Original posted at http://blog.brand-yourself.com.

We often discuss Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, your resume, networking  etc. one at the time or maybe in pairs, but seldom the whole picture is described. Your brand is the sum of the all parts of the communication and information channels you do use, and sometimes by the ones you do not use. Therefore it is essential to have a strategy for how to communicate in the different channels over time. So let look at a checklist for how to work with such a strategy. I assume that you have already defined your brand before starting with this strategy.

The desired outcome

This is the foundation of every strategy, if you have a clear sense of what you are and what you do want to achieve with your communication you are much more likely to get the desired result. I would like you to take this to the next level and defining what outcomes you will get if you get the result you want. By outcome I am referring to the consequences and changes that the result will ignite.

Example: The result is to “being known as an expert in automotive gear box development”, the desired outcome could be “work 20h/week as a consultant with the same salary as before”.

Who would yo like to reach and where are they?

Every person you interact with has different capabilities to help you achieve your desired outcome. Some has zero possibility and some has 100 %. The question you should ask yourself is which persons has the best possibility to get you to where you want to be. If you do not know who it is, then ask yourself how to find that out.

The next step is to identify where these persons are active. Which channels do they use/read/visit?

How do they act – how do you act in each channel?

Once you have identified the key persons for your communication (the Key Opinion Leaders) and identified the channels they are using, start analyzing whom they interact with and in what way are they communicating. Adjust your message and communication to the recipient but don’t loose yourself by changing who you are. Your message and your style should be adjusted to 1) the person(s) you are communicating with, and 2) the appropriate way to communicate in each channel. Imagine yourself talking to an important person on twitter, using 140 characters with a link to more information in the end and maybe a hashtag for categorization. Now imagine interacting in the exact same way when meeting someone over lunch. That person would most probably wonder what the hell you are talking about.

Do you work systematically with a publishing calendar?

To be consistent and have a clear, focused theme across the different channels will make your brand stand out. Also to have common elements that identify yourself  will give the recipient a solid image of who you are. To maintain a high level of consistency and quality of the communication I would recommend you to create a calendar where you plan your activities in the near future. Each entry should incluce

1. Channel (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blog, newsletter, networking events, phone call, seminar etc.)
2. Target audience (specific person or group of people – communicate to attract the right persons)
3. Topic (make sure your topic or subject for discussion is something you can stand up for and that you have made your homework in the area)
4. Desired outcome (when publishing or leaving the networking event – what is the result and outcome that you desire?)

You want to reach me – why and what do you want me to do?

Last, always keep in mind that we all play the game of givers gain, and if I feel that I can trust you and that you communicate confidence, you have to let me know how I can help you take the next step to achieving your goals. Be clear to the recipient what you want them to do and how they can do it, that way you are a lot closer to actually getting it.

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I årets upplaga av MyMission var jag (Ola Rynge) med och tävlade med en ny typ av kundvårdssystem, cSocialClub:

“cSocialClub är en plattform för kundvårdsprogram med fokus på affärsnytta där företagens kunder enkelt kan mäta och belöna sina kunders varumärkesstärkande och säljande engagemang i sociala medier.”

Tyvärr blev idén inte nominerad i den tuffa konkurrensen av 350 andra affärsidéer inom upplevelseindustrin. Vi vill skicka ett stort grattis till följande som blivit nominerade i de olika kategorierna:

Affärsidé

Badanka Kvack – Johan Van Leer
Vera Snook – Marie Bergwall
Bymby.se – Linda Eriksson
Bloggboken – Juliana Fritzhand
Freenet – Ararat Pogosean

Nytänk

Fyrform – Christal Knappe
Unbreakella – Karin Stammarnäs
UNICO Topfloor – Maritza Molin
Human Watch – Henrik Paulsson
Food Square – Sabiqah Bahrom

Wildcard

Multiper viewgadget – Hamed Ordibehesht
Blind Screen – Robert Nordman
ÅretRuntsommarcafe – Linda Gustafsson
Ultimate Gaming – Ulf Fors
Hard Money – Antonio Poté

Kulturbidrag

Combined Art – Karl Winroth
“Art to go” – Elisabeth Bilander
Undefined – Ulrika Arvidsson
Fabulera Mera! – Karin Ahlin
Stadsgungor – Malin Wallin

Prisutdelningen äger rum på Brewhouse den 26 maj klockan 18.00

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You have probably already read a few posts on how to monitor your brand, you might even have set up a Google Alerts as explained in this post by my fellow writer at brand-yourself.com, Meg Guiseppi. In her post Meg explains very well what you should monitor (I would also like to add former employers, colleagues and clients to the list) and she has a good list of what to do with it.

What I have noticed, along with quite a few other bloggers, is that Google Alerts misses a lot of local results. Also, it returns quite a few older results that are irrelevant due to being outdated. In a time when we get flooded with information, this can be really annoying. Another drawback with Google Alerts is that you have to add keywords one by one which makes it hard to manage when you add a lot of keywords.

There are a few options out there that I think do a better job, such as SocialMention for social media, Google Blogsearch for blogs etc. where you can set up RSS-feeds and monitor your search results. This is better than Google Alerts in the sense that it gives better results, but it is even harder to manage multiple search words when doing it in different channels.

For this reason we have developed Rynge Media Monitor (currently in beta). I would like to invite the readers of this blog to try it out. Just sign up for a beta account and within a few days you will be given access to the system. It is easy to manage; you can set up a feed for each interest area (eg. My brands or My former employers) and in each feed you can enter the keywords you´d like to monitor. The result will be presented in a feed that you can add to your favorites RSS-reader. However, I recommend using Google Reader since it is set up for easy sharing of interesting results.

Please let me know your experiences with monitoring your brands and other key words and also how we can improve the Rynge Media Monitor to be even more useful to the users. Thanks!

This post was originally posted at http://blog.brand-yourself.com.

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If you are a Gmail user, follow Ola Range’s official Google Buzz profile at: http://www.google.com/profiles/ola.rynge

This is how Google explains Google Buzz:

“Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there’s always been a big social network underlying Gmail.” For more information about features and how it work, visit this post from Mashable.

One could argue that we do not need another social network, but I think there are some factors that make Buzz interesting:

• Gmail user base of 170 million accounts makes it one of the largest social networks in an instant. The question is how many of the users will use the social service.
• Easy integration of other services makes it easy to connect and share tweets, flickr photos etc. in Buzz when published in other networks.
• One stop. You check your mail and social network in one place, and connect easily with new contacts as you start e-mail conversations with them.
• Mobile and location based updates with other Google services (see movie below)

To be really interesting, I think it will need more features and maybe the most interesting feature is that it is supposed to be an open system. “Our goal is to make Buzz a fully open and distributed platform for conversations. We’re building on a suite of open protocols to create a complete read/write developer API.” (Official Google Blog).

I will use it, maybe not as much as Facebook and Twitter, but my major concern is how to use it in a business context and would love feedback from you on how you think one can use it.

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More and more information is being published online, on news sites, social media, blogs and discussion boards. Knowing what is being said or reported about your organization or industry is essential to establish communication with the press, your clients and other stake holders. It is also a great source of information in the decision making process.

We have been developing Rynge Media Monitor to provide a tool that is easy to set up, easy to integrate and use and that provide the essential data for your organization. News websites, social media, forums, blogs and video blogs are monitored on an hourly basis to track the issues important to you.

Do we need another media monitor tool? I think so since the ones out there are overly complex, focusing on fancy graphs, big corporations and lack the focus of business value and usability. The Rynge Media Monitor will be easy to use, we will provide cases for how to best use the tools and want to create a dialog with the users to constantly improving the quality of service and increasing the business value.

During the spring we will launch the service to the public, but if you want access already today, sign up for our private beta.

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This is the second article in a series about Creative Relationship Marketing – Customer focused traditional and social media marketing (the first post can be found here). Since the abbreviation CRM was already taken, I will use CRM² for Creative Relationship Marketing. I think the extra ² is suitable since the Creative Relationship Marketing approach takes CRM to a new level. And since it is on a higher level, you have to make sure that the right resources are in place.

To think marketing and being creative about it is not something that comes naturally to everyone, and even then corporate traditions and culture will make anyone losing their creativity if it is not stimulated. So how can you make sure if you have the right person for the job?

First I usually look for someone within the (marketing) organization that has an interest for new methods of spreading the message and are not afraid of trial-and-error, but at the same time have a keen ear to customer requests and reactions. The person should also have some experience or at least interest in the new social technologies. Even if a lot of the social relations tools available are free or cheap, there is a cost involved since every relationship needs nurturing and care, which consumes time. Time that the person and his manager must be willing to invest to make the effort worthwhile.

So what if there are no one with the right qualities and/or time? Then there are basically two options:

1. Find a new co-worker suitable to the task
Employing someone is always a big step, but the reward of having a dedicated CRM² officer can be immense if it is the right person.

2. Create a long term relation with a consultant
This is a faster and more flexible solution, but normally a more expensive one.

The advantage of a consultant is that he/she (hopefully) is an expert in the field, but the disadvantage is that he/she is not an expert in the industry and your company. In most cases the best solution is a mix of a consultant and a current or new employee, where the consultant is a part of creating strategies, routines and plan. If you have found a great partner to work with, the consultant can inspire and awaken the creativity of the employee(s) and coach them to learn how to think in a creative manner and hence develop new creative ways of marketing the company’s products and services.

So, look at your organization to see if you have the resources available to enter the world of CRM². When you have done that, let’s take a look at setting goals for your new marketing efforts.

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I do not like the phrase “social media”, even if I work with it every day. The reason is that it tries to describe something new and often in a free standing context. Creative Relationship Marketing is broader but also more to the point. It is broader in the sense that it also include the use of traditional media in new ways, but more to the point that it is about marketing and building relationships.

Every day we market our product and services, our ideas and ourselves, but it is really all about communications and relations. This is my view on the current and future of marketing and communication.

Creative Relationship Marketing

Social media is not new. Viral marketing has been around since forever, online forums since the time of the Bulletin Board Systems (pre-Internet) and real time communication existed in the early days of the Internet via IRC and ICQ, blogs been around for decades etc. The thing we call social media is really just new web services that has reached a broad enough target group to be interested to marketers.

What is new is the creative use of the media and the focus on creating relationships with clients. Well, this is actually not new either, at least not for some persons/companies, but the mainstream use of creative solutions are new. Many of the mainstream users still have still to understand that it is about relationship building and not about pushing a message through as many channels as possible.

Ons should also observe that for many persons the above is not new at all, if you are part of the younger generations (born in the 80′s or later) you are probably more prone to test new channels without reflecting over that they are new and creative. You are then probably more interested in the functionality and what problems it solves. You can belong to another generation and still have this focus, but you will find that the percentage is much higher for the young.

The basis of marketing and communication (that you learn in the universities) are not very hard, but to apply it with creativity and gain a competitive advantage, that is the complex part.

Over the next weeks I will go into different aspects of Creative Relationship Marketing and how you can apply this thinking to get the most out of your business. Even though the posts will be business focused, with just a ounce of creativity, you can apply it to develop yourself and your personal relations as well (if you make a distinction between business and personal).

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According to a report by the social media analytics company Sysomos, Sweden has 75 000 users or 0,54 % out of the total 14 million users in April 2009. This puts Sweden on the 15th place of number of twitter users in the world. However most probably these users are early adopters and not mainstream users, and if it 85 % that do not post on a daily basis, then it is only a little more than 10 000 really active Swedish users on Twitter.

You probably ask yourself how useful Twitter is as a marketing tool for reaching the Swedish audience, but then you should also consider that more than 70 % of the Twitter users joined during the first five months of 2009.

- Ola Rynge

Ola Rynge is the CEO of The Rynge Group and author of the The Rynge Blog, which focuses on Personal Branding as a personal development tool and how it can be be used to create more opportunities for entrepreneurs.
Connect with Ola on Twitter @rynge.