Tips for branding your business, products and services online using Social Media

Nowadays, with such demanding consumers, when you think about starting a business you must think about branding it as well. But what is branding?

Branding is creating a whole experience and a strong idea around your products or services. The colors, the logo, the bags, the employees  uniforms, the stores: everything is part of what you are selling. Back in the days, a few visionaries started to create and identity to their companies, and that is what makes a Mc Donald’s burger different than any other burger in the world. Whether you like the Mc Donald’s burgers or not, you still are well familiar with their brand and you know it is a single experience.

We asked this question to Duncan Alney, at the last edition of the Search Engine Strategies New York 2009. In the video below he is giving a couple advices about how-to brand using Social Media and Web 2.0.

Branding using Social Media is something that everybody is talking about. New Media such as Blogs, Social Networks, Bookmarks, Podcasting, Video and Photo Sharing made branding something much more cheaper than it use to be. The fact of being more accessible doesn’t mean it is low quality or unprofessional. You can actually find and reach possible costumer in a more precise way, according to what they are looking for. You are also able to listen better and find a bigger number of small audiences that are looking for you and what your company has to offer.

Here are a few tips about how you can use Social Media tools and websites to promote your business online:

1. Create accounts in Social Networks and sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Delicious and Digg. Use always the same user name and share your logo with the world. The more complete your profiles are the better, so everybody can learn more about your business. Don’t forget to manage your account often and interact to people related to your interests;
2. Take pictures and make movies about your business, services, products, employees, stores, costumer service, EVERYTHING, and upload them to your page on you YouTube or any other site where you can share videos and photos. You will be actually creating commercials about your brand and developing a Marketing campaigns online;
3. Create a RSS (Real Simple Sindication) feed and incentive your visitors to subscribe to your content. This way they will receive your content in their reader everytime you uptade your blog. It is much nicer way than send invasive e-mails everytime you post, and it’s also a good termomether to know how much people are wiling to commit to your company;
4. Visit, read and comment in sites related to your business blog. That is a good way to understand your marketing, know about what costumers are looking for and also become part of the community. You can also create quality links posting discussions, joining forums and getting envolved in the conversation;
5. Be a real person! When it comes to Social Media, it’s not about creating a bunch of accounts and being on the top of all new tools or techologies. It’s about the way you use all those tools to build your brand reputation. If in the past companies had to spend millons of dollars in Marketing to actually hide and fake their weeknesses, the Marketing of the future is all about truthfully, autenticy and exposing. Puting your brand into Social Media is also a good way to deal with crisis reputation and problems with your services. On the other hand, if you don’t CARE about people or just can’t see your business as part of a context, probably Social Media is not a good place for you!

New Media vs Mainstream Media: Greg Jarboe explains how they are teaching each other

Bloggers are breaking news and dozens of traditional mainstream media newspapers are closing down. This was one of the topics from the “News Search SEO” panel, at the Search Engine Strategies New York 2009 event.

The fact that now more and more people are able to shoot videos or pictures from cell phones changed the concept of news. Regular people are now on the scene, registering and publishing facts. When news becomes at the same time very personal but not necessarily unprofessional, everybody has to be their own PR.

The video below was taken at the latest edition of the SES-NY. Greg Jarboe from SEO-PR speaking exclusively with Bloggers School about how the New Media and the Mainstream Nedia need each other.

Greg Jarboe is a successful online marketing guru, and his company combines and makes cleaver uses of Press Releases and Search Engine Optimization. He is also the news search, blog search and PR correspondent for the Search Engine Watch Blog.

We found great info at this session about the ways the New and Traditional Media are coming together. It is so exciting to be part of something that so fresh and current.

Guy Kawasaki’s controversy surrounds SES NY 2009

The controversial Guy Kawasaki opened up a huge discussion about the way he uses Twitter during the 10th edition of the Search Engine Strategies New York 2009. One of the biggest event that highlights Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing Strategies for beginners and advanced took place in the Hilton Hotel, in Manhattan, from March 23rd to 27th.

The topic of Kawasaki’s keynote was “Twitter As a Tool for Social Media”, but a lot of people left the place thinking as Twitter as a tool for spamming your followers. He actually showed tricks and tips to upgrade your followers numbers and demonstrated how having more than 96,000 followers can be something powerful.

Guy also presented a few tools and platform he uses to send automatic answers to Twitter’s users, and how he selects interesting or bizarre links just to be Re-Twitted.

Here it is a list of tools Guy Kawasaki aplies to power his Twitter use:

• Retweetist: Used to repeat some information previously tweeted by another user
• TweetDeck: He shows his personal TweetDeck and how things are all broken out.
• Twhirl: He uses Twhirl to monitor his two Twitter accounts
• CoTweet: Built for companies who are tweeting. It’s Web-based and suggested for people who have multiple accounts or multiple people. You can assign tweets to people and monitor tweets.

Bloggers School is Covering the Conference and Expo Search Engine Strategies NY 2009

Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing are definitely topics every Professional Bloggers should know about. The fact that regular users are now creating content (even if they are just leaving a comment in some page) changed totally the SEO and SEM prism.

If you want to learn more about these topics you better get sticky to this site. Bloggers School is going to bring you the best of the Conference and Expo Search Engine Strategies NY 2009. There are lots of great tracks about Blogging and new media.

We will find out more this Wednesday 8PM EST on Bloggers School Radio. We will talking about the event’s calendar and the classes and workshop we will attend.

Next week, Wednesday 18th we will talk to Matt McGowan, VP & Publisher for Incisive Media Plc. He oversees all marketing activities for the ClickZ Network and SearchEngineWatch.com in addition to their respective trade show series, ClickZ Events and Search Engine Strategies.

Prior to joining Incisive, Matt was a Vice President at PropertyRoom.com, where he oversaw all Sales, Marketing and Operations for the Southern California based Auction Services Company. Earlier in his career in San Francisco, CA, Matt developed an e-business strategy for the multinational publishing house, Pearson Plc, and prior to that Matt worked on the institutional desk for Schwab Capital Markets and Trading a division of Charles Schwab Inc, in New York, NY and San Francisco, CA.

Our other special guest is Matt Peters from Pandemic Labs. His company is specials and Viral Marketing, a type of virtual word-of-mouth.

So if you have questions, write it down and give us a call. (347) 215-7878 between 8PM and 9PM EST. If you miss it, you can always listen to our archive.