Brands are really just a fancy way to talk about a compilation of your customers’ experiences with your business. These customers experience brands a lot of different ways.

As customers’ interactions with companies (brands) are increasingly online, shouldn’t we shift our focus? Why do we still believe traditional marketers should control branding? Why are we afraid to put branding power in the hands of the digitally-driven folks? After all, for many current and future customers, your website is your brand. It’s the hub, the driving force behind all of the experiences customers have with your company. People are spending as much or more time online as they are watching TV these days – and that’s not just the teens and 20-somethings. Digital is already driving brands, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

Online-only businesses are obvious examples, but increasingly, traditional brick and mortar and B-to-B businesses are reaping benefits – and raking in sales – by creating digitally-driven brands.

Let’s review a familiar example: Best Buy. They’re still an electronics store with lots of semi-annoying helpers in blue. The face-to-face experience will never go away. It’s just enhanced by a bevy of online communication tools.

For example, customers can reserve products online (on a phone or a computer) and pick them up in stores.

Once they take products home, they can talk in real-time to Best Buy’s customer service folks through Twelpforce, a group of 2,200 Best Buy employees who answer customers’ questions and solve issues via Twitter.

If customers come up with grand ideas that would make their experiences better (a key component of branding), they can share them at Best Buy’s IdeaX.

Best Buy has tackled everything from creating a streamlined mobile site to customer and employee forums, blogs, and Facebook applications on their fan page. They’re all over digital branding. In other words, they create positive customer experiences through the tools, accessibility and information they provide online.

Now, I know you’re thinking: well of course she believes in digital branding…she works at a digital agency! And that’s fair. As an early adopter and digital marketing geek, it’s easy to see why I’d be a proponent. But there are plenty of people backing me up these days. And there is plenty of new research that supports the theory. An example? How about this Razorfish report about digital experiences driving brands. I think you might like it.

Slide 8 is my favorite:

• 65% of consumers have had a digital experience change their opinion about a brand.
• 97% of consumers say their digital experience influenced whether or not they eventually purchased a product or service from that brand.
  

So tell me: how do your customers experience your brand in this Digital Age?

Miranda McCage is an Associate Digital Strategist at MediaSauce. She’d like to hear about how you’re developing a brand with digital. Contact Miranda at 317-284-5683, on Twitter @mirandamccage or email her at miranda.mccage@mediasauce.com.

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A lot of businesses get caught up in the analytics game, looking deep into their site metrics to find trends, identify new referral sources and see how their site is growing. It’s easy to burn hours pouring over these reports – often the only tangible piece of data you have to judge your site’s success.

The problem is, the number of unique visitors, page views, or time on site is only an indicator of a site’s success. The real measurement is the number of actual conversions that happen on the site.

In this context, we define a conversion as “a prospective customer taking a marketer’s intended action.” These conversions are tracked through form submissions, data tracking and other methods that reveal to you insights about your visitor, their behavior and ultimately that they conduct some form of transaction with you.

Let’s explore a few different conversion concepts:

1. The form. The most simple and direct form of conversion on a web site is the use of a form. Often asking for a direct inquiry of the customer to your business, the form provides a direct method of a site visitor to reveal who they are and what they want. more

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Maybe you’re going to retire in the next five years. If that’s you, then don’t worry about a thing. But, if you plan on working in 2015, you should consider your relevancy now. As technology facilitates behavioral change, organizations of all sizes must develop new strategies. A clear path to irrelevancy is to ignore change or, worse yet, fight it.

If you continue to do business as usual, running your career and business day by day, then you will find that you might not be needed. Consider these red flags:

1. You don’t have a mobile strategy, yet you spend all your time relying on your mobile device to connect and communicate.
2. You have no defined online strategy, you just guess and explore, yet like eighty percent of all c-level executives, you  spend up to 4 hours a day on the Internet. more

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Launching your company’s social media presence is a big step – both in terms of shifting to a more engaging and customer-centric marketing approach, and because of the resources you’ll need to dedicate to make it succeed.

As a strategist at MediaSauce, I’m often charged with helping clients launch their social media initiatives. I’ve found that the most challenging thing for most marketers isn’t learning how to use new tools. It’s knowing how to get digitally organized.

Time management, baby.

Now, I should clarify. These tips are for businesses. If you want to spend 5 hours checking out your old high school friends’ family photos, by all means, feel free. Your time, your dime! more

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How does a company – that desires to break the mold of an ‘agency’ or ‘web design company’ or ‘creative shop’ – figure out what to call itself?

A few weeks ago I told the story behind the inspiration that prompted MediaSauce. I promised at that time to also give some insight into how our name came into being.

Looking up the definition of ’sauce’ in the dictionary gives a wide variety of results, but I’d summarize the overall points to:

1. Adding flavor, moisture and visual appeal to dishes – often a unique element to cuisines around the world
2. to give piquance or zest- to spice up the experience
3. to add value and change the ordinary into something unique

The term ’sauce’ really stuck with us as we looked at all the amazing things our creative team was capable of putting together – and the dreams and ambitions we had for the company in our early days.

more

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Whether it’s planning next year’s strategy, thinking about next weekend’s schedule, or exploring the next breakthrough technology, it seems that the pace at which we’re moving forward leaves little time to look to the past. Meanwhile, we each leave in our wake an absurd footprint of information–photos, videos, emails, text messages, voicemails, tweets, blog comments, product reviews, transaction histories, GPS coordinates, grumpy passive-aggressive notes to neighbors, and so on. Will these tidbits of tedium mixed with occasional moments of brilliance become our legacies? more

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As someone who is not technology-savvy, I’m often asked by fellow CEOs and entrepreneurs how a guy like me got the inspiration to create an organization like MediaSauce (A close second being ‘where did we get our name?’ which I’ll cover some other time.)

The idea for MediaSauce formed a few years before the company was formed – which may sound familiar to most of you who have also launched firms from an idea or vision.

I’d been fortunate, or crazy enough, to have built two businesses from scratch and both earned spots on Inc. Magazine’s list of fastest growing companies. In my previous business, before MediaSauce, I owned a fast growing ATM distribution/processing company. Our success came, in part, from a really innovative branding program that helped us generate business from local financial institutions.  Growing nationally, we were struggling to get traction on the East coast and so I traveled there to immerse myself in the marketplace and find out why our program – working elsewhere in the country – wasn’t working there.

I asked each of our eight sales reps in the area to define our branding program – as they understood it. Keep in mind we had all the traditional marketing materials (brochures, video tapes, etc).  The result was a real shocker! I got eight different answers! more

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Creating platforms to demonstrate and build company culture is an increasingly important strategy in building a work force for our 24/7 economy. With so much uncertainty, being a strong community within our organization is critical as we work to maintain talent, maximize productivity and generate a culture that helps us recruit the right talent for the future.

Last week I visited with the HR leadership and employee culture committee at one of Indiana’s largest and most successful manufacturers to hold a workshop on how  social media and employee engagement can spur a new found desire to become part of your company community.

The  presentation focused on several important topics, including:

• The world is changing – and company newsletters and picnics are no longer having ‘value’ as an organization’s communication tool
• What platforms and tool can help you activate employees to take ownership of their culture and inspire awareness?
• What do your employees really care about in life and work that you can capitalize on to inspire them to connect with colleagues?
• What are the rules for successful employment engagement and activation?
• What makes a company culture viral, in the online world? more

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Several months ago a client of MediaSauce challenged me to consider why he should tell his sales force they have to change following one of the Sales 2.0 seminars I give. As someone who has interfaced and challenged existing sales approaches for most of my career, I was zealous to give input on the topic. The result was a diatribe that finished with our client asking simply, “Could you write that down?”

I did, and later the manifesto was published in The Social Media Bible as part of the contribution MediaSauce made to this important book.  And now, I share it here with our readers of the MediaSauce blog.

Why do we sell the same way we always have? Because it’s safe and reliable. Because it’s what we know. Because we’ve become entrenched in thinking that what we have to say is what our customers want to hear. Because it has worked for the past (insert your number of) years! more

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MediaSauce is excited to continue their partnership with the  Indiana Sports Corporation and the 2009 Corporate Challenge. The event is an annual favorite of numerous leading Indiana companies including Simon, BSA LifeStructures, Ice Miller and so many more.

The Corporate Challenge is a fun-filled, annual community event that emphasizes healthy lifestyles and company camaraderie.  One hundred Central Indiana businesses will form teams of up to 100 employees and compete against the other participating companies.  This year, 4,000 individual athletes are expected to compete in events that include distance runs, shorter sprints, a fitness walk, and field activities (called “Good Sport Events”), such as basketball shootout, football throw for accuracy, golf chipping challenge, and the cornhole challenge, to name a few.

The Corporate Challenge also includes a charity portion competition where companies receive points based on how much they donate to Gleaners Food Bank, the Indiana Sports Corporation’s Geared for Health: Sports Equipment for Kids Program, and Central Indiana Regional Blood Center. more

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