What’s your brand?

The Economist recently had an article noting the rise of the “faceless bosses”. Outsized personalities such as Jack Welch and Robert Nardelli are gone or retired. Carly Fiorina has turned her attention to politics.

While clearly, in today’s turbulent times, keeping your head down is attractive, I found this article an odd juxtaposition with the revolution in branding that social media is creating. Corporate branding, ho hum, personal branding is what is hot. If you haven’t figured out, you are brandU. What we say and do on twitter, facebook and our blogs becomes part of the gestalt that defines the online perception of who we are and what we have to offer.

So what does your brand say about you? Is it disorganized and not clear? Show me yours! As someone whose brand is not as together as I would like, I would love to see a a great example. Just post your URL or social media handle
below.

FTC new guidelines on product reviews in blogs

This just in. I just heard on NPR that the FTC has released new guidelines regarding blogs that “endorse” products. Product reviews is a common blog post, popular with searchers who are researching a potential purchase, and yes bloggers sometimes get paid for the reviews or at least get free stuff. The FTC thinks these relationships the bloggers have with companies, need to be fully disclosed. Fines can be pretty hefty, up to $11,000 per infraction.

Not surprisingly, the twittersphere has picked up on it quickly. I found a tweet pointing to a cnet article discussing the impact on twitter and facebook users.

Seems that affiliate links is outside the scope of these new guidelines, but more careful reading is needed.

Twitter’s summer

Twitter is certainly having a momentous summer. There was the recent DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks, that rendered it inoperative. And the battle lines between it and facebook became more clearly drawn. Twitter is definitively morphing before our eyes, as I recently alluded to in my “lost its shine” post, but the question is into what?

The two trends to watch are use of twitter for branding, as Martha Stewart has, and the its search engine.

If you haven’t jumped yet onto the twitter bandwagon, check out this blog post I got from the Web 2.0 group on LinkedIn, an excellent group of links on using twitter.

Has Twitter lost its shine?

Interesting thing about observing trends, you can watch move them through groups as a wave.   Let’s take twitter for example, it first became popular with the tech hip as a cool way to share just about anything, in 140 characters or less.   I loved twitter at events such as the Web2.0 expo, following the instantaneous commentary on the speakers, and of course knowing where the cool party was.

In the last six months, it’s become the latest must have tool for entrepreneurial marketing.  Talks about using social media for marketing your business have become a staple at business networking events.   And with good reason, MarketOutLoud filled seats for it’s marketing events with it’s facebook connections.   Some became social media divas.  For the savvy it’s been a great lead generation tool.

But twitter has recently become less fun to use, at least for me.  It seems like every day I get a follow request from someone that has less than 40 updates (boring!), or even worse, zero.   And people that I chose to follow, immediately DM’ed me with a tweet with a link to their product.  These get unfollowed really quickly.

On the other hand, facebook which I initially didn’t like much has become a better place to hang out, I have enough friends who post interesting things to catch my interest.   The walled garden aspect of facebook, derided with frustration by some, seems to keep the riffraff out, the quality connections in.

And surprisingly, teenagers, a group you would have thought been the early adopters, don’t use twitter either. As my son’s sniffs “my Dad uses twitter”.

So if you have never used twitter, is it safe to ignore it now?  Absolutely, not.  Twitter is still a major force to be reckoned with.  As evidenced by the recent Iranian election unrest, twitter is where the news breaks first.  Fast breaking events that grab broad interest is where twitter shines, and it can be an excellent way to search for news.   And there are influencers in the twittersphere that can direct significant traffic, if you want to play in the twitterspace for business reasons, at the very least find the ones in your industry to keep a pulse on your market.

And if you didn’t know what a DM was, it’s high time you figured it out.