As a follow-up to our Podcast discussing the value of an Interactive Competitive Analysis, I wanted to discuss the efforts that go into the process of performing a interactive competitive analysis?  There’s no mystery involved, just a lot of research, tracking, and evaluation.

Hundreds of hours of research and preparation, in fact, can go into a comprehensive competitive analysis.  The work involved touches on the functionality, usability, popularity, and availability of a brand and its competitors’ websites.

A deep dig is done to these websites.  Everything ranging from site traffic, visitor demographics, and site messaging to site content, site programming, and site tools and usability are examined.  This wide range of information is then pooled together to gain a full sense of each website’s good and bad elements.

The interactive marketing efforts of a brand’s competition is making are also explored, including key terms, search engine ranking, keyword buys, social media efforts, banner ads, and specific campaigns.  A variety of tools are utilized to analyze results of competitor efforts and benchmark the interactive advertising of our brand.

After compiling a massive amount of data, rankings are developed for best practices for the brand’s industry, determining for a series of categories which of the competitors are ahead of the pack and explaining why.

The entire competitive analysis process has a huge impact on interactive marketing strategy.  All the angles are examined to determine the best direction for a brand’s interactive marketing strategy to take.  A competitive analysis is able to take a full and objective view of the brand and its industry as a whole, enabling the big picture to come into focus more clearly.

Keep in mind that this is competitive analysis, not competitive guesswork.  While branding is analyzed subjectively, an objective review can determine, for example, if a competitor’s site tools work.  The performance of the competition’s advertising efforts can also be objectively tracked to determine if these campaigns are good or bad, effective or not.

Once the final analysis is completed, the findings are presented to the brand.  After investing in an interactive competitive analysis, it is highly recommended that brands utilize the findings of a competitive analysis to guide their interactive marketing strategy.  Three key benefits highlight the importance of utilizing these findings:

• First, being competitive in the interactive marketing realm involves a major investment.  A competitive analysis helps make sure your budget is wisely spent.
• Second, there is no need to use resources to learn the lessons that have already been learned by others.  The key is to pattern your plan on a successful one and come up with a unique spin that is specific to your brand and not blatantly copying any existing campaign.  Originality counts.
• Third, for the brand’s interactive marketing agency, the competitive analysis helps it understand an industry’s best practices and what a brand’s competitors are doing and then use this to fuel the development of original creative ideas for the brand.

Silence may be golden but not for brands when it comes to their online image. Social media has opened a wellspring of conversation enabling users to criticize and commend virtually anything.. A savvy brand cannot do the equivalent of sticking its fingers in its ears and ignore what is being about it in the social media arena.

Controlling brand image requires constant involvement in the online chatter. But there are some rules of the road to keep in mind before you set off down the information highway.

The message is everything, so make sure everything is on message
Getting your brand into the conversation is not something that should be done on the spur of the moment. Remember, whatever message your brand puts online can stay out there for a long time and be passed around from user to user. Take the time to carefully plan out how your brand’s messaging will sound and react to the input it receives, good or bad. Also make sure the message is being aimed at the right audience and in the right venues. Some social media sites and blogs will be more receptive to your brand and its message than others. Some research beforehand can make sure your brand’s message falls on interested ears and not deaf ones.

Be a good listener; be a better responder
Your brand will encounter a wide range of responses when it sets up its social media presence. You’ll meet a lot of happy customers but you’re also bound to encounter users who are dissatisfied or worse with your brand. There’s no way everyone will like your brand. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen to they have to say. Sometimes a simple acknowledgement of a user’s complaint helps improve their view of your brand. Listen to what users are saying, take what you hear, and use that to provide responses that can have a positive impact on your brand image.

Adopt, adapt, and improve
Once your brand hits the blogosphere with its message, there will be a reaction by users to what you are saying. Respond to that response and adjust what your message to address the buzz that’s being generated. Doing so properly will keep your brand on a course to positive vibes and not one that points it toward potential brand disaster. Remember that you brand is now a part of a conversation. A good conversationalist should be able to tell when they’ve misspoken or put their foot in their mouth. The key is being able to correct your mistake and steer your message and your brand in the right direction.

Don’t just do it. Keep doing it.
Social media isn’t a quick fix for brand image control. Once you start, prepare to be committed for the long haul. The conversation is ongoing. If you join it, be ready to stay. Abandoned blogs without recent postings make your brand appear uncommitted and disinterested. Sincerity is also a must as your deliver your brand message. Be straightforward with your intended audience and your brand will be the better for it.

Keeping your brand’s image as pristine as possible via social media can be challenging and even overwhelming without the experience needed to understand the nuances and nature of this new means of reaching the public. Luckily, your brand can have access to the experience it needs for its social media brand campaign by working with LeapFrog Interactive. We have an experienced team that will work with your brand to help you understand the social media marketplace and successfully navigate its twists and turns. With LeapFrog Interactive as your partner, you won’t lose control of your brand’s reputation as it flies into the turbulent skies of social media.

As we’ve recently discussed in our blog and the LeapCast, interactive contests can be a great way to promote your brand online. However, it’s important that you provide your interactive agency with adequate background data to properly plan and execute the promotion to hit your target goals. Answering these questions at the outset ensures a great result in th end.

What are your specific goals for the promotion? What are you trying to accomplish? Are you simply trying to promote your brand into a deeper penetration of your target market? Are you rebranding your business to an entirely new demographic? Are you pushing a new product line? Is building an email database the primary goal? Your agency needs this information to develop a powerful promotion that will work for you.

We also need to look at the overall existing online brand presence for the company. If your organization doesn’t have an established brand presence already, that makes the branding impact of the promotion that much more important.

A promotion can be a great way to motivate users to interact with your brand, so it’s particularly helpful when you are repositioning your brand in the market. In this regard, the more demographic and interest information you can provide to your agency regarding your target audience, the more focused and effective the promotion can be in reaching that audience.

Having clear goals in place prior to beginning an online contest promotion ensures that those goals are met and exceeded by the campaign. Providing your agency with comprehensive information about goals, target audience and your brand’s current position gets things off on the right foot.

“You can’t buy homegrown tomatoes,” as the old saying goes. You also can’t buy a “brand evangelist.” To understand why, you have to go back to the word “evangelist” and its ecclesiastical roots. The word comes from the Greek words eu and angellus, meaning “messenger with good news.”

At the most basic level, that’s what a brand evangelist is: someone who’s discovered something truly great, and is so excited that he or she is compelled to share it with the world. That’s why you can’t “hire” a brand evangelist. But you can find them, empower them, and reward them.

The first step is being legitimately great news to your customers, clients or patrons. If you don’t offer something truly exceptional, you simply can’t expect to pay people to pretend that you are. That kind of thinking goes directly against the principles of authenticity and genuine word-of-mouth value that brand evangelism embodies.

Paid endorsement is not brand evangelism, no matter how hard some marketers may try to spin it that way. Have businesses used paid endorsement models successfully to promote their brands in the past? Absolutely. In that sense, it’s no different than paying an athlete to star in your commercial, or doing product placement in a movie. Paid endorsement still has a place in 21st century marketing (although I personally believe its power is waning in favor of updated forms of word-of-mouth from ordinary consumers).

That said, paid endorsement is still traditional advertising. The jury is still out on whether or not paying bloggers to endorse your business has demonstrable value. But calling that “brand evangelism” is like spray-painting a horse and buggy and calling it an automobile.

As the buzz begins to slow on Apple’s iPhone, we’re hearing renewed rumors of the long-awaited “gPhone” from Google. While the rumors vary from source to source, there are a few consistencies, one of which is that a mobile device from Google would heavily utilize open source technologies and would most likely run on a version of Linux.

As recently as 2004, business bloggers such as Jeffrey Veen were still skeptical about the viability of open source technologies for enterprise-class business applications. Now, just three years later, it seems nearly everyone, including the Google Guys, is willing to stake their capital on open source.

The August 27, 2007 issue of eWeek, features a cover story relating how another LeapFrog, the toy manufacturer, is increasingly employing open-source solutions in their products.

Last year, when we began looking at developing our own enterprise-class Content Management System, we considered every option, including developing from scratch. We’ve got a terrific crew of talented programmers, so we knew that we had the capability to build a powerful solution from the ground up. However, we finally decided to build our LeapFrog Editing and Publishing Framework (L.E.A.P. Framework, for short) on the open source Drupal framework. The headstart provided by starting from a robust and stable codebase allowed us to both develop the finished CMS rapidly and cost-effectively, and also resulted in a more polished end product.

Our clients have been extremely pleased with the L.E.A.P. Framework, and it’s now been tested in some fairly aggressive use environments, proving capable of scaling well at a global level across multiple languages.

Open source technologies have made an impact on the global business environment. As more and more businesses turn to open source as at least a beginning point for application development, rapid deployment of more new and helpful consumer applications such as the gPhone are sure to follow.