I am certainly no brand expert, but I buy a lot of brands. As such, I have an opinion. ;-)

In my view, "brand-centric leadership" describes the degree of brand influence in the C-suite concisely. There are only 9 instances of this term in Google, so this is not a widely-published term. Oddly enough, it is also trademarked.

It's my observation that you can easily spot companies who lack a brand-centric leadership. Here is one example.

A few years ago I was advising Vail Resorts concerning their their newly acquired ground transportation company, Colorado Mountain Express. The marketing people (at CME) needed to establish a strong presence in Twitter for their brand (now a sub-brand of Vail Resorts), known throughout Colorado and the US by skiers as simply “CME". The tag line of the company for almost 10 years was "Ride CME" and their primary website was RideCME.com. CME captured about 78% of the ground transportation market share by the time they were acquired by Vail Resorts in 2009.

I suggested @RideCME as the Twitter handle. However, the CMO and CEO decided on @CME_van. I told them @CME_van was a silly idea and unlikely to be well received or widely adopted. The presence of an underscore in the brand was really a bad decision because it's fundamentally difficult to type on a keyboard, especially mobile keyboards, the primary communication domain of travelers. The executives said the word "van" needed to be in the handle and off they went with their new Twitter strategy.

Separately, I registered @RideCME and clamped an automated Vail News feed on to it. Today, @RideCME has three times the followers as @CME_van and to this socially knowledgeable audience I needn't explain why. I happily signed over the @RideCME account to Vail Resorts once they realized how much more powerful a brand-consistent approach to social media can be. Why they haven’t killed the @CME_van account and consolidated under their primary brand is baffling but also additional validation the organization lacks brand-centric leadership.

Is CME managed by brand-centric leaders?

I'm guessing, no. Executive management’s inability to understand simple brand concepts is a reflection of a company's that lack brand-centric leadership. Furthermore. I will offer what I consider to be a precise definition of brand-centric leadership.

Brand-centric leaders ...

• ... are aware of the scope of the company's brand assets.
• ... understand how its customer segments map into the company's brand and sub-brands.
• ... factor in brand issues in every decision involving customer touch points.
• ... use business development channels to accentuate brand awareness.
• ... integrate brand value and brand equity growth into their strategic plans.
• ... establish clear guidelines concerning brand-centricity across the organization.

Social media is simply one additional touch-point for your brand. It should reflect and leverage your brand equity in concert with your strategic plans.

Just sayin' ...

SEO is a complex matter.

Many people think that the most important aspect of search is found in popular terms, also known as the short tail of search. While there are millions of searches every day for "Brittany Spears", few commerce transactions actually occur from this query.

But the misguided concept of popularity also extends to business queries. If you watch yourself or others as they search Google, you'll notice a pattern. They start with a few keywords and over time, they add more terms to try to zero in on exactly what they're looking for. Rarely do a few terms satisfy the desired search outcome or lead to actionable events.

Two important things can be learned by observation:

1. Popular search terms are defined (mostly) by failed search attempts. Google counts all searches and the data used to determine what people are searching for is based on millions of searches that were used only as the beginning of a search session. As such, the data is heavily biased with first query attempts (FQAs) is misleading.
2. The most important aspect of search behavior is the search terms that were present in the search field when the searcher stopped searching. When this moment occurs, the query in the search string represents the data that matters most because it resulted in one of two possible outcomes involving the search session; (i) the searcher found exactly what he/she was looking for or, (ii) the searcher gave up.

The last query attempt (LQA) is the "actionable" query because it represents an outcome. Popular search terms are not highly representative of outcomes; rather, they represent a search journey.

Making business decisions for paid campaign and SEO based on "search journeys" is not a sound marketing practice. Only fleeting benefits form brand impressions are possible by appearing in the results of search journeys. Furthermore, predicting LQAs is also considered largely impossible by enlightened search experts. All search companies have [quietly] published data about long tail search terms. The most shocking aspects of this data is that more about 97% of all queries are unique. This means that for every million queries, about 970,000 of them are different and completely unpredictable.

We know from Pareto curves that every activity on this planet follows a general pattern; popularity represents a very small fraction of overall activity. In the case of the long tail of search, there are millions of markets of dozens looking for very specific information. Attacking these markets through short tail search strategies (i.e., popularity) is futile if you hope to attract key buyers that are qualified prospects.

What's the answer?

There's no debate; the long tail of search is clearly where your most passionate and profitable customers will come from. But how do you sculpt you content to attract these important buyers through organic search? This answer is simple - write. Write about your domain expertise. Write about your industry, products, services, successes, and failures. Wrap this information around your digital marketing assets that cannot be easily indexed such as PDFs, videos, and PowerPoint slides.

An abundance of written content about your products and services, written specifically from your perspective, will ultimately create many of the variants of search phrases necessary to dominate your market segment in organic search. Strategically, this is wise.

Imagine a site that has 1,000 articles and each article gets two visitors per day from search engine referrals; 60,000 new visitors per month through search. I gain a similar site designed to achieve traffic through short tail search with 10 key phrases on 10 website pages, each producing 6000 new visitors per month. If competition pushes you out of the top ten for just one of the terms, your traffic will likely drop by about ten percent. Loss of just two highly ranked popular terms is likely to push you out of the profitability envelope. In contrast to the long tail strategy, no single competitive pressure point exists; your dominance across hundreds or thousands of long tail terms is both sustainable and naturally defensible.

There's nothing inherently wrong with top rankings for short tail terms, but the data suggests this is not how you dominate organic search or achieve pervasive visibility. Short tail SEO strategies also require great attention, lots of effort to maintain, and continual monitoring. You might think a premium content strategy is costly, but a short tail SEO program is as well.

With specific regard to Supercourse, the SEO benefits of submitting a course should be considered a by-product. The bigger dividend (I assume) is being part of a very prestigious group and collection of high-quality content.

I'm privileged to get to speak with a lot of business and marketing executives about social media strategies and almost with predictable certainty, they skeptically ask ...

"How will social media help my business? Give me the ROI for this new line-item on the budget."

While I can sympathize with an organization's fiscal requirements to understand the return-on-investment for any given initiative, it's also just as important to understand ROI from the customer's perspective. One way to address this often asked question concerning the business benefits of a social media strategy, is to look at from the other side of the table. 

"How does social networking and social media help my customer?"

Instead of thinking about your own ROI, imagine calculating the ROI from the customer's perspective. It's clear that the social media cruise liner has left the harbor with many companies standing on the dock wondering if it's worth it to rent a cigarette boat to catch up and assimilate with guests partying on the cruise ship.

Your current and future customers have already calculated the ROI of surfing and foraging for knowledge across the open waters of the web versus alternatives. They have concluded that it's far more profitable (and socially beneficial) to align themselves with networks that streamline the path to knowledge about family, friends, products, entertainment, and services.

I think it's time to stop asking how social media will help your business and transition your views in a manner that will help your organization understand how social media and social networking will help your customer.

Just sayin...