Blog Branding: Bringing Touchy-feely Relationships to Blogs

“Deep Jive Interests’ Tony Hung tackles “Branding Matters a Lot for Search Engines Unless You Are Happy With 1%, an interesting perspective on the issue of blog branding, identity, and PageRank.

Branding plays a *big* role in a great many things, and search engines are no exception.

Specifically, something marketing folk like to call “top of mind awareness”, or “top of mind recall”, but also how people think about, re-arrange and re-order their perceptions of things. And in this case, its search engines.

The summary is that they took identical search engine results and ascribed the results to four different search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, MSN Live Search, and some in-house search engine. When asked which results were the best, its absolutely no surprise that people favoured the ones labeled “Google” and “Yahoo” even though the search results were identical.

The study he references, from Pennsylvania State University, might be worth investigating more, but either way, there is no doubt that search engine algorithms are improving greatly and perception matters as well as the math.

Branding Is About Recognition and Feelings

With another perspective on the same subject, Chris Garrett offers “Better Blog Branding: Your Successful Brand”, summing up branding with two characteristics: recognition and feelings:

Recognition can be achieved simply enough. Repeated interactions with consistency. Just like Pavlov’s experiments with his hounds, there needs to be a positive pay-off with those repeated exposures.

We are back to customer experience and evoking positive feelings again. Oh-no, the touchy-feely stuff!

Think about it though, we do feel different about certain brands. Some brands just make us feel good.

Applying these to a blog will be the hottest topics in blogging over the next year. You just wait!

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network, and author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.