I spent this week at the very insightful Web in Travel, an event the Avid Marketer recommends hospitality & tourism professionals to attend. This event definitely helps you stay on top of the latest trends and issues driving travel distribution and marketing. And one of the hot topics for this year – Social Media! Hence, I decided to talk a little on branding and social media.

Social media poses the greatest challenge to engaging customers today, according to a poll of more than 200 professional marketers. With the engagement of so many individuals across social networks, organizations need to increasingly treat consumers as individuals – both in order to recruit new customers and to retain existing ones. Not forgetting the fact that conversations can now spread across the web in seconds, and this can have both a dramatic positive or negative impact on your brand. So, what is the relationship between branding and social media?

One thing I am sure we already know: Your brand is not your logo.

Your brand identity = action + perception.

• Action. What products you make or carry. What you did that one time something went wrong. How you treat customers.
• Perception. How your audience perceives those actions.

Action remains.
Social media has not changed the influence your actions can have on your brand.

Make someone angry, they’ll still hate you just as much. Make someone happy, and they’ll still love you just as much.

Want to build a great brand in social media (or anywhere else, for that matter)? Be nice.

Perception spreads like a virus.
The change to your brand: The speed of perception.

Perception of your actions can spread fast. Really fast. Like speed of lint fast.

So, when you make someone angry, they can tell 20,000,000 of their closest friends about it within minutes. Same thing if you make them happy.

What do you do?

First, don’t change your behavior.

Second, be sure you talk to people. Lots of people. Online and off. Every ‘touch’ with a particular person makes it more likely they will remember you when someone else talks about you. If they recognize your name, they will probably pass the message along using a retweet (on Twitter), a comment (on Facebook) or whatever other vehicles exist.

Third, monitor the conversation. Use Google Reader as a monitoring tool. Check in now and then. Hear a relevant question or problem? Jump right in and help out.

Fourth, don’t try too hard. We don’t want your inspirational quote in our Twitter stream 10x a day. We don’t need to hear where you’re at right this moment. We definitely don’t want a hard sell. We just want the same helpful stuff you’ve always provided. And we totally appreciate your help when we have a question.

Branding and marketing in 2010 is about going social.

Conversation and community is everything. If consumers trust the community, they will extend trust to your brand. It will not just be word of mouth, but the right word of mouth within the community. An influential consumer will talk and everyone will listen. They will look for more websites using Facebook Connect to share information with their friends. Social media has accelerated the rate at which public perception of your actions/brand can spread. Listen, learn, react accordingly, and a great brand will follow.

It’s time to manage your online image.