Page 107 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

If you work for a large company, at this point, you might be thinking, “What
does this have to do with me? This is out of my hands. An advertising agency
does all this stuff.”

The best-managed companies are pushing hard to humanize themselves and
emphasize the P2P (people-to-people) factor. They realize that building online
relationships can’t be a campaign that fluctuates with the annual budget. The
best brands recognize that the nature of marketing has fundamentally changed
because the expectations of consumers have changed. They’re people who want
to be treated like people, not “targets.”

I love this perspective from Linda Boff, GE’s executive director of global
brand marketing.5 “Most people still associate our brand with appliances and
lighting,” she said. “But that’s a very, very small part of GE. We are early
adopters; we are a brand that is about innovation, invention, discovering things.
And early adopters are the kind of people we want to be talking to, the kind of
people who might want to work at GE, or partner with us, or invest with us. And
we want to humanize the company. We want to throw open the doors and
behave the way a person behaves.”

So you see, building a human and heroic brand is important no matter the size
of your company.

This chapter has covered a lot of ground, from the aptitude layer to
reciprocity, from influence to the It Factor. Let’s put it all together and codify
some practical steps to finding and releasing your inner hero.

1. Establish congruity.
There are a number of readers of my blog who share it with their audiences
almost every day. One of them is the media-savvy Brooke Ballard, founder of B
Squared Media in New York. She recently told me why she makes the decision
to share my content so regularly:

“My relationship with the author matters. I started to get to know
about you through your blog, as you serve up little slices of life to your
readers. We hear about your travels, your life, and your family ... and
if users are following you on social, they get other tantalizing bites
through actual pictures of those things. An entire portrait is painted—
providing insight to who you really are. Maybe it’s my own love of
psychographics and being human that leads to that connection, but
very few people let others in the way you do— with true transparency.

“For me, tone also has something to do with it,” Ballard continued.