Category Archives: Social Media Marketing

Personal Branding – How-to Avoid Brand Name Confusion

Posted on January 26, 2012 | 5 Comments

Personal Branding is all about earning your brand the attention it deserves; but what if your brand shares the spotlight with someone else? In other words, what if you have a common name?

If the next employer, or client, or contact googles your name up to learn more about you after that brief encounter at the business cocktail you attended last week, will they find you, or someone else with your name. What if that person they found has digital dirt, how does that affect the future of your relationship? You might lose the job, or the business, or that opportunity …

Let’s take an example … two of my students introduced themselves as Ahmed Kamal. I found 447 results on LinkedIn called Ahmed Kamal! Now what are the odds of anyone finding you amongst that list? Let’s just be optimistic and say VERY SLIM!

John Antonios - How-to Avoid Brand Confusion Image

John Antonios - Brand Confusion - (Photographer: Astrid Challita)

You need to make sure your brand name is not confused with someone else’s and here’s how you go about doing that:

Change THE NAME

Chances are Ahmed Kamal won’t go to the official register and change his name … so that’s not the change I’m talking about here. I’m talking about adding uniqueness to your name. Here are some options:

  1. Add a key identifying factor: Associate your name with a title, an adjective, a profession; for example: Ahmed Kamal, MD or Ahmed Kamal, The Painter or The Great Ahmed Kamal … ok maybe you shouldn’t consider that last option, it might be attributed to a narcissistic tendency, unless that’s how you’d like to brand yourself, then by all means, go ahead!
  2. Nicknames: I never understood why everyone in Egypt had a nickname, but then I realized that this is the only way people can identify who they were referring to, since they all share very common first and last names. A tip on using a nickname though, make sure it’s not offensive in any circle. I have a friend that I’ve always known as Moë Ash – I recently tried to add him to my LinkedIn professional network, and I couldn’t find him. Then I discovered that his real name is Mohammed Reda … so when I conducted the search on that name on LinkedIn, as expected, I found one too many results. So my advice to him was to add his nickname to his real name, and introduce himself in any network as Mohammed Reda better known (or also known) as Moë Ash.
  3. Mix it up with initials: Sometimes all you need to do is use initials – A great example on that front is my friend Christine L Bowen, who uses CLB as an acronym for her name and she also translates that into her brand attribute (Create, Live, Be).

COMMUNIcate the same brand name

Regardless of the option you end up choosing for making your brand unique, make sure you communicate that same brand name across all platforms, online and offline.

  1. Own the name – or what I like to refer to as e-real-estate. Purchase your brand name url … www.yourbrandname.com 
  2. Social Networks synergy - use the same brand name on all your social networks – have a look at this free tool www.namechk.com – it allows you to check the dominance of your chosen brand name (which should be your username) on multiple networks.
  3. Offline Material – be it your business card, your CV, or your signature, or any other kind of introduction (even an oral one) … make sure you communicate your brand name as you would like the receiver to remember it and search for it (for further reference)

drown the competition

You can never delete a search result from Google, but you can certainly drown it. In other words, you can make sure that result, which you want to hide, does not show up in the first three pages of Google. That can be achieved by owning your online brand name, as explained in the above section, and by being active in the different platforms and adding valuable content.

Here are some ways you can do that:

  1. Blog & Share: if you want to get noticed by your next employer or client, you need to make you are share you knowledge, thoughts, reviews about the industry (brand or product) on your blog. You need to make sure that the keywords you wanted to be associated with are frequently used on your blog.
    Needless to say, I’m talking about blogging, as a certain prerequisite to any online brand. Think of the blog as your main brand communication hub, which can be reached at www.yourbrandname.com
  2. Commenting on high traffic blogs: A great way to get noticed in the online community is to leave smart comments on high traffic  blogs. Notice, I said “smart” comments … you want to make sure the comments you leave behind arouse the interest of the reader enough from him or her to link back to you and check your profile, or blog … technically, you rank higher in Google when you have more incoming links. All comments will be signed off with your brand name
  3. Brand it: sign everything you share online with your brand name. If you upload a picture or an infographic that you created, make sure your brand name is there on the image, and in the name of the file you upload.

Now go on, google your name? are you happy with the results? how many you’s are there? Does your name appear in the first 3 results? How many time does  your brand name recur on the first 3 pages? now be honest, if you didn’t know you, could you tell which you is YOU? Confusing, I know, this is exactly how those seeking you out feel! Think About It! 

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KLOUT – Measuring Your Personal Branding Influence & Style

Posted on January 15, 2012 | Leave a comment

There are thousands of Social Media monitoring tools out there that should certainly be used to measure the effectiveness of your branding activities. This here is the first in a series of posts that will be introducing how to make the best use of these tools. In today’s post, I’ll be talking about the benefits of Klout and why I believe it’s an indispensable personal branding monitoring tool.

PS. Before you go on with this post, make sure you signup for Klout using your twitter account, and have it open in a separate window, as I will be reverting to it several times during the course of this post.

What is Klout?

In short, Klout is tool used to measure and leverage your online influence based on your use of social media communication tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and Google+. Wherever you have an online presence, you have the opportunity to influence people by creating or sharing content that inspires actions such as likes, retweets, shares, comments and more. The more engagement your posts receive, the more influential you are. Tracking this influence overtime, allows you to understand your brand resonance further, and basically, highlights what you should continue you doing, and what you should refrain from exploring.

What does you Klout score measure?

John Antonios - Understanding Klout - Score

Figure 1 - Klout Score

Klout gives your influence a score from 1 to 100. This score is calculated based the level of your social media engagement, so make sure you connect all your social networks and use them properly to score higher. Here are some attributes that go into the calculation of your score:

  • Facebook – likes, comments
  • Twitter – retweets, mentions
  • LinkedIn – comments, likes
  • Foursquare – tips, to-dos, done
  • Google+ – comments, re-shares, +1

It’s also important to mention that the average Klout score is 20 (not 50). The higher you score, the more difficult it becomes to add points to your score.

The score itself is not as important as the trend presented by the historical data. In Figure 1, you’ll notice that my current Klout score is approximately 56. The drops showcased in the graph highlight my period of extended inactivity. Note that this score is updated on a daily basis based on your activity. You should aim at having a positive sloped graph.

Having a large number of followers or likes or whatnot is not what counts towards your Klout score – it’s the level of engagement with your audience that matters. So basically, it’s not the size of your network, but how you use it to inflict action!

What are you influential about?

This feature of Klout is of utmost importance.

According to William Arruda, the 3Cs of Personal Branding are Clarity, Consistency, and Constancy. Being a Jack-of-all-trades is not exactly the best approach to personal branding – in fact, I’d highly advise against being one. Your aim is to be known for something not everything. Gone are the days where a generic approach is plausible; you should aim at developing a certain level of expertise, and target a specific audience!

Klout monitors your social media activity and analyzes what topics you’re most influential about. In Figure 2 – you’ll notice that I’m personally influential about Personal Branding and Social Media – this is perfectly aligned with Personal Brand objectives.

John Antonios - Understanding Klout - Influential Topics

Figure 2 - Klout - Influential Topics

Have a look at your influential topics, are the top 5 topics analyzed by Klout representative of your brand? If the answer is “No”, then you might want to reconsider what you’re putting out there!

What is your Klout Style?

This is by far my favorite Klout feature!

Klout has developed a great matrix to help you understand your social networking style. This complex matrix measures your style of engagement (Listening, Participating, Sharing, and Creating) and your content (Broad, Focused, Consistent, and Casual). This in turn forms 16 different styles as depicted in Figure 3. For further description about each style, make sure you look at this interactive graph (just hover the different section of the matrix and learn about each style).

Klout Style Matrix

Figure 3 - Klout Style Matrix

You want to completely avoid being in the lower left quadrant! If your personal brand lies in that corner of the Klout matrix, you should start engaging with your social network and be more active. Depending on your brand attributes, you might choose to go towards the right of this graph by being more focused in terms of topics discussed, and consistent in delivering it. Or you may choose to move vertically up if you are more in the spirit of sharing information you come across with your followers. Finally, you may choose to move diagonally upwards, which more often than not requires of you to have an pre-existing imposing brand (like a celebrity would). People like Lady Gaga & Barak Obama occupy the celebrity corner – basically, what this entails is an audience that hangs on every word and probably retweets the hell out of anything they post, but they (Gaga & Obama) rarely (more like never) make it a two-way conversation.

However, I strongly recommend you focus on having your personal brand in the lower right quadrant of the Klout matrix. Being a specialist means that within  your area of expertise your opinion is second to none. Your provide focused content around a specific topic or industry and share it with a highly engaged audience. This is the kind of fame you need to attract towards your brand – “earned fame” not a bought one!

Additional klout features

Aside from all the great features discussed above, Klout scores your:

  • Amplification – how much you influence people
  • True Reach – the number of people you influence, both within your immediate network, and across their extended networks.
  • Network – how influential is your network

Klout also allows you to compare your different scores – this feature allows you to benchmark your social media engagement against your competition and therefore enhance your online performance.

This brings us to the end of our Klout discussion for this post. Whatever you are doing to communicate your brand, make sure you are measuring your progress and setting goals, otherwise, your efforts might go unnoticed, and that would be a shame. Think About It!

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I will be publishing a series of articles to help you better manage your personal brand – so make sure you subscribe to my blog or to my RSS feed (http://johnantonios.com/feed) to your favorite reader (eg. Google Reader)

Do you use other tools to monitor your personal brand? If so, why don’t you share them in the comment section below …

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Posted in Branding, How-to, Monitoring Tools, Personal Branding, Social Media Marketing

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Branding 2.0 for NGOs

Posted on October 1, 2011 | Leave a comment

Nebny Masr LogoOn Wednesday, September 28, 2011, I had the honor and pleasure of discussing the subject of Branding 2.0 for NGOs as part of a joint collaboration conference between Microsoft Egypt, UNDP and ICT Trust Fund, entitled “Nebny Masr” or “Building Egypt,” that was hosted by the Sawy Culture Wheel in Zamalek. Over 200 NGOs from all over Egypt gathered to learn how to make the best use of technology in fighting for their cause (read more …).

The truth is Branding for NGOs is not very different from branding any other product/service or even personal branding. During my presentation, I asked the audience if they agreed that fundraising is the main problem of NGOs, to which I got a confirmation of more than 90%. However, that is not true.

Money is not an obstacle, nor is it a goal!

Contributor/Donors are all around and they do have the money, but we need to take a closer look at their thought process.

  • Transparency – Donors would like to know if their donations are being spent in the right place and for the right cause.
  • Conversion – Donors attention span is similar to any consumer, continuously bombarded by different messages. Once the donor has landed on the NGO’s site, knowing how he/she can help should be obvious. The “conversion” rate from potential donor to an actual one should be made simple.
  • The Right Cause – with millions of NGOs around the world, choosing the right one to support can become a nightmare.
One of the attendees highlighted that usually most contribution are made on the basis of personal relations between the donor and a board member of the NGO – this makes financial sustainability a major problem. The institutions’ success (or in this case, survival) cannot solely be dependent on certain individuals. 

So if money is not the problem facing NGOs, then what is? Branding! Yes, the right branding allows NGOs to stand out from the crowd and earn the attention of the “right” donor.

Right donor? Just like any other brand, an NGO should never try to position itself as a crowd pleaser and seek the attention of everybody  - it should aim at staying true to the cause it serves and the values its build on. The right donor is the one that shares similar values and beliefs.

But what strategy should NGOs follow to brand themselves? The one I’d recommend is Storytelling. We can all remember a story from when were 5, even younger … as humans, we always relate to stories! Storytelling is the perfect branding tool: unique, memorable, and sharable. Seth Godin detailed the art of great story telling that I think you should all read.

Christina Muntean spoke of four types of storytelling for NGOs:

  1. Character-driven storytelling
  2. Action-driven storytelling
  3. Atmosphere-driven storytelling
  4. Emotion-driven storytelling
Not only is it important to find your story, it is also crucial to choose the right media to tell it. Social Media serves as an ideal medium of communication given the perks that come with it: Low entry cost, reach, simplicity, diversity of tools and options, and much more! So what’s keeping you from getting your story out there, Think About It!
I promised the attendees of the Nebny Masr conference that I would upload the presentation and I do keep my promises! Branding 2.0 for NGOs by John Antonios (just right-click and save)

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Naked Brands

Posted on March 31, 2011 | 3 Comments

Catchy title, right? I thought so too … in fact, today’s post is all about nakedness! Before you get any thoughts, I’m referring to brands putting themselves out there … hold on, that still sounds wrong! OK, let me try that again. In our discussion today, we’ll be talking about the concept of bare & dare – I don’t think that explanation helped either. Anyway … here it goes.

In a much earlier post, entitled “Personal Branding – The 10 Commandments“, I discussed the concept of brand nudity – where you expose yourself to be judged, loved, hated, ridiculed, admired … after all , it’s not a beauty pageant, you’re not seeking everybody’s approval. Fortunately, some brands have adopted that level of transparency and laid their heart on their sleeves – with no protection, no conditions, no strings attached. A good example of that is Nokia.

On March 16, 2011, a friend on twitter, Tarek Shalaby, sent me a DM asking me to send him my email so he can fill me in on the launch event of Nokia E7. He also told me that they will be giving away the phone to test and talk about our experience!

Nokia E7 - John Antonios

FREE PHONE – what could more can one ask for? that sounds fabulous, i thought to myself. But then I asked if this great gifts comes with strings? Would I have to lie, and continuously push out positive feedback about the phone? The refreshing answer was: “NO – we’re actually looking forward to learn from your experience – so please, by all means, be honest!”

That was even more shocking than the FREE PHONE – wow, honesty in marketing.

Clearly, Nokia is not doing this because they just felt they had money to spare and simply started giving out phones worth $850 a pop (but i’ll get to that later). They sought out influencers in the social media sphere in Egypt to test drive the phones and talk about it in their circles. This is great marketing, since studies have shown that people are three times more willing to trust recommendations from a friend, than they are advertising. Its is daring move by Nokia – the crowd is dominated by iPhone and Android fans – with a couple of exceptions supporting Blackberry. Clearly not Nokia’s territory – then again, the number one place to gain insight and pick up on customer needs – raw, untampered, unedited data! How valuable is that!?!

Since we brought money into the equation, let’s look at this initiative from a financial perspective. The launch event took place at the Four Seasons Nile Plaza catering to 50 guests, including a 3-course meal, Hors d’œuvres, and a completely FREE Nokia E7. The setup was fabulous … and so was everything else. Sounds costly, doesn’t it? Uh, not really. Think of the alternative – mass media (TV, Billboards, etc …), where you addresses the mass public, knowing that only a very small portion would afford the phone (or would care to own one for that matter). Needless to say, the latter costs a whole lot of money that doesn’t start to compare to the direct marketing approach taken by Nokia.

Aside from the obvious costs associated with the alternative, I would also like you to consider the price tag on the following tools needed to support it: focus group, market research, advertising on different social networking platforms, consumer insights, brand advocacy … With the direction Nokia has taken in earning the attention of mobile users to the new Nokia E7, it covered all the aforementioned areas. So basically, Nokia did more for less – but more so, Nokia dared to be different.

What should Nokia do next?

To reap the benefits of this initiative, Nokia should:

  • Track the feedback across the different social networks from the lucky few receivers of the Nokia E7
  • Provide customer service online
  • Build a Q&A list generated from the questions presented online
  • Build a forum / blog or any other platform where these “test drivers” can share their experience and help share the knowledge
  • Provide tips and tricks on occasional basis to make the best out of the Nokia E7 experience
  • Measure conversion rate

These are but a few options Nokia could tackle to sustain the incredible momentum created by the event.

Questions to think about:

  • What do you think of Nokia’s approach?
  • If you were the brand manager of Nokia E7, would you have done things differently?
  • How can Nokia build on this initiative?

Think About It!

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SMART Revolution Falls Short – Focus #Egypt

Posted on March 10, 2011 | 2 Comments

In my last post, I was taken by all the emotions surrounding, what was dubbed as, the 2.0 Revolution in Egypt. I tried to reflect on the marketing lessons behind the success of this social media revolution. In conclusion, the key success factor was the emotional selling proposition represented by the brand elements of the uprise! However, that alone is not sufficient for the sustainability of such success.

The feelings of happiness, freedom, and love that were direct results of the revolution, were soon to be replaced by feelings of anxiety, fear, rage, and complete chaos. But why? where did it all go wrong? and when? Trust me, I won’t even try to analyse this from a political stand point – I would fail miserably as a politician because i’m not familiar with the shades of color between black and white. Instead, I would like to continue the reasoning started in my previous post, and try to extract the marketing lessons from the post-Jan 25 Revolution period.

The post-revolution period is a typical case of Headless Chicken Marketing! OK fine, I can’t really use the word “typical” to explain a term that I just came up with – but the idiom does seem self-sufficient.

This phenomenon is often seen in companies with marketing shortsightedness. They tend to go for tactics and forget strategy. They would rather spend on Ad-hoc marketing campaigns and get immediate short-lived  results instead of  building a sustainable plan resulting in continuous (yet slower) results. If post-campaign sales results are equivalent to pre-campaign sales results, than I have basically spend money to make money, but I’m still in the same position I was in, if not worse! This describes the 2011 Egyptian Revolution – we’re back right where we started!

Every marketing campaign has three phases: pre- (past), during (present), and post (future). All three phases are equally important and crucial to the success of the overall campaign. These phases are defined by SMART objectives (Specific, Measurable, Attainable/Achievable , Realistic/Relevant, and Timely).

  • What are the Specific objectives of the revolution?
  • How do you Measure these objectives? Where do we stand from our our specified objectives?
  • Do we all Agree on the objectives? Are we aiming for the moon?
  • Is aiming for the moon a Realistic thing to do given our resources in terms of human capital, time, etc …? Is aiming for the moon Relevant to our cause?
  • When is the deadline to achieve our objectives? when is the cutoff Time?

In my educated opinion, the 2.0 Revolution wasn’t that “SMART” – and because of that, we’re losing time, resources, and even lives!

In closing, I would like to point out that Freedom is not an SMART objective … it’s a beautiful dream! But you know what they say, “Be careful what you wish for!” Are Egyptians ready for the burden of freedom? From what I’m witnessing on the streets of Cairo, I don’t think we’re even close. Think About It!

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