Do you live your brand?

Proper branding is so much more than a cool logo and a clever tag line. It is the essence of your enterprise. It is your image that has been carefully created and built over the years to communicate instant recognition of who you are and what you stand for.

In order for that external image to resonate fully with your customers and clients, your vendors, partners, stakeholders and others, the brand must be implemented with precision and enthusiasm internally. The more conscientious you and everyone in your enterprise are of even the minutest detail of your brand, the more successful it will be. From the “micro-brand” perspective, it means that your color scheme, typeface for headlines and body copy, placement of the logo – with or without the tagline – are intricately communicated to every person within your organization as well as your advertising, PR and communications agencies. Just as important (and maybe more so) is the “macro-brand” – living the brand by employees and the independent contractors who represent you. If your brand is meant to inspire confidence, they need to inspire confidence; if your brand is about helping people, they need to be helpful; if your brand is trustworthiness, they need to be dependable; if your brand is quick service, they need to be fast. Employees or contractors who fail to live the brand make a mockery of it and destroy the brand for the people they come in contact with.

Security – it’s about more than cyber theft and hackers

When you think security, you often think about firewalls, spyware, and black hat hackers and crackers, who seem devoted to breaking through your computer security systems. But there’s another kind of security that you ought to be just as concerned about – system failure.

Think about all of the data that’s on your computer or in your server. It’s safe and secure with all of your updated security systems in place, right? But when your system goes down – which almost every system (no matter how large or small) does from time to time – is it storing information you need right now, before IT can restore you to full functionality? The inability to access that information may mean that you miss a deadline, that you are unable to make a presentation, that you lose an account. Of course you know to back up everything – you tell everyone in your organization to back up their files. And of course (we say with tongue firmly implanted in cheek), that happens all of the time. But even if you’ve backed up 99% of your files, Murphy’s Law demands that the files you really need are in that 1% that you can’t reach.

That’s not an issue for people who compute on their clouds. Their files are always there, available from any connected computer. Even if their one and only computer is down, they can make a trip to a public library, access their cloud, and bingo – there are the files they need.