Remember Tom Peters’ book The Brand You 50? It was all about how you yourself are a brand worth marketing, worth protecting and how to make your brand more desirable to employers and bosses.
Chances are you’ve been to branding school at your association, something along the lines of how to and how not to use the logo, what PMS color is acceptable, what the tagline is, how to sign emails. Chances also are that, if you’ve been on either of the two big social networks for business–Facebook or LinkedIn–you’ve seen pages built by some group that’s picked up your logo and some of your content and is sharing it with their fans. Most of the time, this is benign and actually helps you spread your brand without doing anything. They’re doing the work that you don’t have to and as long as you’re part of the conversation, it’s all good.
User communities, in fact, have the ability to create their own brands, according to a working paper from two professors. Apache open source software, for instance, was created by the Apache Software Foundation rather than by the company.
How do you feel about that? This is the step beyond them finding your content so interesting that they want to share it. This is them creating a loyal following, a group that recognizes a brand when they see one. Brands have their own attributes. You might be dependable and solid while the user-created brand is cutting edge and responsive.
