Going Viral: Social Media, IP, and Branding

Posted on March 17, 2016 by brandaudits

Brand + Business x Christine Moody*

The rise of social media is making it more difficult to understand and protect your organisation’s intellectual property (IP) and brand reputation. However, in this new digital world, your brand is more important and valuable than ever before.

Some of the more intangible IP aspects of your organisation are associated with its brand, the brand experience and logo design. These include patents, trademarks, copyright, business methodologies, good will and brand recognition. This is important IP that can add immense value to your business. According to a recent report by Fortune Magazine, organisations need to pay attention to their intangible assets, with the value of the intangible assets in S&P top 500 companies rising from 17% of total assets in 1975 to 84% in 2015!

In the article,‘Defence Strategy’ (published in the latest edition of the Australian Institute of Company Directors’ Company Director), Domini Stuart says this issue will be particularly important with the Federal Government’s $1 billion dollar innovation initiative. He says: “the board must understand how IP can create value.”

Stuart goes on to say that: “Directors should be aware of which components, systems, or processes set them apart from their competitors and drive the value of the company.”

So just how do you understand your brand and protect it today’s digital world?

1) Stand out in the crowd—define your brand

Differentiating your organisation begins with your brand. Many people make the mistake of thinking that their brand starts with a beautifully designed logo and website, but it doesn’t.

Your brand starts with your unique story. Why are you in business? What problem is your organisation solving? This is your organisation’s ‘WHY’ and it forms your organisation’s brand story.

The brand story is central to all your organisation’s decisions. It informs which clients you target, retail locations, products and services as well as staff. It is also used to inform our differentiated brand ecosystem—everything that your organisation ‘says’ and ‘does’.

The tools you use to communicate your brand, such as Facebook, will evolve and change over time, but your brand story never changes. It remains unique to your organisation.

2) Develop a brand strategy for your brand online

Organisations need to make their brand highly visible online. Unfortunately, the increasing number of social media platforms and the hype around them has created confusion. As a result, many organisations are forfeiting their brand strategy.

Your brand strategy is the ‘glue’ that holds the brand ecosystem together. And understanding how to use social media platforms to tell your brand story is crucial.

Social media is just another communication tool and it needs to be considered in the bigger picture rather than as a separate ‘thing’. It is no different from the other communication tools your organisation uses.

Your brand strategy is the ‘glue’ that holds the brand ecosystem together. And understanding how to use social media platforms to tell your brand story is crucial.

What is important is how you interpret the brand across all the social media platforms. You need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each platform and then use them to tell your brand story consistently. That is, understand the difference between Facebook and LinkedIn and how to use both effectively inline with your brand story.

To leverage your brand in the social media space, the starting point is to create a framework for social media that includes the ‘WHY’, the brand strategy, and three key messages for that organisation, along with the types of stories that support your brand story.

Whatever you do and whatever platform is used you have to tell an authentic story and give your clients and potential clients, information that is useful versus just selling them something!

3) Make sure your staff know your brand

The best brand strategy will fall apart unless your staff: ‘get it’. Your team is your best brand advocate (or the worst if they don’t know what it is). I regularly conduct brand audits for clients and often find that most of the staff doesn’t know the company history or what the company’s brand stands for. Don’t fall into this trap. Make sure your brand strategy is included as an important part of staff orientation and that there is ongoing internal communications training.

4) Legally protect your brand online—trade mark and copyright issues

Organisations need to consider online as part of the brand ecosystem—online (website and social media) + offline (brochures, retail fit out, uniforms).

Working with clients, I frequently discover their valuable brand IP is not protected, particularly logos and brand names. Often clients are reluctant to seek a trade mark registration because of time or cost or both. They just want to get on with business!

I advise clients to protect their brand IP as soon as possible. It can get harder to do this as the company grows and can be a nightmare if company is being sold! Another great risk organisations take in not protecting their brand identity is that someone else registers the rights.

Tips for protecting your brand identity

Prior to trade mark registration check availability of the website name by checking both domain registration (I suggest registering both .com + .au) and ASIC business name registration.

Before choosing an entity name, check in with an IP lawyer to find out the likelihood of the name being successfully registered.

Work with an IP lawyer to check potential trademark registration issues prior to commencing any brand identity, logo or artwork design. (I like to work with an IP lawyer in the early stages that is, when I am preparing the brief for the brand’s identity. I get an understanding of the type of business now and what where it hopes to be in the future so all IP classes can be considered.)

Conduct regular brand audits to reveal new IP and check previously registered IP.

Have a process in place to ensure that any new brand elements (such as product names) are checked and registered.

Have processes and policies in place to ensure that all materials used are within the rights usage—while this was important for offline materials in the past this is more important than ever before in the online world!

5) Maintain the visual integrity of your brand

The way your brand looks online is important. You run the risk of degrading your brand visually if employees reproduce the brand identity logo themselves or authorise an external supplier to do so.

Overcome this risk by documenting everything into a set of brand guidelines and communicate the guidelines throughout the organisation. This ensures the logo, colours and fonts are used in the way for which they were designed. It also helps to audit your brand and ensures brand guidelines are regularly updated and distributed.

Both your Board and CEO need to be educated on the importance of the brand guidelines so that they “talk the talk and walk the walk” as brand ambassadors.

6) Using freebies online? Check you will still own the copyright

There has been a rapid growth of online materials and ‘free’ templates to use for promotional campaigns and other brand building initiatives. There are also many popular online tools to use for creating websites, including WordPress. (WordPress is one of the most popular online, open source website creation tools because it is easy to use and you don’t have to be a coder!) However, with any of these great tools, you need to check the fine print as you may not own the content you are uploading.

Note: This article is a condensed version of a presentation I gave as part of Legalwise’s Intellectual Property Law Roundup.

*Christine Moody is one of Australia’s leading brand strategists and the founder brand management consultancy, Brand Audits. With more than 30 years’ professional experience, Christine has helped a diverse client base of local and international brands, including Gold Coast City Council, Hilton Hotels, and Wrigleys USA, to develop, protect and achieve brand differentiation. Her particular interest is personal brand audits to assist executives realise their full potential.

For more information: chris.moody@brandaudits.com.au or +61 419 888 468.

Photo credit: Shoe drawing from MOMA exhibition—Andy Warhol: Campbell’s Soup Cans and Other Works, 1953-1967 (By Christine Moody, NYC 2015).

Identifying your brand reputation risks and opportunities—With a focus on social media

Posted on March 10, 2016 by brandaudits

Brand + Business x Christine Moody*

Protecting and building your organisation’s brand reputation is straight forward, once you know how. This week, I presented on this topic at the Institute of Internal Auditors’ South Pacific and Asia Conference (SOPAC) 2016 and I’m sharing with you the same tips I gave at the conference.

1) Create a brand story and platform—it will determine your organisation’s client experience, from brand identity to marketing, IP and reputational risk

Before you can protect and build your brand, you need to first articulate your brand by developing a brand story.

A brand story is a one-pager. It explains your brand and why it exists. It starts with articulating why you organisation is in business and its point of difference. It is not about defining your current products and services, but explaining the problem you are solving for you customer.

Protecting and building your organisation’s brand reputation is straight forward, once you know how.

The brand story forms your organisation’s brand platform, from which you develop the brand and marketing strategy. It also becomes the basis for everything the organisation says and does.

Organisations use their brand story to filter decision-making. From start-ups to multi-nationals, the brand story dictates all the facets of the business, from where you are going to be located to what products you make. The brand story also informs your external (marketing collateral, media, website, social media) and internal (staff, office) communications. It also helps the organisation to understand what social media platforms or sponsorship opportunities align with the brand.

2) Contemporary communication tools, such as social media, have exponentially increased reputational risk as well as increased the opportunities for brand differentiation

Social media is a valuable tool for speaking directly to your customers. Uniquely, social media also allows your customers to have a (public) conversation with you in real time. Used well, social media has the potential to increase your brand profile and drive revenue growth. However, the potential for brand damage is also very real.

To leverage social media and minimise the risk of brand damage, establish your brand story before developing a social media strategy.

a) Use social media channels aligned with your brand and customers
The brand story will help you decide which social media channels to use. This choice will be based on what you want to say and where your customer participates. For example, LinkedIn is considered a business tool. Facebook started out as social connector, but has grown in popularity for businesses with e-commerce platforms now linking to Facebook.

b) Plan your posts
Use your brand story to create your narrative, select your sources and the amount of times you post on social media.

c) Develop a policy for responding to negative comments
Knowing and understanding your brand also informs your organisation on how to respond to negative comments on social media. Your social media strategy should include a policy for how to respond to negative posts and the process.

Remember that how and when you respond to negative comments is potentially seen by a range of people—including your customers, suppliers and your competition. The most important thing is to respond to the comment, be accountable and offer to assist.

In my experience, the best thing to do is to provide a name and contact details (email or phone) for someone to deal with the problem off line. Taking the matter offline enables you to deal with it personally and hopefully win back the customer. The main thing to remember is that if you have stuffed up, own it, solve it and move on

d) Inform your audience (don’t sell)
Don’t sell through social media. Instead give great advice and teach your clients something. Become the expert!

I recommend organisations also use content for their social media posts from a range of platforms. Again, identify which sites align with your brand and include a defined set of sources your trust in the social media strategy, such as one of my favourites, the Harvard Business Review.

e) Keep your staff on board with the brand story
Don’t forget to extend the brand story and your social media strategy to your staff. Without a doubt, your employees also have their own private social media accounts. What they say about the organisation on their social media accounts can have significant ramifications.

Manage this by ensuring your staff understand your organisation’s social media policy and this is reflected in their contracts and more importantly in their post-employment obligations. Of course if you have a great working environment staff will be happy to talk about how much they love working there.

This issue is becoming more important as potential employees are finding out what the organisation is like before they even apply for a position. A bad review means that you could be missing out on attracting the right staff.

3) Establish a framework to monitor and manage your organisation’s brand to identify reputation risk and opportunities

Social media allows organisations to be transparent. It also offers new opportunities to innovate and to get closer to your customers that have never been so cost-effective and powerful. You need to both monitor and proactively manage your interaction with social media to maximise the opportunities and minimise the risk.

a) Manage your social media accounts with a dedicate staff resource
Dedicate an employee to monitoring your social media as well as posting consistent messages and managing the frequency of posts.

b) Review customer feedback
Social media gives you an opportunity to find out what others think of your organisation and the topics your customers engage. Reviewing what customers say allows you to improve products and services can or develop new ones.

c) Understand what your customer wants
Every organisation has many sources of customer data, but this is not much use if you do not use it. You still need to analyse that customer data.

Before you start to collect the data, you need to make sure you have a question you need answered. For example, how do our customers prefer to contact us (website versus Facebook)? Once you collect the data you need to have a portal to store all the data for analysis. The results of the analysis should be communicated throughout the organisation.

d) Conduct and annual audit
Technology will continue to transform how we do business. For this reason, it’s critical that you conduct an annual audit for both online (website and social media platforms) and offline (traditional brochures) communications to ensure it is still reflects the brand’s strategy.

e) Keep up personal contact
While social media allows you to stay closer to your customers than ever before, this needs to be overlaid with face-to-face interactions as well. For example, if you are a professional service provider you should still put time aside for regular informal coffee catch-ups with your customers. This can highlight issues before they become a problem—it also builds relationships with your customers.

As well as posting social media comments, you should also have regular internal meetings with your customer-facing staff to find out what is happening ‘on the shop floor’. They are the brand ambassadors in your company and have to be trained to keep their eyes and ears open to new opportunities and comments from customers.

For more information: chris.moody@brandaudits.com.au or +61 419 888 468.

Photo credit: Christine Moody, Chelsea Market W15th Street, NYC 2015.