What are your best practices for building your brand in the age of social media?

The key is to be ubiquitous and responsive. There is little to no chance that your brand will be interacting with customers on only one platform (e.g. Facebook).

Expect to need to pay attention to Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp, Gowala, Quora and a number of others.

Don't avoid conflict. Instead, reach out to it, embrace it, and work to understand the root cause of the problem and resolve it.

Be proactive. When you know something is wrong or will cause confusion, be the first party to comment on it.

Don't over promise. Only promise what you can deliver. Expectations are highly inflated on the Web and nothing fans those flames more than setting something up which can't be achieved.

Content. You can provide so much to brand yourself as an expert in a given field: on blogs, in comments, on social media channels. You can tie it all together across all platforms.

Brand in the age of social media is ultimately a reflection of what your customers say you are, instead of what you say you are. So, if you want to build your brand, make sure you are delivering the product and experience you want your customers to speak about. If you want your brand to be friendly and approachable, be that way, have all your employees be that way and make sure your systems support that approach. If you want to be seen as easy to do business with, make sure you are. It may seem obvious - be what you say you are - but it is very hard to live that in aspects of a company. And critically essential that you do so.

I agree with Dan Kraus. In the age of social media, it's not about what you say you are - it's about what your customers say you are. Peer-to-peer referral is CRUCIAL. Over 74% of consumers rely on social networks to guide their purchase decisions. Our company, stopped.at, is a social media marketing tool that helps websites and e-commerce companies generate organic P2P referral and create customer loyalty.

Stopped.at is, in essence, Foursquare for Online Locations. Users check-in to their favorite websites, earn points for sharing their online location with friends on Facebook and Twitter, and use those points to unlock deals from the websites they check-in to the most.

We believe that building your brand in the age of social media is about turning your customers into brand advocates and rewarding them with special deals for promoting your business to their friends. In doing so - you establish a great reputation as a brand who appreciates their customers AND you increase your overall sales conversation (64% of online consumers have based their purchase decision on having a coupon code).

Social media created a new age of "business humanization", a revolutionary concept that trashes all old marketing school books!

Humans are authentic and so should your brand. Having an "authentic brand story" is what businesses need to focus on in order to create effective social presence.

Here're some tips on how to cultivate brand authenticity. I hope you find them helpful:

http://garious.com/blog/2011/03/the-charlie-sheen-and-gary-vaynerchuk-recipe-...
http://www.ideamarketers.com/?articleid=1935323

The whole idea of a brand is DIFFERENTIATION. Always has been. Always will be.

If YOU don't differentiate yourself from your competition, you'll never have a brand -- you'll just be another generic commodity. And if YOU don't drive and shape the differentiation of your own product no one else is going to do that for you. You'll just get left behind, as most products are.

In the so-called "social media age," it's become very fashionable to think it's better to be passive. Don't "push" your product. Don't tell your potential customers what to think or what to prefer. Gosh, that's not "democratic." Today we're supposed to encourage a "two-way conversation" with customers. All we're supposed to do is some low-key blogging and a YouTube video (and hope that some of our target audience sees them). Then we're supposed to sit back at our website and wait for the buying audience to say what it "thinks" -- and tell every one of their personal and business friends. And hope that they think OUR product is the best of all the competition. The best products will rise to the top on their own, right? Good luck with that plan!

As we all know, there's now an endless flow of hype pushing social media as every marketer's quick route to nirvana. But most of the hype is pretty theoretical and fluffy, with very little hard DATA about specific marketing RESULTS. Well, before you get too excited about this new panacea, you should check out some of the recent data from a very big social media campaign from a very big marketer (Pepsi) and see how miserably it failed. See: http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2011/03/social-medias-massive-failure.html

Al Shultz
http://www.alshultz.com/