.

- Anita presented a fascinating case study, a network map of the Northeast Ohio blogosphere. To develop the map, Anita and her colleagues employed special software, an Excel spreadsheet, and Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point concepts of connectors (linkers, in this context) and mavens (subject matter experts). The map demonstrates the relationships of various blogs to the "core," or most popular, blog in the community. (The techniques used to create the map apply to other types of communities, not simply geographical ones.)

Anita pointed to four surprising results. First, seemingly unconnected blogs can actually be connected. In this case, the connector blogs all covered different subjects. Second, the most influential people and organizations in the physical world do not necessarily wield the greatest influence in the blogosphere. Third, a blogger who has great influence in the blogosphere at large may not be influential within a specific segment -- in this case, the Northeast Ohio community. Fourth, "if you're trying to promote your brand, you may be looking for love in all the wrong places." For example, Virginia Postrel's blog is very popular in Cleveland, though she has nothing to do with Cleveland.

- Studies show, according to Andy, that bloggers tend to keep linking to the people they are linking to already. This suggests that the relationships documented in Anita's map would not tend to change quickly and dramatically.

- In Dan's mobile enterprise space, very few people are blogging apart from syndicated mainstream media content. He is always looking for the people who are connected.

- Evelyn suggested that automated tracking tools are not always necessary. You can phone your customers and ask them where they look for information on specific subjects. What do they read? Further, she asked, "Can you tell by reading my blog who influences me? If you can, let me know!"

- Elizabeth asked the panel, "How can we protect the brand when everyone is an author?" We can't, replied Andy, because we don't own the brand. It exists in the customer's head. Companies need to protect the product, not the brand, because the customer owns the brand and gets to decide what to do with it -- as in, "I own the brand and I'll give it back to you if I don't like it."  (What the company does own and can protect is its trademark.)

- What about start-ups using the blogosphere as a way to create a brand? asked Elizabeth. Dan replied that companies design products with the expectation of certain results. But products get released and are used in many unexpected ways. The blogosphere helps to expand the meaning of a brand.

- A comment from prominent audience member Stowe Boyd, Corante principal and "avid student of the world of collaborative technologies and their impacts on business and society:"  "Be afraid when nouns become verbs . . . .In an era of social media, a brand is not a promise, but an invitation to get involved in a dialog about how to improve your product.