When it comes to developing great products and strong brands few things are as important as listening and talking with customers. Today many of these conversations are happening online and as marketers follow the traffic they have an interesting opportunity to personalize their brand in ways not possible through traditional public relations.

So what does it mean to personalize a brand, how do you do it, and what’s the role of social media? First off, the “brand experience” discussion is a bigger one than I can address here. For the moment, I’d even like to side step the impact of other digital media including website, advertising, and direct marketing to focus squarely on social media.

My reasoning: social content (AKA “the social Web”) is second only to the product ownership experience in its ability to influence opinions about a brand. It overwhelms other transient touch points (e.g., the buying experience) because over time it persists and it grows. Individuals can ignore it, but the social Web almost certainly represents the easiest and most available source for a vicarious, always-on brand experience where they can find:
1) Abundant user-generated content ranging from product feature reviews, owner testimonials, customer service stories, re-sale prices, etc.
2) Content that is largely viewed as more trust worthy compared to content published by marketing and PR types, and
3) Search results populated more densely by content from “people like me.” That is, social content gets more eyeballs — higher placement by search engines relative to similar content posted on all but the most skillfully optimized corporate web sites.

This makes social media a very powerful tool for product marketers to communicate a positive brand image. It’s not that public relations doesn’t have a role, but the context and participants in the social Web are different and more varied than for tradition PR. These conversations can be intricate, highly dynamic and thick with product and competitive details. Generally they are exposed to everybody — these are not carefully crafted messaging exercises. Regardless of who participates in the social Web on a company’s behalf, this is no place for hand shaking specialists so think twice about the skills required to engage customers in an environment as transparent, for example, as blogs and forums.

Getting back to a definition of personalizing a brand, among all else, it means developing a brand relationship through honest, first person communications. On Twitter, for example, I see many brand names marketing to their customer base — obviously trying to build a following. But is this the right path to take? The problem is that generally people don’t want to interact with a brand or trademark. They want to interact with other people. There is just something disingenuous about the anonymity of conversing with a no name person hiding behind a brand, and this gets to the “how?”

If you are working to develop an influencer network on Twitter, consider engaging as individuals, not as a brand. A great first step would be to set up personal accounts for all participants — executives and staffers who have complete profiles on LinkedIn or some other social network. You can still set up a corporate Twitter account for communicating company news, marketing events or handling direct inquiries, but if you plan to use social tools as a low cost broadcast channel, be very clear about the purpose of your branded account. It’s one thing to offer followers real time product alerts or promotional offers, but quite another to broadcast what barely qualifies as product news to a following that is looking for thought leadership or entertainment.

One criticism of this approach is that you wind up with multiple accounts to manage your brand presence, and that’s just on one network – Twitter. Thankfully, there are tools like Splitweet and Peoplebrowsr that make managing multiple accounts across multiple networks very achievable.

As in any social situation, if you are looking to make new connections, then it pays to be attractive and interesting. In the social Web, this usually equates to sharing unique insights, stirring up controversy, or being provocative in some way. You can even have fun and be funny, but don’t be boring and be careful with your mix of hard vs. soft content.

Whatever your approach the most successful tactics build an emotional connection – kind of a gut level affiliation with your cause. Even blatant brand advocates can succeed in doing this as long as they are transparent about their purpose, respectful of others, and in general follow an ethical high road. In almost any situation, mean doesn’t play well on the social Web, so don’t get into personal attacks. Flaming posts or trolling for a public fight in the social spheres often comes across like a purposeful, self indulgent exercise, even if you don’t intend it that way.

More so than products, people are multi-dimensional. Our professional lives coexist side by side with are personal lives and gradually the two are beginning to co-mingle on the social Web. There are plenty of examples in the mainstream media of business and personal interests converging. The most obvious are the public service broadcasts or educational programs funded by major corporations and broadcast without commercial interruptions on public television. Through their affiliation with charitable organizations (e.g., the United Way) and community outreach programs, the US National Football League (NFL) provides another very visible example of this strategy in action.

On the surface, these causes might seem to have little if anything to do with the product, but corporations long ago realized that by doing good deeds for the public at large, they are developing brand affinity with people who care about these causes.

Translating these analogies to the social Web, it’s very possible to develop multiple points of affinity between your constituents and your brand. This doesn’t mean becoming a change-the-world philanthropist or clogging your communications with pretentious do-good-isms. You can simply manage a mix of interesting or anecdotal content to break up the monotony. Communications don’t always need to be about products. It’s a good idea to identify causes that have broad appeal across your target demographic, and be purposeful in communicating them via social channels.

Probably the best example of executing the tactics I’ve described here (at least on Twitter) is @guykawasaki. He seldom varnishes his point of view, but he’s honest about his affiliations, interesting and anything but mean spirited. Though he has many people ghost posting on his behalf, he’s up front about it. And, it appears he personally manages all person-to-person communications himself. His is a good model particularly for executives to follow. Here’s a brief Q&A that describes his approach for Twitter.

Try leveraging these tactics within a broader personalization strategy and let me know how they work for you. But by all means be strategic in your approach. Don’t just dispatch your summer interns on the social Web with loosely defined objectives. That is an approach certain to disappoint you and potentially alienate your following.