Branding | Communication Is The Key

Make information simple.

Communicate complicated issues simply and power will be rewarded, for example The Guardian’s wonderfully adept data blog.

Above, the image describes the UK deficit over the last 33 years. You can see what’s happened and who was responsible. One image turns what could have been a very long history lesson into an instant, tweetable story.

Two million people read The Sun every day for the same reason. Journalists there excel at transforming a very complicated story into one attention-grabbing, succinct headline. Within the industry, The Sun journalists are highly respected.

You need to do the same with your business. Describe the main value proposition in one sentence:

Share a car to reduce commuting costs
Auto-find the best price
Easy bookkeeping
Never run out of toilet roll again
Any film, anywhere
Wine tasting, delivered

It doesn’t matter if your business also does many other things. Focus on one. Procter & Gamble don’t write,

Fairy Liquid: Good for cleaning. But we also do Gilette razors, Old Spice aftershave, Duracell batteries, Tampax and Pampers.

They create a brand a focus on one position. That’s it.

Explain it in one sentence. It’s not the consumer’s fault if they don’t ‘get it’. It’s yours for either timing it wrong, or communicating badly. Have a look at The Guardian’s data blog and learn how they turn big issues into compelling images. Then try it for yourself.

What leaders think vs. what followers think

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Leadership defined by leaders:

Forward-thinking, determination, ambition, strategic-clarity, emotional intelligence, drive, creativity, initiative, energy, charisma, inner-awareness, team-building expertise, belief, command, consistency, discipline, empathy, focus, self-assurance, positivity, a thirst for knowledge and a thousand other things.

Leadership defined by followers:

Trust
Compassion
Stability
Hope

It’s easy to see why young people, startups and anyone with aspirations get confused with leadership. If you go to a book shop and walk to the business section you’ll find a thousand-and-one leadership titles all saying different things: GO BIG and Gun-Hoe! vs. tread quietly and be thoughtful.

Yet what all these books/authors have in common is that they recognise their own strengths. The charging bull knows it’s fast and strong whilst the turtle knows it has time.

The acknowledgement of your own strengths allows people to have trust in you; You’re not bullshitting them. And by focusing your strengths in the work you choose, you increase your stability.

However, relationships work both ways. Whilst followers like the fact they can trust you and that you have stability, they also want to know you care; that you show compassion. Together trust, stability and compassion leads to hope.

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I learnt this whilst reading Strengths Based Leadership, by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie. It’s more of a leadership glossary than a book, entwined with an online test to help you find your strengths (mine were forward and strategic thinking. They’ve surveyed over ten thousand leaders across the world, and also thousands of followers too. Worth doing the test, called StrengthsFinder, as it literally helps you find your strengths (note, once you start the test you can’t stop and it takes ten minutes).

In Communication Is The Key, Opinion branding, communications, compassion, followers, leadership, positioning, reputation, trust

Measuring True Influence

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To grow your business, find influential people that can be turned into advocates Flickr

To grow your brand, company, message or sales, you want to target influential people that can help. Turning them into advocates allows you to tap into their network, and further extend your reach. But how do you find them?

This is the problem I’ve been working on for a while, and I think I’ve taken a few steps forward that I’d like to share with you. More than that though, I would like to invite you to join in and collaborate, because it is by no way finished or perfect, and a fresh pair of eyes would be much appreciated. Let’s call it an open-theory project.

This blog post:

Explains how to measure influence
Introduces you to Factiva – the biggest news database
Discusses how to create a stakeholder analysis
Asks you for help

Continue reading “Measuring True Influence” »

In Communication Is The Key, Opinion, Public Relations advocates, branding, business development, marketing, measurement, measuring influence, pr, public relations, sales

What happens when you consistently maintain the Slight Edge principle?

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What happens when you smile at thirty strangers a day? What happens when you remember the names of everyone you meet? What happens when you anticipate trends and patterns? What happens when you consistently maintain The Slight Edge?

This is what Jeff Olson questions in his The Slight Edge (lent to me by Vernon James, Network Marketer and member of London Startups - thanks!), and in this blog post I want to explore some of the ideas and look at what happens when you turn small behavioural changes into habits and their compounded effect on business and life.

Continue reading “What happens when you consistently maintain the Slight Edge principle?” »

In Book Reviews, Communication Is The Key, Marketing, Networking, Opinion, Public Relations anticipation, branding, change, communication is the key, compound interest, jeff olson, marketing, names, results, slight edge, smiling

When you get your business into the press, try to leave a link trail. This means having one article lead onto another, onto another, onto another. It has huge SEO and branding benefits that you ought to know.

For example, I recently wrote about the Kooki app on The Huffington Post,

Launched only two months ago, Kooki has already been featured in The Guardian as a ‘Winning New Business‘ and looks set to be a hit with Londoners as it partners with new shops everyday.

You can see how this is then linked to their feature in The Guardian, which in turn, was linked to their website. A link trail like this is great for search-engine-optimisation and branding.

In terms of Google, you’re helping it find more backlinks to your website, increasing your pagerank and scoring higher on the results pages.

For branding, readers immediately see greater credibility and can learn more should they choose to. It’s alright to have just one article in a newspaper or magazine, but you can’t lean on that forever. Customers become much more aware of your brand if you’re being talked about again and again.

Once you’ve racked up ten or more articles from various well-respected news outlets (university blogs are even better), consider creating a Wikipedia page. Here, you can put a reference to all of these articles, making sure that Google and readers will have access forever more.

But, a word of caution. Wikipedia volunteers are extremely strict when it comes to establishing a new Wikipedia page. It’s meant to be an encyclopedia, remember? So when you’re writing about your business or product, think about it from that point of view. As a general rule of thumb, either the product, business or story of creation must be remarkable (and proven to be so).

Have you won any awards? Been referenced by celebrities or book authors? Been mentioned in the press over ten times?

It took me a long time to figure out what gets accepted as a new Wikipedia page, so if you keep that in mind, you’ll be on the right track.

What Is An Integrated Communications Strategy?

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An integrated communications strategy is not just about social media

Everybody loves social media. It’s easy to use, easy to understand and free. But that creates a problem: Competition. New businesses focus on social media, forgetting about the other channels of communication available to them.

This blog post explains what an integrated communications strategy is and why you should use one.

Continue reading “What Is An Integrated Communications Strategy?” »

In Advertising, Communication Is The Key, Marketing, Networking, Public Relations, Social Media advertising, branding, communication is the key, corporate communications, integrated communications strategy, public relations

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