Every company needs a face behind the scenes, or a few faces.  Every company needs that one person that you closely relate to the brand, for example Robert Scoble is the guy you think of when you think of Rackspace, Rand Fishkin is the guy for SEOmoz, The Verge has Joshua Topolski and a handful of editors, hell ESPN has a variety of personalities including Scott Van Pelt & Stuart Scott.

Every brand needs a face.  Someone that everyone can relate to and when they think of your brand, they immediately  think “oh, yeah that guy”.   Friendly, funny, lovable, a variety of words are often used to describe this person.  The one constant that’s always important though, is that this person is always reflecting your brand.  A trade show, a social channel, this person is often seen everywhere all at once.

A face is something that every company needs in today’s digital world.  Often it can be a role that the Owner or Manager usually takes, in the case of the Dallas Mavericks they have Owner Mark Cuban, but in some cases it can be a Social Media Manager such as Scott Monty of Ford or Rafe Needleman, who recently became the Platform Advocate for Evernote.  These are men whose job it is to speek clearly for the company and take positions on behalf of it, for better or worst they were hired to become the brand’s face.

The world values faces for brands now than ever before.  Have you seen Google recently?  Their authorship tag is now showing more authors than ever before in the search ranking pages. Use social media? People don’t want to follow companies, they follow people.

Finding a face for your company is more important now than ever, so it’s important that you find the face before your company creates one for you.

I’ve been taking a look at Linkedin groups lately and recently added myself to a social media group that I found.  I signed up for the email notifications and thought I would give the group a chance, until I got the following in the first email.

I saw this question and immediately smacked myself in the head.  I thought we had moved past this, at this point.  People do not want to see the same conversation on every platform.    Also do I need to point out that EdgeRank and people don’t like third party applications, using Facebook.

People think social media is just a tool, it’s not.  Every converation and social media application is different.  Imagine if Twitter is where you talk to your barber and Facebook is where you will talk to your wife.  Do you want to be sharing the same thing with your wife and barger?  I don’t think so.

A friend of mine recently turned to Facebook to help build his online audience, but soon found the application to be much harder to manage than he originally thought.  His follower count stayed in the lower teens and after a few months, he just stared at the account dumbfounded, not knowing what to do with it.

“How do I get friends?” He asked me over and over again.

I took a quick look at his social media accounts and realized a number of mistakes he was making, including he had no social media buttons on his website and he was not updating the account regularly.  His customers were simply getting lost in the maze, that is now the social media bubble.

ARE YOUR CUSTOMERS LOST IN THE MAZE?

When building a social media platform for your customers, your first priority should be why are you going to be there and how are your customers going to find you there.

There is tons of social media channels out there, so if you’re going to be on one, you have to make it easy for your customers to find you.  Post your social media buttons everywhere and constantly remind your customers that you are on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.

Then post to your accounts.  Once your customers are able to navigate the maze and find your social media accounts, let them know that they are arriving at a prime destination not at a Sahara.

Don’t let your customers get lost, like my friend Michael did, because when they get lost they might just find another destination to go to.