One of the main reasons that I am glad that they aren’t around anymore is that no one, including me, connected with this project ever asked the question: What do you want this site to do for you? Of course now I ask the question as a matter of routine.

What I am noticing now that time has passed, business owners are doing the same thing with social media. ” We need a social media presence” and that’s the end of the sentence, and I suspect, the end of the thought process. That’s unfortunate, because with social media, you’re playing with fire.

Brand Love

So how does a company build a community around their brand? There are a few steps, and not all of them are simple.

Define your brand as a persona: What does your brand like? Dislike? Stand for? Stand against? What is the ethos of your brand? What is your brand promise? Your brand story? And what kind of car would it drive? Some of these questions sound silly, but you’ll need to look at your brand as an individual actor amongst a group of actors in the social media ecosystem.

Once you have defined your brand as a persona, then develop a list of keywords that have a connection to your brand. This is a good time to break out that mind-mapping app and gather people who know your brand and whose judgement you trust. The more diverse the group the better.

Now that you have found your brand’s persona, who are the people that would gravitate towards the products and services that represent your brand at it’s best? What do they like? Dislike? Stand for? Once you have identified that audience, then come up with the keywords that connect to that audience.

See how those keywords mesh. When you combine those lists, you may come up with new keywords. Make that your master list.

Now, if you haven’t already, set up your social media touch points; Facebook and Twitter at a minimum. Once those are set up, make sure that all of your other touch points mention your social media presence. Current customers can be a great way to build your fan base.

Okay. So everything is set up to go after new fans. Four steps:

Invite: Through your social media and other channels, invite your target audience to join your fan page or follow you on Twitter. You can find these people by searching the Twitterverse or Facebook using your previously developed keywords and see who comes up. Engage them honestly in your authentic brand voice and ask them to check you out. Some will, some won’t. The trick is to keep at it.

Incentivize: Integral to the invite process is to create an incentive for them to like your brand or follow you. This incentive needs to align with the values of your brand and the values of your audience. If your brand is aligned against an environmentally-conscious group, perhaps a $1.00 contribution to reduce their carbon footprint for every like might get them to sign up.

Impress: Show your audience how authentic your brand is and gain credibility with this group and their trust. Give examples of when you’re putting your money where your mouth is, or show real world examples of how your product is helping people just like them.

Interact: Here is where many businesses drop the ball. Once you have initiated a conversation with your audience, you must continue to communicate with them and respond to them as if you are in a real conversation (because you are). You must also remember that your brand is just one of the people speaking in this many-to-many communications model. Of those that actually try your product or service, make sure that they are blown away. If you do create an impression on (hopefully delight) a customer, invite them (again) to make their thoughts known on your social media page, regardless of their experience. They will feel heard. Through this process, you will create brand advocates who will make the job of getting new sign-ups easier.

Remember those keywords? When you make a post, any post, make sure that at least one of those keywords are included in every post or tweet. Make good use of the hash-tag (#) in Twitter AND Facebook. This will make it easier for others to find you. Over time, your brand will become associated with those keywords and in the minds of your new, growing, vibrant fan base.

Mind map of social media strategy for Celebrations on Market

I’d love to hear any thoughts you may have on the subject and any details about your experience creating/maintaining your social media strategy.

Seriously.

It’s cool to take a design and develop a system around it. Right now, I am working on brand guidelines for a client that is undergoing a complete rebrand. It started innocently enough…”Hey, can you whip up a sales video for us?” “We need a new white paper design, can you help?”

Before too long, a style developed and the client decided that it was the look of their new brand. Most times, with bigger entities, there is a more prolonged process to defining the look, feel and voice (yes, voice) of a brand before it is deployed.  Small businesses tend to wing it just a little more. With the proper documentation of a project, you can define a brand based on the project at hand.

Many times, a new project helps the business owner(s) define what is important and what their brand actually stands for. When you have that information, it can be fairly easy to extrapolate to a brand standard. So it is with my new medium-sized client.

Todd Moto's Bulletproof Brand Identity Guidelines

Thanks to Todd Moto‘s posting his Bulletproof Brand Identity Guidelines, I have refined my brand guidelines to an easily digestible document that makes brand stewardship approachable and easy to comprehend.

One thing I learned early on is that the brand guidelines or style guidelines document should epitomize the best case scenario of use of the brand. Keep that in mind when you are creating a style guide. Something über modern, cool and sleek like Todd’s might not work for a more conservative organization, so keep that in mind as you are creating your document.

Something else I want to note…brand guidelines are just that. While in the corporate arena, I made my bones pushing, stretching and making the brand go places that it had not gone before. It’s a living document meant to foster creativity, not inhibit it.

I’ll post an image when the document is approved.

This prospect has a great concept to take their brand’s product to the next level and wanted to discuss with me how to go about getting into the mobile app arena. They said that they have ideas that they wanted to keep secret. No problem, I responded, I will bring along a standard NDA (non-disclosure agreement) so everyone can speak freely. After a nice preliminary discussion and a few moments of wrangling over just what the NDA was supposed to protect, I finally said, “This document is designed more for your protection than it is for mine. ” When I began to volunteer advice about how best to tackle their problem, the owner of the company set the NDA aside and said “I don’t need this. I trust you.”

The reason for this post is that, yes, in the information age, information is power. Many people then guard information so closely that they come off cagey, vague and shifty. Not the best way to build trust with your client.

Establishing your expertise is one of the best ways to build user/customer/confidence in your brand. So how better to establish your expertise than giving away some information for free. Demonstrate that you have expertise to spare by being free with your knowledge. Don’t be threatened by sharing what you know because the implication of sharing is “what can they do if they really tried?”

So if you have a client that needs some free advice on a subject you know a lot about, do them and yourself a favor and just give it to them. You’ll be helping to win over a new fan and perhaps sales and referrals down the road.

Jim was on point and had the following questions answered fully:

• Who are you?
• Why should I listen to what you have to say?
• What can you do for me?
• Do you have the expertise to back up your claims?
• What can I expect when working with you?

Many companies can’t answer those questions right off the bat and it’s up to the creative strategists like me to help them discover those answers and figure out ways to deliver that message to their intended audience.

It’s a lesson for creatives and small business owners alike that getting to the heart of the “why” is crucial to the success of any brand, advertising or marketing project. When a client comes to the table with those questions already answered in a clear, compelling way, then they are truly helping me help them.

Look for more info about this client coming soon!

So it got me thinking and spelunking on the web. But the answer was in one of my Evernote folders. The author of an article that I clipped spoke about the user experience and echoed something that I have been speaking about all along: the designer and the brand must take into account what the user’s expectations are when landing on the site.

This user expectation is what drives Google and other search engines. When I search for something, I expect that the page that I land on will give me (some of ) the information that I am looking for. If it doesn’t, then I bounce and am off to the next option.

Trust me, I am going somewhere with this. So let’s say that you have a touch point with a prospective customer. And let’s say for example that this touch point is not a digital channel. You handed them a card, a flyer or they saw your ad on TV. What do you think that their expectation would be once they got to your site?

Of course you know the answer. They expect to recognize something in the web space that they saw or experienced in that other channel. If they don’t that is a disconnect (shock) and that is bad, because users usually react negatively to shocks online (aww).

But even if you have everything aligned and symmetrical between your channels? Well, you still have this: The New Room Effect.

As you might expect, the New Room Effect is derived from the experience from entering a room that you have never been in before. The momentary confusion when confronting something new (and let’s not forget that confusion = fear and hesitation) is alleviated when one locates familiar objects. Ah, that’s actually a window. Oh, the toilet is over HERE. Anticipating and compensating for this confusion is the essence of UX and UI design. Here is a snippet from the article by Shawn Borsky for Anthem Design Group:

The main focus of interfaces should not be avoid all confusion, because that’s not practical. Its too easy to confuse a user. It is much better focus on how to handle confusion or hesitation. Consider this situation. When you walk into a room or building in which you have never been, you will be initially confused.

Why? Naturally, you must become familiar with the new information before you can interact with it. I like to call this the “New Room” effect. Your main focus as a designer should be to anticipate this stage of analysis and confusion and then dispel it quickly by creating familiar cues, anticipated guides, and goal oriented design.

So okay. When you are asking people to perform a task, say, BUY NOW!, this is not the time to make your user spend valuable time and cognitive energy trying to determine if this object is or isn’t the proper button to click. Not to make too dramatic a point, NOTHING should stand in the way of your user accomplishing the goal you’ve set for them and you should do whatever you can to help them decide that your goal is their goal. That’s digital’s contribution to a solid, cross-channel, brand-nourishing, customer-centric creative strategy.

More from Shawn Borsky:

What does this mean for usability designers? Our goal should not be to make something simple or clean, those approaches will come later. We should first make sure to help our users form the right expectations, be comfortable with the results, and become familiar with the process.

This of course, takes a keen understanding of your audience and your business objectives. Take time to evaluate them both and how those two usually competing objectives will interact so that everyone feels satisfied.

Creatives and clients, ask yourself and your team: what would the average user expect to see when they land on this page? Why is the user here? What barriers can I remove for the user? When you answer those questions, make sure that you have created enough expected creative/content/brand elements that reduce the time that it takes for your users to figure out that they are in the right place and that it’s actually easy to accomplish their (your) desired task.

SHAMELESS PLUG:
We’re UX, UI, and IA experts at M19 MEDIA, and we answer those questions with every site that we build. Give us a call if we can help you.

Following is a great example of the knockout version in use. The clients are Pennington Dental Associates in New Jersey. Here is their logo in full color:

Note that it looks great on a white or light colored background. Sometimes, that is not always possible.

Here is their logo as a knockout:

As part of the logo design process, consider how and where your/your client’s logo will possibly appear and prepare versions for those scenarios.

The folks at Pennington are still very happy with their logo and shared that photo with me. One of the reasons for that happiness is that their logo can go where they need it to. Something to, er, chew on.

One of the themes that I have found in my spelunking is that creatives found it frustrating that clients don’t /can’t buy in to their perfect design. And I realized that that clients (especially small business clients who have no filter) didn’t buy in because the design came as a shock to them because (surprise!) they didn’t effectively communicate their vision for the end product. We all know, unless it pops out of our favorite cake with a wad of hundreds, people generally don’t like shocks.

As a matter of course creatives and small business clients should demand that a creative brief be drafted and perfected so that each party can know what to expect from each other from a creative standpoint and minimize those end product surprises. That said, a significant problem with creative briefs is that they are prose documents and don’t give the client an idea of the look and feel of the finished product.

So how to manage that? Enter the mood board.

The mood board outlines the color palette, images, typography and other design criteria in a visual manner that the creative brief cannot.

The mood board is a way to get clients to buy into the visual aspect of the design project and can reduce the number of iterations before approval. So, especially when it comes to a project where M19 MEDIA is developing a new brand, style guide or critical design project, we will employ a mood board as part of our creative brief.

As a small business client (hell, as any client) you should ask for a mood board from your creative vendor. Creatives? Get the client buy in on the mood board. It will save you time and effort. Below, you will find a mood board for a current client. And yes, I was listening to Robert Plant while I wrote this post.

This is actually a time-saver. The mood board serves as the visual bible for any creative project and defines the sandbox in which the creative team can play. It is also a critical client buy-in checkpoint and should be a part of every designer's creative process.

The one revelation that this study made was that 26% of all respondents stated that orange was a “cheap” color. I have a very different opinion, but hey, they did the study. Looks like yellow took a hit, too.

Orange described as a "cheap" color

Here’s a logo that was just approved for a massage therapist client.

In my research, I found lots of massage logos to be a little on the heavy side. This logo is meant to convey health, cleanliness and serenity. Tell us what you think.

I'm all for simplicity

You  know, in a world full  of catch phrases and oh-so clever wordplay, sometimes it’s awesome just to see something plain-spoken and well, obvious.

Try it out sometime. Just say what you want the user/viewer/reader to know about your business and leave it at that. You’d might be surprised how that message can cut through the miasma of cleverness.

This one was so good that it made my aggregator. Could it do the same for your business?