Alignment between Social Media Perception and your Brand Positioning – a Litmus Test [Screencast]

We no longer have absolute control over our brand. It’s fascinating (and nostalgic) to look back just a decade ago and marvel at how easy it was to manage media perception through your PR Rolodex. Today, everyone is a publisher and within this highly opinionated social media sphere, it is challenging to ascertain and measure whether your company and products’ brand positioning is aligned with the perception of your brand.

We did a quick test in order to get a ‘snapshot’ of how aligned (or disconnected) your brand positioning is with its perception in social media. We document it in this short screencast:

Our apparatus? The free Social Mention social media monitoring tool and Wordle, a nifty tag cloud generator. With these we get a convenient and easy-to-generate overview of whether the keywords that you intend to associate with your brand also resonate throughout the social media spectrum.

The steps involved:

1. Run a simple query with your product or company name in your favourite social media monitoring tool. In the example we used Social Mention.
2. Download the result in CSV format.

1. Open the file in a spreadsheet editor.
2. Delete all the columns except ‘Title’/ ‘Headline’ and ‘Description’ and Save the file. One important step, which is not shown in the screencast, is to eliminate the in-house echo chamber, i.e., to filter out the internal sources, such as company website, blogs, Twitter feeds, etc.

1. Open the CSV file with a text editor.
2. Find and replace all the words for ‘Company Name’ or ‘Product Name’. Copy the whole text.
3. Open Wordle, create a new tag cloud.
4. Paste the whole text in the text area, and hit ‘Go’.
5. Change the font and layout of the word cloud to suit your purpose.

1. View the larger keywords and map those against your own brand positioning keywords.

Obviously the data that you get initially needs to be viewed through critical eyes. And it won’t compare with actually sitting down and spending time analyzing the collected data. But what you do have is a simple litmus test for the alignment of how you want to position your brand with its perception in social media.

So what do you think of our test? Try it out and tell us what you found!