Your Brand Image

I recently watched a very interesting program on PBS Frontline entitled Digital Nation that has some major implications for your business or personal brand. We are spending more time on our computers, notebooks, netbooks, PDAs, Smart phones iPhones, and soon the iPad – increasingly we are using more than one of these devices at the same time.

We spend our time on talking on the phone, text messaging, emailing, Googling the world, social networking, shopping, and being entertained. By one estimate many people will spend half of their waking life in the virtual world online. Many people feel withdrawal if they are disconnected even for a few minutes – maybe this is where the term “crackberry” came from.

All of this connectedness and multitasking has come at a price. Studies are showing that multitasking is largely a myth. The more things we try to do at the same time the poorer we perform them all – witness the recent event where the airline pilots overflew the Minneapolis airport by several hundred miles while they were engrossed in their laptops. People’s concentration and attention spans are being reduced at an increasing rate.

So what does this have to do with your business or personal brand? We increasingly rely on the Virtual World to get our brand message out. Some of the traditional means we used are no longer relevant or effective. In a world of short concentration and attention spans, a world where people are multitasking on multiple devices your brand can easily be passed over in milliseconds .

Some things you can do:

• Make sure you have targeted your brand message to the right audience. Audiences are becoming more fragmented by the day. I have built my own “yellow pages” of resources through my relationships on social networking and other means. My real “yellow pages” are nothing more than a doorstop and Google may soon approach being its online equivalent.
  
  
• Make sure your brand message is authentic and it can be easily absorbed and understood in a very little amount of time. You don’t have a lot of time to capture your audience’s attention, so keep it short, interesting and to the point.
  
  
• Images can register in the mind a lot faster than text or even a catchy headline. Use your brand images to capture your prospect's attention and drive your message home.
  
  
• If you are portraying your brand with stock images think twice before you congratulate yourself on how much money you saved. Make your brand images authentic and tell a story about your brand – not just something to fill the white space on your website. Do you really think your audience gives a second look to images they have seen or think they have seen a hundred times before?
  
  
• If you are using an image of yourself to portray your personal brand keep it interesting and professionally done. When you use a personal brand image pretend that your reader is a casting director for a film. They are sorting through a stack of headshots and you only have a few seconds to capture their attention. Does your personal brand image elicit “That person looks interesting, I would like to get to know them better” in your audience?

Ok, in the time it took you to read this article, did you check your email, answer a Facebook message, make a Tweet, or do other activities in the Virtual World? See what I mean?

Neil McKenzie is a Denver based commercial photographer specializing in business and personal brand photography. He has over 30 years experience in business planning, advertising and marketing in both the consulting and corporate worlds. He has developed and currently teaches the course “Artrepreneurship” at the Center for Innovation at Metropolitan State College Denver. He will have an upcoming regular column entitled “Business for the Creative Enterprise (and everyone else)” in Colorado Business Magazine.

Website: Neil McKenzie Photography
Center For Innovation

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