But, rebranding is a scary process when it comes to nurturing and building a community. Ideally, we want to retain our loyal readers and supporters throughout our evolution, while at the same time attracting new community members who align with our values and goals. We also want to be able to track our evolution, and approach the act of growing our community in a natural, organic way.
But, how do we do this? After all, this is all new to us too. Here’s how we tackled the task…

Our Current Peeps

In order to measure the evolution of our community, we needed to create a snapshot of the community we currently have. To do this, we enlisted the help of some cool tools.

Mentionmapp

I am sure many of you are familiar with this fun little tool by now, especially since we’ve mentioned it before. But it’s worth reiterating how helpful this tool can be, especially when trying to visualize an entire community and how everyone is interconnected. Since I am fairly new to the SEO community as a whole, as well as our unique group of faithful, online friends, Rhea took some time to outline different people (literally) in color-coded boxes to illustrate who had been strong supporters of our brand throughout history. It helped me to easily recognize names and faces, and to see who their important connections are, giving me a list of potential contacts whom I should follow and engage with on a more personal level.

After getting some first-hand experience with this, I feel this would be a great method for organizations to train incoming social media managers on their unique professional landscape: top allies, supporters, and competitors.

Top Commentators Widget

In addition to evaluating our social mention map, we also used the Top Commentators widget to aggregate a list of the people who comment most often on our blog. The list below tracks our top commenters from YTD:

We found that, naturally, different social media accounts attract different subsets of our community. Therefore, it was important to separate those who are more active with our Twitter account from those who are more active on our blog. As you can see, there is a very different group of people in our blog circle!

Previous Survey Data

A little over a year ago, we ran a survey on our blog and asked a lot of questions of our faithful community. While we recognize that our community has changed quite a bit since then, we still found it very helpful to see the visual breakdown that described our visitors and the content they craved.

We used a Google Docs form to run the survey and compile the data for us in these fun and easy-to-read formats:

How Respondents Categorized Themselves

Desired Content

As you can see, we have an almost even mix of SEOs in both the agency and in-house arenas. Since we recognize that each area presents its own problems, we can tailor content to help meet the needs of both agency and in-house SEOs.

From Outspoken Media to Outspoken Media 2.0

After getting a good handle on where we currently are community-wise, we then had to define where we’d like to go. We had already done some major heavy lifting on this topic through the organizational development process. However, to help drive a content strategy, we all sat down as a team and discussed what it meant to be “Outspoken.” For example:

• What are our values?
• What topics are we most passionate about?
• Why do people like us as a company?
• What makes us different/unique/specialized?

We also dreamed about the future – three, four, and five years from now:

• Who do we want to be as a company?
• What kind of work do we want to be doing?
• What kinds of clients do we want to be working with?
• How can we demonstrate our company values through our content?

From there, we began to create personas for our target audience. We described the types of people we want to reach through our content, and in the end came up with three “profiles” that helped to typify our ideal community members. In these persona profiles, we worked to define:

• Who are these people professionally?
• How or why did they come to our blog?
• What are their professional goals?
• What types of content can we produce to help them reach their goals?

By sitting down and discussing all of this as a group, we helped to define our voice, our future audience, and the types of content we are going to create. Those three parameters are enough to drive the overall feel and direction of our content strategy moving forward.

Getting From Point A to Point B: Just Do It

In order to implement our new content strategy, we have started having regular, company-wide content meetings. During the process we talk about the hot topics the industry is facing, as well as the issues we are dealing with internally. Together, we brainstorm topic ideas, then work together to tease out the high-value, actionable items within each topic, designing quick outlines of all upcoming posts. We also talk about how we can integrate all of our social media channels – our blog, Twitter, Facebook and Google+ – to support engagement on each topic.

From there, we schedule both “draft” and “live” dates in our shared editorial Google calendar for all blog posts. It’s a great way for everyone on the team to stay in touch with the content that is going to be published that day. We also believe in our team members having their own unique voices, and ownership over their content, so when something they wrote goes live, it’s also their responsibility to manage comments and interact with the community as questions or e-mails roll in.

Every day is another step in the learning process. I got my first real taste of video editing for our blog when we did our micro-SEO audit back in May. We decided to launch the video on a Friday, and it didn’t get the reception we were hoping for. But, we got some great feedback on how to improve it, and we now know to launch future video content like that earlier in the week.

We are constantly testing, tweaking, and experimenting, and we recognize it will take time for us to nail down the best ways/times/places to promote different content. Yes, we have read various studies on when content should be published, but the truth is, we believe our community is unique, and what may work for some may not work for us. So we test and track results.

So what about you? Community managers, I’d love to see you weigh in on this. How do you define your audience? How do you track your results? How do you manage content creation among your team? Tell us in the comments!

You…well, you can’t write. Or at least that’s what you’ve been telling yourself for the past thirty years.

Because you don’t believe you can write, you seek out advice, often from writers (or self-proclaimed ones). You ask for their tools of the trade and writing advice. The problem is sometimes these folks point you in the wrong direction. They don’t mean to feed you lies or bad best practices. It just, well, happens.

For example, below are five well-intentioned pieces of writing advice that may actually do more harm than good when you’re trying to build content for an SEO campaign. Break these “words of wisdom” and the content you put out will thank you. It will also probably suck less.

“Listen to music while writing!”

This might be the worst piece of advice ever told. And how many times have you heard it? About a million. You’re told that if you listen to music while you write it will help you block out distractions and make you focus better. And it will. If you’re listening to jazz or classical music or anything that doesn’t have actual words happening. But most of us aren’t listening to that. We’re listening to the music we like. Music with catchy beats, sweet lyrics, and that makes us dance around in our chair without a hint of shame. Essentially, it creates an even more powerful distraction – the need to get all Kevin Bacon up in our office.

Because our brain can’t help but focus on the words we’re hearing, listening to music ends up making us less focused and more ADD than we’d be on our own. It’s not music that helps you tune out the world, noise does. Want to put yourself into a trance of super-focus? Let SimplyNoise help you white-noise your way to productivity or check out RainyMood to let rain and thunder guide the words out.  These two sites will help you block out disruptions WITHOUT adding more to the fire.

“Just write what you know!”

Not sure what to write about in your blog today or what to create a sizzling new infographic around? Just write what you know! I’m not sure what that really means, but it’s terrible, vague and misleading advice. You should not write about what you know. No one really cares about all the things you know. What they do care about is what they WANT to know. The information they’re interested in and the advice that’s going to help them do something in their lives better. It’s not about you at all.

But fret not! The truly fantastic thing about having customers on the Web is that they tell you, every day, exactly what it is they want to know. They’re leaving you messages in your analytics, your site logs, through the conversations they have with you via social channels, and through the search modifiers they use. Don’t write what you know. Write what they’re asking for. And use all the information you have at your disposal to figure out what the heck that is. Then serve it back to them.

“Write to impress!”

Telling someone they need to “come off smart”, “impress their audience” or “sound like an expert” in the content they write is a fantastic way to paralyze them or put them on a sad journey of incredibly awkward writing where their Web site copy reads like their 10th grade essay on Shakespeare. You don’t need to sound intelligent or like a scientist when talking to your customers. You just need to sound like them.

• You need to use the same words they do.
• You need to use the same paint points.
• You need to show the same fears, the same concerns, the same wants.
• You need to be weird like them.

The best way to ruin the writing you’re doing for your SEO campaign is to focus on yourself or your company. Focus on them. Sound and represent them. That’s where the magic happens.

“Writing is serious business!”

You’re writing content to introduce people to your brand, to communicate with them, and to drive them to take a particular action. You’re not curing cancer (unless you are) or saving puppies (again, unless you are). So take off the cape and remove all that pressure that goes along with having to save the world on a daily or weekly basis and just write.

Write to your audience. Tell them exactly what you want them to know, in your own words but in their language. Talk to them like you’re talking to your closest friend. If it helps you get the words out, have a drink or two while you’re trying to find your magic and get it all out. You can write buzzed, you just have to make sure you edit sober. Do whatever you need to do to remove the pressure. It’s not going to help you speak to your audience any more effectively.

“Only share when you have an original idea!”

If you truly believe that you can’t put finger to keyboard until you have something truly original and remarkable to say…you’re going to spend a lot of time NOT writing content to help your search engine optimization efforts. There are no original ideas left. Everything you produce is going to be a reflection of things you’ve consumed, thought about, were inspired by from someone else. And that’s okay to admit. It’s okay to mention how reading a blog post from Copyblogger changed the way you looked at copy and how Rhea’s post on OODA loops changed the way you handle the SEO process. You don’t have to be 100 percent original. You have to be interesting and valuable. Sometimes we confuse those and don’t write content that could be great.

Those are just a handful of “good writing myths” that I’ve seen suck the life out of many SEO campaigns or blog posts. What stumps your writing? Or what’s helped you break through and write content that your audience relates to?

I recently gave a community manager interview where I was asked whether CMs were finally being given the respect they deserve, what goes into the position, and what their roles are within an organization. You can read my answers to those questions and more over there but what was really on my mind is something I don’t think gets talked about enough – just how easily it is to burn out from the position.

As I’ve written before, being an online public face isn’t all rainbows and unicorns. There’s a dark side associated with always being on, having to manage several different social media identities (at minimum, yours + one branded account), a host of different platforms (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Q&A sites, etc), your own blog (holla), wrangling fans, bringing out the best in people, responding to attacks, and constantly defending what you do to people in your organization and in your life. Those who spend their days working to build these communities and living such public lives can easily find themselves burning out from working on too many problems, too many sites, and trying to be too many things to too many people.

If you’re a Community Manager, how do you protect yourself?
Or, if you’re a brand, how do you protect the person you’ve put into this role and ensure they stay in it for a long time? Hiring and re-hiring not only gets expensive, but it makes it more difficult for your community to trust your public face.

Below are a few tips.

Set Boundaries

Don’t be a dummy; set boundaries for yourself and your community.

For example:

• When are you “on” as a Community Manager and at what time do you turn off?
• How often will you “check in” with the various social networks?
• What’s the priority level assigned to each site?
• What will you track and what won’t you track?

These questions are important to answer because they’ll help guide interaction and set limits that will help your Community Manager maintain their sanity. Not long too, it was expected that just because a Community Manager COULD do their job 24/7 thanks to Web-enabled phones and a constant Internet connection that they should essentially be on-call for the brand. However, we’re starting to see people step away from that belief and set up core operating times. This is beneficial for a couple of reasons.

First, it tells your community WHEN you’re there and actively listening and ready to engage. This is helpful for setting user expectations. If you tell your community you’re only there between 10am-6pm, then they won’t go looking for you at 10pm when they have a question. It also gives a Community Manager the time they need to detach. We can’t live on all the time. That’s how people die. Or go crazy and take lots of people with them.

Find Your Tools

There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel or feel like you need to do everything by hand in order to be engaging with your community the right way. To help save time and mental energy, seek out tools that can help you do your Community Manager responsibilities more efficiently and more powerfully.

What types of tools should you seek out?

A tool like UberVu will provide you with real-time analytics; one dashboard to track all your social metrics like fans, followers, mentions, etc; the ability to assign tasks and manage your team from a central dashboard (!), provide demographic information, and more. Community Managers working for larger brands will have something like this already waiting for them in-house, however, for small- and medium-sized companies, UberVu can help streamline what can otherwise be a very fragmented and time-consuming process.

ViralHeat is another social analytics program to help you track mentions, measure sentiment, provide analytics and help give you the insight you need to essentially be in multiple places at the same time. It also integrates with SalesForce to help you do something with those leads you’re acquiring through social channels.

If you hung around during our 12 Days of SEO, you’ll remember that Joe, Outspoken Media’s SEO Manager, introduced us to Mention Mapp, a tool that helps you discover groups of people that Twitter users connect with the most. Enter in a username, and it will generate a visual representation of that person’s relationships. If you’re looking to understand who influences whom or find clusters you think your community should be part of, this can help you identify those pretty easily.

The tools listed above are just a tiny sample of what’s around there. As a Community Manager, depending on what you find yourself doing most often, there are tools to help with content management, tracking events, managing multiple Twitter accounts, etc.

Befriend Other Community Managers

We all need to vent and be around people who understand what we do and what we’re struggling with. It’s for that reason that attending BlogWorld Expo has become one of the absolute highlights of my year. It’s one of the few conferences I can go to and be surrounded by people who do exactly what I do, understand the pressures, and who are passionate about it. As Community Managers, it’s really important that we have that outlet. If you can’t get to a show like BlogWorld, participate in Twitter Chats related to the subject. There’s a Communication Manager Chat every Wednesday from 2pm-3pm Eastern. Get involved. Or if you’re not ready to talk yet, at least listen. Not only is it a chance for you, the CM, to hear about issues your colleagues are facing but it can also be a way to highlight your brand and the community you’re forming there.

If that’s not your scene, talk to your boss or the people on your team about the stresses you’re feeling or what your day looks like. Sometimes talking through problems can help you find answers you wouldn’t have found on your own. Or someone will say something in that meeting that will put your brain on a different path and open up new doors.

Keep your perspective

• If you can’t blog today, the world will not explode.
• If you can’t tweet today you’re sick, your community will be there waiting tomorrow.
• If you put off responding to that blog comment for an hour to eat lunch, the world will forgive you.

No, I swear, that’s all true even if it doesn’t feel like it is!

We hire Community Managers to be work on the front lines of our brand. It’s a huge investment – both for the CM and for the company whose put them in that position. Make sure you’re taking care of your brand’s public face. Because why burn out is dangerous, it’s even more dangerous when the person burning out for your company has access to your company Twitter account. ;)

For all the CMs out there, how have you avoid burning out? What works for you?

Oh, and video meme anyone?

See?

As you might imagine, the angle Dr. Pepper has chosen to take for their 10-calorie diet soda drink has ruffled quite a few feathers. Okay, it’s ruffled a lot of feathers.

• Like my coworker who angrily forwarded the video to everyone in the office.
• Or Steve Hall who explained why we can’t swallow the joke.
• Or the AP and Village Voice.
• Or the women leaving snarktastic comments all over the Dr. Pepper Facebook page.

You could say it’s kind of a mess.

If the ad campaign was designed to get Dr. Pepper its fifteen minutes of Internet flame and fame, well then it certainly worked. But if they were trying to be clever or do market segmentation in any sort of intelligent way, they failed. And not at all because of the ad’s no-women stance.

Dr. Pepper failed the same way so many brands fail do when they get online.

• They tried to be edgy and were just sad.
• They tried to be polarizing and were just silly.
• They failed because if they WERE going to offend anyone, that ad is more offensive to men than it is to women.

If there’s one thing I wish brands could learn is that you can be polarizing and still be intelligent. You can be clever without pandering to the lowest common denominator of man (or woman). You can be edgy without being an idiot or a royal bitch.

When you dumb down your marketing, you not only embarrass yourself, but your entire audience.

And that’s what I saw happening with Dr. Pepper’s ad for Dr. Pepper Ten. I wasn’t offended as a woman that this diet soda company was saying I couldn’t play. I was offended with how badly they were doing it.

Men shooting lasers in the woods?

Men making fun of women for watching chick flicks?

Men riding ATVs?

Really? That’s the best Man Zone content you’ve got? Come visit the Outspoken Media office in Troy and I’ll let you yank my pigtails, too.

Not that it’s uncommon, mind you. We saw a similar mess with Groupon earlier this year. They tried to be funny and polarizing and instead ended up begging for forgiveness with its tail between its legs when they couldn’t take the heat. Manly.

Being edgy/polarizing/remarkable without falling off the stupid cliff requires two things:

1. A true understanding of your audience to know how they need to be pushed.
2. A backbone.

It’s rare to find a big brand that has both.

When I think of brands who understand how to be polarizing and intelligent at the same time I think of Matt Inman. I think of Erika Napoletano. I think of Peter Shankman.

They polarize people by making intelligent arguments that speak to a common problem, experience or villain and strongly push people toward a certain belief. You wouldn’t find any of them dumbing things down for their audience or running through a forest with lasers.

Well, that’s not true. You might find Matt Inman in a forest shooting giant cats with lasers, but I digress…

At Outspoken Media, we’re also known for doing some pushing. Whether we’re outing brand jacking, calling out Google, mooting your excuses or getting everyone worked up over the topic of the day, we know how to play off people’s emotions to get them riled up. As a marketer, I’d argue that you have to. And it’s healthy.

“There’s nothing wrong with being edgy in marketing or purposely polarizing or pissing off your audience at times. There’s nothing wrong with Dr. Pepper going after a male audience and poking fun at us females. But there is something wrong with insulting everyone’s intelligence to do that. For me, that’s where Dr. Pepper went wrong.

I also found it interesting that Jim Trebilcock, executive vice president of marketing for Dr. Pepper, noted he wasn’t worried that women would be offended by the ad. He said that “women get the joke” and that their macho stance was “a way to start the conversation that can spread and get people engaged in the product”.

Jim – no one is engaged with your product right now. They’re engaged with telling you how dumb you are. And when they forget all about this flare-up in a week’s time, you won’t even have that.

In your attempt to be memorable, you actually became forgettable. That’s offensive.

To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world; it’s a very noisy world. And we’re not going to get the chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.” — Steve Jobs

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about storytelling and the place that it has in marketing. More than a decade ago, Steve Jobs said that our only defense against a noisy world was to be clear about what we wanted people to know and remember about us. That’s what marketing is to me – formulating the story we want people to know about and then making it part of everything we do.

It’s about bleeding it.

How do you craft a memorable brand story?

1. Determine what you stand for and where you fit in. Who are you right now and who do you want to be? This is your culture. It’s your core.
2. Assess the traits that you have that best allow you to represent that core. This is where creating your character comes in – it’s the marketing persona inside of you that shows the best and most marketable version of yourself to your audience. Do not make up characteristics, but do highlight your best ones while removing the noise (the ones that don’t matter)
3. Piece together your brand story by finding the common thread between 1 and 2 and building from there. Use the characteristics and company stories that help you best convey what it is you’re trying to tell people.
4. Finalize your story until it looks, feels, smells, tastes and sounds like your core.
5. Work your story into everything you do, keeping 100 percent consistent.
6. Tell your story from every touch point.

Crafting a brand story allows you to communicate to your consumer exactly who you want to be so that they know how they are supposed to remember you. That’s how you break through the noise. By giving them something to remember.

When I talk about Outspoken Media, I don’t tell people that we’re an SEO consulting company or that we do online reputation management. I tell them that Outspoken Media was the result of Rhea Drysdale and myself becoming frustrated with the quality of services being offered in the industry and what we do decided to do about it. How we left high-paying jobs in the heart of the recession to create something better than what we believe was out there.

When someone asks me how I got into the Internet marketing world despite my degree being in journalism, I could tell them it was lucky or that I simply fell into it or that I took one job that changed my whole career path. Or I could bring it back to how growing up without a voice taught me how important it is to help brands’ find theirs.

It’s only spin if it’s not true. Otherwise it’s a story that ties your experiences to your culture back to your consumer.

If you choose NOT to build a story around your brand, you leave it open for others to craft your own brand story. And believe me, they will. And you might not like their rendition of what your brand means.

[Hat tip to Presentation Zen for pointing me toward the video linked above with their post on identifying your core values.]

Like most social media consulting companies, we spend a fair amount of time evaluating the brands of others. We want to make sure that when we identify influencers or contacts for clients that we’re selecting the right people for them to engage and connect with. Below are six factors we use to help us measure how marketable a brand or persona may be. We recommend you use them when building up your own personal brand to ensure you’re creating something that is marketable in the future. Because while Klout and the other social influence measurement tools are interesting, it doesn’t always give you the best idea of what you should specifically be focusing on.

Here’s what we look at:

1. Influence

Do people listen when you speak? Have you built up enough authority to really influence someone’s decision? True Influencers know that there’s a difference between being “popular” and being “influential”. Someone who is influential can compel something to buy a product, sign up for a course or subscribe to an email newsletter simply be tweeting the link or asking people to give it a look. The higher your Influence Factor, the more likely it is you’re building engaged fans, not lifeless bodies. If you’re concerned your Influence Factor isn’t as high as it should be, devote some extra time to demonstrating your authority on a particular subject – whether that means creating content about it or doing a better job sharing others content.

2. Weirdness

The title of Seth Godin’s new book (which I plan to buy, BTW) is We Are All Weird. We have to be weird. Because weird is what gets noticed. It’s what stands out and it’s what resonates with us the most. Because as Seth says, we’re all a little weird. When I evaluate someone’s brand, I’m looking for that twinge of weirdness. I don’t want to see that you collect and eat hair, but I want to see that there’s something about you that’s different and memorable. Maybe this goes back to the idea of why you need to create a character. But, take a look at your own brand – what makes you weird and what are you doing to leverage it?

3. Reach

When you share something, how far does it go? How many communities, circles or groups have you created Influence in? Do you notice that it’s different people tweeting and sharing your content or is the same 15 people who have been following you for the past six years? It’s important to keep an idea on who is sharing your content to help you see how the platform you’re creating is or is not growing. Ideally, you want your ideas to spread into as many different communities as possible so that you can expose yourself to more people.

If you’re not Reach’ing as far as you’d like, start venturing out of your security bubble and creating a presence in different satellite communities. Jay Baer had a great post this morning about how blogger outreach changes the PR timeline forever. It’s applicable here, as well./

4. Engagement

Related to Influence and Reach, how likely is it that your followers, fans and customers are going to engage back with you when you send something out? Have you attracted/collected/bought 20,000 followers who are excited to be part of your brand and share your story OR do you have 20,000 who wouldn’t respond if you tweeted you had been kidnapped and were trapped in the back of some dude’s truck? If it’s the latter, it’s a sign you’re not building a very marketable brand and should spend some more time in the sandbox being a good social media citizen.

5. Who Knows You

I know. It’s a sad world when we’re judged not for who we are but for who knows us but, well, suck it up, because that’s life. In both business and social media, very often it’s not what you know, but who you know and who it is singing your praises and namedropping you in conversations. When you’re doing your brand monitoring, take note of who it is that’s mentioning you. How many (worthy) end-of-year lists are you making? How many of the people YOU want to connect with are also trying to connect with you or already sharing your name with their audiences? I know it’s nice to think that you’re an island and that you don’t need anyone else but, well, this is call social media, not sit-in-your-cave media.

6. Demand

What does your inbox look like? How about your @ Replies tab? How interested does it appear people are in the brand of you? Are they contacting you to be a source in their news article? Do they want your opinion on X? Are you being asked to speak at conferences (or are you accepted when you pitch) or try out people’s new products? I know it can be hard to take a look at your brand and measure how desirable people find you, but try to make it as data-specific as possible so your feelings don’t get hurt. The real question is – are people seeking you out or is it you constantly trying to be sought out? If it’s the latter, then maybe you need to continue to put yourself out there more to prove what you’re worth and get people biting. And that’s fine, but if that’s not overtime starting to turn around, that be a sign that you’re building something people aren’t interested in.

There are the arms (or legs or hats) we make note of when determining how marketable a persona is or whether that individual (or brand) is a good fit for our client. What do you think? Does your Watch For list look like mine? Or am I totally off base? You can tell me. ;)

Once upon a time, we all failed at Twitter. And I’m not talking about failing to get influencers to retweet us. Though, most of us failed at that to.  But what I mean is that we all initially failed at using Twitter properly as a brand-building tool.

Like mankind is known to do, we learned to make lemonade. We learned that with the onset of Twitter, branding had become a didactic process. Through handpicked tweets, the impetus had now fallen on companies to teach prospective clients and customers how to regard them. Useful links, smart engagement, and genuine conversation taught end users that you were a steady, reliable, intriguing brand worthy of their business. In managing @bluephoenixnyc for Blue Phoenix Media, my approach focuses on engaging the affiliate marketing community while building bridges out to broader segments of internet culture. But my approach also considers this: There are no wrong leads. It’s an ambitious goal, but ultimately rewarding.

For those companies (be they SMBs or big Bs) not too well-versed with social media awareness, or who simply don’t have the manpower to oversee it, such ambition can lead to bad habits that, over time, can grow into brand-killers. So the onus is on you to protect your brand.

Below are ten such brand-killers and ways how beef up your own Twitter strategy.

1. Talking-Heads Tweets.

Whether we’re going to conferences or just partaking in a universal event (the Royal Wedding comes to mind!), hashtags are a way for tweeters of a feather to stick together. But many well-intentioned hashtag-driven sub-communities frequently become a gallery of talking-heads. Have you read George Saunders’ “Braindead Megaphone”? If not, please do. Because that’s what hashtag-driven sub-communities become when everybody is talking at once–and to nobody in particular. It’s a brand development dead end.

Fix: Stop shouting. Have a conversation and engage. Talk about the conference you’re at, the Royal Wedding livestream, the American Idol results show. Branding does not have to be in-your-face self-promotion. It just has to be humanizing.

2. Auto-Tweets.

Automated tweets are worse than spambots. They’re instant brand killers. It’s the Twitter version of receiving a form letter for users who have just recently followed you: “Hi @USER! Thanks for following me! Check out http://dumblink.com/barf.html!” More importantly, it’s a shoddy way to try to convert new followers into leads. By generating auto-DMs, you risk losing followers. Scheduled tweets, alternately, aren’t so universally terrible, but still require awareness and discretion. Case in point: When the world learned about Osama bin Laden’s death from the President, many big brands—like Lady Gaga—had scheduled tweets go live, to unintentional comic effect. Another unfortunate deployment of a scheduled tweet? The PATH train’s Mother’s Day well-wishes that went live about an hour after one of its trains had crashed and injured over 30 passengers.

Fix: Keep it real. Disable the automator. Deploy scheduled tweets with discretion. Go the extra mile when necessary and delete them if the context becomes irrelevant.

3. Sandwich Tweets.

We all hate Sandwich Tweets. A Sandwich Tweet is exactly as it sounds. It’s a tweet a user contributes to the effect of, “Eatin’ a sandwich!” It’s devoid of substance. From a personal perspective, it provides no opportunity for further chatter; from a professional perspective, it provides many opportunities to be reviled and mocked.

Fix: If it’s the best sandwich of your entire life, by all means, tweet so. Then tell us what it is. Then tell us where we can get it. In other words: Give us the delicious details. Then give your favorite deli some props by driving some more business to them.

4. Troll Tweets.

This isn’t about gnarled old men tweeting aggressively from underneath bridges. It’s about people who pollute the Twitter ecosystem by lobbing nasty messages into the ether. It’s not that Twitter should become a beacon of the “new niceness” that has suddenly become web chic. But it should remain a productive place to socialize, both personally and professionally. Troll tweets do neither. However, they do one thing remarkably well: Shut down all productive conversation. Let’s look at one of Twitter’s best-known trolls in its short history: Chris Brown. With his angry tweets, Brown has quickly become a bête noire of Twitter. And while he can still sell records with such an indelible mark on his brand, the rest of us can’t—sell records or anything really. The answer here is simple…

Fix: Be nice or become a B2B bête noire.

5. Copycat Tweets.

There are users who perhaps haven’t mapped out their branding strategy. Or they don’t want to. Whatever their reasoning, they’ve decided that instead of original content, they’ll just clog up the ecosystem by retweeting everything an industry or thought leader says, no matter how banal. The problem with this approach? It never amounts into anything more than a watered-down aggregator. You’re existing in the shadows of industry towers instead of standing out.

Fix: Stand out. Be opinionated and original. Don’t be afraid to be wrong. If someone calls you out on it, you can civilly discuss your perspective and hey! you may even earn a few followers in the process.

6. NSFW Tweets.

The evolution of business palaver is curious at best. We’re suddenly in the era of too-casual oversharing—and it’s a bewildering era. Kenneth Cole can insensitively seize a tragedy and still enjoy steady revenue! But we’re not all up-scale peddlers of khaki pants and button-ups. Also bear in mind that there is such a thing as too far: Remember when Chrysler fired that guy for accidentally insulting a broad swath of its market share? We might be too-casual, but we’re still professionals. That means: Watch your language, demonstrate a modicum of respect, and if you want to share dirty jokes, do it off-the-record and off-the-clock, so you don’t implicate your brand. Unlike a personal brand, a corporate brand is much slower to recover from colossal social media failures. Chrysler is probably still recoiling from its Twitter debacle.

Fix: Decency and discretion.

7. Billboard Tweets.

If you’re a SMB and you’re not cut from the same fashionable cloth that fancy start-ups in Silicon Valley (or its petite East Coast sister Silicon Alley) are, awareness is going to be a very up-hill battle. But don’t mistake that challenge for an opportunity to use Twitter as another channel to spin out alternating advertisements. Unlike TV or most websites that rely on display ads, Twitter’s opt-in engagement makes it so about 101% of the burden falls on the brand to entice users, not the other way around. 101% because the best and successful brands are already putting in 100%.

Fix: Just like blogging has made SMBs responsible to establish themselves as original thought leaders, Twitter now challenges SMBs to do the same…in a lot less space. It’s about content, people.

8. Tone-deaf Tweets.

An important thing about Twitter is tone. Don’t use one that would have other companies regard you as one of the millions of #Beliebers. While cutesy tones might work for Kim Kardashian or my personal favorite, The Office star Mindy Kaling, they’re both showbiz personalities. You’re an internet marketer and even Kim Kardashian sticks to what she knows best on Twitter: Shilling shady products. And if she were to go off-message and suddenly talk about keyword densities, her brand value would depreciate astronomically. By the same virtue, don’t forgo tone entirely—that’s worse. No one will notice you if your tweets lack flair and have all the appeal of slowly-peeling paint.

Fix: Know your limits. Stick to a smart, consistent tone.

9. Vacuum Tweets.

Questions are a great way to perk up your Twitter mix. They show that you’re looking to solicit feedback from your followers and anyone else listening in. But in abundance, it just kills your strategy. An abundance (as in 95% of your tweets) of questions waves a flag to the effect of: “Oh! We know nothing! We don’t know what to say! Do our job for us!” Inexperienced is a word that no brand wants stalking them like a stray cat. That’s exactly what a company too-frequently posing broad questions in a bid for user engagement risks.

Fix: Don’t suck up the conversation. Instead, create it. Engage users not by baiting them, but by inspiring them to react.

10. Eavesdropping Tweets.

So you know how you hate it when you and a friend are talking about how awesome something—like chess sets—are? Both of you are like, “Man! Wooden chess sets rule!” Then a third person mysteriously appears and says, “Wooden chess sets are endangering forests. Forests are essential and I’m about  explain why even though the way both of you are furrowing your brows indicate waning interest. “Well, Twitter users hate it when your brand becomes that third person. You could argue that they should DM one another if such a conversation was truly private. But it’s not up to you to dictate the terms of the conversation between two other people. It is up to you to mind your boundaries. Just because they’re high-profile tweeters doesn’t give third parties carte blanche to interrupt—unless it’s for a very good reason. As Jenna Maroney once said on 30 Rock: “Respect celebrity privacy.”

Fix: Boundaries. Never cavalierly break into a conversation between two other people on Twitter—unless there’s a gem truly worth sharing.

Mind you, this is by no means a Twitter gospel to brand development. These are merely basic rules worth learning. Because Twitter’s  like (is?) life: You have to learn the rules before you learn how to break them.  Remember: Baby steps before big kid strides.

Amber’s right when she says it doesn’t matter how great your product is, how well known you are or what fancy features you may hail – your brand lives and dies by your front line employees, nothing else. And in this hyper-connected world of social media, all of your employees are front line employees. If your stomach just dropped at that thought, you have a problem.

A big one.

This isn’t a new business concept. We’ve always been able to learn everything we needed to know about a company from talking to their receptionist. We knew that the receptionist treated us the way they were treated. If she was rude or argumentative, it told us one thing about the company’s culture. If he was warm and helpful, it told us something completely differently. What’s changed is that in 2011, regardless of their official title, everyone on your team is the receptionist.

And with that comes a different kind of training. Sure, people must be trained on how to do their jobs well and how to get results…but they also need to be trained on how to live on the front lines. Because it’s a war zone out there! Each person on your staff must know how to represent the company, how to be the unofficial spokesman, and how to be the face. It’s up to you to arm them with the ability to do that.

How are you going to do that? With a new training program based around the five areas below.

0: Realize you must train everyone

Let me restate this because I know some of you are already ignoring me. Everyone on your team is now the receptionist. It’s not just your entry-level employees manning the phones or your high-level executives that you need to worry about. Social media touches every member on your team and every facet of your organization. Through your phone lines, your blog, your Twittering, Facebook, in-store interactions – everyone has the potential to make or break your sales process.

1. Officially promote everyone to the front lines

Make your employees’ new responsibilities official by formally adding the role of Company Brand Evangelist to their job description. This will not only change the culture of your company, but it will make this role ever-present in employees’ minds and open up a new conversation about transparency. Talk to your team about what this change means to the company and the new power that they have to change external about the brand. You no longer a team of employees, you’re a promotional force. By involving them and building an army, you make them much more invested in their success. You also introduce them to their new role and make them more self-aware about their own social media presence.

2. Introduce them to the company’s social media policy

With their new promotion still warm, give your army their new rulebook. If you haven’t yet taken the time to create a company social media policy, do it now. Without one you leave yourself vulnerable to confused mistake-making employees, accidental tweet mishaps and other brand badness. You allow your employees make the right decisions by helping them to understand their new roles, giving them the best practices for engagement, and explaining the company viewpoint on social media. Empowering them with this information will calm their fears and build their confidence while talking about the brand publicly. It’s the difference between creating a unified brand presence, and a fragmented one.

3. Help them find their power move

Hey, some of your employees will be natural brand ambassadors. You will turn them loose and they’ll easily be able to translate the passion they have for their job into personable conversations, displaying their unique power moves (my favorite). This is awesome and you should hug those people tightly. However, not everyone will take to social media like a fish to water. So will get stuck on shore, unsure of how to dip a toe in. And that’s okay. This is where introducing your team to case studies of success, people they can emulate, and real-time examples can help them find their footing. You way even want to give them a script they can work off until they feel more comfortable interacting without a net.

It’s also worth noting that every person on your team does not have to be an outspoken brand evangelist; they just have to be competent. They should be able to handle public customer complaints, product questions, and know how to represent the brand while in full view of the public. That doesn’t mean they have to be the life of the party. Because some people, despite all their awesomeness, will still drop a drink on themselves in public settings.

4. Give them combat training

I’m a firm believer in that employees need combat training before they should ever be near the front lines. Your employees must become full-blown jedis. They not only need to be schooled in the ins-and-outs of your product/service like never before in order to answer questions in real-time, they also need to know how to find the conversations they need to be part of. They need to be able to wrangle Google Alerts like it’s their job, they need to understand how to work a company social media dashboard, and they need to know what to do when someone shows up to Twitter to call them a fake, a fraud and a liar. This is where their training really comes into play. Because it will be in these situations that someone will either make your brand or sabotage it. Teach them out to walk out of the fire before you throw them into. Sweet Jesus, do I wish someone had given me combat training before I started blogging.

5. Trust them

After each member of your team has completed their front line training – trust them. And let them know that you trust them. If you’ve done your job right, your employees will understand their role, its importance, how to handle situations, and where to go for additional information. Now let them loose. Being a helicopter parent and hovering over them will make them feel unsure and apprehensive about participating. Back off and give them the authority and the approval to act on their own accord. The power this will have on your brand will be felt throughout the entire organization.

Those are my 5+ tips on how to prepare an employee to fight on the front lines of your brand. What’s your process or how have you trained yourself? Anything you wish you knew before you started?

I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but Twitter is infested with bots. Dirty, dirty, bots!

For the past couple of weeks, the Twitter spam bots have been out in full force, often hitting accounts with handfuls of new cleavage-baring followers per minute. There’s been a lot of conversation about it on Twitter and lots of complaints things are spiraling out of control – but that’s all been from users. With so many folks complaining about the rise in Twitter bots and Twitter spam, I can’t help but think we haven’t heard much from Twitter. Where are they and what are they doing about it?

Perhaps, I thought, I had just missed the announcement. I looked around.

Any word on the @twitter account? Nope.

Anything on the official Twitter blog? There were some great posts about translating Twitter into more languages, Twitter for Android and the #superbowl, but nothing about why my Followers page was starting to look like the Nevada Bunny Ranch (not linking that, sorry).

Houston, we have a problem.

While Twitter’s out denying Google and Twitter acquisition rumors, their site, the one these multi-billion dollar brands are dancing around acquiring, is going down the tubes. It’s happening because they’re not doing right by their users. It doesn’t matter how sexy you are to Google, Facebook, your mother – you have a problem when your core users can’t accomplish basic tasks. Right now the influx of spam bots and fake accounts hitting the site are hindering user experience. People are getting swamped with spammy followers, numbers are being inflated, and we have to watch which keywords we dropped to not get hit even harder. And nothing is being said about it.

Twitter, this is when you need to step in.

All brands inevitably reach this point; it’s the point where you’re either eaten by yourself or you take serious action.

We saw Sphinn do it. They noticed their site was being overtaken by low quality articles and decided to take it back. You may not love Quora, but they’ve taken steps to prevent becoming ridden with spam, upping the barrier for new user participation.

Twitter, on the other hand, seems to have abandoned the gates.

By allowing fake users to enter your site and get in the way of your core users, you open yourself up to a world of
problems.

• Thanks to auto-follow bot (another awesome creation), fake accounts come in and immediately build up perceived authority, gaining hundreds of auto-follows a day. This fake reputation can then be used as capital to shill their own products, the products of others, or the accounts can be sold off to “social media experts” to shill themselves.
• Fake users = increase in fake @ replies that people need to sift through, making it harder for them to find their real conversations and use the site.
• Fake users (not to be confused with Kenneth Cole) manipulate Trending Topics, again, making it harder for real users to find the conversations they’re looking for, while also inflating perceived authority.
• Spam bots often work in packs to manipulate Trending Topics, creating fake relevance and passing around low-quality (sometimes dangerous) content.
• Fake users throw garbage all over the lawn that real users have to walk over. Until they get tired of it. And then the real users leave crying about how your site just became the new MySpace.

Twitter needs to protect the quality of its service, especially if they’re looking to cash in on its value via advertising or partnerships. Would adding a captcha or some other authentication to Twitter’s sign up process help? It would. For a bit until the folks responsible for the fake accounts would up the ante. But it would be a start.

Maybe Twitter needs to dedicate more resources to spotting these spam circles, and finding ways to infiltrate and remove them. Hey, if they need help they can use Erik Deckers’ post on 10 signs for spotting Twitter spammers. Perhaps there’s a way to create an algorithm of sorts that looks for patterns, unnatural follower/following rations, etc, and creates a Google-esque authority score.

Or maybe Roger Dooley is right and it’s up to USERS to be more proactive about reporting spam or to at least stop engaging with accounts that clearly aren’t natural.

Though not everyone agrees with that.

I don’t know what the ultimate answer is, maybe you do and you’d like to share it. What I do know is that it’s a critical
point. At the same time Twitter looks to be anticipating some major steps into adulthood, their quality is dropping. It’s time to get the crap off the lawn because people are only willing to step over your drama for so long. The “social media experts” may hang around, but the regular people, the people you need to push toward mainstream adoption, they’re gonna head back to messing around on Facebook.

The ball’s in your court, Twitter. Whatcha gonna do?

As a user, what do you want to see Twitter do? I want to know.

Here’s a snippet of the statement released by Groupon CEO Andrew Mason on why the ads were yanked.

We hate that we offended people, and we’re very sorry that we did – it’s the last thing we wanted. We’ve listened to your feedback, and since we don’t see the point in continuing to anger people, we’re pulling the ads […] We will run something less polarizing instead. We thought we were poking fun at ourselves, but clearly the execution was off and the joke didn’t come through. I personally take responsibility; although we worked with a professional ad agency, in the end, it was my decision to run the ads.

Okay, so here’s the thing.

Groupon is an emerging startup known for being both quirky and supporters of social activism. In theory, the ads created were smart because they highlighted both components and showed off the Groupon personality. Well done there. And well done to Groupon for trying to be edgy and recruiting the viral marketing geniuses at CP + B. Did the ads flop when users missed the activism call to action? Some might say they did. But for all the drama, $500,000 will still be netted for the causes and Groupon has been on the tip of everyone’s tongue (and blog) all week long.

All those “outraged” people – do they matter? Will they remember why they were so mad in a week? Can any of them pick out Tibet on a map or name a country that even has a rainforest? My money’s on no. They’re faux offended. But that’s a different issue for a different post.

What really irked me about Andrew’s apology was that he’s not yanking the commercials because, in hindsight, he agrees they were offensive. He doesn’t appear to think that at all. Groupon’s pulling the ads because they polarized people. And that’s a sucky reason for doing anything.

Groupon is a fast-growing startup. The smartest thing they can do is polarize people. To create a segment of the population that is SO pissed off at them they can’t even stand it and to create another segment who thinks the ads were ingeniously hilarious. Because that’s how you grow a community and a fan base. It’s also how you get people talking about you, increase the eyes on your brand and show more people what you have to offer. And if you think there weren’t any people who loved the ads, you’re wrong. Plenty of people found those ads to smart and funny, they’re just not blogging about it because no one is going to blog about how hilarious they found that anti-save the whales commercial were.

No, I mean, besides me.

If Groupon wants to apologize for offending people, fine. But they should stand behind what they created. Maybe it wasn’t perfect and maybe it ruffled some feathers, but if you believe in them, you stand by them. That’s how you show people what you’re about. You’re about being quirky, irrelevant, and laughing at yourself and the seriousness of life. I don’t know about you, but that’s a brand mission statement I can get behind. You don’t become a brand people love by sitting in the middle of the road. Spend too much there and you’re going to get run over. And that’s typically what we see with brands.

Being polarizing is what makes your brand interesting and connects it to others.

For as many people who despised Michael Jackson, he’s also revered. For as many people who think Snooki is an abomination on the human race, she’s a New York Times best-selling author with a huge platform. For as many who are puzzled by Lady Gaga, others can’t get enough. The story isn’t found in the averages, it’s found in the outliers.

Don’t be afraid to be polarizing to prove a point, to move a conversation, or to get people to notice you – as long as it’s authentic. As long as you actually believe what you’re preaching and what you’re putting out. I think Groupon believed in those ads and they should have stood by them. The reason most ads and companies fail is because they’re unable to leave any kind of impression, good or bad. They’re safe, they’re boring and they’re forgettable. Last weekend Groupon took a stand and they became memorable. They polarized their audience. And good for them. Too bad they went back on it.