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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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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Baby Boomers Kill TV for Internet

Baby Boomers are looking to kill TV subscriptions.  Now this is big news.  Granted it’s only a survey but to see people (Baby Boomers at that) start to shift their viewing habits away from TV and to computers should give advertisers a pause when it comes to the high rates of TV advertising.

“Among traditional TV viewers, an astonishing one-in-five (20%) say they’re likely to downgrade or cancel their current TV service package in the next 6 months. The likelihood of canceling is highest among Cable (22%) and Satellite subscribers (22%), and lowest among fiber-optic TV subscribers (7%).” – ChangeWave

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This post was published simultaneously on http://rallythecause.com. To view the discussion it generated there, feel free to jump over there after you finish reading the post.

Two Things You Need to Learn from this Post:

1. Character is at your core, image & brand are what you project to others, and reputation is how others perceive you. While you can control the first two, you cannot control the third.
2. The human mind is continually seeking to identify discrepancies between what others say they are and what they actually are. If the image you project is different than your character, the gap between the two will buckle and collapse under scrutiny.

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I recently spoke at Indiana Construction Roundtable and SMPS – Society for Marketing Professionals first joint seminar on “Social Media are Internet tools used for sharing and discussing information. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter help connect like-minded people, companies, and associations.”  They did a fairly quick interview with me that I would like to share with you.

I used a lot of my recent ISBDC conference information and you can check all those facts over here – stuff like Facebook being up 700% and how communication has risen 18% in overall time online.  Those are big numbers. more

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I get lots of questions about how I personally use social networks to market MediaSauce and myself.

And to tell you the truth, sometimes I think I know the answer to this question and sometimes I feel like I don’t.

Has any of my contacts through Linkedin, Facebook or Twitter generated business for MediaSauce.  Well, sort of.  But maybe it’s not the kind of direct correlation that advertising and marketing delivers.  Or that we think advertising and marketing deliver.

You see, you can’t argue with the facts.  Lots and lots of people are using these platforms.  The increase in usage is tremendous.

Facebook is up 700% in time spent and has over 200 million users – over 100 million unique visitors last month.

Linkedin is up 69% in time spent and has over 41 million users – over 12 million unique visitors last month.

And finally, Twitter, the marketing buzz word for the first six months of this year, is up a whooping 3700% increase in time spent and has over 32 million users – over 19 million unique visitors last month.  This is all from Nielsen, if you think I’m making it up.

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I don’t want to be negative about this.  I’m trying to change my ways when it comes to posting negative comments and blogs.  It’s not that I’m going to take away “FAIL” but I’m going to try and offer constructive criticism and maybe an idea or two on how they can change.

So the beef today is with DIRECTV and Sprint.  I’ve been a customer of both for a long time.  DIRECTV for the past five years and Sprint since I’ve had a cell phone (back in 1999).  That’s a long time, right?

I’ve defended both to naysayers and I’ve also pushed a lot of customers their way but I’m done.  I have to be and let me tell you why.

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Two Things You Need to Learn From This Post:
1. We will see more and more cause marketing campaigns use social media (for better and for worse).
2. The successful ones will put the cause first and the brand a distant second.

A More Detailed Exploration:
Last Thursday, Ben Kunz from Mediaassociates.com asked me on Twitter:

Do you think @bmorrissey is right? Could SM (social media) cause marketing become SM (social media) pollution?

Ben and I enjoy trading contrarian opinions and I respect his perspective, so I went to check out Brian Morrissey’s post entitled “Here Come the Brand Social Marketing Bribes” about Kraft’s current marketing campaign.
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Ford is changing cars and PR

So I got this email last week.

Hi, Don

On Wednesday, May 13, Ford will be stopping in Indianapolis to host a 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid “open house” starting at 10 a.m. at The Westin Indianapolis, Capital One Room, 50 South Capital Avenue. It’s part of a 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid cross-country tour – 33 cities over 60 days.

The all-new 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid is getting a lot of buzz lately. In recent news, the 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid achieved an astounding 1,445.7 miles on a single tank of gas driving a total of 69 hours. It is the precursor to Ford’s planned line of plug-in hybrid vehicles, which Ford plans to place on the market in 2012.

Speaking at the open house will be Lisa Drake, chief engineer, Ford Sustainable Mobility Technology, to talk about and demonstrate the 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid including Ford’s state-of-the-art SmartGauge technology. During the presentation Lisa will discuss Ford’s goals to have best-in-class MPG ratings for all vehicles in the Ford lineup as well as new Ford technologies like EcoBoost, which will be available in half a million Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury vehicles over the next five years. She will also touch on the importance of sustainability and working jointly with environmental stakeholders.

Following the presentation, you will then have the opportunity to take the new 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid for a test drive.

I really hope you can come out and join us. Please let me know, I would love to have your feedback!

Cheers,

Janine

I thought “Wow, this is pretty cool.” I wonder what I’m doing on Wednesday. Crap, I have too much work to do but maybe I can find some time to go.

But here’s the interesting part. I don’t know Janine – we’ve never spoken before. She found me – like many others in cities across the nation – by researching my blog and Twitter feeds. more

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