I am a regular reader of http://www.personalbrandingblog.com/ because I believe the only real way to be a success in Social Media Marketing (SMM) is to have a personal brand. If you go into SMM selling you product as your brand you are immediately setting yourself up in competition with every other rep. for that brand. In other words why should anyone come to you as opposed to the others? What you have to do is give them a reason to choose you. That’s where your brand comes in.
To establish your personal brand simply do the following think of one or two words only that describe why anyone should buy anything from you. I chose solutions because throughout my career I have been told I am a creative problem solver. As the products I sell help people the brand APeel Solutions popped in my head and I liked it. So that is a MUST if you intend to go the SMM route do it first.
Here are the highlights of an interview they carried out with Chris Anderson Editor-In-Chief of Wired magazine about the impact of the free economy (SMM) on branding.
Question:What do you think the best online business model is in the free economy? Freemium as you say. Maybe explain that a little bit more?
“Yeah, so I think. Free is perhaps the most misunderstood four-letter word beginning with F in the English language. Among the many misunderstandings about free are some misunderstandings about the book; which is that some people think that in our marketing, everything should be free. Or that everything should be advertising supportive. In fact, the book certainly acknowledges the ad-model, but focuses more on freemium- which is the combination of free and premium.
The best way to think about that is a version of the traditional free sample: as your selling muffins, you might give out one percent of your muffins as free samples to sell the rest. You can’t really give out much more than that or you will go bankrupt because there are real costs associated with those muffins. The freemium model, which really only works in the digital space and, you know, additional markets, is one where you give out 80 percent or 90 percent of your product in a free form to drive demand for a superior paid version that maybe ten percent of the people want. And because digital products are so cheap and getting cheaper, that ten percent paying users can subsidize 90 percent free users and everybody wins.
They use free as a form of marketing to reach the maximum possible audience, and then offer two products – a free version and a paid version with the hope that the most engaged consumers and that the most active power-users will see the value in the product, will use the product and love the product – see the value in the product such as they want additional feature that they be willing to pay for that.”
Question:Will free force businesses and people to work harder, fast, smarter and deliver higher quality products?
Free is where the products market themselves; where the free form of the product is the advertisement. What that requires is that you can’t just tell people about the products or, you know, come up with the ad campaign.
The products actually need to:
* A: be useful
* B: be so useful that some people are willing to pay for more
So the product has to be great. Free is not a silver bullet that makes every product marketable. Free is a great way to allow people to sample the products, but if they don’t like what they are sampling, or if they are not thrilled or delighted and wanting more, then you know, you can’t convert them to paid. So, you know, it’s never been a good idea to have a bad product, but now when you are in the freemium model, having a product is not a sufficiently compelling guarantee that the freemium product will work for you because the sampling tells people all they need to know – which is that the product is not worth paying for.”
The book Chris is referring to is Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price – Chris Anderson
Here is a YouTube video where Chris explains his ideas on Free
