Not that this hybrid (the shop, not the bikes) hasn’t been seen before — elsewhere.  Bike-shop-coffee-joints been established in Minneapolis and Portland, among other spots.  But the idea of selling locally-made bicycles which are (we hope) rugged enough for the streets and parkways of Chicago is a great point of difference.  Your coffee and your tourer, both brewed locally!  What urban hipster — or biking commuter — could want more?

From a positioning and branding standpoint, they’re doing pretty well, too.  There’s a clean esthetic to everything that’s very current.  It’s got the stripped-down, airy sensibility that similar “young urban” brands project.

It’s the kind of logical merger of biking and coffee culture that makes sense in any urban environment nowadays, as more people look for alternatives.  So we’ll raise a latte to their future success, and to the initiative behind making an idea like this happen…and hopefully take root for years to come.

As a Chicago branding agency, when we speak with some prospective clients, they often answer this by reciting a list of attributes that are intended to give them a “parity play” — to show they belong in their audience’s consideration set.  They say things like…

“We’re easy to install and integrate.”

“We’ve got excellent service and support.”

“We’re a cost-effective solution.”

Well…duh.  If you’re remotely competitive in your category — if you’re moving product and keeping your head above water — then of course you’ve got these squared away.  But none of them truly “positions” your brand in a way that makes it stand out, or stand above.

There are two questions you need to ask yourself in order to develop a really true stand-apart positioning:

• What’s truly differentiated about your company or what you’ve got to sell?
• What’s my esteemed competition saying about itself?

Purchasers decide to buy products or services based on certain aspects of price, features, support, reputation, reliability and interoperability, among others.  In every one of these categories, you owe it to you business to mine out the facet that sets you aside from the rest in a positive way.

But as you’re doing so, try to avoid the “hype-0logy” of terms and spin that seem to position a brand, but don’t really say anything.  Things like best-in-class, solid, an industry leader, increases performance, a new paradigm, and similar gushings don’t really make you distinct — not when anybody else who’s close to you in the category can probably make the same approximate claims.

So what are a few things you can do to truly position yourself in a concrete way?

• Specifics and superspecifics: Call out features and details that are markedly different and/or superior.  A good copywriter can make good copy out of even the slightest point of difference about your product — so use them!
  
• Real ROI: Get granular and numeric in terms of results, efficiencies, performance advantages, even customer payback.
• Testimonials: Using customer case studies as proof points, especially when you can get users to speak to specifics of how you made a difference to their business.

1. “Like” like you mean it. Don’t use the “Like” function on Facebook just to capture mass lists.  Because social media users will come to resent it, and won’t ever believe in the sincerity of your brand or message if you’re spamming them with coupon offers.

2. Lay off the auto-directs on Twitter. If you’re going to use social media as a direct marketing tool, at least try to individualize your messaging.  Undifferentiated auto-directs make you look lazy, impersonal and crass.

3. Abusing LinkedIn. There are two facets to this: Trying to make connections without any kind of personalized message, first of all – but that’s not as egregious as spamming Discussion Groups with pitches that, more often than not, have nothing to do with context.  If you’ve got a worthwhile POV or build on the existing discussion, or can launch an interesting thread, you’ll do yourself a thousand times more good than with intrusive spamming.

4. Don’t advertise – connect. What’s the difference?  Social media allows connection and true dialogue, not one-way message or promo blitzing.  Do those, and you’ll impugn yourself with social media users.  And, frankly, if you want to advertise…there are much more cost-effective

5. Don’t call yourself a guru, unless you are. And if you’re truly a guru, you don’t have to blow hard and hot about your expertise: you’ll have a community of followers who can attest to your competence, and a quiver full of superb insights and counsel you can lay on the rest of us to prove your value.  Beware the “guru” whose primary soapbox seems to be all about proclaiming his or her guruhood.

6. Hit the reset button…regularly. Social media, mobile media and online media are evolving at an exponential rate.  So it’s worthwhile for each and every brand, in each and every category, to re-examine their assumptions, their toolkits and their digital marketing strategy at the onset of every year — and don’t even rest on your laurels quarter-by-quarter.  Innovations and striking new platforms, apps and tools are reaching marketers and consumers nearly every day, and staying on top of them — and in step with your competition — requires constant due diligence to install and coordinate these tools, and to make sure the messages you’re putting out aren’t past their refresh date.

1. Set goals, first and foremost. What are you after – more Likes?  More website traffic?  CRM opt-ins?  Sales?  Figure that out first, not just for your first promotion but for your entire social media promotion calendar, and get alignment from internal stakeholders and external resources before you make a single move.  And while you’re setting goals, make sure you’ve got detailed budgets in mind, too!

2. Before you promote, build a strong community. Start by trying to develop a Facebook, Twitter or blog community that has real interest and engagement in your brand.  Don’t rely on a promotion or sweepstakes to build a truly engaged, viral audience; it’s a mistake to think respondents to a sales promo will prove to be long-term loyalists.  So start with a kernel of evangelists who are themselves social – they’re a great foundation to reach other users!

3. Keep it simple. It’s all very good to create an elaborate, multi-tier promotion – but that’s often a waste of effort.  Whether consumers or B2B customers, people want simple, easy-to-grasp promotions they can respond to quickly and simply.

4. Make it rich. You should make it easy to enter – but you need to make the prize attractive and significant; “make the grand prize grand,” as an old axiom goes.  It’ll drive much greater awareness and engagement.

5. Know the rules. Facebook, for example, has explicit Promotion Guidelines (that change regularly) – but there are often industry guidelines and local laws you need to keep in mind, too.  Stay within the law or the rules of the game.

6. Use the right tool. There are plenty of social media promotions tools and firms out there, from Volvant to Strutta, with various levels of features and sophistication.  Look for the vendor or tool that offers the most flexibility and suitability for your business.  Most of these offer free trials – so take advantage of them!

7. Track and adjust. You can create and launch an online promotion very quickly, thanks to the new tools at your disposal. That gives you the ability to quickly assess and adjust your program(s) to maximize results, sometimes even as the program is underway.  Cumulatively, you’ll also gather a large amount of valuable data about your audience and their interests that can be good as gold in future marketing efforts.

8. See things their way. Always put yourself in the place of your audience – and if the promotion, prize or offer doesn’t excite you, why would you expect to excite them?  They’re constantly inundated with offers and promos, so take the time to get inside their point of view – and create a program that really engages!

Apparel market Uniqlo, for example, has “no brand message: Instead of selling a lifestyle to a target market, it creates small, unique projects that become tools for the user.  Each new project…differs from the others as related parts to a whole.”

That behavior becomes branding, in the minds of consumers.  And it’s incredibly flexible and adaptive, as new tools and behaviors can be layered atop the prior ones, allowing the brand to “live” organically — it’s very much in the mind of its audience, versus being a doctrinaire “look and feel” projected strictly by the marketer.

By extensions for the B2B marketer or SME, this means the way you behave has real branding value in the marketplace, so be conscious of how your interactions with your target audience can deliver a nuanced impression of brand identity. Be consistent, deliver value, and you may find that “effective branding” is much more than just a logomark or a positioning statement.

Graphic courtesy of Fast Company.

Unless a social media marketing program is built on precise business intelligence tools that can mine the social graph to create an accurate profile of users’ prior behaviors, preferences and recommendations, any social targeting program will see a great deal of slippage – just like traditional media programs.

It’s the marketer’s choice — do they prefer attrition or amplification from their SMM campaign?

Some would say there’s a measure of both in any social media marketing effort, but a good marketer is out to optimize ROI.  That’s accomplished by precision social targeting…not “carpet bombing the social Web” with coupons.

For B2B marketers, identifying your real audience and converting them to loyalists is critically important in utilizing social media.

Attrition is simple to understand: you might invest in reaching a horde of users, but very few will respond – and only a sliver of those who do may constitute quality CRM leads or prospective  evangelists.  Even a marketer that does may have a hard time following up and activating those leads: Old Spice did a magnificent job of capturing fans with its “Smell Like a Man” campaign, but then notoriously neglected to know what to do with them.

Amplification is the effect of enlisting engaged, evangelistic influencers in your cause.  The positives are many — and the ROI multiple you’ll see may be foremost among them.  What’s the magic trick behind amplification?  There isn’t any.  It’s simply about using business intelligence tools to isolate and understand your best audience.

No magic: just smarter SMM.

What’s the magic trick behind amplification?  There isn’t any.  It’s simply about using accurate business intelligence tools to mine the data that helps you isolate and understand your best audience in the social Web using the right social targeting tactics.

The differences between the two outcomes can be profound, and will become more apparent as the social Web evolves further.  Users will willingly co-opt your message and carry it to others, if you’re approaching them with understanding and apt timing.  But that won’t come from a scattershot, old-media approach to engagement.

As has been pointed out by smarter guys than us, true engagement derives from seeing users not as an undifferentiated mass of “social network users,” but as members of highly-individuated clusters, or “nanonetworks,” with very specific needs, wants and preferences.  Amplification happens when those preferences are gratified through appropriately timed and engineered offers or messages that are acutely relevant…so much so that the user won’t hesitate to viralize them among their cluster peers.

So marketers for major consumer brands are increasingly turning to product placement in films and television programs, to the Web, to social media and viral tactics, to experiential and WOM strategies, to try to reach their audience.

But we’d argue there’s a different dynamic at work in how B2B marketers interact with their audience — it’s a very active, versus passive, group.  Even when they’re leafing idly through a trade magazine, it’s usually during working hours, or at a point where their attitude and attention is engaged in “workthink.”   In many cases, they’ll be searching for solutions to issues…or they’ll file away your brand and product particulars for later recall, if they’re in your category, even if they’re not buying quite yet.

But it still mandates digital and experiential complements to that trade advertising presence.  And for SMEs, there are still “traditional” options that make sense.  Local radio and TV buys can be highly effective, especially if they’re tagged with a resounding call-to-action.

What we may see in the not-too-distant future, especially as video-0n-demand gains (especially if Apple’s “iTV” happens), is that traditional broadcasting is defunct, replaced by personalized streams.  If these are linked to your social network profile, the ads could be absolutely customized to your particular wants and preferences, which may give advertisers a leg up in reaching audiences with 30-second spots that aren’t just relevant to the viewer…but even sought out.

Mobile media formats will make the selectability even more individual.  Given the power to screen out messages they’re not interested in seeing, consumers will be able to erect some formidable walls against advertising.  Permission will be key, and gaining that permission will mandate levels of authenticity, interaction and value-to-users from brands that will be unlike anything we’ve seen before.

Facebook is an increasing channel for engagement among B2B firms, both through outbound promotions, advertising and newsletters, and as a complement to other sales and CRM channels.  Here’s an infographic that describes exactly how Facebook users escalate from potential fans on up to “Super Fans” – or as you may consider them, Brand Evangelists who not only give you permission to interact with them, but spread the word among their own private networks, including co-workers and industry contacts.

That makes them incredibly valuable to you, and that’s why reaching and converting them must be a key strength of any social marketing effort a business might attempt…efforts that should follow these four “best practices…”

Don’t Mass-Attack – Engage!

Once you’ve identified potential heavy users who can be “evangelizes,” you ought to target them with ads and offers that are truly relevant to them.

Many Facebook marketers are good at generating static that actually gets in the way of building real relationships with users.  By mass-blasting the social Web with low-end offers to drive Likes, they may capture casual users…but that does nothing to engage and convert true evangelists and loyalists.  In some cases, it might even drive those users off.

So make sure to target users with engagement ads that speak to their specific needs.  Engagement ads drive promote links within Facebook — such as your own page – to users you’ve identified based on the sorting and targeting tools Facebook itself provides.  “Like” links embedded in the ads let those users easily pull your updates into their own News Feed.

Remember to include a strong call-to-action that rings true with your targeted user, and you’ll be engaging truly-interested users who you can turn into potential evangelists before you know it.

Other hints?  Use a photograph, ideally of real people.  That works far better in the social milieu of Facebook than a logo ever will.  And measure performance using your tracking tools, so you can make on-the-fly adjustments based on which ads or offers are pulling best!

Contests can build qualified contacts!

Promote contests on Facebook — it’s an excellent strategy for generating viral and word-of-mouth advertising among your Fans, to ladder them from “prospects” on up to “enangelists.”

Each time you launch a contest to Fans, you’re creating a viral opportunity.  Just give them means to “Share” the experience with their “Friends”…but to get them to follow through on that and network qualified leads, you’ve got to provide the right incentive.

Think hard about what’s going to drive real engagement and virality with your best evangelists – not just casual fans.  What kind of prize is going to appeal most resonantly and directly to your particular audience?

Awarding an iPad for example, is a great draw – but if you’re in the business of marketing a specific widget, wouldn’t it make more sense to award a prize that’s specific to the interests of your niche widget user, rather than a prize that’ll draw mobs of users who’ll likely never engage with your brand again?  Casual users who may Share your program with equally casual entrants who aren’t really interested in what you’ve got to sell?

When you try to follow up with casual users who were only attracted to your contest for the sake of the winning something – rather than having a real interest in your category or brand – you’ll find it’s tough to mine evangelists and loyalists out of that pool of entrants.

Land them at your landing page.

Facebook marketers typically can create their own landing pages for each social media promotion.  You may already have a welcome tab – a landing page for users who haven’t yet Liked  your product or service.

You need to embed a call-to-action on that page that provides incentive for them to “Like” you.  Use compelling copy, a special offer, a video, valuable content or whatever it takes to get htem to engage with you more directly.

Calls-to-action create engagement.

Brassy salesmanship doesn’t work on Facebook.  What does work are targeted, compelling and relevant reasons to engage, usually offering content that’s perceived as valuable or resonant.

Short, clickable calls-to-action are a good place to start.  “Click here!” to get to a blog post, a white paper, a video, an infographic.  All of it offering engaging value that build affinity with users, and steers them into your sales funnel.

Does all of the above seem ridiculously simple?  Yes…because a little common sense and practice, it simply is.

The simplest way to do this is to identify 2-3 blogs in your category, then regularly review them so you understand their topics and discussions.  Then simply participate, but do so by adding real value: provide anecdotes with key learnings and insights.  Do not spam them with self-serving hard-sell approaches.  You’ll only get flamed for it.

Some good resources for finding popular blogs include Alltop, or – for business-specific blogs — Technorati’s list of the Top 100 Small Business blogs.

If you’ve participated earnestly and constructively in these blogs, reach out to their admins or owners and ask if they’d be interested in see you guest post an article.  They’ll probably have specific requirements and editorial say-so, but it’s a great opportunity for larger exposure.  Take it a step further: give them a chance to guest post on your blog, too.

There’s an ecology and pecking order in blogworld, of course.  You may have to play in the minors for a while before you get invited to the big leagues.  But wherever you’re participating, you’re driving buzz and dialogue you can shape to benefit your business.

A client doesn’t launch a review unless there’s dissatisfaction at work somewhere, and in this case, it’s with the fine folks at BSSP who sold in the notion of “The Shack.”

Was “Radio” so prejudicial a word?  Did it mire the brand in the world of hobbyists and tech geeks, as opposed to trying to position itself as a kind of mini-Best Buy?   The problem may not be with the branding but with the positioning.  Calling itself “The Shack” told us even less about the store than “Radio Shack” did, and seemed to spit in the eye of whatever heritage and awareness it already had.  The best solution? Fix your product mix and consumer awareness issues first, before blaming it on the name.  Have some inventory that’s scary/exciting to get people interested again.

There’s a reason Best Buy sucked it up and gave away so much real estate to Apple, and it goes beyond just selling Apples.