SxSW: Tweethouse, Day1/Session1 – Branding

Greg and I just arrived in Austin last night and the weather is gorgeous! The panels, parties and events are just starting to heat up but we launched our SxSW at the TweetHouse at Mellow Johnny’s Bike Shop.

The first panel at the TweetHouse started with moderator Brian Solis asking the panel to provide their definition of branding. (I’m paraphrasing here but these are the key takeaways):

• Serial Entrepreneur Peter Shankman from Help A Reporter Out: It’s nice to have good awareness of your name, but the real goal should be to communicate the good things your name represents.
• Adventure Girl: Branding is a 2-way street…don’t forget about engagement.
• Mobile Marketer from Red Fish Media Matt McKenna got some laughs by quoting the definition of branding from Wikipedia: The process of a symbol being burned into the skin of a living person.
• @cbarger from Chevrolet: Branding is finding out what the audience wants to do instead of imposing yourself on your customers.
• Barb Dybad from Mashable noted:  It’s really about establishing a personality:  “If your brand was a person, how would it behave?”  She added that you have to be unique, and creative with your execution of the brand…but the key is to “put a face on it!”

Everyone emphasized the need for establishing trust from peer recommendations on Twitter instead of MadMen era style “This is who we are.”

Chevrolet’s Christopher Barger shared with the audience how they used Twitter when they were going through Chapter 11. He said that in their dissemination of content, they tried to strike about a 25-75% ratio between “here’s what we’re putting out” vs. “what questions do you have that we can answer?” The key, in his opinion, was to ask and answer questions more often then “broadcasting.”

Peter Shankman chimed in “If you want to broadcast, buy a TV spot!”

Adventure Girl, a Twitter celeb who has over a million followers, talked about how listening to her fans helped mold her brand and change her content focus.  She said she started by tweeting travel tips “until Travelzoo, Jetblue and tons of others started doing that.”  When she saw how redundant that type of content was becoming on Twitter, she reached out to her audience and asked them what they wanted to hear from her. They answered in droves: more lifestyle insights.  “They said, ‘you’re  always traveling to all these cool places, tell us about your adventures!“  So she changed her focus to be more about her personal experiences and journeys then about information or deals that they could find anywhere.  It worked incredibly well. “My audience helped me create my brand.”

Similar to a B2B Magazine breakfast panel that Greg, Ramon and I attended a few weeks ago in NYC, the topic of using Twitter for Customer Service became a big topic of conversation.

Barb Dybad from Mashable: “I think there’s a benefit to customer service when you do it in public. Not only are you solving someone’s issue but you’re showing others that you’re helping customers…A restaurant can figure out things about where they are going wrong – like ‘your portions are too small.’”  The realtime nature of this is important.”

Peter (from Help A Reporter Out) chimed in, “It’s a great early warning system…this could just be the problem of one disgruntled person, or it could be a symptom of a massive issue that’s about to become a scandal and you can hear about it and address it before the world learns it’s even happening.”

Chevy’s Christopher Barger (@cbarger) said boldly, “Turn it over to your most loyal customers and let them run it for you…give your best brand-advocates control. Even for just a week!” He relayed the story of how they gave people Chevy’s for a week and let them create videos, photos, they said ‘Our brand is you this week -’ and it went up on Facebook, on Twitter. We got amazing, highly viral content. “There’s a level of trust you have to reach with these guys…picking the right people is key. But they will define it their own way. We put know checks in place – what they created we published in our customer-branded site.”

Brian Solis (the monitor, and A-list marketing blogger) said there was recent research that revealed there are a significant number of customers on Twitter who joined specifically for “specials, offers and deals…and those are immediately monetizable.”

Follow the panelists on Twitter: @skydiver, @redfishmedia, @venturegirl, @cbarger, @doctorparadox, @briansolis.