There’s exciting stuff going on with my Vitamin Water.

Allow me to set the scene: Seattle’s annual Capitol Hill Block Party showcases over 60 indie bands. It’s a summer weekend that turns a downtown neighborhood into a huge party with 3 stages of music, big crowds, and lots of sun.

Vitamin Water went to the CHBP, but they didn’t pass out free samples from the back of a van as expected.  Instead they rented a hip loft space and set up fans, bean bag chairs and a dance floor. A DJ spun tunes as cute bartenders served Vitamin Water cocktails. And of course…refrigerators were filled with as much free Vitamin Water as one could handle.

My friends and I had such a good time, we spent over 2 hours dancing, meeting people and taking glam shots in their photo booth—that’s us above cocktails in hand.  I appreciate that they created a distinct experience for us music fans by making sure everyone had a good time as a good party host should.

This is social branding at its best.  This company went to where their customers hang out and contributed what’s important to them. And this kind of understanding is the magic that creates a special camaraderie and drives more meaningful relationships with people.

Needless to say, we all went home with purses full of Vitamin Water excited for their next dance party.

- Bianca Abate

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Social networking has just about hit its peak. What I mean by that is, we have reached a point of maximum density for social networks such that new ones popping up are bound to fail. The winners have emerged–Facebook for personal, LinkedIn for business, and Twitter for marketing–and now the focus is turning to how to make every online experience social (wherever you are on the web). It’s placeless social networking or the social web.

Companies need to be thinking about how they engage with users beyond the traditional website to establish and build an ongoing social relationship wherever a user happens to be. The days of brochure-ware have been over for awhile. It’s time to think about what it means to be social–then, build a company-wide strategy that extends beyond having a website, a Facebook page and a LinkedIn profile to how you strategically use human resources, marketing, sales and the web to build social relationships.

–Jen Travis

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In a clever switcheroo, Dominos pizza has turned the tables of opinion with its use of social media.  Practically brought down by a Youtube video of two employees doing disgusting things with their pizza, Dominos has come back with a vengeance, with its own YouTube video showing customers in focus groups slamming its pizza.  Why would that be a good idea?  Their campaign is brilliant! Everyone can support a brand that admits a wrongdoing and wants to change. And even more so, when they actually attempt to make a change, which they are doing with a new recipe for “honest to goodness” pizza. It’s a rebranding campaign filled with chutzpah and authenticity, which I predict will save their pepperoni.

-Lynn Parker

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While I was really there to see how the morning’s keynote speaker Al Gore was going to sell global warming to 11,000 HR leaders, I found a statement made by the Society of Human Resources Management board chair Robb Van Cleave to be really quite interesting. He said during his speech at their national convention on June 28th, “With the proliferation of social media your employees are becoming brand ambassadors and you, you HR leaders are becoming brand managers.”

I found this particularly interesting because during the early morning workshop I conducted, that had concluded not 15 minutes prior to Mr. Van Cleave’s speech, I covered the social nature of modern brands and the opportunity to enlist employees in the service of this new reality to build one’s brand and to increase employee engagement. I suppose it’s possible that Mr. Van Cleave plucked the quote from my presentation, but what’s more likely, given the lively conversation during my session, is that there seems to be a trend.

Social media is forcing a conversation between communications, HR and leadership about the role of employees in the definition and cultivation of their brand promise. In some organizations, this presents the opportunity to differentiate and to create stronger connections with employees and customers alike. And in others, it’s creating stricter policies around the use of online media and the dissemination of company information in the hope that social media is a passing fad.

If successful brands today are those that function as a community, where fans engage, share and personalize, how can you deliver on this expectation without promoting the use of social media?

Regardless of where you’ve come down on this issue, I’d love to hear about how you got there and what you learned about your organization in the process.

–Briana

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Several years ago, I worked as a reporter for a public radio station in the Midwest. One day, while reporting a story about an emerging hi-tech company, I had a revelation about how companies think about themselves. While visiting the company to conduct interviews, I was struck first by the building itself.  The facility was big and spacious with high ceilings and lots of natural light.  There was a slide you could take from the second floor to the first, if you were feeling too whimsical to use the stairs.  There were wonderful paintings and sculptures throughout the facility. They had a restaurant (with a trained chef) on site, as well as a massage therapist and a hair dresser.  A dry cleaner stopped by daily to pick up and drop off laundry, and I was told that a nurse regularly visited the business in case anyone was feeling ill.

The skeptic in me thought, “Yeah… they have to provide all those services because they expect their employees to slave away 20 hours a day. They’re probably miserable.”

Once I started to conduct interviews, I was stunned by the positive attitude shared by employees and owners alike.   From the receptionist who greeted me to the CEO, everyone referred to the same basic ideas about what made their company successful and what they enjoyed about working there.  They all talked about the open culture, the mutual respect coworkers had for each other’s abilities, and the oddly plucky nature of how the company planned to grow. It was a disconcerting experience for me and at the time I wasn’t quite sure why.

Flash forward several years. I am no longer a reporter, although I haven’t lost my journalistic curiosity.  The question of how an organization creates and conveys its culture to all its stakeholders has continued to be a fascinating subject. So, it was a pleasant surprise to find myself doing some work for Parker LePla where they have made an art form out of coaxing the companies into identifying and implementing on what I now know is called Brand.

When the players at Parker LePla first described how they help companies identify and build their brands, the skeptic in me thought, “Yeah, right. How can outsiders tell insiders what their company is all about?”

Yesterday, I got a glimpse of how they do it.  I watched as five members of Parker LePla’s (now referred to PLP-ites) firm discussed their collective understanding of what they learned about a client through a series of interviews and surveys.  The group was quickly able to agree on five core themes that everyone within the organization expressed.  The PLP-ites then worked together to write a statement that not only expresses those themes but also contextualized them in terms of the client’s larger business environment.

I don’t recall any Kool-Aid being served at yesterday’s meeting, but I must have had a sip of something good.  It was amazing to hear how the PLP-ites riffed off of each other’s ideas as they worked toward the common goal of finding the appropriate expression of the client’s brand.

Now, I have no idea how the client will feel about the result of the work I witnessed, and I’m not just saying this because I’m hoping that my work with PLP continues, but it was really exciting to realize that an organization’s culture – any organization – can be discovered, analyzed and verbalized with the right set of objective minds working on discovering it.  For the firm that that thoroughly knows its brand, the benefits are tremendous – both internally and externally.  That is what I witnessed years ago when I interviewed people at that Midwestern hi-tech firm.  The company still exists, by the way. And continues to grow and develop and maintain its plucky culture.

-Shula Neuman

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