My friend Autom Tagsa wrote a fantastic piece on personal branding that’s posted on his blog — The Dynamics of a Personal Brand. He hits all the right reasons and all the good that can come from personal branding. I highly recommend that you read it. Autom makes a great case for how to develop and maintain a personal brand with transparency, integrity and cooperative behavior. Great stuff. Autom nailed it.

My angst over the idea of personal branding stems from my understanding of branding. I live in Kansas City, so let’s take it back to a basic cowboy level. Ranchers began branding cattle on the open range in order to identify their own herd. They did so by burning a unique symbol on bovine buttocks. It quickly became a selling feature. If you consistently provided quality livestock at the point of sale the symbol began to have meaning and value – brand promise was born. Brands also helped keep cattle rustlers away from your herd. This worked because the brand came with the promise of shooting, hanging or ass whuppin’ by the rancher if the rustler got caught. Without delivery of that brand promise though, the cattle weren’t safe and the brand had no value. Ultimately, the brand became a symbolic representation of the ranch emblematic of quality and security. It could transcend generations and owners. Now brands are built because they have value and can be bought and sold.

That’s my rub with personal branding. Brett Favre cannot sell the Brett Favre brand to Tim Tebow, no matter how much they both might benefit. In my mind that means that personal brands live and die with the person. I think that involves something much bigger and more important than personal branding. It involves character, personality and behavior. Calling this personal branding seems contrived to me. It cheapens the core tenets that define each of us as a person. The very essence that makes me unique is too important to toss off as the latest marketing fad.

I freely admit that I could be all wet on this one. It wouldn’t be the first time. Personal branding is an easy way to summarize a wide range of human qualities making it possible to speak clearly about social media. That’s important. As Autom Tagsa eloquently points out, the core of your humanity is on full display in social channels and should be treated accordingly. But I worry that tagging my humanity with a marketing term somehow lessens it and makes it too easy too change for the sake of convenience. It strikes me as a very slippery slope. What do you think?

Photo: Cowboys branding a calf in fenced area. South Dakota, 1888.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, John C.H. Grabill collection

Every year when we tie up the boat a few guys get off with their little hammers and tink, tink, tink for concretions, geodes and such. Occasionally someone finds an interesting one, but it’s a pretty rare occurrence. This year started out pretty much the same. Then something changed. One of the guys found a very interesting concretion and we all started talking about it. Among us were anthropologists, geologists and engineers. Pretty soon there was a collective sharing of information about what causes the formations and where to find them. Suddenly, everyone on board knew to look for a particular pattern in the layers of rock on the shoreline. It paid off. The next place we decided to tie up had a vein of concretions so thick that everyone quickly got bored digging them out. Now the problem was to choose the best ones. The result was an array of very collectible specimens.

Getting the whole team on the same page, engaged with the information needed to advance the cause — what a novel idea. If something so simple can help a barge full of old, fat, bald, rock collectors imagine what it could do for your team!

Image: http://allencentre.wikispaces.com

licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.5 License.

Later that same day I met with a development team from a community benefit organization (nonprofit organization). They nervously explained that their fundraising efforts needed to quickly produce some pretty aggressive results to fund their latest expansion. I turned the conversation to their sustainability plans and they chuckled. Given their current growth they couldn’t possibly consider funding their endowment. So, I went a step further and asked about their marketing budget for fundraising. Again they chuckled. Nearly everything they had was directed at growth — and they were suffering mightily. We all shook our heads.

In all businesses growth and profit are in constant tension with one another. It doesn’t matter whether the business is a for-profit or nonprofit. Just as the laws of physics affect everything on earth, the laws of profit and loss affect every organization. Growth creates losses. It is not continually sustainable. Without profit, or in the case of a community benefit organization residual income, there is no sustainability. Without sustainability there is no tomorrow.

Profit and growth are two levers — if you push one you have to pull the other one. They have to be carefully negotiated back and forth to generate the power to sustain. Push either one for too long and everything stops.

Do you have your levers under control?

Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Everyone wants the first project with a new customer to be a homerun. We are no different at Spur. It’s exciting to start something new. It’s exciting to want to show your expertise. It’s exciting to help someone else succeed. Not to mention that you really want them to come back and continue to be a customer. So it stands to reason that it stinks big time when things go wrong.

I’m sitting here writing this with knots in my back, a headache and churning gut because it was my turn to blow it today. I’m not talking about my letting my son go skydiving. We can talk more about that in a moment. Today we had a string of calamities with a campaign launch for a new client. We tripped over everything! So it got me thinking. What is it about trying to hit a homerun the first time out with a new customer that sometimes fails so badly?

My son’s skydiving group certainly had plenty of incentive to get it right. Skydiving mistakes are pretty unforgiving. So, what happened? The same thing that happened to them happened to us today. We were both victims of our own experience. We’ve done the same procedure so many times that it’s now done unconsciously.  In my son’s case, a highly experienced professional packed his parachute. But he made a very small error that nearly had fatal consequences. It was a simple oversight that breached protocol. We did the same thing. In an effort to please we ignored the protocol. It started a chain reaction of events that ended in a near fiasco. We’re lucky and were able to fix the situation in a few hours. When we mess up, no one really gets hurt.

Homeruns happen when everything goes right. It’s a process. To make it repeatable you need to develop and follow the process. Distractions can be fatal. You can take your eye off the ball, zone out, or get flustered and the result is the same — a swing and a miss. It’s the same way at work. Following the protocol in the heat of the moment is the only way to hit it out of the park. Whether it’s the first time and you’re excited, something changed and you’re flustered, or it’s the hundredth time and you’re on autopilot, you need to be relentlessly thorough — every time.

Image licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license versions 3.0, 2.5, 2.0, and 1.0.

Your donors and prospects are valuable but different from one another. They all have their own motive for being interested in your organization. They are all at their own point in the philanthropic cycle and need to be treated accordingly — as individuals. Communicate with them separately.

Marketing brings prospects to your door. It tells your story and lights the fire of passion. But it is an expense. Its role is to attract prospects so that the few who will become donors can see the path to giving and become motivated to take it. Once they give and the check clears, they’ve become a donor and you can begin to cultivate an appropriate donor relationship with them. Thank them for their gift. Confirm what they gave and where it will be spent. Then show them the results of their gift and thank them for making it happen. Now you can ask them again. Everyone else is still in the attraction phase of the relationship with you. Asking them for money at every touch is at best futile and at worst offensive.

Instead, cultivate a relationship using your marketing efforts to interact with your prospects and score the results in your donor database. Use the scoring to drive your interactions and over time you will be working with a lot more donors on their own terms with greater results. If you continue to include an overt ask in every communication that your organization sends out you will probably see a steady decline in donations. That’s usually what happens leading up to my being asked this.

[Pic: Flickr]: licensed under a Creative Commons License

Frontline associates have social interaction with the most important people in your business, the customers. The operative word here is social. In the same way that organizations are pouring money on developing their social networks via social media, they also need to extend their social reach through their frontline. Conversations with bank tellers are nearly identical to Twitter tweets in length and depth. Alumni telethon conversations could fit right in on Facebook, stirring the flames of alma mater. But the frontline associates don’t use Facebook and Twitter, they interact directly with customers. Yet, the conversations in these direct human channels are often completely scripted and have dismal results.

To extend your social effort to the frontline, consider this:

Effectively communicate your mission and strategy.

Tell them why you do what you do as an organization. Help them to embrace the big picture and be a part of it. Help them understand how they fit in and the importance of their role.

Don’t tell them specifically what to say.

Be inclusive in planning your strategy. Include the frontline in developing your approach. Work with them to embrace the approach. Respect their feedback and pushback on what works and what fails — they live it every day. Let them use their own words to connect with your customers based on their understanding of the mission, the goal and their role.

Teach your culture and measure their behavior.

By openly communicating the mission, vision and values of your organization along with the immediate goal you can share your collectively story in the moment. Get all of your associates to join the tribe. Clearly communicate the desired behaviors and celebrate positive outcomes with stories that reinforce the mission, vision and values. The desired behaviors and results will soon become the social norm.

By doing this you will develop a richer culture that operates from understanding verses rote behavior. You may need to upgrade your frontline, but the changes will be worth the effort. Genuine social interaction with your customers will result in stronger relationships.

Image: Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

We recently began working with a client’s new brand standards. They have an expansive system that is very comprehensive covering most instances that their massive organization will need. Of course, as soon as we started working with it we encountered the usual unanticipated conflicts, unworkable ideas and unforeseen issues. I went home to get something to eat and try to figure out how I would work through the problems with the client the next day.

As I started to make dinner I surveyed the available ingredients in the kitchen and pulled a cookbook off the shelf for inspiration. While I was doing this it occurred to me that I no longer use cookbooks to recreate recipes from the book. The results always strike me as a little lackluster. The ingredients are never exactly right or I don’t have the same type of pan or utensils. So I use them as a starting point for making something good with the available ingredients. I know a little bit about how food works and how various cooking methods impact the ingredients. It’s pretty easy to look at a recipe and imagine how it could be altered into something else given the current circumstances. I also very rarely disappoint my dining companions (and no, I do not have a dog). For me, the recipes are the spirit of the law, a point of departure and direction to pursue.

I think the same holds true for brand standards. They are a direction to pursue, not a law carved in stone. By agreeing to use the standards as inspiration for solving the problem at hand with the current constraints, the brand standards become inspirational, not restrictive. By agreeing that we all want to do what’s best for the brand and that we are navigating along an uncharted path through time a marketing team can be free to respond to all of the unexpected, unworkable and unforeseen issues that were impossible to predict when the standards were made. Brand standards aren’t a book of laws, they’re an ideal to pursue.

Photo by Ninette Enrique is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

That’s the real crux of the issue. Good and bad experiences are a result of your delivery on your brand promise. If you under promise and over deliver you are remarkably good. If you over promise and under deliver you are remarkably bad. It’s as simple as that. Except now you are rewarded or punished in near real time with the opinion spreading like wildfire.

Here’s a simple case in point. The animated movie, Despicable Me, recently opened. A mommy blogger friend took her brood to see it and was unimpressed. She announced that it sucked on Facebook and Twitter. Tracking the fallout was impressive and scary. Within a few minutes she received replies from friends who intended to take their kids to see it but had suddenly changed their minds. They repeated what they heard to their friends and the damage continued to spread. In all, it’s probably a drop in the bucket for the producers. But the several thousand dollars that was lost by one comment happened in a matter of moments across the nation and continued on for several days.

All of this happened from one comment because the pre-release advertising over promised and the final product under delivered. A quick Google search showed that my friend was not alone and the scenario played out similarly all over the country. Had the movie been average they would have said nothing. But it was remarkable, so they made remarks. The remarks weren’t good. That’s not a problem with social media; it’s a problem delivering on your brand promise. Social media is just the messenger.

Photo by Flickr user tanakawho, used under a Creative Commons license. No birds were harmed in its making.

In 1999, Seth Godin published Permission Marketing: turning strangers into friends, and friends into customers. If you haven’t read it, you should. It is the marketing world’s primer on permission marketing — the process of getting someone’s permission to talk to him or her about their needs because they have determined that your product or service could help them. It shines a white-hot spotlight on the fact that old school, interruption based marketing is largely dead.

These days people are most likely to receive your first touch from your website and/or blog. They see you at arms length on their own terms and are gone before you know they were there. How do you treat them? Are you selfish with their time and interest? Do you shower them with features and benefits? Do you show them your remarkable pricing? Or do you show them how you solve issues just like the one have? Do you clearly demonstrate why you exist as a company showing them your mission in the world? Do you offer any real help?

If not, your first touch with your prospects may be seen as kind of selfish. I suppose you could ignore it and continue to party like it’s 1999. Actually, no you can’t. We knew better back then too. Change is good. Give it a try.

Photo by Matt Day (Licensed under Creative Commons)

In fact, it probably cost us an account with a regional bank recently. We lead clients through some tough soul searching in order to discover their differential advantage in their market. It helps us to understand the things that their customers love about them that are unique to them. It works great. But this time was different. This time when we talked to the room full of bankers about their differential advantage in the market as a reflection of their purpose in the world we got blank stares. When we pressed on about the importance of identifying your market positioning they continued to stare. Finally, after a lengthy and somewhat awkward meeting one of the senior executives muttered half to himself that their difference is rates — banking is about having the best rates. We did not get the account.

The firm that got the account has developed a fine corporate identity system for them and produced a comprehensive series of multi-channel ad campaigns. All things that I wish we were doing for the bank, but we soldier on with all of the other accounts that we are very happy to serve. In doing so, we discovered something very curious about our non-client and now competitor bank. In spite of all of the effort and expense of their rebranding and self-promotion, their market positioning remains the same and their financial position does as well.

The reason for the lack of change is that they are saying the same thing that they were saying before all of the changes. They always promoted rates and only rates. They continue to do so. They are locked in a race to the bottom. In their world, the bank with the lowest rates and the lowest overhead wins. That works for some folks, but not most. The ones that it works for aren’t loyal either. They’re rate shoppers. In an always connected world, rate shopping is a breeze and requires no human interaction. Loyalty requires a relationship. Relationships require caring. To care someone needs to understand why. Why do you exist? Why do you matter? Why should I care?

If you have great answers to these questions, chances are you are a market leader.

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