On Being Ubiquitous

The question I so often get from small business owners and entrepreneurs is “HOW, exactly, does a small business build a brand online today?”

I think the answer lies in a strategy of becoming Ubiquitous.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines “ubiquitous” as: "existing or being everywhere at the same the same time: constantly encountered.” Translated to the online world of business, this means very simply that you want your business to be constantly encountered. You want people to figuratively bump into your brand – your trade name, your logo, your domain name, your products, your services – every time they turn around online. In other words, you want to be EVERYWHERE online.

At first glance this may sound like an impossible task for a small business on a limited budget. It costs money – lots of it – to be seen everywhere online, doesn’t it?

Well, it CAN cost a lot of money. On the other hand, it is also possible, with some carefully placed effort and a clear understanding of how the Web works today, to get the kind of everywhere visibility I’m talking about, on a limited budget. I know, because I’m building my business’s brand on literally a shoestring budget.

You will have to make some trade-offs, namely trading time for money. It will require putting in some time to develop that everywhere visibility I am talking about. But it can be done.

Your Website is the Beginning, Not the End

The starting point for building your brand online is your website. Think of your website as your home base for your online presence. But in today’s world, you can’t stop there. We live in the world of the Cut and Paste Web, as PR executive Steve Rubel dubbed it. He wrote:

Imagine for a moment that you can take any piece of online content that you care about - a news feed, an image, a box score, multimedia, a stream of updates from your friends - and easily pin it wherever you want. Once clipped, you can drop the content on your desktop, an online start page like Windows Live or Pageflakes, “the deck" of your mobile device or even “a crawl” on your Internet-connected television.

This isn’t some far off vision. It’s the near-term future. It’s the coming era of the Cut and Paste Web.

The Cut and Paste Web means that the public has the power to place content where THEY want to consume it, not just where you place it.

You have two choices:

(1) You can resist, create a walled garden, and try to make it difficult for users to move your content around.

(2) Or you can embrace this phenomenon and make it as easy as possible for your website content to be placed wherever users want to put it.

The first choice seems futile given today’s technology, and is likely to isolate your Web presence. The second choice – the one I strongly recommend – will help you in your strategy for your brand to be “bumped into every time someone turns around.” Think of hundreds, no thousands of places online displaying your content or your logo, or linking back to your website. It’s like having a small army of people doing your brand building for you.

You’re in the Content Business Now

Of course, in order to have content for users to cut and paste as they wish, you need as part of your strategy to have content creation mechanisms in place. John Battelle recently wrote “You’re in the media business now” … you’ve got to become a content producer.

One of the easiest ways to produce large amounts of written content is with a blog. Most blogs automatically generate RSS feeds, which are nothing more than a portable form of your blog posts that users can cut and paste and consume where they wish.

On top of a blog, more and more businesses have a video strategy. They are creating video content which they place on their websites and also share with the public on aggregator sites like YouTube. Video has a number of advantages, not the least of which is that it’s one of the most viral forms of content - 57% of online adults share video with others. Plus, videos are well represented within the major search engine results, in essence giving you an extra shot at being found in the search engines if your brand is properly associated with a video.

You might also want to consider developing Facebook apps, iPhone apps, widgets and gadgets. All are portable chunks of content and functionality which are packaged up so they easily can be embedded elsewhere on the Web and in the converging frontier, mobile devices.

There are numerous other ways to distribute content: article distribution sites; audio podcasts through ground-breaking sites such as BlogTalkRadio.com; press releases that are distributed through one of the online distributions sites like PRWeb.com. Find what suits your business. Each of these content mechanisms encourages your brand to spread.

Search, Advertising and Social Media Amplify Your Brand Presence

All of this content you are creating, if properly tagged/written with relevant keywords, has the potential to get indexed in the search engines, where searchers can find your business. It’s this cumulative effect of creating content, spreading it across many places on the Web, and having it found in the search engines where the real power kicks in. Search is growing in importance -- according to the Pew Internet Project, 89% of online adults use search engines to find things.

In addition to being found in the natural search results, another option for online visibility is search advertising. Search advertising is one of the fastest ways to be found in the search results, as it doesn’t have the long lead times of some of the other techniques. Think of search advertising also as a megaphone that amplifies your brand name alongside the natural search results for terms you want it to be associated with.

Social media, such as content sharing sites like Stumbleupon and Digg, and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, also serve as great places to be seen online. All the while you are making connections and conversing with others and sharing interesting content, your brand is being spread and seen. You’re making an impression.

Summary

The final point to remember is that building a strong, visible, memorable brand online takes time and is a never-ending quest.  You have to stick with it, to maintain your brand recognition.  But once you have a strong brand, it’s worth its weight in gold.