Branding Rant

People develop relationships with brands, the more they encounter them. Therefore, if your brand is plastered around everywhere, people are set to become familiar with your brand and keep you atop their minds. Sounds good, but how can this be done in the online world?

Well, I’m practicing 3 distinct ways of incorporating brands into the lives of advocates on MiniRiders.com.au and 3GNMedia.com.

1. Provide RSS

With RSS, you can instruct your visitors to add your website’s content to their feed reader, or even better - to their MSN/Yahoo/Google homepages. Not only do they see this every day when they sign in, if they ever forget about the site, the next time they log into their feed reader, their relationship with your brand will be re-kindled.

2. Develop Groups on Social Networking Sites

With the popularity of Myspace and Facebook, it’s basically inevitable that your advocates will be on there. So, in the spirit of developing another touchpoint for customers to interact with your brand, why not sign up to one of these places and start a group? We have Facebook Groups for MiniRiders, 3GN Media and even Pocket-Bike-Racing (shhh… they don’t know about the last one yet!). In addition, for 3GN we have a Myspace and a Last.fm group.

On the topic of Last.FM, this, in my opinion, is highly undervalued. Your users can sign up, log their music, get recommendations based on their listening history and even collectively chart their music in groups. Your users will find it exciting and participation in the group charts will help bond them to the community. As an added bonus they even let you syndicate all the content from their site onto your own! How great is that?

3. Produce Merchandise

To be honest, I haven’t developed merchandise before, but we’re deep into the creative process at the moment, developing designs amongst the community of MiniRiders (as you can see here). Once I have copies of the designs (in Photoshop format), I’ll be able to upload them and create a store at CafePress.com or Zazzle.com. From a store there, our users can order from a range of T-shirts, Mouspads, Stickers and all sorts of things. If anyone has any advice whether to choose CafePress or Zazzle, please comment.

Regardless, this will increase the visibility of the MiniRiders brand throughout Australia as our members wear our brand.

Ultimately, the more you identify with your brand advocates, the more popular you’ll become, as they rave about you. How have you managed to plaster your brand on your advocates?