If your audience participates in one of the popular social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, or Foursquare, then it is important to be engaged in that online environment.

The easiest and most effective way to gain and keep a social media following is by providing value to your audience. If you can provide value to your audience in these new social environments, they will become loyal followers.

Here are some of our favorite examples of companies using social media to engage their audiences by providing value.

1. Lululemon

Lulumon is little known in Europe, but has taken North America by storm. The luxury-priced high quality yoga and sport apparel is fashionable and has taken over gyms and airport waiting areas. Part of their success can be attributed to how they stealthily became part of every twenty to thirty-something’s lives through social media.

Lululemon has corporate Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare accounts, and then each store also has their own. The value provided by each is different. The corporate brand accounts provide value in uploading pictures of soon to be released products, and by sharing information and special stories about the products, fabrics and about the people who work with Lululemon. Each new employee gets a bio and a warm welcome over the internet to their 175,000 fans on Facebook or their 37,000 followers on Twitter. The corporate pages also have contests where fans or followers submit pictures of themselves and friends doing various challenges in their Lululemon apparel. The best entries are then featured on the main pages, and on the website’s blog.

The Lululemon store pages provide value to customers in a different way. Any time you enter a Lululemon store, you could find 10 or even 30 people stretched out on mats all over the store participating in a free yoga class. The stores also offer free yoga classes outdoors all through the year, which provides a great deal of valuable information for followers. New products in store, new employees and answering local yoga and sport questions allows each Lululemon store’s social media presence to be successful.

Some examples

As you can see, there is a team dedicated to ensuring that each reference of @Lululemon and Lululemon in Twitter receives a reply. Lululemon’s Facebook page is as equally successful.

As you can tell, there is a great deal of discussion on the main page, which is every companies dream. This subculture has such a devoted following that although the page is moderated and you can expect an answer from the company within an hour during working hours, fans will stick up for the brand and will ensure that any negative comments get put to rest.

Ok. I guess you’re sick of Lululemon now.

2. Old Spice

Old Spice sticks to their brand, and provides value to customers through humour.

This type of humour is geared towards their target audience, and is mimicked on Old Spice’s Facebook page.

Although it may seem cheesy or silly, each comment that is posted on the Facebook page is “liked” by well over a thousand people, many of whom also make comments. On Facebook whenever someone likes a page, unless they have tweaked their settings, all of their friends will receive a notice in their news feed indicating that “John” has just liked the comment from Old Spice. Not only are Old Spice creating value, but they are also maintaining top of mind awareness with all of their fans and with their followers on Twitter, and with many people who are friends with their followers and fans.

This low cost brand reinforcement is certainly strengthening the brand relationship between this audience and the company.

3. Dell

On Twitter through @DellOutlet and @DellOutletUK, Dell provides value to their target audiences that are on Twitter. Although @DellOutlet the US version, has many more followers than the UK partner site, both provide value by offering refurbished one-off discount computers for sale. Both these social media sites also provide codes for discounts off hardware and software products, which keeps customers engaged and keeps them planning about their next Dell purchase.

One interesting thing that Dell also does with these two outlet sites, is it has the picture and information of the person who will be responding on their Twitter background. This ads a personal touch, and it helps to remind customers that you are not speaking to an automated system- you are speaking to Stephen or Stephanie.

4. Disney

Although their Twitter feeds are simply news and don’t provide anything special to fans (I guess Disney’s audience aren’t on Twitter- their parents are!) they do have a Facebook page that can keep fans occupied for hours.

The value that Disney provides to their audience in Facebook is providing a new way to interact with their favorite characters. Showing trailers for upcoming movies and letting fans share them with friends, they creating a custom Disney experience where their audiences are.

5. Oxfam

Oxfam has created a unique Facebook page, recognising that their supporters are spending time in Facebook. This interactive page allows fans and visitors to get information about races and marathons.

The Sports Events page on the Oxfam Facebook page is an example of a utility very fit for the medium. Using such a social online platform such as Facebook, it provides an easy way for teams to get together, for friends to plan, without sending e-mails, without making calls. It can all be arranged in Facebook.

These are some of our favorite examples of companies using social media to create value for customers. Just to have a page is not enough if you really want to take advantage of the medium and really engage with your audience.

Taking advantage of social media platforms to reach your audience, as in the examples shown, really strengthens brand relationships, and can help to clarify a brand personality to the audience. Showing brand personality to an audience is best demonstrated by the funny, quirky Old Spice messages. What is your brand personality? How are you providing value to your audience?

It seems from Steve O’Hear’s  “Is Anyone Out There?” article posted on TechCrunch last week, that yes a lot of companies now know about the importance of social media and everyone understands that using social media to engage with audiences is beneficial. The article notes that “90% of UK tech companies featured had a presence on two or more social networks”, but of all these brands on Twitter, “43% of brands had never replied to a single tweet”.

What’s keeping all these companies from optimising their Twitter and Facebook initiatives? The new expectation of customer service is that within a few hours of complaining online, someone perky and powerful from the company will respond, and offer to solve your problem. I am actually impressed that a lot of companies are doing this, and I have had a few personal examples. I was delighted the first few times my queries or concerns were addressed on Twitter (within a few hours), and was very satisfied that the companies were listening my concerns. Moving forward, these few companies have raised the bar for customer service, and for anyone who has filed a complaint on Twitter, this is now the standard.

The author noted that many companies are responding to complaints on Twitter, but are not actually following through with fixing customer complaints and concerns. It seems as though the team charged with responding to social queries have no power, although in many cases customers will feel satisfied that their concerns were simply acknowledged.

That the team of interns charged with responding to social queries actually have no power, although in the end customers may feel better about their experience and about the brand, simply because someone was listening.

Why are companies not responding to follower’s tweets, as the article suggests? There are two reasons. Firstly, no one has time to log on to the Twitter account, and the social engagement queries are not deemed priorities. Secondly, the benefits of engaging with audiences in social media are not fully understood. Yes, Twitter is a useful means of sending targeted messages to an engaged audience in a one-way stream. Twitter is also useful in gaining sales leads, networking and engaging with customers. If someone called your office with inquiries about your business, would someone return their call? Yes. Is there a difference?

Have you ever had any experiences with customer service in social networks? I once read that in terms of customer satisfaction from hotel stays, if the customer or client has a bad experience and the hotel goes above and beyond to correct the problem, that the customer is more likely to book and stay at that hotel again than if there hadn’t been an issue in the first place. Will the same be true for complaints vented in social cyberspace?

It’s important to have an online and offline brand. Each interaction that your customers and clients have with your organisation contributes to their perception of your brand. Here are some tips to consider, whether you are primarily an online business or whether your online presence simply compliments your real-life image.

Your brand, offline.

If your business has a primarily offline presence, perhaps you have an office location or a storefront, and you recognize that it is important to have an online presence. A website should be simple and should be purpose driven. If customers visit your website for information, it should be clearly and simply available. It should also reflect your brand personality.

Although the website will act as many people’s first impression of your business, the customer service, client relations and physical image of the location of your business will form many of the core aspects of your organisations’ brand.

Each interaction that a customer or client has with your company impacts their perception of your brand. Each interaction must represent your values, personality and must be clear and simple for the audience.

Please read on to discover tips to consider when moving your brand online, or having an online presence.

Your brand, online.

If you only have an online presence as many businesses currently do, you have to use the limited virtual space that you have available to you- whether a website, social network, e-mail or all three, in the best possible way to not only attract customers but to communicate with them as well.

When communicating with clients and customers, brand personality is extremely important. Online this must be done through appropriate use of tone and writing as a personality. Each contact must represent the organisation since there will be few business meetings, no smiling Saturday afternoon faces- the personal touch must be created through online contact.

Having a primary presence online also means that the website and any search engine optimisation initiatives need to be simple and clear. Fortunately, a complex and technically varied online presence will not necessarily impress your audience, simplicity in design has proven successful online. I only need one word to convince you: Google. With simple design, the content must represent the brand personality and must be simple, clear and easy for the audience to interact with.

One of the largest challenges living primarily online is developing effective brand positioning. Without spending a lot of money on online advertising, it is critical that if your product or service is typically found through web searches, that your website is optimised for search engines to find (our previous blog post on writing for search engines).

If you exist primarily online, being accessible to current and potential clients and customers is important. Google offers a useful keyword suggestion tool in their AdWords platform where you can explore keywords without purchasing advertising (as shown in the picture below). Using this platform, Google will recommend keywords that people will search for based on the content of your website. This will provide valuable insight to see if your website actually reflects the words that you thought it would, and it might give you new ideas of words that your customers are using to find you, that you wouldn’t necessarily have thought of.

This tool will also tell you how much different suggested keywords will cost, giving you an idea of how popular they are (the more expensive = the more popular, supply and demand!) and will give you an idea of how big your competition is for those search terms.

When you’re based online, location is important. Location is important because physically, you could be sitting on your couch running your vast empire, or you could be in a hotel room. If you have a (really) small business, you could be the person responding to info@yoursmallbusiness.com, sales@yoursmallbusiness.com, support@yoursmallbusiness.com and opportunities@yoursmallbusiness.com. Your virtual location should equally reflect your brand image.

Whether you are primarily based online or offline, how are you going to leverage your brand’s emotional appeal. Although branding does not easily lend itself to one-size fits all solutions that you can read on a blog, emotional appeal for your brand is even more complicated. One of the largest branding challenges you will encounter is how to develop an emotional appeal with customers. What will that emotional appeal be? The emotional appeal will be closely linked to the values that your brand holds and finding consumers who also share those values.

For more on competitive advantage and finding customers who share similar values, visit our post on competitive advantage.  Stay tuned for the more blog posts in our branding series!

Sitting here writing a blog on branding, I am surrounded by brands. I’m working on my MacBook Pro, and next to me there’s a Sharpie pen. The Gap blazer that I wore yesterday is hung over the back of the armchair. I’m wearing Lululemon and there’s a Burt’s Bees lip balm on the table next to me. I can see Tuesday’s Guardian and Telegram which I’ll read on the weekend and a box of eco-friendly tissues next to me for my soon coming head cold, although I have no idea what the brand is.

Every time we see a brand that we recognize, we immediately paint a picture in our minds and have a positive, negative or neutral impression of that brand. In most instances your impression of the brand is largely shaped by your experiences with the brand, which is why it is critical that brand promises match a customer’s experience. I recently read that people get greater happiness and satisfaction from experiences than they do from buying and consuming products. Whether that’s true or not, it does speak to the importance of your customers’ experience with your brand, whether that’s with your product, service or as the intended recipient of strategic communications.

This is the first blog post from the upcoming series on branding. If there are any branding topics that you are interested in seeing in the series, just let us know!

Each business and organisation faces unique challenges when it comes to branding, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Unless you engage with an integrated agency to work with you to analyze your current and ideal brand positioning, you’ll have to make due with our top 5 branding aspects to consider, and add this blog to your RSS feeds to check back a few times in the next few weeks to keep up with our branding series.

1. If your brand was a person, would you be their friend?

Would you look up to them, or would you want to help them out? What kind of car would they drive? How old would they be? Would they have a big house, or live in a modern, open concept flat? Would they wear glasses? How would they vote? Although this question asks “would you be their friend”, the more important question is “would your target audience be their friend?”.

2. I have a brand. See- here’s my logo.

Tricked you! A logo isn’t a brand. A logo is often used as a visual signature, a visual mnemonic or cue that is used to represent the company. This logo is in alignment with your organisations’ brand identity and graphic standards (hopefully), which all help to create a cohesive and consistent way of communicating internally and externally. A logo is essential, it’s something to put on your company letterhead, to put on your website and something to have on your business card, but it’s not your brand. It’s important that your customers and potential customers and clients recognise your organisation visually, but each time someone hears the name of your brand, sees an ad for your brand, or communicates with someone from your organisation they are building an impression of your brand in their mind. Hopefully this impression will be exactly what you want it to be. If you’re confused, you should visit this blog every day for the next two weeks to learn all about branding.

3. Everyone in our company loves the brand.

Internal buy-in is important in ‘living’ the brand. In making important brand related decisions, it’s important that the decision-makers are trusted to make the best decision for the company. When there is a group of people making a decision, there are many different, varied, opinions involved. Once a consensus has been reached, the resulting decision usually satisfies all varied opinions. This direction, this consensus, in satisfying all parties, is suddenly a less committed version of the strategy. I’m not suggesting that consensus based decisions are not effective, just providing a message of caution. When something so important as brand is concerned, a consensus based decision is not always what’s best for the brand. Caution is good in preventing poor decisions, but not always in the case of brand strategy. Once everyone around the board room table agrees on how to move forward, suddenly your customers may mistake your direction for that of your competitors.

4. Measurement

Although not all of us are numerically oriented, measurement is an important part of branding. In order to accurately know where you want to be in terms of a customer’s perception of your brand, you need to know where you are. If you have the resources, it is important to understand how your customers perceive your brand. For advertising and future communications purposes, knowing how effective your efforts have been also demonstrates how you need to proceed.

5. Copying your competition

In the world of branding and competitive advantage, recognizing that your competition are moving in a certain direction and mimicking that direction will certainly result in your brand having a lesser-than version of your competitor’s brand. If you want your own brand, it’s important to know what your competitors are doing, and it’s important to know how your brand is different.

Stay tuned for the rest of our blog series on branding.