Screen Grab from ENGAGEMENTdb Report

Brands are worth billions of dollars to companies, and companies will go to great lengths to protect them offline and online. Type the name of a brand on Google, and your first result is certainly going to be the website of the company who owns it.  The same can’t be said when you search for a brand on Twitter.

No question Twitter is gaining corporate acceptance.  A new Burson-Marsteller and Proof Digital Media analysis found that in 2009, Twitter surpassed blogging as the social media platform of choice — at least among the Fortune 100.  Or take Charlene Li’s ENGAGEMENTdb analysis of the world’s 100 most valuable brands. The most engaged brands like Starbucks, SAP, Toyota and Dell are using it with great success.

At the same time, in searching for the 100 most valuable brands on Twitter, I found roughly 75 percent don’t appear to own the Twitter page that bears their brand name.  And for some of those that do like @thomsonreuters and @amazon, the pages seem generic or worse like @colgate under lock and key. (The words “Welcome to the World of Colgate-Palmolive” don’t seem very welcoming.)

Take McDonalds for example. The top search on Google is, no surprise, a link to the company’s official website. Now type in @McDonalds on Twitter or “Twitter McDonalds” on Google.  Here are the results.

Perhaps we are just in the early stages of Twitter. In time I am sure that will change.  That seems to be the case with Facebook, where increasingly brands are taking ownership of their unofficial pages. And I should add most companies have Twitter sites with some variation of their brand like @BlackBerryCool and @DellOutlet.

Branding Your Twitter: Top Brand Best Practices

How important is branding?  I think a great deal.  Consider @sony. Its page is so generic that @8bitjoystick asked if it was the official Twitter page for Sony.

The cost to make a branded Twitter site seems nominal compared to the $200,000 plus I have read it costs to create a dedicated YouTube Channel.

So which top 100 brands have taken the time to brand their page and provide added utility?

I like the look of @MTV’s background.  They have made the page consistent with its followers.  So has Accenture.  @accenture reinforces the company’s traditional advertising.  @Toyota is not very elaborate, but I like how they lay out other links and identify their Twitter team. At least, @Ford shows their cars.

In the end, I know content and the level of engagement are far more important than the look and feel of your Twitter page. Comcast hasn’t suffered with an @comcast Twitter page out there.  Especially when you have a wildly successful @Comcastcares page.  But as Twitter takes off, we may find brands going after rogue pages more aggressively.

Let me get back to you.

The Face of the Dallas Mavericks’”Unofficial” Twitter Fan

“Our game is run on fans.” That’s what Washington Redskin tight end and blogger Chris Cooley said on the Dan Patrick Show on Friday.

Fans have long been the lifeblood of sports teams and celebrities.  And the notion of an “official” fan club is not new either.  But now that companies are courting fans, PR and marketing professionals are taking unofficial and official fans and fan sites very seriously.  

Chris Ebbesen would undoubtedly agree.  He is a strategy manager at imc2 (squared) in Dallas by day. But he is also a huge Dallas Mavericks fan. He started tweeting about the Dallas Mavericks in 2008 and has ridden the Twitter wave ever since.  In fact his more than 4,000 followers make him the team’s biggest fan on Twitter.  He takes his tweeting very seriously. And Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks has granted him incredible access to cover games. 

Chris has resisted the marketing department’s offer to make him official. That would make what he does work and cramp his ability to tweet freely.  And so the Dallas Mavericks tweet  under the name Dallasmavs - the “Official Dallas Mavericks Twitter Page.” Mavnews is Chris’s Twitter handle, and it is dedicated to “providing news and updates on the Dallas Mavericks via Twitter. [unofficially].”

Official and Unoffical Fans and Fan Sites

Take a look at Inside Facebook. It’s a well read source for Facebook marketing and developer information, AND it is independent of Facebook.  Its leaderboards rank Facebook pages.  Putting aside those focused on Michael Jackson, chocolate and Family Guy, it lists hundreds of company facebook fan pages, both official and unofficial.  So I did little digging.

As this chart I put together indicates (figures from this weekend), the top three  fan pages are official. But nine of the first 25 Facebook fan pages are unofficial.

Look at brands like Oreos and McDonalds.  The largest fan page – Oreo Cookies – is official, but fan pages named oreos, Oreo, McFlurry Oreo, and Oreos!!! are unofficial.  With McDonalds, the first 5 fan pages that reference the fast food chain (McDonald’s, McDonalds, Mc Flurry Oreo, McDonald’s French Fries, ~ MCDONALDS ~) are unofficial. The sixth is official. The MTV unofficial page had more fans than the MTV official page.  

So are unofficial fans and fan sites a good thing or bad?  It means your fans are engaged and talking about you.  It saves you the work of doing a fan page yourself. On the other hand, you lose control. I would be surprised if many companies know the number of unofficial sites about their brand, much less know how to engage them.

And so what do we do when ardent fans rise to the surface like Chris or Hanna Asfour who is the site adminstrator for ~ McDonalds ~ an unofficial Facebook fan page.  (His 626,370 fans far outpace the 361,214 fans on the Official McDonalds site.) We are confronted with a choice – do we coop them or let them maintain editorial distance?

Jim Anderson over at Vitrue (blog), a social media marketing firm here in Atlanta who has created Facebook applications for leading brands like iTunes wrote me:

“Our experience is that many of these unofficial pages came to life because there were no official pages for users to visit.  As brands build out their Facebook presence and engage with users, those “official” pages will in most cases tend to dominate the unofficial ones.” 

Neutralize or Neuter?

When you are dealing with critics, migrating an unofficial fan page (which is completely allowable by Facebook) helps to neutralize them.  But with fans, the effect can be to neuter them, taking away the very spirit and energy that led to their popularity in the first place.  Or worse you can risk alienating or losing their loyal following. If it is not broken, why fix it?

As marketers and PR professionals we would all love to control every message and eliminate criticism, but that is unlikely. Unofficial voices are unpredictable, but  they provide additional buzz and third party validation.  And while posts can be negative, they provide a reality check and eyes and ears for opportunties and unforeseen problems.  

That being said, when it comes to fan, companies must remain vigilant in monitoring fan activity and have a strategy in place to promote, engage, shut down or take over a fan site.

Let me get back to you.

Are corn chips “information dense” enough for new media?

I was reading about Jimmy Wales’ keynote presentation at the Ad:Tech conference in San Francisco last week.  In deciding whether a particular brand merits new media, Wales said, “unless your brand is information dense, the highly interactive market is both expensive and useless.”  In other words, in his view, certain brands are not rich enough to sustain online communities.   

According to Wales, Marvel is a good brand and Doritos – not so much.  People just don’t have that much to say about corn chips, but they will have lengthy discussions about their favorite Marvel superhero.  He dismisses efforts like the Skittles Twitter campaign as gimmicks. They are at best one hit wonders and at worst recipes for PR headaches.

Now I wasn’t there to hear the presentation, but it did make me think about information density and new media adoption.  The only thing more problematic than a company who refuses to consider new media is a company who embraces new media to drive traffic for the wrong reasons with no appreciation for long term relationships.

So how dense is dense?  What is the litmus test for whether your product is appropriate for new media. Hell a bottle of carmel colored water and sugar was recently named the second most popular brand on Facebook after President Obama. 

Information Density Considerations  

I believe any brand is potentially dense enough to sustain a new media campaign. But it isn’t just the brand. You will find people passionate about anything. Instead, it’s also the campaign behind the brand.  Even dense brands need  an effective new media strategy to sustain online conversations. In attempting a new media campaign, it may be helpful to consider the following questions that I have asked before:  

Long Term vs. Short Term – Are you engaging in a long term conversation or a brief campaign?

Continuity – What steps are in place to maintain connections and continuity after the campaign?

Scalability – Is it scalable? 

Amplification – How does the social media strategy extend other marketing efforts?

Payoff – What is the pay off for the user?

The Community – Do the needs of the community match the marketing strategy?  Is there an identifiable community to reach?

Technology – Does the communications platform match the user target? 

Refreshment – Does the brand community or interactive website have rich, refreshed content?

And sometimes companies don’t have a choice but to tap newl media. How many people would care enough to engage online with the Domino’s pizza brand?   Apparently quite a few especially when a disgusting video by former employees surfaced on YouTube.  Acting late or not having an online infrastructure in place can be terribly damaging to a brand. 

Now I know that marketing and crisis communications are different animals, but they are part of a brand continuum. I think density can be misleading.  It suggests that brands have a choice about new media. At a basic level, companies don’t have an option. As a recent BusinessWeek article points out, conversations are already happening around your brand, and crises can arise that demand an immediate new media response.  The key take away:  be prepared.  If nothing else, measuring information density is a useful way to pressure test your brand and fortify your new media strategy.

Let me get back to you.