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Building An Authentic Brand: A Case Study

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Building a brand that stands for something is challenging; it takes time and, most importantly, authenticity. Almost all companies hope to impart a positive emotion or gain immediate recognition upon someone viewing their logo, hearing their name or considering their story. Zippo is one such company that has been able to achieve that success.

When most people hear the word Zippo, they have immediate brand recognition. Its name and brand persona hold a reputation of tradition and durability that companies and industry leaders can learn from.

Zippo Conveys Quality and Personality

Zippo employs these important values throughout the company. Personality reflects the nature of the brand, right to its core. A Zippo lighter is considered an extension of one’s personality, a reflection of a person’s character right down to the color and design of the lighter. With personality in mind, Zippo has also made innovations in its manufacturing processes to emphasize design by making customizations available on itswebsite. Today, Zippo’s “Customize It” feature online enables consumers to upload any image they want imprinted on their lighter. This creates a unique Zippo, allowing users to make a statement about who they are and what’s important to them.

Zippo works each day to ensure that its brand promises shape its business decisions. It believes that quality starts at its roots, and that supporting consumers who share its values is the most effective way to fuel growth.

“We believe in communicating quality through our lifetime guarantee policy – ‘It Works or We Fix It Free’ – which is threaded throughout the company,” says Global Marketing Director David Warfel.

Marketers, entrepreneurs and company executives alike should consider the values that a company operates within before creating a campaign or advertising strategy. By tying efforts to a brand’s promise, you’ll be creating something that is more meaningful—to you, your company and your consumers.

Zippo Knows How to Communicate Directly with Fans

Zippo recently created an experience for fans by fans—a campaign inspired by consumer feedback and its long-held company values—#ShareThePain. In response to a growing number of consumers turning to social media to vent about the loss of their Zippo lighters, Zippo launched ShareThePain.com and created custom meaningful content unique to Zippo consumers. It engaged with consumers one-on-one via Twitter to commiserate the pain of losing a beloved lighter.

“The results from the campaign have been exceptional, and we’ve seen an organic increase of over 8,500 fans on Zippo’s Facebook and Twitter accounts. It is important for the future of the brand to have a strong presence on social media so that we can continue to nurture the relationships we’ve developed with our passionate fan base,” says Warfel.

#ShareThePain is an example of Zippo furthering its investment in consumer insight, knowing where its target audiences live and engaging with them in meaningful conversation. The key insight is that the entire campaign was built around quality and personality.

In the U.S. alone Zippo continues to see over 100 tweets each month about lost Zippo lighters, and these tweets are completely unsolicited. As a brand, this offers Zippo an ongoing opportunity to engage with fans and offer “condolences” for lost lighters. It also provides an opportunity to learn from consumers and turn feedback into ideas around how to better communicate with them, provide content and services they find most important, and continue to drive the brand in the direction that resonates with consumers most.

Zippo will continue to be a thriving brand because of its authenticity and ability to successfully communicate with its consumers. It’s revolving its business around its consumers, and that’s what people truly value in a brand.

photo credit: raphaelstrada via photopin cc

What Drives Social Influence? Insights From Recruiting Circles

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Written by Carter J. Hostelley, CEO, Leadtail

Marketers change jobs a lot. So every few months I hear from someone who’s job hunting again. Typically, we get together to grab coffee and chat about their situation. And at some point, they ask, “Hey, are there any recruiters you’d recommend I talk to?”

Now, imagine you’re an executive recruiter sitting nearby and listening in. Wouldn’t you like to pull up a chair and join our conversation? Sure you would. And maybe you’d also wonder how to influence me, so that I recommended you.

Social Listening Isn’t Enough

These days, you don’t need to hang out at coffee shops to listen in. You can just tap into your favorite social media news feed to discover what’s being discussed and shared at any moment. But pretty quickly you’ll get overwhelmed. Why? Because you don’t know which conversations to join, whom to engage, and how to influence them.

Without context, social listening isn’t helpful. To make social media more relevant and actionable, you need to tune-out ambient noise. In other words, you need to move from social listening to social insights.

Case In Point: How Do Recruiters Engage on Twitter?

Let’s say you’re an executive recruiter who wants to know what other recruiters are up to on social media. Or maybe you work for a company that sells to recruiters. In either case, you’re looking for social insights about recruiting professionals.

That’s exactly what ERE.net asked my company to do recently. So we developed a report: How Recruiters Engage on Twitter. It summarizes how 557 North American recruiters participated, engaged, and were influenced on Twitter, from June-August 2013. During that time, our sample of  recruiters generated 173,903 tweets, 106,343 shared links, and had a total of 1,533,429 followers.

Why look at Twitter activity? Because it’s a good proxy for social media behavior overall, and offers an advantage over other data sources (such as surveys, polls and focus groups), because it reveals what people actually do, versus what they say they do.

Leadtail Chart Social Influence (2)For example, here’s a visual representation of the people who are most retweeted by recruiters we analyzed:

This report also provides other useful social insights, including: most popular hashtags, most shared content sources, and the top 25 industry publications shared by these recruiters.

Best Practices of Top Influencers

Exclusively for this post, we dove even deeper into Twitter activity among the five people who influence recruiters most. They are:

@MeghanMBiro — Meghan Biro, Founder & CEO, TalentCulture
@blogging4jobs — Jessica Merrell, Editor of Blogging4Jobs
@jimstroud — Jim Stroud, Director of Sourcing and Social Strategy, Bernard Hodes Group
@YouTernMark — Mark Babbitt, Founder & CEO, YouTern
@GlenCathey — Glen Cathey, SVP Talent Strategy and Innovation, Kforce

What did we discover by examining the behavior of this elite group?

•  Influencers tweet a LOT. 4 out of 5 of these top influencers tweet 15+ times a day. (Meghan blows them all away, with an average 107 tweets/day!)

•  Influencers develop a “brand” of their own. Each top influencer has a style and focus that’s unique. For instance, @JimStroud focuses on social recruiting and job search strategy, while @GlenCathey’s approach is decidedly more tech-and-data driven.

•  Influencers don’t lean on retweets. All 5 of the top influencers go light on the RT, keeping them to less than 15% of overall tweet volume. Instead, they share lots of links and often mention other folks.

•  Influencers embrace the community. 3 out of 5 of these influencers will most likely follow you back (they follow 70%+ of those who follow them), and 4 out of 5 include an “@” mention in most of their tweets.

•  Influencers tweet with a goal in mind. Whether it’s to get the word out about their next event, to sell their services, or to grow their audience, these folks tweet links that drive traffic to their other online channels (websites, other social media sites, etc.) 10%-50% of the time.

While these “best practices” come from observing the Twitter activity of only 5 key influencers, they also provide insights into how you may want to consider approaching Twitter and social media to boost your influence.

Tips To Increase Your Social Influence

How can you move from social listening to social insights (and perhaps have an impact on the right people)? Here are 5 tips:

•  Listen to your target audience. Who cares what anyone and everyone is saying? Instead, listen to what’s on the minds of customers, prospects, and key influencers.
•  Be where the right conversations are happening. So many social networks, so little time! Invest your efforts in the social platforms where your target audience is active.
•  Talk about relevant topics. What issues, news, and events have captured the attention of the folks you’re looking to engage? Shouldn’t you be talking about that, too?
•  Discover who’s doing the influencing. Which publications and people do your buyers read, share and interact with? Pay attention to who is popular and influential, and how they engage.
•  Work the aisles. Just being present in social media is not enough. You must cultivate relationships with a community that you develop over time. Eventually, you’ll be in a position to influence those who matter most to you.

Now, imagine we’re back in that coffee shop, where you’re listening to my conversation with my marketing colleague. Let’s say you decide to introduce yourself. Wouldn’t it be great if I said, “Thanks for coming over, I actually follow you on Twitter! I love your comments and the content you share.”? That means you’ve done a great job of influencing me, before our conversation even begins!

Now It’s Your Turn

How are you generating social insights today? What strategies have you found successful in becoming more influential on social media? Share your thoughts in the comments area.

Carter Hostelley (2)(About the Author: Carter Hostelley is the Founder and CEO of Leadtail, a B2B social media and insights agency. He and his team have developed and implemented social media programs for leading business brands and technology startups including WageWorks, Alcatel-Lucent, Symantec, Adaptive Planning, NetBase, and PunchTab. They also publish periodic social insights reports on senior marketers, HR professionals, and recruiters. These reports have been covered by publications such as: Forbes, Business Insider, Huffington Post, ERE, MarketingProfs, AllTwitter, and Social Times. Carter also has over 15 years experience working with venture-backed technology startups in numerous executive roles, and is a contributing author at CMSWire. Connect with him on LinkedIn, Twitter or via email.)

(Editor’s Note: To discuss World of Work topics like this with others in the TalentCulture community, join our online #TChat Events every Wednesday, from 6:30-8pm ET. Everyone is welcome for events, or to join our ongoing Twitter conversation anytime. Learn more…)