Connecting People and Technology for Building Your Brand

Your brand is not like Vegas—what people say on social media about your brand does not stay there! In fact it actually drives whether you get the sale or not.

Did you know: 71% of consumers are likely to purchase an item based on social media recommendations?

When you understand the difference between how technology communicates verses how people communicate and then how to merge them together you’ll begin to understand why some brands go viral or are able to build that cult-like following—two goals that most companies have because they drive sales and build that illusive loyalty factor.

Let’s start with technology!

In the simplest terms, technology only understands zeros and ones. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about a search engine or a digital camera. And, yes the search engines have complicated algorithms that no normal person is intended to actually understand to help sort the data better, but it is still just about the zeros and ones.

Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and every other social platform on the market is a search engine. They all collect data (posts and profile information), aggregate it for your general viewing (that fancy algorithm we talked about earlier), and re-aggregate it for you when you are looking for something specific (searching or using hashtags). Each platform has its own rules and best practices to give you the best results which means what you do to generate business on LinkedIn most likely will not work on Facebook and vice-a-versa.

Now what about those people?

People are complicated! We have feelings and emotions, and are easily distracted…Oh look the sun came out….wait what was I writing about?

Oh yeah, people!

Let’s not forget about those gut feelings, communication barriers, and prejudices. We’re unpredictable, mostly in predictable ways. One of those ways that we are unpredictable is that in most situations we need to hear about a brand multiple times before we’ll consider it “legit” or seriously consider doing business with them. Those are called marketing touch points. A touch-point refers to a voicemail, email, or live conversation. In some cases, it can include advertisements, but for the sake of simplifying my argument, let’s leave it at this. Before social media, that number was between three and five times. Now it’s between seven and thirteen times and it depends if they start off as a cold lead or a vetted prospect!

So what does this mean for branding?

Building that viral brand that has a cult-like following is a blend of connecting with people in a way that the technology understands. And change your goal, would you rather go viral once and be forgotten in a month or consistently be the brand that people talk about, refer, and come across when they are looking for the product or service that you offer?