Free eBook on the importance of creating social capital as part of your personal or business brand-building strategy. Learn what it is, why it is important, and how to create more of it. Based on years as an award-winning technology evangelist and chief marketing officer.

1. TAP INTO
SOCIAL CAPITAL
TO BUILD YOUR
BRAND
Christian Buckley
fiftyfiveandfive

2. Beyond the Color Palette
- 3 -
Social Capital: the way influence works
- 4 -
Focusing on Influencers
- 6 -
Finding Value by Providing Value
- 8 -
About the Author
- 9 -
About Fifty Five and Five
- 10 -
fiftyfiveandfive
2
Table of
Contents

3. common mistake that companies make is to think that corporate branding – the
logo, tagline, and chosen color palette—constitutes their brand. Sure, these things
play a role in branding, but they are just one small facet of the overall brand.
Companies spend seemingly countless hours and endless budgets on perfecting their
logos, websites, and brochures in an effort to establish and build ‘brand awareness’.
However, more than any design element, it is your company culture and the reputation of
your front-line employees that define your company brand. This is why it’s essential for
you to understand who in your company is influential outside company walls.
The challenge, however, is that most companies do not understand who the influencers
are within their companies or across their customer communities. They also struggle to
tailor their messages to those influencers. Even more elusive than a strategy for external
influencers is a plan for internal influencers.
In an era of social media, companies need to understand the value of influence—and how
to extend their social capital. Leveraging internal influence and identifying and targeting
external influence is a key aspect of creating social capital. And it should, therefore, be a
major factor in your marketing mix.
In this eBook, we will explore what influencers are, how their influence works and how you
can leverage their influence to tell your brand story across their networks.
fiftyfiveandfive
3
Beyond the
Color Palette

4. fiftyfiveandfive
4
Social Capital:
the way influence works
¹ Putnam, Robert. 2001. Bowling Alone.
n an influential study of the way
communities work, Robert Putnam, a
Harvard sociologist, offered the
observation that:
"Much of the success of the United States as
a nation had to do with its ability to
generate social capital, that mysterious but
critical set of characteristics of functioning
communities."¹
Social capital is, simply put, the level of
trust that is earned by an individual or a
brand within a social construct. A new
user entering a technology forum, for
instance, has no social capital. As they
participate in conversation threads, asking
questions and answering questions, they
slowly build capital. The same activity
happens within an organization or across
social media.
The importance of augmenting or
improving one's social capital, whether
online or offline, may benefit more than
just the quality of your professional
relationships. Putnam puts it like this:
"Individuals in groups with more social
capital are better off on a large number of
metrics, from health and happiness to
earning potential, than in those groups with
less social capital."
Individuals with strong social capital have
more access to data and generate quicker
and more detailed feedback from their
networks. Case in point: anyone new to a
technologycommunity can ask a question
via Twitter and generally get a quick
response back. But the volume (and
quality) of responses increases
dramatically when the same question is
picked up and re-tweeted by a trusted
member of the community.
For brands, tapping into the influence of
individuals—both within and outside the
company—who have a lot of social capital
can, therefore, be expected to boost trust
in the brand.
Robert Putnam, Harvard sociologist

5. fiftyfiveandfive
5
Being
Authentic
Is social influence about the number of followers your brand has? How many
re-tweets you receive? Or more so the depth of dialog you have and the action that
people take based on your own actions? Is there some other way to identify
(intelligently) as to which connections will provide the most relevant connections
based on your profile, your interests and your most recent searches?
Building social influence is not the same thing as building followers. Tools for
building followers can be somewhat shady, with dozens (or more) tools out there to
help you build followers. The real power in building social influence is substance.
We have two seemingly divergent and opposing views here: the idea of reducing the
noise in our networks by focusing on those relationships that will benefit us the
most; and the idea that expanding our networking pool benefits us by increasing
our chances of identifying beneficial connections that might otherwise be lost by not
casting a wide enough net.
It's an interesting dichotomy. There is no right answer here for how to manage your
networks, but including a regular purging and expansion should be a key tenet of
your influencer strategy.

6. fiftyfiveandfive
6
Focusing on
Influencers
t a recent analyst event, one
customer story that really stood out
was a marketing team that approached
their brand-building activities by
identifying and separating product
"advocates" from customers within their
CRM and then developing individual
strategies for each. Part of their approach
was to specifically identify each influencer,
and nurture them individually, outside of
the strategy used to market for the rest of
their contacts.
Similarly, identifying and working with
your internal influencers can become
another channel strategy. How you work
with these internal influencers—whether
they’re in sales or marketing, or even an
engineer who is very active in relevant
online communities—will likely include a
very different, non-traditional approach to
your primary brand-building strategy.
The point here is to recognize influence
inside and outside of your organization,
and develop strategies that are unique to
each.

7. How can you actually
leverage influencers?
One very successful branding strategy, and a way to support the unique added
value of your internal influencers is by matching internal branding strengths to
external influencer needs wherever possible. For example, you have your marketing
message that you’re testing out, moving forward with, and it is being delivered by
your product management team and your solutions sales team. You have a regular
cadence of webinars, emails and live events, and you’re confident you have a solid
approach with message, delivery and volume.
Now, as you learn about your partners and customers, measuring the success of
these various marketing activities, the real test of your strategy—and the
measurement of your brand—will come through exceptions. Influencers begin to
identify themselves: a customer loves your product and happily joins a webinar or
co-presents at an event on your behalf, but struggles with your sales process and
handling of leads because it does not have the personal connection necessary for a
successful hand-off.
fiftyfiveandfive
7

8. fiftyfiveandfive
8
Finding Value by
Providing Value
y guidance to individuals and
companies alike is that value is
achieved by providing value. Building
social capital for yourself, your product or
your company is most quickly and
lastingly achieved by providing value to
others (by bridging your networks) and
your influencers (to help customers and
partners). Through consistent and
authentic content and conversations, you
can focus first on helping others find
value before considering your own needs.
If you approach your social and
community activities in this way, you will
rapidly build your own social capital while
also building trust with influencers.
There is no quick and easy path to
building social capital. It takes time, effort
and a clearly defined and closely
measured strategy. Nonetheless, the
impact of a strong professional brand is
that it can amplify all other marketing
efforts.Microsoft uses the phrase "Working
like a Network" to describe the new world
of work.
A world where organizations leverage the
people they know, the processes and
business systems that we participate in
and the technology at our fingertips to
give us access to more data, more content
and more of the collective capabilitiesof
everyone connected within our network.
Having strong social capital enables us to
do more with our network, and weak
social capital can most definitely limit us.
To work like a network means that each of
us acts as a broker, adding value to the
clusters in which we participate—and
then connecting data, people and ideas
across clusters to translate each body of
knowledge for those other networks.
Working like a network is not an empty
platitude or marketing slogan—working
like a network is a collaboration
imperative.
Extending your social capital should,
therefore, be a business (and
collaboration) imperative.

9. Christian Buckley is the Chief Evangelist at Beezy, a leading social collaboration ISV, and is
the Founder of CollabTalk. A globally-recognized author, speaker and technology influenc-
er, Christian is a 6-time Microsoft MVP and Top 10 SharePoint and Office 365 Influencer.
He was also part of the Microsoft team that launched SharePoint Online (now part of
Office 365) and worked with some of the world's largest technology companies to build
and deploy social, collaboration and supply chain solutions.
Christian can be found online at www.buckleyplanet.com and on Twitter at
@buckleyplanet.
fiftyfiveandfive
9
About the
Author

10. +44 0203 805 7791
www.fiftyfiveandfive.com
hello@fiftyfiveandfive.com
@takefiftyfive
“We help Microsoft Partners
communicate more effectively, reach
new audiences and drive leads.”
Located in central London, UK, Fifty Five and Five is a full service digital marketing agency.
Founded in 2014 by Chris Wright, a former IT consultant with many years experience
working with Microsoft Partners, we are a fast growing team of marketers,
writers, researchers and designers.
Born out of a recognition that Microsoft Partners face a unique set of challenges when it
comes to B2B marketing, our goal is to help brands define and differentiate themselves.
fiftyfiveandfive
10
About
Fifty Five and Five