Just sat through the first 10 minutes of arguably the worst session at SXSW2010. It had a great title – Interactive Agency Workflow: Design and Development Process – and based on the full room and the fact that SXSW staff were doing a “1-in 1-out” process to keep the room from going over fire code capacity, you could tell a lot of us IA agency folks were looking for real insights.

Unfortunately, the material was nothing new, was presented in a non-visual way and became very sales-y, very quickly. Almost instantaneously the tweets started out about the presentation:

Fail

The exodus began and everyone started ganging up on the guys who presented on twitter. (Don’t believe me, see for yourself here, the results are funny and sad).  I ended up feeling bad for the presenters… because they were unable to stop the onslaught (presentation was built already and underway, the only feedback they were getting at the time was the people leaving the room). But online the slaughter was on and has continued since it ended. I felt bad, but in the end their session should have been better. So it truly was a mistake.

This experience got me thinking about the type of effect a failed brand touch can have on your business.  This could be a bad presentation, a failed webinar, a buggy product launch or any other number of things.

In the ‘old days’ if you make a presentation and it doesn’t go well, you chalk it up as a learning experience, your audience chalks it up as a waste of time and you both move on, probably to never interact again. Prior to social media if you had a product that failed to deliver, people could call or email you (or the Better Business Bureau), but rarely did they have the means for public, instant feedback and an audience of interested readers.

Since the dawn of social media, feedback is instantaneous and often it’s brutally honest. What can you do to protect your brand reputation in the days of social media (besides not giving horrible presentations)?

Make Sure You Know You Failed

Sure there were clues during the presentation (people leaving and potentially chuckling quietly), but the folks from Archetype probably didn’t know how bad it was until they look at the twitter hash tag search results. You need to make sure you know you failed and are being flogged online, to do this you need to:

• Monitor the results of brand searches – use twitter and google searches (or a twitter tool or client, rss feader, google reader, etc) and save searches for your company name and key terms.
• Solicit feedback from others at the event. Hopefully you have people at the presentation who will give you constructive criticism (if you don’t, you should, this will help you improve your public speaking and presence).

You Know You Failed, Now What?

1. Publicly acknowledge your mistake(s). This is important and should be through a public forum (blog post, tweet, press release, web page, etc). Once acknowledged, start reaching out to the people who are publicly pointing a finger at you and apologize that they had a bad experience and insist you’ll try better next time. Honestly most people will stop publicly flogging your company if you just acknowledge the source of their frustration, sincerely apologize and tell them you strive for improvement.
2. Strive for improvement. Fix the problems and try to prevent them from happening again.
3. Move on to hopefully bigger and better things.

–
FYI: I have a lot of other posts queued up and will be publishing them daily for the next few days. This one came out first since it was the most timely.

“The Cobbler’s Kids Have No Shoes”

You may have heard this one before, but this old adage essentially means that because the shoemaker is so busy making shoes for his customers they end up having no time for to make them for their own children. And so it often goes for marketing agencies and their own marketing collateral especially virtual agencies without a large staff.

We’re trying to buck that trend here at Spoke and you’re looking at phase one, a redesigned Spoken Whirred blog. The design of this caused me to reflect on how we got here and the branding process in general.

Defining Brand

Branding derives it’s meaning from ‘branding a mark onto something’ or what you would see cowboys do with a hot branding iron to cattle in older Westerns.¹ This term has evolved into modern marketing parlance to define how a business or product makes a mark on their target audiences mind. Today branding encompasses a wide variety of things including:

• the logo and type treatment.
• the key messaging you use to define your business and the voice you use to communicate to your audience.
• and of course the visual elements – color palettes, graphic design, illustration and photography you use in advertising, website and other marketing collateral.

Since your company’s brand includes all of these elements it evolves over time, usually starting with a logo and messaging and then bigger brand “anchor” pieces like your website, corporate brochures, trade show collateral and advertisements. Each subsequent marketing tactic is adding another layer to your brand, and contributing to what a potential customer will view, hear or read when making a purchasing decision about the business.

The Invisible or Inconsistent Brand

Problems with brands usually creep in as part of normal business operations:

• You do an one-off brochure before a big product launch or tradeshow
• You create your own PowerPoint design based on a template
• You let the magazine or newspaper take your logo and make an ad (with inconsistent fonts and messaging)

The next thing you know, you have a inconsistent brand. These inconsistencies aren’t things potential customers will consciously notice or point out, but taken together your inconsistent use of fonts & colors, the changing corporate tone and voice and having different version of your logo on each thing they see will give them a less favorable opinion of your business and can lead to lost opportunities or business.

Become a Brand Bully

How do you avoid this…? As a business owner you need to define your brand, know that it will change over time and remain vigilant about keeping strict standards about how your business is represented (or shameless plug time – better yet, outsource to an agency like Spoke to do it for you).

What does this have to do with this blog? Well, the design we originally used for this blog no longer fit Spoke’s brand as it evolved, so we decided to redesign it and get it back on track.  This is the first step in a brand refining process that every company needs to go through… Even cobbler’s occasionally need to make shoes for themselves.

---

Author’s note: I will be recapping my daily experiences at SXSW interactive conference starting Friday, March 12. Follow me on twitter to get real time updates of SXSW as it occurs.

“The Brand” might not be officially dead, but it probably shouldn’t buy green bananas, either. If you don’t believe me, look no further than the aisles of any grocery store, and note the proliferation of private-label products.

Last week, several consumer-packaged-goods companies…Kellogg’s, Kraft and Sara Lee reported weaker-than-(they supposedly)-expected earnings, a weaker short-term forecast, and a negative outlook for growth. Every day, CPG companies are losing share to lower-cost products as consumers realize that the store brand is identical to the branded product in almost every way…except for the price.

If Wall Street mavens are looking for the next big bubble, it might just be coming from a big box of branded soap. Whatever companies think their brand is worth, they’re wrong. Whatever equity they think they have invested in their brand can be lost in an instant (see Budweiser).  During a merger or acquisition, Wall Street places a valuation on a brand’s worth, and they call it ‘goodwill’, and list it as an asset. This is now commonly perceived to be the value of the brand.

Here’s the problem. Whatever equation they use to evaluate the ‘worth’ of a brand, it is a made up equation (“um…what if we multiply it by three?”) Second, they’re entirely wrong. Each and every brand is teetering on worthlessness.

In the ‘good ol’ days’, brands served a purpose (“That’s my cow!”), and later, they helped consumers make purchases from trusted sources in a crowded marketplace (“I like Quaker oatmeal.”).

When information was scarce, brands were necessary in order for decisions to be made efficiently. The brand was a nice mental shortcut for consumers. In a marketplace crowded with a number of similar products, a brand can be a shopper’s friend…like a nod from an old buddy…tried, true and trusted. Put it in the shopping cart.

BUT. That was when information was scarce, and most consumers got their information from paid advertising. Technology continues to make information free and increasingly targeted, in addition, social networking has spawned a new breed of experts (mommy-bloggers, really?), making it easier than ever to avoid paid sponsorship (note the re-explosion of in-show product placement (Texaco Star Theater, anyone?).

The truth is, when given enough information and incentive, consumers will switch brands so fast it would make a sailor blush. It could be argued that I’m brand-loyal to Apple Computers. I have never purchased anything but Macs. I love the product (and make fun of my wife’s PC fairly often). However…if a company came out with an identical product for less money…say…The Banana Computer – I’d buy it in a heartbeat.

Consumers are brand loyal to their wallet, the value you offer them, and the bottom line.

(investor disclosure: I don’t own any of the above-mentioned stocks, but I once dated a girl named Sara Lee)