Recently I stumbled upon Seth Godin’s typically erudite definition of brand value. According to Seth…”a brand’s value is merely the sum total of how much extra people will pay, or how often they choose, the expectations, memories, stories and relationships of one brand over the alternatives.” Hmmm.

It struck me that expectation and relationship are particularly relevant to those charged with managing and enhancing a brand’s digital presence. As each is a full post in itself, this post deals with the notion of expectation.

The digital environment is remarkably caustic – it can strip away the wishful thinking of brand managers or board members in an instant. It can efficiently remove years of expensive branding from the surface of your product in seconds. As such your digital presence can provide a brutally honest reflection of the real nature of your brand – and the online experience that it provides can have a considerable impact.

How considerable? According to the findings of the 2009 Razorfish Digital Brand Experience Report, 65% of consumers in the study reported that they have had a digital experience change their opinion about a brand. 97% of them report that experience influencing whether or not they purchased a product or service from that brand”.

This is not necessarily bad news

Depending upon your perspective this can be good or bad news. Done correctly, your digital presence can extend the relevance of a brand and ultimately engage a whole new segment of prospective customers.

However, the blade cuts both ways. Provide an experience which is inconsistent with how the customer would expect your brand to behave and you may end up with the customer using a blog post, a tweet, or a negative post on a review site to rally support and define your brand for you.

Employing new methods to engage customers is only part of the picture. All too often it’s the basics that let a brand down. The choices you make about seemingly benign web content can send powerful messages about your brand and what it really stands for.

It can be what you don’t say that counts…

For example, absence of meaningful brand credentials (a favourite of brands that dominate their home jurisdictions) can be taken as arrogance. Similarly, failure to provide sufficiently detailed product information can be viewed as closed and defensive. Limited or outmoded contact methods say a great deal about how approachable, helpful and customer-centric a brand really is.

If you don’t think that these things affect the way your brand is perceived, ponder this…

1. 41% decided not to make a planned purchase because they couldn’t readily find a piece of information about the product or service. (JupiterResearch, September 2007)
2. Online businesses lose as many as 6% of consumers due to a lack of online product information. (Allurent, January 2008)
3. 94% of UK shoppers leave sites with inadequate customer service. (Econsultancy, July 2009)

The features, options and content that you include say a lot about the nature of the relationship between your brand and its customers. With this in mind it is good practice to regularly review the components of your digital presence individually and collectively to see if your brand values are truly reflected.

If your brand is meant to be helpful do your offer features and options that are consistent with that position? If friendly and responsive, do you actually provide genuine feedback options to allow customers to tell you what they think. If your brand is truly innovative, prove it with examples and blog posts about your latest innovations instead of just telling your customers.

It always pays to remember that it is often what goes unsaid which speaks loudest about a brand and its true values. It is important to be aware of the messages that you send.

According to a PostRank study released recently, the level of engagement experienced by published articles has increased significantly over the past three years.

According to Ilya Grigorik from PostRank, “In absolute terms, when we sample over the top 1000 of the most engaging feeds for the past three years, we see approximately a 30% year over year growth in engagement – sign that more people are participating in the social web

They go on to say that “increasingly, social hubs such as Facebook, Twitter, and Digg are found in the top 3 traffic drivers, and their influence is only likely to increase over time.”

But the report goes further than simply attributing the growth to the increased popularity of the social hubs. The research report maintains that this growth is largely attributable to the “share, and like this” phenomenon, which is sweeping through Facebook, Twitter, and dozens of other social hubs…”

There are a lot of great insights in this report but there are four considerations that are worthy of further discussion – particularly for brands looking for incremental ways to engage with their customers and begin the social media journey.

The first is that it is clearly important that brands take steps to ensure that it is easy for readers to distribute their content. This is a relatively easy process and (with any luck) one that should not require endless meetings, risk assessments, technology reviews or invasive technological surgery. Hopefully. For those sites that carry the standard “bookmark this” links, its probably time to upgrade to a collective solution.

Whilst the PostRank study points to Facebook, Twitter and Digg, there are more than 120 social media and bookmarking websites that may appeal to your readers. For this reason it is worth considering services such as addThis or shareThis. These bookmarking services are easy to build into your page footers and allow readers to share your content across a mind-numbingly broad range of sites. From a purely personal perspective, I like shareThis in particular as it provides some handy reporting functionality and caters for managing multiple websites.

Secondly, content needs to be worthy of extended distribution. It is worth remembering that despite the increased ease with which customers can refer your content to others it still requires some effort. Readers will only do so if they a. feel that the content genuinely helped them, and b. that they likewise feel that it will do so for others.

Don’t forget that distribution is a personal endorsement of sorts and that despite the inherent anonymity of the web, there is often an association with the referrer’s online identity. Readers will not refer content that reflects poorly on them. As such, it pays to identify the intended stand-alone value of your content at the outset and remain focused on delivering tips, hints or information that will have relevance beyond the context of your website.

Thirdly, engagement can take many forms. The easiest is to provide your dynamic and valuable content in a format that allows readers to comment and/or rate your information. The easiest way to do this is via a blog format where much of the required technology is provided for you. Scary? Yes. But it is standing signal that your brand is ready for, and open to customer dialogue.

Finally and not surprisingly, the report identifies Facebook and Twitter as primary environments where brands with limited resources should look to establish a presence. Whilst this comes as no surprise, the report puts some substance behind the buzz surrounding these social hubs.

It is worth noting that the establishment of a brand presence within either of these environments should not be undertaken lightly. A broader digital strategy should underpin this type of activity and take account of the management safe keeping of the long term customer relationships which will result from this type of activity.

With all this in mind, the report supports the view that corporate and individual brands can benefit from ensuring that their content adds real value and that is easy to share and distribute to and within the main social environments.