Improve Communication for Effective Online Branding

Whenever we talk about the elements of online branding people start listing few names like, blog, social media, search engine marketing, networking etc. Do you think that having these elements in your marketing mix will make you a super brand!

If you are a twitter user, you will often see that hundreds of people are following you for no reason. Ok, they have a reason. Many twitter marketers think that once they start following you, you will also start following them as a return. Thus, if the twitter marketer follows 1000 twitters, he or she may get 100 followers in return. Is it a good marketing strategy for your brand? Do you really think that those 100 people following you have any reason to uphold your brand?

The same thing happens with different social bookmarking websites. To promote a brand or business, marketers often start a new account in different social media websites and start bookmarking all the pages of their website. These profiles do not normally have anything to do with their personal choices and companies often support this on the ground that this is just an official space.

As far as blogging is concerned, many companies add a blog with their corporate website. They mainly use this blog to tell about their products or services. They often claim that as it is a corporate blog, it should only talk about their products and services. Some blogs even exclude the industry from their concern list. Now, is there any difference between these blog posts and a company sponsored advertisement or press release! Recent surveys by independent sources prove that people do not believe corporate blog as far as information is concerned. They prefer personal recommendation, online newspapers and even social networks more than a corporate blog. Just to add, if you run a blog just to talk about your products and services, how are you different from a press release syndicator?

We have another very interesting thing to note here. What if you install two blogs in your website and name them "news releases" and "blog" respectively! People will expect different things from those two links. A blog post (more personal) is different from a news story (more official) and people expect different things from these two.

However, after all, you are publishing your own stories in that blog and this reduces. This is enough to deteriorate the trust factor further. If you want to make the most out of a blog, make sure that you write about your industry there to win some trust from your target market.

Blogs and social networks do not necessarily mean that you are into "web 2.0" era. In web 2.0 scenario, people are bothered about the transparency in business. It is about opening up different avenues to communicate directly with the target market. It is less about selling product - it is about developing a lasting relationship with the target market in the most cost effective way and in a one to one environment. T is about winning the trust of your target market as a reliable source.

Once you can use these basic elements in your online branding and marketing mix, you will gain the edge over your competitors.