Are you involved in social media?  Are you in Marketing?  If you are, you have probably heard the term brand association.  Brand association is a growing trend in social media.  Many people are starting to capitalize on this while growing their social influence or social capital.  Yes even twitter has a grading system and measures your influence.  Because of this, personal branding is becoming a necessity in todays digital economy and I wanted to share with you my take on the topic.

First, when I think of personal branding, I refer to personal branding expert for generation Y  Dan Schawbel (click his name for link to his Blog) who I had the pleasure to meet at Gravity Summit last year in Boston.   Here is the blog post With a video I did interviewing Dan on online branding tips for small business: http://bit.ly/2jYUl Celebrities and other influential people in the online and offline world leverage brand association and capitalize on this everyday.

Now more than ever thanks to social media, we will continue to see this trend gain more popularity with big brand names endorsing people who build up their social capital, social influence, and trust with their audience.  Why should you pay attention to this?  Because thanks to social media, this levels the playing field and creates new opportunities that did not exist before social media.  Now just average people can possibly take advantage of this new opportunity to use social media to associate themselves with brands they are passionate about and capitalize thanks to their brand evangelism.   Affiliate programs do a lot of this too.  Thanks to our personal stories and testimonials (being transparent of course) the smart companies and brands will start reaching out to key influencer’s active in social media and social networking.  This is continually happening and this trend will continue growing so get involved, IF you don’t mind being transparent of course.

Here is my video that explains brand association in more detail.  I am interested in hearing from you-  what are your brand associations? Hint- follow products and services you are passionate about.  If you are not involved now with social media and associating yourself with products and services you are passionate about, then I suggest you start.  Do you see anything wrong with social media and brand association?  Have you been able to capitalize on this yet? I’m interested in hearing your stories.

If you are from Infiniti and intertsted in speaking more about the endorsement- I can be reached via email at snsdjf@gmail.com

Happy Branding!

Tags: Business, Marketing, Social Media, trust, Twitter

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 6th, 2010 at 5:36 PM and is filed under Internet Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.