Twiststl

Our resident blogger is out of town, so we thought we would take this opportunity to share some useful articles with our readers. Given the medium through which we’re sharing this information, what better topic of the day than blogging? We spend a lot of time explaining to our clients how important it is to regularly update their blogs. Getting a dialogue started with your readers is a difficult but important part of defining yourself as a company and staying engaged with your target market. If you’re not sure on how to get started, check out Mashable’s “How To” on creating a successful company blog.

Last week we posted a blog entry on personal branding and the opportunity that the 2010 Olympic athletes now have at their feet. I started to make the point that personal branding is something that everyone can and should invest energy in, but we thought it important enough to re-visit the importance of developing a strong personal. Though the majority of the previous post focused on people that are already famous, a person doesn’t need to be famous in order to create a personal brand. Using the right outlets, anyone can use new media to develop a brand that will help gain them recognition. 

It’s been almost 13 years since Tom Peters published the article “The Brand Called You” in Fastweek Magazine. Peters’ article acknowledged the importance of personal branding years before most people started buying into the concept. Today, the idea of personal branding is not only alive, it’s flourishing. With the emergence of social media, individuals are now able to create and promote their own personal brand to a larger audience and more effectively than was possible in 1997.

In the past, celebrities were the only people with strong personal brands, and to a certain extent their brand was a product of the advertisers that wanted to use them to sell a product, service, or lifestyle. Take for example the Olympic stars of yore. After the medal counts were in, advertisers would consider which athletes had been most successful, the popularity their sport, and which ones were the most likeable before determining who would get their face on the front of the Wheaties box or on the cover of Sports Illustrated. What advertisers were doing was essentially assessing the personal brand of these athletes and determining who they could best use to their advantage. But the system has changed. Athletes no longer have to wait around to be made into a household name; they can do it for themselves. Social media gives individuals, particularly those that already have a following, the opportunity to proactively create their own brands and promote themselves.

As social media marketing becomes a bigger and more important component of businesses’  marketing strategies, many people have started questioning how it is possible to measure the return on investment of social media efforts. Measuring the ROI of social media endeavors is not as simple as counting the number of followers, fans, or friends you have. It involves a combination of things that indicate the level of engagement of the people that are a part of your network. The success of your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin pages are really gauged by their ability to drive traffic to your company’s website.