How to Create the Right Avatar for You and Your Brand

Mihaela Lica — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 17:42:39 +0000

In contrast to corporate or business avatars, personal ones are simple: crop a photograph you like and that’s it. It doesn’t matter whether people like it or not. That avatar represents who you are, and since you don’t care about branding that much you don’t need to worry about what’s in that little picture that will be associated with your name in the social network you’re using. Besides, if you use social networking just for personal reasons, changing that avatar every now and then could be fun and it will also attract some attention from your followers.

Corporate avatars however are somehow more complicated. I always advise against using logos as avatars. They are cold and somehow insinuate that the ones using them are not there to communicate, but to sell.

People in social networks respond better to human faces than to iconic avatars. It’s in human nature to trust more the face behind a business than the business logo. Even more: statistics show that people tend to click more on banners depicting human faces than anything else. If this is true for banner advertising, then it is logically true for social networks, right? (See “The Five Golden Rules of Online Branding” – pdf)

So, what should you use as your avatar if your focus is not entirely personal? A company logo is a good branding tool, but on a social network, like Twitter for example, it’s simply inappropriate. When it comes to brands, the “consumers” simply prefer to know who they are talking to.

The ideal way to present yourself in a corporate branded avatar would be a combination of human face combined with corporate logo, but you have to do it right. For example, @WomensCouncil has a company avatar with human faces and a logo, but it still remains a mystery who the person behind Women’s Council Realtors is.

Faces and Logos – An Ideal Approach

Luckily there are some good examples of how to use a combination of human faces and logos to create a good, brand consistent and recognizable avatar.

First, Scott Monty, head of social media department at Ford Motor Company, is a superb example. Another is Nicole Simon, who advertises her participation of the NEXT 2009 Share Economy summit in May this year. Next, Ian Chapman is branding himself, and Danny Brown will obviously take the 12for12k challenge. Other good examples: Jeffrey Summers, Axel Schultze, John (colder Ice), Lisa Preston , Gunnar Skeid, Gord Weisflock, David Pethrick, and Dot Design (who doesn’t have a name, but at least he has a face). There are surely many more, but it took me more than one hour to find even these, so if you find any, feel free to share them please. As for my own avatar… I had to change it today, so I wouldn’t appear hypocritical. :)

The moral of the story is: not many of the companies that make social profiles on various networks (I am not talking only Twitter here, I am merely using it as an example) know how to approach branding within social media. Traditional methods of displaying a logo and hoping for the best will not attract followers. People are tired of trusts and large corporations pitching them incessantly. If anything, they want to connect with real company staff members who are able to answer real questions, and in the case of Twitter, in real time. Somehow, no one can envision the Nike logo being animated or warm enough to engage a conversation or listen to a gripe.

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How to Successfully Integrate Social Media Into Your Site

Matt Mickiewicz — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 04:21:22 +0000

While attending Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, I had the chance to hear Bob Buch from Digg present tips and case studies on integrating social media marketing into your or your clients’ websites.

Digg Traffic

“Each story that makes it onto the frontpage of Digg gets a minimum of 20,000 clicks back to the publisher. The best stories will get 200,000 – 250,000 clicks. Digg sends 80 million clicks per month to 3rd party websites,” says Buch.

How are other sites benefiting?

TheOnion gets 600,000 page views per month from Digg users
Wired.com gets 1 million page views per month from Digg users
Telegraph.co.uk, the most successful Digg integration partner, and most popular broadsheet newspaper in the UK, gets 5.5 million page views per month from Digg users.

Key to success: Focus

If you have one of these on your sites, you’re doing it wrong:

A much better integration looks like this:

In other words – less is more.

Use the Smart Digg Widget

The Smart Digg widget shows the number of votes to date and is massively more successful than a regular “Digg This” icon without the counter.

Integrated Most Popular Widget

Digg Widget on Telegraph.co.uk

One of the most popular elements on many content websites is a “Most Popular Content” box which highlights 5-10 popular articles based on recent page views. Time.com found that the “Digg Widget” integrated into their site, got 5X more interaction than their own “Most Popular Articles” box and massively increased their own traffic as a result of tons of additional Digging activity.

Facebook Connect

Popular tech news publisher TechCrunch saw registrations increase by 100%, while capturing additional demographic data on their users by integrating Facebook Connect.

While unusually successful, Bob notes that most websites see an increase of 30-80% increase in registration, and an additional 15-80% in comments and user generated content as a result of a clean Facebook Connect integration. You can even import user photos and other demographic data back into your site – such as location, gender, and other information that might otherwise drag down your sign-ups if integrated into your own registration process.

One of the biggest successes of Facebook connect is being able to virally spread your message, by appearing on the “News” wall for users who use post on your site, vote, upload, or otherwise interact with your site.

With each Facebook user having an average of 120 Facebook friends, this is a very quick way to expose your brand to a lot of people, really quickly, while providing “social proof”.

SitePoint » Social Media Strategies

How to Create the Right Avatar for You and Your Brand

Faces and Logos – An Ideal Approach

How to Successfully Integrate Social Media Into Your Site