If you’re still working on figuring out search engine and page optimization, this post may not be for you. SEO and page optimization are still all about sites as destinations. That theory that says people will need to come to your place and you’ll do your best to have them stick to it. However, with social – and especially real time – we have people at the center. Their online presence and interactions create the connection, not any one specific place.

Which means that the context where your brand lives will be even more situational than it’s been in the past. All the hard work of deciding what the company or product story will look like needs to take place at the development and the service delivery stages, not just in the promotional phase. Owning your brand, it turns out, equals revealing the real core of the company – the real “it” through the real you.

Here are five real issues with real time connections and brands:

1. Having clear focus in all you do replaces rigid messaging - playing back what the business is doing in real time means that you’ve adopted clear and simple communications throughout the organization so that each individual who participates in its supply chain and is in direct or indirect contact with customers will be able to articulate what the business stands for.

2. Investing more means putting skin in the game - it’s not a matter of budgets and funds anymore. Social participation is much more than buying ad space for a campaign. There are things your money won’t be able to buy. Things like honest interest, attention, time spent addressing questions and talking with people online.

3. Making the commitment to respond to market needs takes greater discipline - this requires extreme flexibility. Service companies may have a slight advantage over businesses that produce products. But only if the attitude and approach the organization takes are of learning continuously and innovating accordingly. One note on this point: just because you can do something, it doesn’t mean you should as it may not provide value to customers and results for the organization.

4. Creating strong products and services integrates tightly with talking about them - brand ownership is about aligning what a company makes, what it delivers, with how its customers and employees say about it. The very existence of the business depends on its ability to help people do what they need and want to do.

5. Delivering on your promises means creating operational abilities throughout the organization - real time means that at every touch point, you will need to provide the same kind of experience, not just conversation. Many smart organizations will start down the path of cross functional training. Functions that in the past were seen as corporate or administrative will become knowledgeable about the business and help further interaction and brand impressions.

Tomorrow’s brand leaders will emerge from commitment to living and breathing the business core values and express them through interactions. In each industry, there is opportunity for a company to set the highest standards for its field, measure the impact of its actions, and communicate from a well understood platform that demonstrates it walks the talk.

Stopwatch image by Casey Marshall. Licensed under the Creative Commons.

Tagged as: Brands, Interactive, Marketing, Realtime