I was having a chat today with a student from Leeds University, who is doing a dissertation on brands in social media. This took me back a bit to my other areas of work but, also, during the discussion, made me think a bit about what we mean by brand.
There was certainly a time when brands were owned by the multinationals and were seen, by me at least, as being representative of all the bad things mass capitalism has to offer. However, times were changing and so was brand recognition and, as a 17 year old I took part in some market research and was stunned by just how many logos and, thus, how many brands I was aware of. Perhaps it was the success of this branding that meant that everything had to have a brand. Alastair Campbell’s New Labour brand paved the way for the political brands we have in the UK today and charities like WWF, Amnesty and the NSPCC led the charitable sectors into the branding realm.  Local Government was at it too, with councils and even some of their services having logos, key messages and corporate style guides by the turn of the century. As a grassroots campaigner I started using the ideas myself, putting a name and a logo to small one or two man campaigns, giving the impression of a far greater organisation.

It’s taken a long time for a lot of the smaller charities and community groups to cotton on to these ideas, and a few still haven’t. However, it’s at this point that social media comes into play.

Social Media is a branding exercise. Brand has stopped being something that is the domain of the multi national. It’s stopped being the tools of large organisations. It’s even stopped being a sidethought by grassroots campaigners. Brand is now truely in the domain of the individual.  Even the most open facebook user needs to recognise that they are not really sharing everything about themselves – they are sharing select information with the intention of influencing people and affecting how they are perceived.  Like the great multi-nationals, logos, reputation and crisis management are needed.  The logo is the facebook profile picture, the reputation is the groups you join, the photos you comment on or the wall posts you make and crisis management is what you do when someone posts a negative comment on your photos.

I’ve experienced personal brand myself.  At various meetings of the past six months, I’ve found people don’t know me or who I am, but do follow and know about “kevupnorth” (my twitter name).  So, kevupnorth is a user that is known beyond Kevin Campbell-Wright, someone who has his own reputation and on whom people have made their own judgements.  I can’t help but wonder, if I put particular effort into it, whether I could build up a totally inaccurate portrait of kevupnorth, or manipulate his reputation without effecting my own.

The problem is that brand management has been a skill used for decades (or possibly centuries) by incredibly clever operators who we now call “spin doctors”.  It has been honed by exchanges of practice and education.  Yet now, everyone needs to have these skills to make good use of their social networking presence.

To bring this back round to the point of this blog, how is this relevant for communities?  One of the questions in the discussion today was whether I felt every brand would one day be represented via social media.  While I said that they would, I also emphasised that brands would change.  In a world where we are all brands ourselves, it will stand to reason that every community group, every community activist and even every community problem and challenge will be a brand, which will require its own ideas around reputation management, key messages, logos and PR.   If we’re going to tackle digital literacy seriously and support communities in acheiving what they want to, we need to do more than just teach them how and why to use the net and tools for safe usage.  We have to allow them to develop their brand – and give them the skills to manage it.