That was the question that Bea Fields, a top leadership coach, asked 14 business leaders. I’m flattered that she included me in that group.

There were a variety of answers, as you might expect. She printed them, including mine, in her post Gaining Loyal Customer By Building a Strong Leadership Brand.

Bea’s Definition

Bea’s summarized own take on the question as follows, “When you build a brand based on true, enduring leadership, each person in the company not only speaks about the brand and the promises you make to your customers in your marketing strategies… each person in your company truly lives those promises every day in both their personal and professional lives…”

What is Your Definition?

Both personal and company branding can be confounding to define. How do you define your leadership brand? Don’t be shy. Please leave a comment below.

Kyle-Beth Hilfer, Esq.

I spoke recently at the GSMI Social Media Legal Risks and Strategies Summit on “Protecting Your Brand in Social Media” and “Prize Promotions in Social Media and Mobile Marketing.” Most of the audience was feeling their way into social media and trying to get a handle on the legal issues they might confront. While many attendees seemed convinced of the power of social media, they also seemed scared by the risks. I was reminded of the words of Theodore Roosevelt: “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.” Indeed, it is possible to chart a course in social media that affords legal protection and safeguards to a brand. Below, I outline a five step process.

STEP ONE: Familiarize yourself with the social media platforms’ rules. Read the terms of use, privacy statements, guidelines, and FAQ for the platforms in which you have an interest. Discern differences in their treatments of trademarks, copyrights, privacy, and prize promotions. Determine how the platforms’ rules align with your own brand’s protections.

STEP TWO: Create policies that protect your brand. Your social media team should consist of legal, HR, and marketing personnel. The team should plan your brand’s social media policies for your people and your intellectual property. Policies for people should consider the requirements of the FTC Endorsement and Testimonial Guidelines. They should also guide employees on how to engage in social media in a way that promotes the brand and makes sense for your own corporate culture. There is no one size fits all social media policy. Each company should draft its policies to align with preexisting guidelines for social interaction, email, confidential information, and intellectual property protection. Your policies for intellectual property in social media should outline consistent use of your trademarks, DMCA takedown procedures, and protection of your trade secrets.

STEP THREE: Engage legal counsel in creating a marketing plan. Do you want to invite user generated content? How will you vet the content before posting? How will you monitor responses to the content? How swiftly can you respond to content or remove it from your pages? As you roll out into the social media space, you may take on a prize promotion or a branded loyalty program. Perhaps you will consider using geo-location technology to enable behavioral marketing. Bring legal into the discussion early as you plan strategy and your marketing approach. Rewrite your privacy policies if necessary. Review the legal paradigms that apply to your marketing efforts. Your counsel should support your business goals and be able to help you create meaningful programs with minimal legal risk.

STEP FOUR: Think proactively about other venues. The next frontier is mobile marketing. How will your social media program connect to mobile? How do the social media platforms you are on allow you to extend to mobile? Consider how your brand wants to communicate with its customers to obtain the requisite opt-in for each mobile marketing effort.

STEP FIVE: Balance enforcement with public relations. Remember that in the world of social media, cease and desist letters have frequently back-fired from a public relations perspective. Consider the amount of harm being done to the brand and respond in a proportionate way. Examine the Righthaven cases to avoid being seen as a “bully” in the marketplace. Remember that in social media, anti-social behavior can harm a brand far more than a technical copyright infringement.

© Kyle-Beth Hilfer, P.C. 2011. Kyle-Beth Hilfer, Esq. specializes in advertising, marketing, promotions, intellectual property and new media law. She is also Of Counsel to Collen IP, a full serviceintellectual property law firm. For more information about her law practice and more blog posts, please visit Kyle-Beth Hilfer, P.C. (where this post originally appeared). Twitter: @kbhilferlaw.

[tweetmeme]The web has become the preferred source of information about your company.  It’s a fact.  That’s where your employees, customers and prospects are getting their information about you.   So, it’s more important than ever that your brand attributes and key messages are communicated in language that is clear, concise and compelling. Nothing less than your reputation is at stake if you get it wrong.

Name Brands

Image via Wikipedia

When we speak of brands a few immediately jump to mind:  Coca-Cola, the world’s most valuable brand, Google, and Facebook, for example.  Coca-Cola has been around forever and built its brand over time.  Google was launched in 1998 and quickly became the leading search engine.  It’s a noun and a verb when you “Google” something.  Facebook is a Harvard case study of how a company built a global brand in the space of six short years (by co-founders who attended Harvard).  Facebook is ubiquitous.  Does anyone need to explain what Facebook is?  The brand is crystal clear.  Nowadays, brands are built and destroyed in Internet time.

Individuals have personal brands too.  Oprah, Elvis and Sting are three entertainers with such recognizable brands all you need to hear is their first names to know who they are and the values they represent.

The word “brand” has come to have many definitions.  When you are building your brand it is important to use a common vocabulary so that you and your colleagues are working from the same script.

What is a brand?

•    A brand is what an organization wishes to be known for.  It is a pro-active strategic process to establish the direction, leadership, clarity of purpose and inspiration for the organization’s mission.  It is an inside-out process.

What is positioning?

•    Positioning is how an organization and the services it provides are perceived in the minds of its target audiences.  It is looking from the outside-in.  The challenge is to have your brand and positioning in alignment.

What is corporate identity?

Image via CrunchBase

•    Corporate identity is the visual expression of the organization’s name, logo, and tagline.

How do you define a brand, positioning and corporate identity?

[tweetmeme]Have you noticed – how could you miss it – that the familiar Google logo is nowhere to be seen on the search engine’s landing page?  Instead, a soft green Google logo, with a sports figure matching the day’s events at the Winter Olympics, has replaced the colorful one that about a billion searchers see each day.

If you’re a sports fan, you may love it.  But a lot of people actually hate it (OK, maybe my friend is not representative of the universe).  They want the familiar Google.  And, remember, not everyone is a sports fan.

But there is a larger issue here:  should a company tamper with its brand identity when it is the category leader?  That’s putting it mildly for Google.  Yet, we’ve seen damage inflicted on companies that tied their brand to a celebrity and/or a particular sport when things turned sour (read Accenture and Tiger Woods).

On the other hand, the Olympics generate a tremendous amount of excitement and pride in the athletes and their countries.  That can provide a “halo” effect for a company like Google.

So, what do you think?

I’ve read a flotilla of articles and blogs about the importance of having a personal brand, and how key it is for companies to have a positioning that excites their target markets.  Yet, I haven’t read anything to my satisfaction that clarifies in simple language all the terms that are bandied about.

The word “brand” has come to have many definitions.  The key is that when you are working on your brand it is important to use a common vocabulary so that you and your colleagues are communicating in the same language.

Here are three simple definitions:

What is a brand?

• A brand is what an organization wishes to be known for.  It’s the words you use to describe yourself and/or your company, and is the result of a strategic analysis to establish your unique selling proposition.  It is an inside-out process.

What is positioning?

• Positioning is how an organization and the services it provides are perceived in the minds of its target audiences. It is looking from the outside-in.  The challenge is to have your brand and positioning in alignment.

What is corporate identity?

• Corporate identity is the visual expression of the organization’s name, logo, tagline.

Now isn’t that simple to understand?  What’s not simple is defining your brand, whether it’s personal or for a business.  It is hard work to understand what makes you unique and what you are really selling.  I haven’t figured it all out myself yet, and when I see that even the biggest companies mess up their brands (remember Coke?), then I take heart that I’ll get it right someday.  How do you feel about your brand?