Integrating culture with B2B branding

[Originally written for Kuliza's social technology blog - ZaGarage]

Background: After spending almost 2 years in B2B focussed services companies, I have become more convinced of the need to branding efforts in this space. However, as compared to B2B product companies, establishing a B2B services brand is altogether a very different game. In this space, a majority of the perceived value of your brand is the summation of the individual personal brands of your people (employees) and in some cases partners.

In emerging B2B services companies like Kuliza, this turns out to be a total game changer as your branding efforts are no longer a function of what you are saying to the world in your promotions but how capable does the world consider your people with respect to your core brand promise. And since people in the company become an important part in branding, it becomes a necessity for your HR and culture functions to support your branding. In a way, it becomes a very interesting scenario where your marketing and culture functions jointly operate to create a brand in the minds of your potential customers and employees.

I had this idea for some time in my mind, until I read Tony Hsieh’s blog on ‘Your culture is your brand’ and Bill Taylors HBR article which revolved around the same concept. Hence I realized it would be a good idea to share some initial thoughts and learnings on how can brand managers get their internal company culture to support their branding efforts.

Scope:

Here I would like to focus on small to medium sized B2B services companies that plan to have a serious social web presence. Many of the suggestion here come out from our own learnings at initiating branding practices at Kuliza.

Learnings:

Here are the ways that can help create a company culture support its branding efforts:

• Create personal brands internally

This is easier said than done, but social web has given us many tools to help people in the company establish their presence. B2B services brands are increasingly trying to show that they work with experts. They are taking blogging and microblogging more seriously to position themselves thought leaders and educators in their respective spaces.

But where they are making mistakes is that they end up focussing on the brand rather than the people. The brands hence loose the opportunity of creating an impression of field expertise for its people in its audiences’ minds.

Creating a culture of blogging inside organization is itself a difficult task. Here is a nice article on how your company should blog and how to start blogging practices inside your company.

But then blogging and microblogging are just a subset of the solution. There are ample platforms where your employees can generate personal reputation, from events speaking, conferences to being a recognized face in forums and Q&A platforms like Quora.

• Create a culture of open research and independence of views

One of the reasons why companies’ efforts for blogging fail is because they give responsibilities to their people to create content but fail upon creating a sandbox within which they can play. This is important for employees to understand the boundaries within which they can help the company.

Encourage you employees to disclose their affiliation to your company in their posts and web profiles (Dell does that heavily), encourage them to cross post the blogs they write for company on their own blog, create a culture of open research where they can showcase their ideas to the world (Altimeter Group believes very strongly in this). Have a social media policy (ours is here) and a community manager + moderator to continue producing quality content even from such a distributed effort.

It is also a good idea that your KPIs in such cases is not just the reach of your brand (for e.g. your brand’s Twitter channel, blog readers, Facebook Fans) but the combined reach of all people who would like to show their association with the brand. This is a great idea for employees and the company to work together in creating a brand for each other.

• Team up with your HR and culture departments

This is something we are fortunate to have at Kuliza. Our branding is a combined function of Marketing and HR and the branding team consists of the Chief Evangelist, the Brand Manager and the CPO. This helps in keeping the HR team in sync with the branding activities and understanding the attached value and challenges.

This helps the marketing team get valuable feedback in motivating employees in company branding initiatives. In fact the ZaGarage Talk initiative at Kuliza is a joint effort from this team, which focuses idea exchange inside Kuliza on social technology and entrepreneurship. The previous one was ZaLife blog – Kuliza’s culture blog

• Create internal champions

The way in social media marketing, you have to let go off the control of your brand to evangelists and outside community, similarly here too you have to let go off the control of your branding efforts to your employees.

The best way to do that is create internal champions who would help you in your branding efforts, motivate their office friends to participate and volunteer for certain responsibilities in the branding efforts. Remember: Evangelizing begins at home.

In Kuliza we are planning to have internal champions for our services – ZaSocial, ZaMobile and ZaCloud and they can choose upon which Branding function – marketing, culture, IP and training – will they like to contribute their time other than their core jobs (which might be developer management, project management etc)

• Communicate your branding efforts to employees

Again, this is easier said than done, but when the employees turn up to be the brand ambassadors, it is better that they understand the overall picture.

For example, it is a good idea if people inside the company understand the value of blogging and microblogging; how it is good for them and their company; what are the good practices they should follow for their social web presence; what is the personality of the brand you want to convey outside. Similarly you should be ready to listen to their suggestions and learn from their ideas.

• Train your team to face the world

Lastly, it is really important to have a culture of teaching, training and mutual idea exchange. The people need to be ready to become the representatives of your brand. If you are planning to position yourself as thought leaders in your space, you won’t like the research to be concentrated with only some people in your company. There is a need for research to be shared and people to be trained in what others are thinking / researching in the organization.