A Branding MAD Lib
January 2, 2011
As a new year begins, I always spend a bunch of time pondering my past, my future, and where I’m going. A big part of that is branding and positioning – who am I, and what problem do I want the people in my life to have when they think of only of me.
This year, I have a different situation – in all of my endeavours (MAD Security, The Hacker Aacademy, Information Security Leaders), I have partners. I can’t just think of where I want to go all by myself – I’m reliant on other minds to co-develop and agree to the direction we’re taking.
So, I came up with a rather simple way of thinking about positioning, direction and vision: a simple MAD lib:
(I / {name of entity}) am/is/are the best (name of primary activity) in the (geographic region / location / entity) . (I / {name of entity}) am/is/are also quite good at (name of secondary activity) .
You’ll know that you have a real brand statement when you can have an independent third-party read the statement that you have prepared and agree that it is (or could be) true.
The key to the exercise is to resist the temptation to have more than one primary activities (or to make the activity overly broad) – a brand statement is about your unique differentiator. You may truly be good at multiple things, but you can only really be known as the best at one thing. And the more precise and specific you are about your brand statement, the more likely it is to reflect some amount of truth.
(As a note: the second “is also quite good at” is optional, but left there because lots of people have secondary skills that they are known for as well)
An example… a not-so-good brand-madlib:
Michael Vick is the best quarterback in the NFL . Michael Vick is also quite good at being contrite for his past wrongs. .
It’s not so good because there’s some amount of argument whether Michael Vick is the best quarterback in the NFL. At the very least, Peyton Manning and Tom Brady might have something to say about it. Now, this one, I don’t think anybody could disagree with:
Michael Vick is the best dual-threat running/passing quarterback in the NFL . Michael Vick is also quite good at raising pit-bull puppies. . (Yes, that was a low blow…)
In fact, that one’s so good that if you removed Michael Vick’s name, most people would still know who the statement referred to.
So… what’s the brand MAD lib for your company? How about your own personal MAD lib?
Social Media Marketing in Security – Part 2
January 25, 2008
I started to write a response to Anton’s comment to my previous post on the subject, and realized that it was almost as long as the blog entry itself. Really, I think that Anton is just being pedantic and playing Devil’s Advocate, but he makes an important point:
“Well, what is a company if not a collection of people? … I am on LinkedIn = LogLogic on LinkedIn. I blog and a post goes to Facebook -> LogLogic message speads.”
And that seems to be the entirety of the “strategy” being used by most security companies. Rather than using any sort of coordinated strategy around branding through the social media sites, it seems like most of the companies figure that their employees will “get the message across” by accident.
Something tells me that Anton’s activities on LinkedIn aren’t part of a coordinated strategy conceived by the branding team. Nor is there a LogLogic strategy for the use of Facebook.
Not to pick on anyone, but I’ll use an example I’m intimately friendly with (because I started the blog when I was there) – how is nCircle using those tools to market their blog? Simple answer: they’re not. There’s nobody pushing the use of LinkedIn Answers or Yahoo Answers, no twittering of blog posts, no use of Facebook or (though I hate it) MySpace to drive traffic and/or awareness of what they’re doing. They might argue that it’s not part of branding to their targets, but I’d disagree – I know a lot of people in their target audience that are on each of the social media entities above.
While I singled out nCircle, they at least have a blog, unlike most of the companies in our space.
For two good examples of “how it could be otherwise”, check out the way that Jason Alba uses twitter entries to promote every blog entry he writes. Or the way that Stacy Thayer is using Facebook to market the SOURCE Conference. (Aside: have you bought your tickets yet? They’re going really fast.
Social Media and Security Marketing..
January 21, 2008
So, this conversation has come up over and over again in the last few days – I keep ending up in detailed conversations with security marketing people about how to create a presence using social media.
It’s amazing to me that information security people are always on the cutting edge of technology (kept there by, in my opinion, the fact that the most vulnerable technology is always the newest). But we’re terribly bad (as an industry) at keeping up with the cutting edge in marketing. I look at someone like Jason Alba, who is a brilliant marketer with his blog, LinkedIn (and wrote the book on it), Facebook (he wrote the book on that one too), and Twitter.
And then I look at the companies in our industry. Nothing. Zip. Nada.
At least not that I’ve seen. So, I’m putting this one out there: who has good examples of security companies using any of the tools above? How about it? Anything? Bueller?
I’ve got a million ideas about how this could be done, but I’m not seeing it out there in the world. And it makes me sad.