Your brand is reflected in everything your company says and does. And when you ‘say’ and ‘do’ via social media, that reflection travels at the speed of a browser refresh and amplifies louder than a thousand clicks of a share button.

Practicing these four principles will help you strengthen your social brand communications across all digital media.

1. Remember your brand’s core values

Whenever you sit down to craft a message, write an email, update your fan page, send out a tweet, or respond to a commenter, think of your brand’s core values and personality. Before writing a single word, ask yourself: will this help or hurt the brand? Is it congruent to what the brand stand’s for? Stay aligned and relevant, and you will communicate your message more appropriately.

If you’re just getting your brand onto social sites, then start by listening to your audience first. What are they talking about? What are they sharing with their friends? What questions are they asking? Once you get to know your audience’s interests, questions, and frustrations, you can begin interacting with them and offering up content they find valuable.

2. Help your employees believe in your brand

Absolutely everyone in your organization holds the responsibility of reinforcing your brand (even your window cleaner should know what’s up). If your people don’t believe in the brand’s vision and values, then they won’t be able to properly interact with outside parties. If they confuse or offend your customers somehow, it will only damage your image. This translates to the offline world as well. Employees must understand and agree with your brand before they can go off on their own and interact with consumers, partners, investors, suppliers, distributors, and the media. Make it a habit to consistently reward actions that show brand responsibility.

Workers come and go. On average, a person holds a job for around two to five years. Somehow, it is up to you to make sure the brand’s culture is passed down to the newbies like a legend is passed down to younger generations. The experienced workers who understand your brand may be gone tomorrow, and the fresh ones that join have no idea what’s going on… until you educate them. Ongoing internal training is essential to ensure everyone is on the same page and your corporate culture doesn’t weaken over time.

3. Build relationships and create brand advocates

A social brand has to be social. Period. Throwing up a Facebook page with your logo on it and getting some “likes” is merely a half-assed attempt at social branding. It takes deep two-way conversations with consumers, and the building of relationships. Lots of companies use social media mainly for customer service. For example, of all the tweets sent out from Whole Foods Market on Twitter (@WholeFoods), 85% are responses to customer comments, according to Bill Tolany, Head of Integrated Media.

Offering special treatments or incentives to happy customers can turn them into brand advocates. If a customer already likes your product or service, and you treat them right, they may start to share your vision and spread your message for you. What’s more, brand advocates naturally influence the opinions and buying behaviours of their family and friends, because that’s who people trust the most.

You could even think about starting your own brand advocacy program. Check out the Ford Fiesta Movement, in which 100 “Fiesta Agents” across the U.S.A. get to drive a Fiesta for 6 months, complete monthly missions, and share their experiences in many ways. You can also check out the Microsoft MVP Program, consisting of around 4,000 teachers, artists, doctors, engineers, and technologists who share their know-how with huge online followings.

4. Respond properly to negative feedback

A social brand is an exposed brand, open to negative feedback and criticism. But dealing with negativity in the right way can turn a critic into your next customer or an angry customer into your next number one fan. The results of negative feedback depend entirely on how you deal with them. Handle them well, and you become a star; ignore them, and you might as well hang your portrait on the corporate wall of shame.

We can’t be all things to all people, so you’re bound to receive complaints in one form or another. When an unhappy someone posts a complaint about your product or service, others tend to follow along and add their two negative cents as well. Whatever you do, don’t ignore this. It can snowball out of control unless you respond properly. Say something wrong, and it’ll make things worse.

One of the best and easiest things you can do is simply offer help (or maybe an apology) to the original complainer. It shows that you care about how your customers feel. And as customers, we love that sort of thing, don’t we?

Being a social brand means just that-being social. Talk to people like how you would talk to them face-to-face. With pretty much any company and any type of response, you’ll want to keep it friendly and helpful. Get a second pair of eyes to check your tone of voice before hitting the send button. Align your messages with the vision and values of the company. Continually educate your employees and make sure they are with you. Talk to your window cleaner and see if he knows what your company stands for.

Brand accountability is nothing new, but with social media, ignorance and incompetence will break you down faster than a drill sergent having a nicotine fit.

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I wanted to eat lunch at a Chinese restaurant that I have been to before. The restaurant serves its food buffet style. The food is good and so is the price; A perfect spot to eat a quick-lunch. When I arrived at the restaurant, I was greeted by a sign on the door that said that the operating hours of the restaurant were 11am until 11pm, Monday through Friday. The time was 11:30am, clearly within their hours of operation. I was surprised to find that when I pulled on the door, the dead-bolt was still locked. I looked in the tinted windows and thought at first that this restaurant had gone out of business. There was no activity to be seen. No people. No greeter. The lights to the restaurant were off.

Then something in motion caught my eye. It was a golden lucky cat figure that the restaurant had in the waiting area. The lucky cat was waving its paw – someone had to have turned it on. Perhaps the owners of the restaurant had forgotten to open their doors or they had lost track of time. With my face pressed against the window, I scanned the interior for additional signs of life. The buffet steam tables sat in the back of the establishment and a you could note steam coming off of the heated water. There was steam, but no food. A couple standing nearby told me that they had been waiting since 11am for the anticipated opening.

They had not seen anyone either. They should open soon, I thought, I sat down at an outside table under the front patio of the business. While I waited, I observed. More than a dozen potential patrons approached the restaurant in anticipation of the same quick-lunch that we were hoping to eat. Each one of them did the same thing that I did: they tried the door, pointed to the sign where the operating hours were posted, and pressed their faces to the glass to discover the cause of the incongruity between the sign and the locked door. They all saw the lucky cat just as I did. I was fascinated by the duplicate behavior and the disbelief the potential patrons had when they found the information on the door to be untrue. I decided to wait until noon to see if the place would actually get it together and open for lunch and to observe how people continued to act towards the sign on the door. Just before noon, a large family approached the door. Their behavior was identical to everyone else’s.

To my surprise, a man dressed as a cook came to the door. Instead of opening the door, he made hand signals to the family that he needed more time before they were to open. The family pointed to the sign on the door in protest. They were annoyed that he would not let them in and soon left. At noon I left as planned. As I counted the people who tried to eat at this restaurant today, my count came to 15. Each of them including myself had expected to eat at the restaurant. All of us left disappointed. Those 15 people could be the profit margin for the day for that business. How many of them will post on their Facebook page a negative comment about this experience? How many will never return?

The Importance of Signs as Brand Promises

We as consumers are exposed to hundreds of signs every day. What is amazing is that we believe what we see on a sign. We take them literally at face value. We are so used to being directed that we rarely question if the information is correct. Signs are brands. A brand is a promise of an expected product or service. We all expected that the brand of this restaurant was that they were open at 11am. They were not. They lied. Their brand lied and broke the brand promise. Now the only brand promise we have is that their brand is unpredictable. Unpredictability in the marketplace does not fetch a premium price. It gets what is leftover, because that is what it deserves. No one should have to beg a business to take their money. A business should make it easy for customers to transact with them.

If the business was having a problem that day, they needed to communicate that with their customers. A simple piece of paper that said “Sorry, we are opening at 12pm today” would have been sufficient. That would have preserved their brand with the 15 of us and kept their brand promise; even if we would have chosen to go elsewhere for lunch. A sign is a brand promise. Customers will hold you to your sign. It is your unwritten contract with them. Don’t break promises to your customers. This restaurant will need more than a lucky cat to help them survive if this is the way they keep their brand promise.

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Now if you are an active member of one or more of these professional organizations this is where you need to network. The best advertising you can have as an Accountant is a good network of like-minded and associated businesses.

The advantages of Networking

Networking is the best way for you to advertise your services but you don’t do this overtly or through classified ads in newspapers or even AdWords on the internet. The best way for an Accountant to gain news clients is by recommendation.

A recommendation by a fellow member from a professional organization is one that carries a lot of ‘kudos’ for your business and for you personally. A recommendation is slightly different to a word-of-mouth suggestion because they are actually recommending you rather than just telling someone about your services.

When you joined your professional body of like-minded professionals, you would have most likely been asked what your business did and what your position was in the company or corporation. This is your opportunity to say what you did and what your specialty was (if any). After this, any time you talk about your accounting business needs to be done in more general terms because you will have given them a broad and comprehensive outline of your services in order to be invited into the organization.

Professional organizations are very ‘picky’ about those who they invite to join. After all, they are:

1) A professional body of educated and serious business people and

2) People will always be “labelled by the company they keep” so they need to be very particular.

What are some Professional Organizations for Accountants?

There is any number of professional organizations around the world today to service the Accounting Profession. However, these are good to belong to but they are not good for getting work from. These industry group organizations are good for recommendations and validation.

Some of these organizations are designed to do other works apart from acting as a body of professional people. Every industry has their own professional body like the Society of certified public accountants, Institute of Public Accountants, Certified Chartered Accountants, and they often support a charitable group in a community.

Service Clubs

Service clubs represent a good cross-section of a communities industry. Clubs like Rotary International and Lions clubs are two service clubs that are International Organizations and they are across all industries and Country borders. Both are now cross gender so there is no longer gender discrimination and any professional person can be invited to join.

Clubs like Rotary and Lions benefit their local community with charity work and support within their own communities as well as internationally.

It is from networking within these professional organizations that an accountant can advertise their accounting business simply by being in the organization and working for their local community.

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