8 Things I Learned At Brand Camp 2010

Brand Camp 2010 was last Friday. It had a different vibe than last year's event, but still was a day full of great speakers giving great presentations. Some were informational, some were inspirational, all were interesting. There were a few themes that seemed to be repeated often, too. Here's a few nuggets I gleaned.

1. Make Sure Your Brand is Portable. Hajj Flemings, who kicked off the day, talked about the need to be able to take your personal brand with you when you leave a place where you are using your brand for the company. If you're tweeting under the company name, make sure you have your own account too. Several people besides Hajj sited Frank who used to tweet as @ComcastCares and had over 60,000 followers. He left Comcast a few months ago, but Comcast got to keep all the followers and Frank had to start over again. Olivier Blanchard, in his talk, said the answer is to prepare for it ahead of time and share. You need to extract your lists and set up a database that both you and the company can share. That way if something happens, both can access the list.

2. Your Personal and Your Professional Brand Are The Same Thing. Peter Shankman talked about this. Your brand is everything you do every day, publicly or privately. Your brand is your brand, there is no distinction between what you do online in a personal or professional setting, it's all you. Be aware of that. Cd Lang talked about how many people send their LinkedIn profile instead of a resume. But recruiters research beyond that. If you are one person on LinkedIn, but totally something different on your Facebook and Twitter stream, they will look at your LinkedIn profile as being inauthentic. You need to be transparent, but not so much as you damage your own brand's DNA. Don't be all buttoned up on one channel and putting posts and pics about how smashed you got in another channel. Chris Barger, GM's social media guy, said once you sign on with a brand, you always represent the brand – even when you're not talking about that brand.

  3. Vision and Mission Are Not Interchangeable. Ari Weinzweig of Zingerman's Deli talked about how an inpiring, strategically sound vision leads to greatness. But don't confuse vision and mission. Your mission is your North Star. It's fixed and is always there. It guides you to where you want to be. Your vision is what your envision something will look like when you get there, sometime in the future. Your vision is where you're going and your strategic plan is how you get there.

4. Business Skills: You Need to Write Betterer. One thing we heard over and over again is that, in this new online environment, so much of our business dealings will be written word that writing skills are now of paramount importance. The panel spoke about how so much communication is in written form (blogs, tweets, updates, posts, etc) that writing skills are a key business skill. Hajj Flemings talked about how nobody is as interested in your life story as you are. You need to share compelling info in a short blast that explains what you have to say whether you're there to explain it or not.  Peter Shankman said, "social media is brevity. Brevity is knowing how to write."

5. Over 25% of the Human Genes are the Same as a Banana. Get Over Yourself! This was a quote from one of Chris Barger's slides, but it was another one of those themes we heard over and over (the get over yourself part, not the banana part). Shankman said you can provide information can just talk to yourself. You don't have the right to have followers, you have the right to post valuable information that's relevant to your audience and gain a following. Barger talked about how it's not just the social media professionals who need to "get over yourself," but the brands do to, because it's about people, not brands. Accept that your people will emerge and that they are assets to your business. Educate and train them. And have a succession plan.

6. Your Company Needs a Social Media Plan. Another thing that became clear in talk after talk. Social media is here to stay. Not only that, it's becoming an integral part of both professional and personal life. So, it's time that companies give serious consideration to creating a social media policy. As Olivier Blanchard pointed out, if you don't have one, HR people and bosses will have to make something up on the spot when a problem arises. And they may not be the best people to create one. If your company has one, employees will know what they can and can't do, and when there is an issue, company officials will know what it is they can and should do about it. I've heard from a number of experts on the subject that IBM has one of the best social media policies. It's something they build over time, with people contributing to it over the years on a corporate SM wiki.

7. Build Your Network Before You Need It. Sarah Evans told a story about how she was woke up in the middle of the night by an earthquake in Chicago. Not sure what had happened, she got up and tweeted about it. Got some responses and started investigating. Then she pulled together her information and posted it on iCNN. Later the story was picked up by the New York Times. Both the Times and iCNN called her and got stories on the quake. Evans made sure to mention her business during the interviews. When the stories ran, they mentioned her and her PR business. Because the people who were already in her network, including the iCNN reporter, she got info and got it out. The end result? She got five new and viable new business leads directly from that story.

8. Your Hashtags Say a Lot About You. Cd Lang ended her talk spelling out what some of the hashtags she sees really mean If you don't know, a hashtag is a word or phrase without spaces on twitter with a # in front of it so you can find what other people are saying about a subject. Sometimes they're also used for editorial comment. Lang gave these definitions of what some editorial hashtags actually mean:#justsaying – means you really don't want to listen to another opinion. #tellitlikeitis – really means you're saying you are a leading authority. #donttakeitsoperaonally – it was meant to be personal. #justmyopinion – another "expert" who doesn't want to listen to your opinion. In other words, some hashtags say "I'm kind of a douchbag."

Well, those are some of the things that jumped out at me from this year's Brand Camp. There are other things that might make for good blog posts down the line. And I haven't even touched on the amazing things I heard and learned the week before at TedX Detroit!

Mike McClure – Yaffe Social Media Guy – overflowing with good stuff recently input into my brian.