TAP INTO SOCIAL CAPITAL TO BUILD YOUR

BRAND

Christian Buckley

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Beyond the Color Palette

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Social Capital: the way influence works

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Focusing on Influencers

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Finding Value by Providing Value

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About the Author

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About Fifty Five and Five

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Table ofContents

common mistake that companies make is to think that corporate branding – the logo, tagline, and chosen color palette—constitutes their brand. Sure, these things

play a role in branding, but they are just one small facet of the overall brand.

Companies spend seemingly countless hours and endless budgets on perfecting their logos, websites, and brochures in an effort to establish and build ‘brand awareness’. However, more than any design element, it is your company culture and the reputation of your front-line employees that define your company brand. This is why it’s essential for you to understand who in your company is influential outside company walls.

The challenge, however, is that most companies do not understand who the influencers are within their companies or across their customer communities. They also struggle to tailor their messages to those influencers. Even more elusive than a strategy for external influencers is a plan for internal influencers.

In an era of social media, companies need to understand the value of influence—and how to extend their social capital. Leveraging internal influence and identifying and targeting external influence is a key aspect of creating social capital. And it should, therefore, be a major factor in your marketing mix.

In this eBook, we will explore what influencers are, how their influence works and how you can leverage their influence to tell your brand story across their networks.

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Beyond the Color Palette

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Social Capital: the way influence works

¹ Putnam, Robert. 2001. Bowling Alone.

n an influential study of the way communities work, Robert Putnam, a

Harvard sociologist, offered the observation that:

"Much of the success of the United States as a nation had to do with its ability to

generate social capital, that mysterious but critical set of characteristics of functioning

communities."¹ Social capital is, simply put, the level of trust that is earned by an individual or a brand within a social construct. A new user entering a technology forum, for instance, has no social capital. As they participate in conversation threads, asking questions and answering questions, they slowly build capital. The same activity happens within an organization or across social media. The importance of augmenting or improving one's social capital, whether online or offline, may benefit more than just the quality of your professional relationships. Putnam puts it like this:

"Individuals in groups with more social capital are better off on a large number of

metrics, from health and happiness to earning potential, than in those groups with

less social capital."

Individuals with strong social capital have more access to data and generate quicker and more detailed feedback from their networks. Case in point: anyone new to a technologycommunity can ask a question via Twitter and generally get a quick response back. But the volume (and quality) of responses increases dramatically when the same question is picked up and re-tweeted by a trusted member of the community.

For brands, tapping into the influence of individuals—both within and outside the company—who have a lot of social capital can, therefore, be expected to boost trust in the brand.

Robert Putnam, Harvard sociologist

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Being Authentic

Is social influence about the number of followers your brand has? How many re-tweets you receive? Or more so the depth of dialog you have and the action that people take based on your own actions? Is there some other way to identify (intelligently) as to which connections will provide the most relevant connections based on your profile, your interests and your most recent searches?

Building social influence is not the same thing as building followers. Tools for building followers can be somewhat shady, with dozens (or more) tools out there to help you build followers. The real power in building social influence is substance.

We have two seemingly divergent and opposing views here: the idea of reducing the noise in our networks by focusing on those relationships that will benefit us the most; and the idea that expanding our networking pool benefits us by increasing our chances of identifying beneficial connections that might otherwise be lost by not casting a wide enough net.

It's an interesting dichotomy. There is no right answer here for how to manage your networks, but including a regular purging and expansion should be a key tenet of your influencer strategy.

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Focusing onInfluencers

t a recent analyst event, one customer story that really stood out

was a marketing team that approached their brand-building activities by identifying and separating product "advocates" from customers within their CRM and then developing individual strategies for each. Part of their approach was to specifically identify each influencer, and nurture them individually, outside of the strategy used to market for the rest of their contacts.

Similarly, identifying and working with your internal influencers can become another channel strategy. How you work with these internal influencers—whether they’re in sales or marketing, or even an engineer who is very active in relevant online communities—will likely include a very different, non-traditional approach to your primary brand-building strategy.

The point here is to recognize influence inside and outside of your organization, and develop strategies that are unique to each.

How can you actuallyleverage influencers?

One very successful branding strategy, and a way to support the unique added value of your internal influencers is by matching internal branding strengths to external influencer needs wherever possible. For example, you have your marketing message that you’re testing out, moving forward with, and it is being delivered by your product management team and your solutions sales team. You have a regular cadence of webinars, emails and live events, and you’re confident you have a solid approach with message, delivery and volume.

Now, as you learn about your partners and customers, measuring the success of these various marketing activities, the real test of your strategy—and the measurement of your brand—will come through exceptions. Influencers begin to identify themselves: a customer loves your product and happily joins a webinar or co-presents at an event on your behalf, but struggles with your sales process and handling of leads because it does not have the personal connection necessary for a successful hand-off.

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Finding Value by Providing Value

y guidance to individuals and companies alike is that value is

achieved by providing value. Building social capital for yourself, your product or your company is most quickly and lastingly achieved by providing value to others (by bridging your networks) and your influencers (to help customers and partners). Through consistent and authentic content and conversations, you can focus first on helping others find value before considering your own needs.

If you approach your social and community activities in this way, you will rapidly build your own social capital while also building trust with influencers.

There is no quick and easy path to building social capital. It takes time, effort and a clearly defined and closely measured strategy. Nonetheless, the impact of a strong professional brand is that it can amplify all other marketing efforts.Microsoft uses the phrase "Working like a Network" to describe the new world of work.

A world where organizations leverage the people they know, the processes and business systems that we participate in and the technology at our fingertips to give us access to more data, more content and more of the collective capabilitiesof everyone connected within our network. Having strong social capital enables us to do more with our network, and weak social capital can most definitely limit us.

To work like a network means that each of us acts as a broker, adding value to the clusters in which we participate—and then connecting data, people and ideas across clusters to translate each body of knowledge for those other networks. Working like a network is not an empty platitude or marketing slogan—working like a network is a collaboration imperative.

Extending your social capital should, therefore, be a business (and collaboration) imperative.

Christian Buckley is the Chief Evangelist at Beezy, a leading social collaboration ISV, and is the Founder of CollabTalk. A globally-recognized author, speaker and technology influenc-er, Christian is a 6-time Microsoft MVP and Top 10 SharePoint and Office 365 Influencer. He was also part of the Microsoft team that launched SharePoint Online (now part of Office 365) and worked with some of the world's largest technology companies to build and deploy social, collaboration and supply chain solutions.

Christian can be found online at www.buckleyplanet.com and on Twitter at @buckleyplanet.

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About the Author

+44 0203 805 7791 www.fiftyfiveandfive.com

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“We help Microsoft Partners communicate more effectively, reach

new audiences and drive leads.”

Located in central London, UK, Fifty Five and Five is a full service digital marketing agency.

Founded in 2014 by Chris Wright, a former IT consultant with many years experienceworking with Microsoft Partners, we are a fast growing team of marketers,writers, researchers and designers.

Born out of a recognition that Microsoft Partners face a unique set of challenges when it comes to B2B marketing, our goal is to help brands define and differentiate themselves.

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About Fifty Five and Five