Katrina Klier's Blog

My day job is digital marketing with a decidedly channel pivot (versus end customer), but that does not mean I cannot learn a lot from companies who are amazing at consumer marketing. A community is a community after all, especially in the digital era so learnings from B2B and B2C are highly transferable. One company that is truly great at marketing innovation, and has been for decades, is Coca-Cola.

 Digital marketing and social media in particular have a natural gravitas for food and beverage companies. After all, sharing a Coke with a friend is one of life’s great social pleasures. Coca-Cola products are guests at most social functions in some capacity, so presence in the social media space is more than natural, it is absolutely required for Coca-Cola to get right. With a brand like Coca-Cola you simply cannot afford to be the “social” outcast.

 Wendy Clark, Senior VP of Integrated Marketing Communications and Capabilities at the Coca-Cola Company recently spoke at the AdAge Digital Conference about marketing innovation in the digital era. While you would expect someone with a job title like Ms. Clark to have lots of snazzy catch phrases, you might not expect them to be so universally relevant. Coca-Cola is a large, older company with an enviable market position in numerous products after all. But even with all the marketing budget and brand horsepower that the Coca-Cola Company brings, Ms. Clark gave an inspiring and enlightening presentation.

 The overarching theme of Ms. Clark’s presentation was… be gracious.

Yes, that’s right – be gracious. Being gracious with your communities, customers, indeed all your marketing activities has paid off substantially for the Coca-Cola family of products. Their internal research shows that as soon as they start to push in a community (translation, not being so gracious) the community backlashes either in small waves or large ones.

 This quote from Ms. Clark sums up why being gracious is so important:

 “The days of controlling the message are absolutely over.  At best you’ll be invited in and you’ll get to co-create and participate with consumers.”

 She went on to explain that marketing is “liquid and linked” in ways never before. Liquid because “everything communicates” as Ms. Clark says. And she is right – vending machines, trucks, even the cans themselves communicate to the consumer possibly long before they see one of your artistic print ads, or hear your new jingle on TV.

 My favorite part of her presentation was talking about creating an emotional experience connection with customers via art images on the Coca-Cola cans. Basically she turned a fixed cost of operations (producing the cans) into a marketing asset. She explains that Coca-Cola has to make the cans anyway, so why not have them communicate as well! Everything communicates in the same gracious way. And that is the linked component. All your marketing, messages, community engagement must be linked back to your core brand strategy.

 Why is linkage so important? Well here are some more interesting stats from Coca-Cola. On YouTube, there are 146 million pieces of content for Coca-Cola, but only 26 million, or 18% of the content was actually created by Coca-Cola. Their fans created their own content on top of the company-generated ideas, shared their content with their networks and extended Coca-Cola’s brand reach far beyond what the company could do alone. It is rather amazing when you think about it. 82% of Coca-Cola’s YouTube content was generated by their fans so this fan-generated content by definition resonates with the unique cultures of the various fan communities of Coca-Cola products. That’s right, it resonates with various cultures – allowing the Coca-Cola brands to be gracious yet again.

 Building great and gracious marketing in this liquid and linked world requires a new framework to think about digital marketing. I liked Ms. Clark’s spin on how to use the widely accepted Paid-Owned-Shared-Earned digital media model that most of us use each day. She’s put an action spin on it like this:

 Innovate Paid

Activate Owned

Integrate Shared

Engage Earned

Include storytelling content across all your media.

 To net it all out… Be gracious and celebrate the community in this very liquid and linked world. It’s a new age of marketing and Coca-Cola certainly is a leader. If you need some inspiration, watch the video of Wendy Clark’s AdAge keynote – the talk track is wonderful. And with that, I think it’s time for a Coke and a smile :-)

If you have ever looked for a new job or sought to volunteer, you have asked yourself this question. The people around you have made a judgment call on your personal brand, often based on the virtual you, before even meeting you in person. Following my last post on Virtual is Real, once you have a rough game plan for your online presence; it is time to think branding for the virtual you which of course reflects the in-person you as well. This post will focus on creating an online brand for the professional you.

To do this, take cues from the business world to create your personal brand online. You become the product. What you represent becomes your brand message. And the people or companies that can benefit from what you represent become your target audience. How you demonstrate what you represent through skills, successful work examples and ability to grow with a business are the specific value pillars of your brand. And the emotional connection you create as a result of the how is the trust hook you create that will propel people to the action you are seeking from them or if no emotional and trust connection is established, your target audience will take other actions that result in a need for you to adjust your approach or audience.

Some great examples of this from business are included in Forbes annual list of The World’s Most Reputable Companies. The list includes many familiar brands and a mix of industries plus a few surprises. The lessons for us all in this article come from the methodology used to put this list together. It stands to reason that if certain dimensions make a company brand highly reputable, these same dimensions will make your online professional brand more reputable as well.

The Reputation Institute put the study together for Forbes and looked at seven dimensions in assessing the reputation of the companies. Reputation is built over time and dimensions that stand the test of time drove a greater impact on a company’s reputation than shorter time horizon dimensions. In fact, the study found that “…perceptions of the enterprise (workplace, governance and citizenship) trumped product perceptions (products and services plus innovation) and performance (financial performance and leadership) in driving reputation.” Financial performance which is largely driven by the quarterly cycles of the SEC and Wall Street are very short term. Leadership also, can have a high turnover rate in some companies and industries and is viewed as shorter term. Product and service perceptions are medium term as products come and go, evolve and grow sometimes at a rapid pace depending on the industry.

But the enterprise perceptions of workplace, governance and citizenship are the real long term reputation builders. These enterprise dimensions are how a company shows up time after time, over and over in the communities where they do business, with the customers they serve and with the employees who dedicate their time and skills to the company. In fact the study found that these enterprise dimensions drove 43% of a company’s reputation. So it is no surprise that companies who have these attributes at the center of their company culture top the list: Google, Apple, Disney, BMW, LEGO round out the top five.

So what can all of us learn from these companies? How can we translate these learnings into a more reputable professional brand for ourselves?

The enterprise or long term dimensions mentioned in this study of workplace, governance and citizenship do translate well to an individual. These dimensions will build your professional brand that will stand the test of time and show your value to current and prospective employers.

Let’s break it down:

Workplace is how you show up and work each day. How do you interact with your coworkers, customers, suppliers, etc. Is your physical appearance and workspace driving success and interaction or scaring people away? Your personal workplace reputation follows you from company to company as people who have worked with you and for you offer their compliments or curses.

Governance is how you operate within your company’s values and culture. Do you walk the talk, support the company values and brand and serve as a company ambassador in all your business dealings? Do you accrue value to your company simply by how you show up in business dealings or do you detract from the company’s brand? This is largely referred to as your industry reputation and also follows you from company to company with both your accomplishments and how you achieved them. This is of particular interest to companies as poor personal governance leads to unhappy customers, legal issues and PR nightmares.

Citizenship is how you contribute to the broader community where you live and work. Companies are increasingly looking for people who are well rounded with both professional and personal goals and lives. Personal citizenship is very helpful to companies as their brand gets citizenship benefit from the actions of its employees. Citizenship activities of individuals are also an excellent word of mouth marketing opportunity for a company’s brand and who better to represent them than a stellar employee.

You can demonstrate these three dimensions in your online presence. Look through your list of where you show up online in your professional life. Simple things you can do online to build your brand reputation include:

1. Ask for online recommendations to include in your profile on LinkedIn, Xing or your other favorite professional networking sites. Make sure to include a mix of coworkers, employees and managers to show your workplace reputation.
2. List your volunteer positions in your online profiles. Many of these skills translate well to the corporate world and employers will be interested. Plus you never know, you may volunteer in an organization close to the heart of an executive of a prospective employer creating an instant connection and conversation starter. This showcases your citizenship reputation.
3. Quantify and qualify your business impact with numbers for what you have done and recommendations from customers. Saying you increased sales 150% in 2 years backed up by a glowing recommendation or two from customers is far better than saying you managed a sales team and beat quota. You can put the teasers of this in your online profile and add more in your resume.

These three dimensions translated to a personal level will help you build a professional brand that will be reputable today and tomorrow.

How often do you interact either in person or on the phone with everyone you know at the same time?

Think about it for a minute… If you are like most people, your answer is “not often” or “never”. But regardless of frequency, you think about who you are calling and what you will say before making a phone call. You plan a face-to-face meeting from topics to locations to attendees to what you will wear all ahead of time. You know exactly how you “show up” in the real world of face to face meetings and phone calls.

But what about the virtual world? Where and how do you show up? Do you know? Can you describe the Virtual You? People who may not yet know you in person will form full opinions about you – who you are, what you can do, if they want to have any connection with you – all from what they see about you online. To them the Virtual You is the Real You.

Give it a try. Google, Bing or Yahoo! your name. What comes up? This is what people will see and know about your first… before they ever meet you in person. Is this the virtual you that you want people to know? Maybe the answer is yes or no, but either way you owe it to yourself to guide this virtual you in the direction you want. You are the only person who has to live your life so give yourself the best opportunity and marketing plan possible. Make the Virtual You an accurate and good reflection of the Real You.

Now you are thinking “Great, so how exactly does one do this? How do I make the virtual me the best reflection of the in-person, real me possible?” The good news is with some simple steps you can make major progress whether you are a seasoned online guru or a novice.

Remember that your virtual world includes all the same facets of you as your real world. We all have professional, social and hobby or special interest parts of us.  Every day you directly interact with people in the real world as part of your professional life, social life and hobbies. Professional communities and company websites are all online. Social media is everywhere. Each of us has hobbies or other interests that appear in blogs, organization websites and so on. Your church, photography club, coupon clipping group, etc. will all have either an online presence of their own or a group of people who gravitate toward each other as like-minded people online.

Most people’s lives spread across these three areas – professional, social, interests – so you need to decide if you want the virtual you to balance across them or focus in one particular area.

Here are a few simple steps to get you going:

1. Make a list – 3 columns with Professional, Social, Interests at the top.
2. Write a quick sentence or two as to what you want the virtual you to represent in these categories.
3. List the organizations the real you belongs to or participates in
4. List the online organizations you participate in

This exercise will give you a view into your goals, the audiences you want to reach and how you are reaching them today. Here’s an example exert from my list:

Thinking through the people or audiences you want to reach is the most critical step in this process. Do the people you want to connect with fall in to the professional, social or interests part of your life? Do any them belong in more than one category? A long time colleague from work who has become a close friend over time or a great friend from college that you now work with are a good examples.

Why is this so important? Well think about the real world for a moment. You would not invite your mother, your high school BFF, your boss, a prospective employer, your girlfriends / guy friends and your child’s teacher all to your house for dinner at the same time would you? Of course not. So why would you mix all those audiences in the virtual world?

Not thinking through audiences early is what gets most people in to trouble in the virtual world and in social media in particular. We have all read the stories of people fired for Facebook comments and there are likely countless other missed opportunities or missed promotions because of bad audience mixing that never make the news. Do not leave it to chance. Having a plan for the virtual you improves your chances of success dramatically.

Now that you have your list, you can sort through your connections in each of the online communities where you are active. Sort people into the appropriate part of your life and if needed, reconnect with them in the new and more appropriate way. Do not worry about ruffling anyone’s feathers. If someone asks, for example, why you un-friended them on Facebook but sent them an invite from LinkedIn simply say you value the professional connection with them and wanted to make sure the way you stay in touch best supports that connection.

Then you can add some humor if people push back. Humor always makes people back off. Here’s one I’ve used: “I so much enjoy talking to you about channel marketing opportunities, but I thought I’d spare you the Facebook pictures and commentary of my gourmet cooking escapades. So I moved our connection to a better venue for dialogue that helps both of us and cuts down on the noise for you.” Trust me, it works. I have used exactly that reply myself with a corporate recruiter who wanted to friend me on Facebook after a couple phone calls. We now connect regularly on LinkedIn and I have sent several referrals his way and vice versa. Maybe if over time, I get to know him much better I will add him as a friend on Facebook, but for now, this is a much more productive arrangement.

This approach is logical, fits with the real you and lets the virtual you be the best reflection you can create. Putting the people from your life in to the virtual connection that makes the most sense for how you know them will help you enjoy the virtual you more. And it will give others who do not know you a more accurate reflection of what they can expect from you and wonderful reasons for them to get to know you.

I hope you find this helpful and that the Virtual You is a positive mirror image of the Real You.