Measure Your Brand Effectiveness, Online

Extending your brand reach online is an important part of any company's social branding strategy. Done well, a brand can boost its online awareness at a very low cost by taking advantage of the social multiplier effect -- a phenomenon whereby a small act of giving can have a larger, more amplified effect on the broader social ecosystem.

One of the easiest methods for expanding a brand's visibility is by publishing content. But rather than limiting your publishing activities to one's own website, smart brands realize the exponential benefits of syndicating content in multiple formats to external sites that have visitors that may not normally be exposed to your marketing messages. By posting content to popular social hubs such as Flickr, Slideshare and YouTube, or by making your content available via RSS or API feeds, you can tap into vast new audiences through mere association. It's a powerful marketing weapon that very few companies have taken advantage of as of yet.

Being shareable is about how well you embrace the concept of the giving web (aka Web 2.0, Web 3.0, social web, etc.). The giving web is about getting back what you give. Being shareable means exchanging of one thing for another, and it’s governed by the Law of Reciprocity, the force that ties the bonds of online communities.

There is a powerful mutiplying effect when you 'get what you give.' For example, the marketing team at Heardable published seven PPT decks onto Sideshare.net several months ago. So far, these seven sydicated posts have generated 4,911 PPT slide views,174 downloads and 17 embeds (our presentations posted to personal or corporate websites). With this much impact in just a few months with minimal effort, you can see why many companies publish content externally.

There is definitely a social multiplier effect when a brand pubishes content. And while it may be difficult  to quantify the number of site visits these seven PPT presentations have generated for Heardable.com to date, we can see from our web anaytic log files that some visitors are coming directly from Slideshare. How many people are visiting our website at a later date after viewing our material in unknown. We also don't know if we're seeing an increase in Heardable brand awareness by associating our content with Slideshare. But again, since we do know that our presentation are being viewed, downloaded and shared via embeds, so there has to be at least some incremental life in brand recall.

What we do know is that the cost/benefit analysis is very favorable to our business and well worth the effort.

7 Heardable PPT Presentations on Slideshare.net

Brandformers: Integrated Brand Marketing Strategies Based on Consumer Engagement
1,000 views, 50 downloads, 2 embeds

Being Heardable: A 26 Page Visual Journey
1,350 views, 2 downloads, 1 embed

Branding Is Like Beekeeping
408 views, 23 downloads, 3 embeds

Ballad Of The Invisible Brand
796 views, 62 downloads, 2 embeds

Mastering Your Online Marketing Strategy
375 views, 15 downloads, 4 embeds

How The Social Web Enables Heardable Brands
467 views, 14 downloads, 2 embeds

Heardable Scores Demystified
515 views, 8 downloads, 3 embeds