I’m into details, and my wife is REALLY into details. I think they’re important, she actually can notice them. It works well, since she’s the graphic design half of our enterprise here.

Branding consistency is really about a mindset which says, “NO! We are not using that font for this presentation. Our body-text font is X.” You have to understand that one shade of blue is not the same as another shade of blue. My wife and I have moved an apostrophe we thought was too high, and even once shrunk a single letter of a font (U) because it was slightly fatter than it should have been.

Related to consistency is a personal branding strategy I use…

The Social Bootstrap brand is color and texture rich. Our logo has seven different colors (plus black), all of which have a gradient, and are then placed over a concrete background. I do my best to reflect this color-rich idea in my clothing.

I don’t want to go overboard and wear the seven colors of my logo (that would not be subtle), I do try to (tastefully) wear as many different colors and textures as I can. This is easiest in the fall and winter (more articles of clothing to wear).
For example, I recently wore:

• navy blue pants
• orange dress shirt shirt
• olive green sweater vest
• light khaki suit jacket
• dark khaki socks
• reddish-brown leather shoes and belt
• scarf in several shades of brown and khaki

This is pretty typical of my clothing. While none of those colors is exactly a Social Bootstrap color, the richness of having more colors than most people wear contributes to the personal brand identity I am building. The colors come together in a way that doesn’t stick out or look outrageous, but is different enough to give people a sense of what kind of person I am, and what kind of company I run.

What do you think?
What branding strategies do you use? How do you feel about consistency?
Do you consider your clothing a part of your personal brand?

This post is part of the Brogan 100.
Learn more here and here.

Here they are, in their own words.

Thanks to Pete Cashmore at Mashable for calling this to my attention.

And so I thought- thank goodness, I was wondering where my next blog post would come from. This dude’s freakin’ awesome.

The business started as a business school project (-slash-) outgrowth of his parents’ florist business. Over the last six (I think) years, they’ve grown to over $12 million in sales. Mostly through organic search. That’s incredible.

For most of the time they have been in business they have ranked number one for 71 of their 72 desirable keywords: Easter Gift Baskets, gift baskets snacks, birthday gift baskets.

So naturally- everyone wants to know how they did it.

Well, at first- a bunch of things you can’t do anymore.

Early on, they were paying bloggers to link to them. (Don’t do that!) A bit black hat, yes- but the links were fairly high quality. Useful to the consumer. Informative. The relevance of the links was so high (in reality) that Gourmet Gift Baskets was one of the last sites to get penalized by Google for this sort of behavior (more on that in a minute).

They also paid some sketchy SEO company to do… well, they didn’t really know. Stuff that would get you banned today (link farms, cross-linking subdomains, dummy sites with auto-content). It didn’t get them banned (back then), but it was expensive and didn’t really help at all.

They started creating useful, informative content- well linked articles with unbiased information. That worked really well. Ryan described it as, “pretty gray hat stuff.” The content was good, the links were unbiased (he linked to competitors where appropriate, to educational resources, and so on)- he was able to get high-trust sites to link to this content: dot-edu and dot-gov sites linked to some of his stuff. It worked great!

Trouble was, they were being a little (or completely) manipulative in the way this content was published and controlled, and how he got people to link to it.

Ryan checks his Google rank on all major keywords every morning. One day- they just disappeared. Google got wind of what they were doing, and how they were manipulating content, and they got slammed. After a few weeks in the Google confessional known as resubmission request, Gourmet Gift Baskets pulled back onto page one (near the bottom) in time for the holiday buying season.

The strategy since then has been two pronged:

• Be less evil.
• Diversify

Be less evil.
Step one was less black and gray, more solid white hat SEO stuff. Deep in the site are these fantastic educational articles about gifts, gift baskets, food, holidays. A boatload of content that a regular visitor doesn’t see (there’s no navigation to them). The only one he mentioned was Ukrainian Easter Eggs.
They produce all this fantastic deep content, which links back to their home page. They then attempt to find people to link to that content. This creates indirect links back to the homepage- a sort of SEO funnel of goodness.
Expensive, time consuming, slow.
But effective.

Diversify
At its peak, over 80% of their business was coming from organic search on Google. While lots of people would kill for results like that, any good business person will tell you that you shouldn’t be so incredibly dependent on a single source of income. What if the algorithm changes? What if they get banned or penalized? Ryan estimates they lost about $2 million of sales the holiday season they were at the bottom of page one instead of the top.

Additionally- they’re maxed out. How do you grow an online business when everyone who looks for your product finds you? They can’t think of any more keyword phrases to optimize for. They have more or less hit the wall with revenue from organic search- and they’re spending $90,000 a year to keep it that way.

So the company is starting to move backwards into traditional media, forward into Social media, and sideways into a whole new way to generate SEO goodness.

The coolest SEO strategy I’ve ever heard of
When Ryan first said, “We’re gonna break world records!” I thought he was speaking in that overly-enthusiastic sales guru hyperbole I’ve grown accustomed to in the last few years. I was wrong.

Gourmet Gift Baskets is going to bake the World’s Largest Cupcake!

How big do you think the current world’s largest cupcake is? You’d probably think in terms of a Volkswagon, right? No, sadly- the current record holder is an embarrassingly small footstool of a cupcake.
151 pounds.
Lame.

Ryan’s cupcake is going to be 7,151 pounds! Now we’re talking. Custom fabricated cupcake mold. The world’s largest electric oven. A cupcake the size of a car. This dude is serious.

With a little bit of wheeling and dealing, a bit of creativity, and a whole lot of bootstrapping, this whole thing is going to cost around $20,000. Much less than the $90,000 a year he’s been paying. And what higher quality links they’ll get. This is beyond white-hat/black-hat. This is Wizard’s Hat SEO.

To Do
You there. Entrepreneur. Internet marketer. SEO guru.

Stop trying to game the system. Gourmet Gift Baskets is a great case study in SEO trickery- what used to work, why it worked, and why it doesn’t work anymore. If you’ve been doing SEO for more than two years, you probably need to forget everything you know.

Do something different. Something ridiculous. Something at least the size of a Volkswagon.

And don’t put all your Ukrainian Easter Eggs in one Gourmet Gift Basket.

Well… Maybe.

The thing is, you do have to do all that if you want to become a Thought Leader… in the field of New Media, Social Media, and Thought Leadership. If you want bloggers to see you as the world’s greatest blogger, there is a never ending arms race to have the coolest new technology, the greatest new Socially-integrated, semantic high-definition 3G cheese slicer.

But you just want to be a Thought Leader for Estate Planning or payroll processing. You just want more people to donate to your community theatre. You just want to sell more red flip-flops.

For you, most of those things are not essentials, just possibilities. Good ideas, maybe. Additional tools.

What does it really take to become a Thought Leader? What are the small set of things that are required?
Here’s my list.

Innovation

The bedrock of Thought Leadership is innovation. That doesn’t have to mean crazy-new technology. It might mean that, but it also might mean a new way of doing an old thing, or a new way of thinking about things, or even just a unique point of view.

If you’re not different- unique, interesting, innovative, creative- in some way, then it’s remarkably unlikely that anyone will ever care about your Social Media strategy. They won’t remember you after networking events. They won’t bother to come to your seminars or read your books. Why would they?

Without innovation, everything else stops being “Thought Leadership Activity” and becomes “New-Fangled Advertising and Time-Waste.”

Content-Rich Website

Until the world changes again (it will, but it hasn’t yet), a website that is full of interesting and useful content is the cornerstone of Thought Leadership. When someone hears your name, meets you at an event, or gets one of your newsletters, the first thing they’ll do (if they care) is Google you.

As great as a LinkedIn profile is, what they really want to find is your website. And when they get to it, they will make all sorts of judgements about you. Based on the way your site looks, the way it navigates, and depth of its resources, people will decide how good you are, how interesting, and how valuable. They will know (or think they know) if you are a start-up or an established business. They will know (or think they know) how much you know about your industry. How big your firm is. How profitable you are. Whether you’re a legitimate business or some goofy MLM scam. What kind of culture your company has. What kind of clients you service. Whether you are honest or not. Whether you are cool or not.

Blog

A blog (like the one you are reading) is something like an online journal and something like a personal Op-Ed collumn. They can be part of your overall firm website, or they can be separately hosted and separately branded. It’s a place where you can, on a regular basis, write about your thoughts and opinions relating to your field or industry. You can comment on current events and trends, you can announce company news or promotions, and you can advance your philosophies.

Blogs are essential for at least three reasons. The first is that they provide a regular way for people to connect with you and your ideas. The second is that the constant addition of content provided by blog writing is highly valued by Google. The third is simply that it is expected.

Robust Social Media Presence

No, you don’t have to live tweet while you stand in line at the grocery store. Nor do you need to post on everybody’s wall or follow everyone’s feeds. But you do need a presence. If someone wants to link to you, they should be able to find you. If they want to follow you on Twitter, they should have the option.

You can’t do everything, and it is very easy to lose yourself to the time-sink of Social Media (especially if you can convince yourself that it is “business”). But people expect to be able to find you on at least the most popular networks. If they can’t, they’ll just move on to the next hopeful.

E-Books and White Papers

These are just PDF files (usually), which address particular issues within your field in a more in depth way than a blog post or online article could. Typically, White Papers are shorter (5-15 pages) than E-Books (25-100) and more technical as well.

White Papers and E-Books give visitors to your site an opportunity to see the depth of your knowledge on particular topics, while getting some informatiion they can actually use. Even better, If your E-books or White Papers are useful and valuable, your readers will forward copies to their friends and colleagues, advertising on your behalf.

Print Books

Nothing says “expert” more than having published a book.

It is now possible to write, edit, design, publish, distribute, and profit from the sale of books, without a publishing company or an agent. Will you be a New York Times Bestseller? Probably not (although, probably not anyway), but that isn’t the goal, really. The goal is to position yourself as an expert, as a Thought Leader, and bring in additional sales to for your primary business. It may turn out that you make additional money from the sale of the print book. That’s just a (welcome) bonus.

Real World Networking

So much of Thought Leadership is tied to relationships. You’re trying to create a network (or a community, or a tribe) of people who think of you when they hear a reference to your industry. People who provide you with new business, but more than that- people who provide you with new ideas, information, resources, friendship, and joy. (It isn’t all abot money, you know).

While it’s possible to develop connections like that solely online and through media, it is so much easier if you just spend time with people. So go. Go to networking events, to conferences, to seminars, to workshops. If there are more than five people in a room, and one of them might be a potential client, you should be there.

Public Speaking

After print books, the most powerful Thought Leadership tool is Public Speaking. That could mean running your own seminars and workshops, or it could mean speaking and giving presentations at other events. When you stand in front of a group of people, and all the attention (or most of it, anyway) is focused on you, people assume you must know what you’re talking about. If it turns out that you do know what you’re talking about, and that you’re able to provide valuable, useful information, your audience will remember. They will tell their friends, they will seek you out for additional information- they will buy from you.

Visual Branding

A fresh, impactful logo.
A consistent color scheme and style.
Attractive fonts, perfect kerning, and a vivid margin.

In order to become a Thought Leader, you need people to engage with you and with your ideas. Your ideas will mostly be words, so you need people to take the time to read your words. Before anyone bothers to read, they will see the logo, or the cover design, or the splash page. They need to be compelled to read what you have to say. And once you have them reading, your branded design needs to make it easy for them to keep reading or to engage further with your material.

Sloppy branding turns people away. Inconsistent branding confuses people, which eventually turns them away. Branding that doesn’t quite match your culture, your personality, or your product inevitably attracts the wrong clients, who will be disappointed when they don’t get what they were expecting.

If you go crazy, trying to jump from one essential element to another, you’ll waste vast amounts of time and money. You’ll become frustrated and eventually give up.

But if you think strategically about how to combine the nine elements into a plan that makes sense for your business and your budget of time and money, you can build a following, become an expert, and create Thought Leadership.

And make a lot of money.

This post is adapted from a chapter in my soon-to-be-available book, DIY Thought Leadership.
The book will break down each one of those Essential Elements and show you how to do each one by yourself and on a budget.
If you’d like to know when the book is available,
Subscribe to This Blog OR Follow me on Twitter

What do you think? Too many essentials? Too few? What are you doing to create Thought Leadership?

I’m in the process of adding service menus to the Social Bootstrap website, so that people can look and see what it is we sell and how much it would cost to hire us. Over on the left hand sidebar of each menu page, I wrote a short, compelling (in my opinion) description of that page’s services area (Web, Print Books, Seminars, etc.). The left sidebar column, though, is a little small, so sometimes lines break in places that look a little unattractive. Here is a screen shot of the “Book Services” sidebar from earlier this morning, right after I wrote the copy:

Notice the line breaks after the words “meant,” and “book,” on the sixth and seventh line. This happens because “convincing” and “publishers” are both too long.

Also, the line break at “self-publishing,” is rather unfortunate.

So- what to do, what to do?

I could try to rewrite the line around, “that meant convincing book publishers,” but there’s got to be a better way. I briefly consider widening the column. I mean, really- I’m going to keep having problems like this with a sidebar so skinny. But, alas- the column is the width that it is because we want it to line up with the “buckle” of the Social Bootstrap logo, and we like the size of the logo.

So then I notice the break between the third and fourth lines:
as an expert than to
literally have “written the

Surely the word “have” could fit on the previous line, if I rewrote to:
as an expert than to have
literally “written the

Natually, that change would adjust that line, and it would affect all the subsequent lines.

So, after making sure I got a screen capture for comparitive “before-and-after” pictures, I switched two words in the copy.

Here’s the result:

Notice that removing “have” from the fourth line made enough room for the word “book.” That pulled everything back, leaving enough room for “convincing” and “publishers” before the line break. The changes cascade down the column, eventually bringing “self-” closer to the end of the line, which is much more attractive and readable.

Much better.

Of course, I’m not quite done. I also notice that without full line breaks between paragraphs, the whole column looks a little crowded and hard to read. To see the result of that, and of any other changes I make, you’ll have to actually look at the Book Services page.

So- Why bother?

Well, mostly it’s about taking pride in your own work. There are a lot of cheesy, poorly designed, hackified websites out there in the world. I don’t want that for my site. It’s possible that the change may even increase my conversion rate (who knows?). But not everything about design should be about conversion rate.

My wife and I were recently at a very nice Taco Bell (well designed, clean, interesting) and I was wondering about ROI (return on investment). That is- does having a nicer Taco Bell dining room attact enough additional sales to be worth the expense of design and renovation. We thought maybe it would, but we also said that we would probably have spent the money even if it didn’t, because that’s the kind of business we like to run.

Perhaps some of you are ROI junkies. Don’t spend an extra moment or an extra nickel on something unless it returns measurable increase in profits. If that’s you, you probably can’t imagine why someone would spend a half-hour on Monday morning smooshing words back and forth on a sidebar column.

But I’m not in business primarily to get a high ROI. Yes, yes- it’s important. I do have bills to pay. But I started Social Bootstrap so that I could build the kind of business I’ve always wanted to be a part of- a business that cares about things like details and quality and text-layout.

And though I’ll never be able to prove that the ROI for a half-hour of text-editing made it a profitable use of my time, I believe it is one more thing a potential customer may notice, one more detail that says, “Yes, we believe in quality and we believe in service, and we believe in details.”

Carolyn Elefant, writing on Nolo’s Legal Marketing Blog, says that a firm should consider using Wikipedia as a marketing tool.

Still, is a Wikipedia entry worthwhile for solo and small firm lawyers? For starters, what kinds of information would you include in the listings? Many large firms with long histories describe the firm’s origins and provide bios of firm founders and well-known alumni. But solo and small firm lawyers might not have enough background material to include. A smaller firm might also link to reported cases or cross-reference practice areas described on Wikipedia. For example, a bankruptcy lawyer could cross-link to the entry on Bankruptcy in Wikipedia, thus providing a good resource for clients with basic questions. Likewise, lawyers could cross-reference the city where they practice or hobbies they enjoy.

No… no, no… no, no, no.

Apparently someone forgot to read the Wikipedia editing guidelines:

Wikipedia is not…
4. Self-promotion.
It can be tempting to write about yourself or projects in which you have a strong personal involvement. However, do remember that the standards for encyclopedic articles apply to such pages just like any other, including the requirement to maintain a neutral point of view, which is difficult when writing about yourself or about projects close to you. Creating overly abundant links and references to autobiographical articles is unacceptable. See Wikipedia:Autobiography, Wikipedia:Notability and Wikipedia:Conflict of interest.

5. Advertising.
Articles about companies and products are written in an objective and unbiased style. Article topics must be third-party verifiable, so articles about very small “garage” or local companies are typically unacceptable. External links to commercial organizations are acceptable if they identify major organizations associated with a topic (see finishing school for an example). Wikipedia neither endorses organizations nor runs affiliate programs. See also Wikipedia:Notability (organizations and companies) for guidelines on corporate notability. Those promoting causes or events, or issuing public service announcements, even if noncommercial, should use a forum other than Wikipedia to do so.

And, instead of a massive uproar of “you’re not supposed to do that sort of thing,” Larry Bodine of LawMarketing Blog reblogs the idea…

A Wikipedia entry can help your law firm generate new business…
Most major law firms already maintain pages on Wikipedia.

So… Because it might be good marketing, we’re supposed to ignore Wikipedia standards about self-promotion, advertising, original research, notability, and autobiography. It even breaks the Ignore All Rules rule, since a shameless advertisement (no.. I know… not an advertisement, just a “profile”) cannot possibly contribute to the quality of the encyclopedia.
And.. just in case all those individual guidelines don’t gel together to help you realize that Wikipedia doesn’t like you writing articles about yourself, there is even a page called, “List of bad article ideas.”
Guess what item number one was?

Yourself or your organization – including a band of which you are a member or employee, even if either is notable! See Wikipedia:Conflict of interest.

Notice, the behavior of writing about your own company is so stupid and juvenile, that it is included on a list that also tells you not to write articles about your college dorm, the street you live on, or the “The New Great Thing you made up in school today.”

(Let’s not even get into the “Don’t Stuff Beans Up Your Nose” rule, which lawyers have been breaking for centuries)

And you people are lawyers… great.

Two bloggers, supposedly on the vanguard of Social Media / Relationship Marketing, should understand that abusing the communities we move in is a bad idea. Whether it results in public outcry or just bad karma is irrelevant.

Bootstrap that, biz-atches.

In the “old days” people thought branding was just about a logo or a color scheme or a tagline. Today, people recognize that your brand is an identity that infuses your company from top to bottom. Well, most people recognize that, anyway.

Unfortunately, a lot of the social media gurus (heroes, all) understand the new meaning of branding, but have forgotten that it should include the old part as well… Color and design and logos and a “look” are important.

So, it’s exciting that Social Bootstrap is rolling out a new logo! Along with the logo, we’re infusing this site and all of our communications and materials with the color scheme.

You’ll see the new logo on the top of this page in the next day or so, and piece by piece a “look” will start to emerge. We hope you like it.

We think it’s awesome.