Do a search on any company on Google nowadays (like my web design business) and you will turn up everything about that company: owners, founders, investors, projects, clients, press, white papers, links, and general chatter.
As the boss or the person in charge of that image, control your message by determining what types of information you want to share (and which information you want to KEEP PRIVATE!!!) with your potential customers and partners.
Your media sometimes is your message. Search engines archive keywords on your website into perpetuity. That picture or poem you published years back finds a second, or third, or fourth life in Google's cache. That gaffe by your top officer makes the news today and people twenty years into the future pull up all the embarrassing details. Your photos? Search for yourself to see what others may find out about you!
Watch out for your media! Control your message!
Political campaigns provide a great example of a competitive field with "customers" (supporters) and product placement (the candidates), brand messaging (the values that candidate embodies), and a platform (a story that draws a potential donor "in").
You might remember "Read my lips" or "It's Morning in America" or "It all began in a place called Hope" or the Swift Boat Veterans as examples of messages that cut through the noise and created memorable images, either through TV or radio clips or on the internet.
With any presidential candidate today, their website is in place, their e-mail lists grow daily, and their "team" of messaging professionals crafts an up-to-the-nanosecond response team.
Bloggers and videologgers also share their insights and documentation of the "inner workings" of the campaign, so the ability to move the message towards what the candidate wants to talk about (not what the oppposition wants to talk about) is of uppermost importance.
Your company is just like any political campaign (but you're online all the time! politicians get breaks every two or four years.)...
Your customers demand respect.
Your fans desire straightforward product descriptions.
Your associates accept only courteous, honest, moral, ethical behavior.
Your public community yearns for integrity in your story.
So deliver on these principles! Be real about your product and service and share what you think is important about what you offer. Speak positively about your abilities and let the competition fend for itself. You have the ability to control your message and develop the right media to reach your customers. If no media exists, create some of your own with a blog, a list of resource links, or a group of informative videos!
Some pointers to encourage the positive messaging that you desire to share about your business or company.
1) Stay on message. Speak about what you want to speak about. Share your insights into the company or your business model.
2) Engage your fans. Encourage customer testimonials and feedback from your greatest supporters. Nothing "sells" your product or service better than someone else.
3) Avoid insults, backbiting, and negativity. Move towards friendly competition, praise, and positive feedback, and your customers will trust you even more.
4) Become the best in what you do. Excel in your industry and become synonymous with what you offer. Think "Kleenex" or "Alka-seltzer" or "Crayolas": their marketing campaigns have created those objects in your mind.
5) Develop a stellar reputation. Avoid shadiness and anything that rubs you the wrong way. Find good friends and stick with them, keep your customers happy, and continue to increase the quality of your products and your services: word-of-mouth triumphs every time.
Above all, control your message. If you've lost control in the past, then start again, today if necessary, by crafting new media messages. Create new branding and marketing strategies that will rise up, over and over again, with the values, ideas, and platforms that you believe in. Over the next eight weeks, you have the opportunity to create an entirely different "first page" of search results for your company! Make it happen!
