Often I meet people who hate using the word “brand” or “personal brand.”  They think the term is a load of bollox and is either meaningless or too confining.

I think the word does have merit.  Sure, it gets thrown around by every wanna-be marketing professional out there, but it does serve a purpose.

Cutting through all the hype and BS, the word “brand,” really boils down to one thing: the expectation your fans/friends/consumers have about you. It’s that simple!  You don’t need to be a marketing professional to understand it.

Think of any service or product and you will have an expectation.  If I say the word Pepsi or Disney or Southwest Airlines, a thought enters your head and you have a perception of what those companies are or should be.  These expectations can be as flexible or as inflexible as you’d like.  They can vary by the thousands, and no one is more right or wrong than any other.

Big corporate brands spend millions to help shape and form your expectation.  They create packaging, logos and commercials because it benefits them if everyone has the SAME thought on their product or service.  Over in the creative world, those expectations are built around the content that is produced.  Mainstream artists may spend more money and attention shaping their brands, but it’s not necessary.  Peter Gabriel fans “expect” him to take many years to create new music, but know that it will be inventive, creative, and different than what came before.  Stephen King has been labeled by some as a horror author, while others know him for his dramatic (Shawshank Redemption) and escapist (Dark Tower) works.  Both have content that form their respective “brands.”

As individuals, we can also create and manage the expectations of others.  Are you funny?  Kind of a dick?  Punctual?  Professional?  Casual?  Do you proceed with caution or jump face first into new projects or ideas?  The answers to these questions form an expectation about you, and thus your personal brand.  It can be whatever you want it to be, and you can make it as important or as unimportant as you choose.

So the next time you hear the word “brand,” don’t think of all the marketing hype that goes along with it.  Simply remind yourself that its an expectation, and not a dirty word.

However, every now and then I stumble upon a survey or poll I feel IS worth a look.  Such was the case when I discovered this SOPHOS poll on Jason Calacanis’s blog:

60% of Facebook users consider quitting over privacy

Is this a truly scientific poll?  No, and SOPHOS admits as much.  But it DOES provide an incredibly compelling look into where facebook currently finds itself.  You may recall I recently blogged on where facebook stacks up in the forest of social media.  Since then things have only intensified as more users become disillusioned, mainstream media picks up the story and Mark Zuckerberg refuses to care.

This poll, while not scientific, gives us a glimpse into the current user-base.  I take away two things:

First, the % of users who have already quit the service is slightly higher then the % of those who have stated they will be staying.  These numbers also follow standard polling and survey results where “absolutists” at both ends are in the minority.

Second, and more importantly, there is a HUGE chunk of users currently on the fence deciding whether to leave or stay.  A combined 60% if you believe this poll.  The real number may be lower, but I don’t believe by much.  The biggest chunk of facebook’s active user-base are casual users; people who joined the service “because their friends or family were on it” and have no deep loyalty or brand-love for it.  THESE are the people that facebook needs to worry about.

The longer and more mainstream the negative publicity against facebook becomes, the higher the likelihood this “middle ground” of users will be swayed to delete their accounts or simply stop using them.  A “dead” account is just as threatening to facebook as a “deleted” one.

Facebook has survived scuffles in the past because their user-base was smaller.  This time may be different.  This time they pushed TOO far and risk offending too many average people in the middle, people who leave a service for the same reason they joined it….because their friends did.  The market is incredibly fickle, and contrary to what others might have you believe, facebook does NOT have a guaranteed spot at the table.

There is a lesson here for brand managers, marketers and even politicians.  With every fan-base or consumer group there are passionate people at opposite ends of every decision.  However, it’s the people in the middle (less passionate but greater in number) who truly decide things.

We’ll continue keeping an eye on this group as the evolution of facebook continues.

What are "Zuck's" real intentions?

But lately I’ve been feeling like we’re all just hoes to the social media company pimps.  We give more and more time, attention and information to these services, and I want to ask a question that most people seem afraid to:  are these services really worth the short-term gain at the risk of supplanting long term brand equity?

Put another way, for a brand (or even you as an individual) is it worth using these services in lieu of a website, app or interactive model that you’ve built and control yourself?

Yes, twitter and facebook have millions upon millions of users.  Yes, you can use these services to find people you care about all in one spot.  Yes, they’re FREE, and no they don’t require a whole lot of effort.  And with the rapid growth of facebook, it would seem a moot point to even consider NOT using it.

However, we’ve been down this road twice before.  The first time was with a little website called Friendster – a service too ahead of its time, in my opinion, yet one which built a solid userbase of young people and new media professionals.  They thought it would last forever until suddenly, a newer, sexier model came along.  This new network had more features than Friendster and EVERYONE you knew was suddenly using it!  It might be hard to remember, but myspace was once this service.  It was hip, easy, free and you could make it your own little place on the web.  Or so we thought because once again a NEWER network came along and “EVERYONE” got in facebook’s back seat, leaving myspace cold and lonely on the side of the road.

I bring this up because countless entertainment and business brands threw millions of dollars and man hours into myspace, making it their holy grail of online marketing.  Artists dropped their official website in favor of a myspace page.  Whole businesses were born off the back of myspace and there were even professionals in Nashville excited about the arrival of “myspace music charts” saying they would “probably end up replacing Billboard and radio airplay charts.”

It saddens me because that same energy, time and money could have been spent making existing websites better and more scalable.  Brands could have discovered new ways to increase traffic to their existing hubs.  (To be fair, many artists and businesses DID use myspace as a limited tool to drive traffic back to an official site or offer, but these were the exception to the rule.)

So now here we are, repeating the same mistakes with twitter and facebook.  Too many people are once again putting their lives and business hopes in the hands of proprietary networks they don’t have any control over.

I know what some of you will probably say…

“That’s the game, you just have to move where the market takes you.” You know what, I don’t buy that.  Why should you have to follow the whims of whatever company is in vogue at this moment?  Why can’t each of us build a brand and a platform that are one in the same?  The technology is there!  It’s free!  It’s open source!  There’s NO logical excuse for why this can’t be done.

So what should we do?

All of us should continue to use these services, but recognize they are supplementary tools at best.  And as tools, we should always consider how they can help drive traffic back to a hub that YOU control.

If twitter goes away tomorrow, what would you do?

If facebook started charging $30 month to use the service what would you do?

These AREN’T rhetorical questions.  Social media companies can do what they like, and in their path to monetization WILL do whatever THEY feel is in THEIR best interest….not yours.

I want leave you with Molly Wood’s recent CNET rant about facebook’s latest features (click here for that article).  It’s very worth your while, but if you’re too lazy/busy then I give you this gem of a quote:

“There’s nothing wrong with making a LOT of money. But you should not, Facebook, get to make that money by tricking me into making personal information public, by creating an increasingly baffling web of privacy-violating loopholes, and by opting me in to every new moneymaking scheme you come up with. That’s how you lose user trust, and losing user trust is how you lose users.”

Do you really want to build your business strategy around a company like this?

During the Super Bowl, this commercial ran:

A classic example of a great, jam-packed Super Bowl ad with old-school effects.  But many were convinced there was either CGI or some editing tricks involved.  Eager to find out for himself, Tech guru Leo Laporte actually contacted the agency behind the piece, Wieden + Kennedy, and got to the bottom of things:

So not only did Old Spice get the expected impressions and return off the Super Bowl spot, BUT because of the nature of the ad and the online public, received millions of additional hits off online views and community discussion.

Remember – something is viral only when it causes you in the MOMENT of consumption to go “whoah, I have to forward this to (insert friend, family member, boss, etc).”  The incredibly funny and the incredibly shocking are good places to start, but the “how did they do that” route also works, as demonstrated here.

That was all going swimmingly until little over a week ago.  Google released a service called Buzz, a new component for gmail that integrates facebook-like social networking functionality.  On the surface this idea is interesting and actually provides some of the functionality originally promised in Google Wave.  Unfortunately, Buzz has turned out to be a nightmare on every level.

First, it attempts to merge email and social networking – two things that a lot of users still view as mutually exclusive.  Email has grown to become a utilitarian tool – social networking is a mini version of the internet.  Folks use them to communicate in different ways.  Google took a finely tuned, 5-year old service (gmail) and bolted on an untested, totally new service with a totally different form and function.

Second, it was thrown at users automatically as an “opt-out” service, not an “opt-in” one.  Gmail users simply logged in one day and found this mess running.  You had to search for and then remove the service if you didn’t want it, not the other way around.

Third, and most important, Google took the long-established trust of Gmail users and trashed it by circumventing their privacy and publicly displaying information that was otherwise private or obscure.  As a result, Buzz is now on the Federal Trade Commission’s insidious-services-to-watch list and multiple class-action lawsuits have been filed against it.  All within the span of about a week and half.

all avoidable

My biggest problem with this, and the fundamental jist of this post, is that this ALL COULD HAVE BEEN AVOIDABLE.  Google isn’t some little rag-tag “mom and pop” – it’s a major billion-dollar corporation.  Smart people work there.  Common sense should have easily made this a typical, successful release.

Even worse, Facebook has notoriously suffered major privacy snafus themselves, providing any competing business a case study in what NOT to do when rolling out a new feature.  Why did Google not pay attention?

who’s to blame?

Simply put, Google has become too big for it’s own good – too caught up in it’s success to consider the needs and behavior of the public.  Instead of listening to what their users need and creating products around it, they force-feed what they pompously think is best and throw privacy to the wind.  A recent interview with CEO Eric Schmidt proves as much.  Google engineers, who often are responsible for too much of a product roll-out, become more arrogant and blind to what users want.  They ask “why wouldn’t you like this?” after the fact instead of “how would you like this to work?”

And because they’re so big, they likely won’t change.  While Buzz is a failure, it hardly puts a dent in Google’s overall business.  The stock price may get dinged, legal defense will have to be paid for and egos will be bruised, but this event won’t sink the ship.

the point?

Even though Google won’t change, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn from their failures.  Small and medium businesses can’t afford such costly mistakes and rule #1 should ALWAYS apply: know your users, know the marketplace.

Google is huge, but slips like this are what give competitors the edge.

Three Internet companies — Affinion, Vertrue, and Webloyalty — and their hundreds of partners were pilloried by Senate lawmakers and academics on Tuesday for deceptive marketing tactics.

“[T]he companies we are investigating have figured out very clever ways to manipulate consumers’ buying habits so they can make a quick buck,” said John D. Rockefeller IV, chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, in a statement.

Read the full story here…

We’re reaching a critical point where the future of the internet is now in question and we may end up with something very different than what we have now.  Imagine a United States where Comcast or AT&T could block any websites they deem inappropriate or “bandwidth heavy” or even give faster access to content they own and control.  Imagine sitting down to download some music from iTunes or watch TV on Hulu only to find that your ISP requires a higher, unconventional fee to access that kind of content.

Fairness and open standards are what allowed the internet to become the economic powerhouse it is today.  In order for future innovation and entrepreneurship to occur, we must support net neutrality.   Please contact your local congressperson or senator and ask them to preserve the open internet.