The project’s mission is to “organize Nigeria’s information” in one place and has the vision “to become Nigeria’s #1 search and information portal”. Simply put, information about Nigeria will soon become easy to find; easy to use; easy to share.

With localized business information search functionality, the new portal set to launch in January 2010 will become to Nigeria what Yahoo! is to America, providing high value content on various categories: Business, Technology, Finance, News, Careers, Advertising, Autos, Real Estate, Shopping, Travel and Tourism, Entertainment, Fashion, Sports and lots more.

I’ll be providing more details soon…

What is Version 2.8?

In line with this new direction, I’ve decided to soft launch Version 2.8 of this blog today, which has been designed to review companies and their brand marketing + advertising campaigns seen on traditional media and digital media as well as their use/misuse of social media tools and technologies.

I think that as more and more companies are struggling to build their brand awareness through various mediums, there should be relevant feedback on their advertising campaigns and marketing efforts in order to ascertain how successful and/or effective they are. Most importantly now that customers are beginning to dictate how companies conduct their businesses and expect their views and opinions to be heard by the company.

Hopefully, this new direction could get company execs in Nigeria to start listening to their customers; create a great user-experience through their unique products; develop creative marketing campaigns and thus build an influential brand.

Notice the keyword?

Impact. Impact. Impact.

That’s what or how your brand must be, if you’re going to stand out from the crowd and differentiate yourself in your market or industry. There are a lot of ways you can create a personal brand or business brand, but I’ve narrowed them to the top three.

1. Name
2. Logo
3. Design

I’ve discussed first and second ways to create and build your brand. After choosing a brand name and logo, your website/blog design should also be unique. Today, I’ll be discussing the third one – Design.

Design

Your looks are very critical if you are to impress a girl or guy, right? Sometimes you even need to wear high quality and expensive designer clothing such as Gucci, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, Louis Vuitton, Pierre Cardin, etc in order to get people’s attention.

If you think of your website or blog’s design the same way you think of your looks, you will be attracting a lot of attention. However, you may not be able to afford the best web designers or developers in town, but you can find a good website design company or an individual to create a unique template for your business.

For instance, this blog’s template has been designed from the scratch by Anibe. Of course, I didn’t choose Anibe because he is the best designer or developer in the world, but his unique skills and expertise have created a simple, but exclusive template for LoyOkezie.com, which could easily be modified in the future.

You can also choose to tweak a free website/blog template or buy a professionally designed website/blog template and modify to your taste and preference. You can choose from an incredible selection of free WordPress themes or custom WordPress themes that can be purchased with a fair price.

You can also add functionality to your website/blog by using plug-ins, widgets, etc that will help boost your site’s usability, search-ability and marketability. It is very critical to pay attention to this since your audience will be more interested in how user-friendly and community-focused your website or blog is.

Whatever you do, try to keep it simple. That’s one thing I find unique about all Google sites. Google is not bothered much about design, rather functionality.

Notice the keyword?

Impact. Impact. Impact.

That’s what or how your brand must be, if you’re going to stand out from the crowd and differentiate yourself in your market or industry. There are a lot of ways you can create a personal brand or business brand, but I’ve narrowed them to the top three.

1. Name
2. Logo
3. Design

Recently, I discussed first way to create and build your brand. After choosing a brand name, you should design a brand logo for your business in order to build awareness. Today, I’ll be discussing the second one – Logo.

Logo

Your business logo is the image of your site, and your personal portrait adds to the image branding for your site. If your logo is not a product of Photoshop or similar image designing software, it would hardly have the aesthetics and features that a quality and easily brand-able logo has and may not grab the attention of users.

Your logo concept and design must also be unique and not look anything like that of another website or company; otherwise you may be sued for brand trademark infringements. It is also important to use quality picture formats such as PNG, GIF or JPEG. I recommend you use the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format, as it gives your logo or portrait the best quality.

Your logo should also be flexible and adaptable to different situations. For instance, Google always modifies their logo during important celebrations such as Halloweens, Christmas, New Year Day, etc, events such as FIFA World Cup, Olympics, and so on.

When designing a brand logo, use the right colours that would appeal to your audience. Granted you might want to use your favourite colours, but what if these colours don’t fly with your audience?

For instance, when designing the logo of Startups Nigeria, I put into consideration the colours of the Nigerian flag (green and white). I like green, but it’s not my best colour, even though my apartment has several shades of green. Thanks to my girl;-)

But, my choice of green for the Startups Nigeria platform is due to the fact that I felt (and still feel) Nigerians can easily connect with the green colour, just like they’ve done with the Globacom brand.

Besides, my goal is to build a business and technology startup community of ‘green’ entrepreneurs and businesses. By that I mean, entrepreneurs and businesses that won’t fade or fail. Hence, businesses that would flourish and remain focused despite the challenges. And of course, startups that rely on green technology.

On the flip side, some people have asked why I’ve used a different colour for my personal blog, www.loyokezie.com and not green. Well, the reason is simple: My favourite colours are Blue and Grey. But perhaps I could add a green smile on my face;-)

In this series of posts, I’ll be discussing how companies today can build their online reputation. But before then, let me share with you the benefits of engaging with and listening to your customers, especially if your company has huge brand awareness.

Recently, I wrote a review on some of MTN Nigeria’s latest products that were launched at the MTN Innovation Day. One of the products/services, Google SMS Search from MTN, generated a lot of negative commentary, because it was generally believed that it could be offered as a value-added service for choosing the MTN Network.

Following this, I forwarded the review to the MTN Customer Care email address to find out their reaction or to get a response, at least. Unfortunately, the customer care agents that emailed me back showed that they were less concerned about consumer responses to their products, as I’m sure any MTN employee reading this might just be.

Here was my email to MTN Nigeria customer care:

Hi there,

Just thought I should bring your attention to feedback from Nigerians
about your product – MTN Google Free SMS Search. There are over 30
comments about the service.

You can find it here:

http://www.startupsnigeria.com/2009/04/mtn-nigeria-unveils-googles-free-sms-search/

Cheers,

Loy

Here was the response:

Dear Sir,

Thank you for contacting us at MTN Customer Care.

Kindly click on the reply button when replying our mails so as to enable us follow up on your issue.

If you are talking about how to get to the Google SMS through our website, please follow this link:

http://www.mtnonline.com/products/googlesms.aspx

Thank you for choosing MTN.

Regards,

Rayo

Evidently, the customer care response showed that MTN Nigeria probably doesn’t have a listening culture and/or a policy for getting involved in conversations surrounding their company, brand, products and personnel. Worse still, the customer care agent didn’t sound like he even read my email.

As a result, they risk their online brand reputation and even though they are have built a brand awareness and are the leading mobile telecommunications operator in Nigeria (in terms of subscribers), those negative responses show that they are not engaging with their customers and may lose them, if they don’t.

Since customers are simply not using the channels or are hardly getting the right answers to their requests in the channels that a company has chosen to communicate with them (usually via email or telephone), they (the company) should follow the chatter online in the channels that customers have chosen via blogs, online forums, and social media sites.

There are some great ways that you can listen to what your customers are saying on the Internet, using search tools and RSS feeds that can help you access information as quickly as possible and in one place, without visiting several websites, communities or blogs.

A great tool is the Google keywords search which allows a company to track what is being said about its staff, its products, its industry and its competitors or just about anything that is relevant to the company.

This may include tracking common misspellings of relevant words related to the company. Also, tracking the names of key people in a company can highlight and protect brand attacks.

However, to avoid monitoring or tracking too much, you can identify those keywords which may indicate that a comment or article has little or nothing to do with your company.

Another great tool is Google Alerts which allows you to filter your search keywords and deliver them as updates to the email address you have specified or via Google reader. Therefore, if MTN Nigeria were to use these tools to track their online reputation, they might consider some keywords like “MTN Nigeria”, “mtnonline.com”, “Ahmed Farouk”, MTN Caller Tunes, MTN SIM Backup, etc.

Listening to and engaging with existing and potential customers online is very critical to building your company’s web reputation. Granted, you may still be skeptical about adopting new tools for communication, but if you develop a policy and strategy, your company will become more successful with customer relationship management.

If you would like to learn how to develop the right social media policy and strategy for your company, kindly email me via speak [at] loyokezie.com

Developing a brand image – personal brand or business brand – is one of the most important strategies for success. Corporate brands such as CNN, Coca-Cola, Google, Globacom, Oceanic Bank, Dangote, and a host of others have created a huge impact on the lives of people, social communities, countries, continents and around the world.

Notice the keyword?

Impact! Impact!! Impact!!!

That’s what or how your brand must be, if you’re going to stand out from the crowd and differentiate yourself in your market or industry. There are a lot of ways you can create a personal brand or business brand, but I’ve narrowed them to the top three.

Today, I’ll be discussing the first way to create and build your brand – Name.

Name

The name of your business startup or simply your personal name should be unique if you are to build a successful brand image. If you take a look at successful internet giants such as Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, you will notice that their names are different from conventional words.

If you can, coin a word for your business startup that would become a household name just like Google, Yahoo, Dangote, or Globacom. On the other hand, in order to build your personal brand image, use your name in such a way that people will never want to forget it.

Here are some tips:

Use your personal name in every communication both offline and online via several channels and platforms (Newspapers, Emails, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, LinkedIn, etc). Make people use your name everyday. For instance, Barack Obama is one of the most successful personal brands, having used his name effectively.

Make sure your personal name has a great search results and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) rankings. For instance, my name ‘Loy Okezie’ has been searched over 4,000 times via Google search. What’s yours?

Build a voice around your name and be recognized as an authority in a particular field. For instance, Paul Graham, one of my mentors is recognized as a reputable authority on startups. My goal is to become a reputable authority on Startups in Nigeria.

Perhaps, you can’t coin a word like Yahoo or Twitter for your business startup. But can you fuse two existing words together to form a unique name? Take a look at Microsoft, for instance. ‘Micro’, which means ’small’ has been fused with ’soft’ (short for software) and has built a brand name as the world’s leading computer software.

The guys at YouTube, the world’s largest video-sharing platform brought two words together ‘You’ and ‘Tube’ and tells you to “Broadcast Yourself”. Little wonder Google bought into the idea.

Or maybe you can modify an existing word by removing a letter. For example, Flickr, the world’s largest photo-sharing community removed the letter ‘e’ from the word ‘flicker’ (meaning flash or sparkle or simply the flick of a camera button) to form the word flickr (pronounced the same way as ‘flicker’).

Again, the world’s largest social networking site, Facebook has used its unique name to build one of the greatest brands in the history of the web. Popular words include: Facebook. Facebooker. Facebooking. Facebooked.

Twitter, the largest micro-blogging platform is building another great brand. As a result, we now have new words like Twittering, Twitterer, Twittered, Twittersphere, Twitterific, Twitterama, Twittermania, and lots more.

By the way, do you notice what all these brands have in common? They are described as the ‘largest’ in their different industries, thus you should be thinking of creating a brand that could be described as ‘the largest’.

Other sites that have built a brand through their names include social networking site – Hi5, News site – CNN, Social bookmarking site – Digg, Technology blog – TechCrunch, and Blogging platform – Blogger.

Some notable African web brands include Afrigator (a fusion of the words ‘Africa’ and ‘Aggregator’, Muti (meaning “tree” in Zulu), Ushahidi (meaning “testimony” in Swahili), Ubuntu, Sturvs (coined from the word ’stuff’), amongst others.

Final thoughts

Your personal name or your business name must be unique and well-marketed if you are to create a huge impact. If you are struggling with creating or building your brand awareness, you need to learn the tools and tricks in order to effectively succeed with your branding efforts and strategy.

Photo via flickr by Gerald Patterson