In the realm of corporate branding, you would be hard-pressed to not admit that communicators within an organization have lost a great deal of control when it comes to shaping an organization’s brand image. The main culprit of this is the crossing of social media over the past couple of years from being just a niche activity to gaining a more homogeneous acceptance amongst the common Internet user. It has stamped its mark on molding public opinion and perception through platform giants such as Facebook and Twitter, and, much to the chagrin of brand managers, a good bulk of this shaping of corporate identity has fallen outside their locus of control.

So what has changed? If we take a look at some of the key trends with regards to how brands used to connect with the consumer, taking pre-2008 as the line just before social media crossed over in terms of adoption, we can see how this shift has slowly but surely taken place. Splitting this shift into two sections, namely external branding i.e. communicating the brand and content to the consumer, and internal branding i.e. brand creation and management, we get a sense of just how pervasive the effect of social media has been today on a company’s branding efforts.

Prior to 2008, brands went through the media for content creation and distribution, and weren’t actually creators themselves. Going along this vein, they also didn’t directly connect with their consumers directly, but rather, utilized “eyeballs” from publishers to get access to their desired audience. This was the typical external branding strategy before the social media machine kicked in. Now that usage of social media platforms is rampant, brands are looking more to engage and build relationships directly with their consumers, and also to utilize these platforms to create and distribute content themselves. From an internal branding perspective, brands used to have a great deal of control in dictating the brand persona and its consistency, but this new shift has caused somewhat of a loss of control, given that the vastness of the social media universe far outweighs the reach of even the biggest brands, and they end up playing catch up instead of dictating the pace with the onset of user-generated content.

In this seemingly-chaotic mess that has now been created, brands need to accept the fact that this new idea of corporate branding is a symbiotic relationship that exists not in the wrestling of control for creative dominance, but a compromise between the two parties that may amplify a company’s brand far further than they originally may have been able to do on their own. Given the choice of technology out there, some of the steps brands can take to gain a foothold in this volatile world are:

• Developing a comprehensive reputation management system that allows for tracking and gauging of a brand’s influence across various platforms
• Keeping a close watch on channel partners and their projection of your brand, as well as the community that dwell within that channel and how they respond to your brand
• Creating a “buddy” system between volunteer brand advocates and people who are new to your brand and using that as an early feedback system for any potential problems

Tags: Branding, Digital Strategy, Social Media