How is it that good salesmanship can defeat a brand?  It happens because good salesmanship, at its roots, is somewhat contradictory to good branding.  Problems occur when master salesmen set brand strategy.  The master salesman isn’t wrong…but his job is to sell a product, not build a brand.  Selling a product and building a brand are two distinctly different tasks.  Selling is short-term.  Branding is long-term.  Branding should outline what the salesman sells and how it’s sold.  Selling (as a strategy) leads to short-term rewards, but long-term identity crisis and price wars.  Branding (as a strategy) means slower growth, but creates longevity and higher price points.

This series deals with 5 areas in which good selling contradicts good branding.  The topic of this post is ENGAGE.

Social media is an excellent conversation piece for this topic.  Social media is today’s gold rush…everyone wants to jump on board, everyone wants to benefit.  The proof of this is the fact that, by 2010, more ad dollars will be spent on social media promotions than on television, print, radio, or outdoor mediums.  Wow.

The problems, however, begin to arise when the traditional 30-second spot types want to jump into the social space and treat it as they did other mediums.  Traditional advertising mediums are designed to interrupt, and good salesmen are masters of interruption.  A good salesman can walk into a store cold off the street and close the deal, regardless of how distracted and busy the shop owner is.  That’s the golden standard for good salespeople.

Social media doesn’t work this way…it isn’t commercial, by design…IT IS SOCIAL.  The object in this space is to engage, not interrupt.  It’s about having a conversation with your consumer, not about inundating them with your message.  Brand managers and marketing gurus that don’t get this will eventually all become irrelevant in the new marketing world.

Social media is not the only medium in which consumers insist on being engaged and not interrupted.  More and more, as consumers become more educated and more inundated with pointless hype, it is becoming vital to engage the consumer in a fruitful conversation rather than take the hard sale approach.

Beginning with your social media strategy, evaluate how good a job your brand is doing at the whole “engaging versus interrupting” thing.  Visit your public profiles on Twitter and Facebook….are you having a conversation with yourself?  Is anyone talking back, asking questions, seeking information, or inquiring about your products?  Or are your company profiles a history of a very one-sided conversation?  The answer to this pop quiz can be a key starting point in realizing where some of your brand’s weaknesses can be found.

Doing something about it is the next step.  Remember, social media is not a mass cold call…and successful branding never interrupts…it always engages.  And, while selling requires some degree of saturation when it comes to your message, good branding requires- not just awareness- but AGREEMENT.