Activate!: Power Up Your Brand to Dominate Your Market, Crush Your Competition & Win in the Digital Age

By Gal S. Borenstein

Fact: Studies show that companies that have better alignment on their digital strategy, achieve better financial performance and customer retention, than their peers. Yet, less than HALF of surveyed C-Suite executives understand the role of DIGITAL ENGAGEMENT and have effective strategies in place. Some fear change. Some fear displacement. But most

• Language: English
• Publisher: Protocol House Publishing
• Release date: Sep 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9780692282212

Book preview

About the Author

Mr. Gal Borenstein is a recognized expert and strategist in digital branding, marketing, social media, advertising, online reputation management and public relations matters. He is the founder and CEO of the Borenstein Group, a top digital marketing communications firm in the Washington, DC metropolitan area that serves clients locally and globally. Since its founding in 1994, the Borenstein Group has helped hundreds of startups, early-stage, growing, and mature companies optimize their brand promise and maximize their brand equity.

Among Borenstein Group’s historical clients are trusted brands such as Forrester Research, IntelliDyne, Pragmatics, Aquent, ADT, Airbus North America, National Air Cargo, TCOM, Supreme Group and Learning Tree International.

Borenstein is a vocal advocate for digital engagement across the corporate brand, from the C-Suite to Corporate Marketing to Customer Satisfaction and Employer Branding. Borenstein Group clients benefit from his strategic ability to quickly convert abstract missions into tangible and visible action plans with coherent digital creative and business objectives that serve the client’s bottom line. Gal published his first business leadership book

What Really Counts for CEOs in 2009. Since then, Mr. Borenstein has been featured as a guest commentator on CNN and Fox Business News on strategic marketing and branding issues. In addition, he has been one of the top digital content contributors to influential business leadership social media networks such as LinkedIn, PR

Week’s The Hub, Advertising Age’s BtoB magazine, HR.com,

DuctTapeMarketing.com and others.

Gal earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Communications from Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and his Master’s Degree with Honors in Business and Telecommunications Management from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my three sons, Benjamin, Jacob, and Max, who help me every day to stay anchored and focused on what really counts and matters in life: family.

Despite my herculean efforts as an educated father to keep up with their innate ability to learn the latest in digital media, every day my sons pointedly teach me how much I don’t know. Seeing the world through their eyes continues to inspire me and provide me with a unique sense of parameters that, even as an educated and strategic communication professional, no book smarts could.

Max is eleven years old and doesn’t know why you’d call someone if you could text them. Jake is fourteen and doesn’t know why he’d ever agree to share his digital pics on Facebook, because that’s where his parents post their news. And Benjamin, my sixteen-year-old, who is focused on his college aspirations, and already is questioning the veracity of the mainstream media reports on just about everything because his sources on Twitter tend to be more accurate, faster, and provide news in real time.

I also dedicate this book to my wife and life partner,

Dr. Julie Kaplan Borenstein, a clinical psychologist by trade, who keeps me sane and always loved as I try to juggle too many tasks at once.

Preface

What’s your reputation worth to you? What’s it worth to your clients? What’s it worth to your friends? And can you monetize it?

The answer to these questions used to be, It doesn’t matter because it’s all about who you know.

Then when business networks of relationships got built, the answer changed to, It doesn’t matter who you know, it’s about who knows you.

And then came the Age of Digital. An age where who you know and who knows you doesn’t matter as much because your brand is out of your personal control. Through countless mobile devices, it’s exposed to anyone with little privacy. Your personal reputation is linked to your company’s actions, along with your friends, frenemies, competition, and co-opetition.

With the swipe of a finger on a tablet, or a keystroke on a keyboard, what you do or don’t do on Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter has the power to either wipe out all that you’ve worked for, or help you win more business. Online reviews about you as a manager that are posted by your staff can help you attract either the best employees in the industry or the worst C players.

I wrote this book because far too often I meet successful professionals who feel overwhelmed or unsure about how to control and own their digital brands. I wrote this book for those who feel this too shall pass, because it won’t! By transforming the way you view digital from that new technology to a powerful business enabler, I believe that you can muster the power to dominate your market, crush your competition, and control your brand destiny.

That’s why you need to activate!

Ten Things You Will Learn

Why digital engagement is a MUST for your success

How to build your digital professional brand

How to build your digital corporate brand

How to build a culture of digital engagement in

your company

How to handle social media in corporate settings

How to create and sustain online reputation management in the Age of Google

How to leverage digital recruitment for better

employer branding

How to activate marketing automation for growth

& more sales leads

How to gain a competitive advantage with digital marketing intelligence

How to use gamification to engage employees

and clients

Why You Need

This Book

"Believe it or not, the fundamentals of marketing and sales have not changed that much – what’s really changed in the digital age is how people buy. Activate! is your road map for mastering how people buy."

– John Jantsch

Bestselling Author of Duct Tape Marketing

and Duct Tape Selling

Brands of all shapes and sizes must quickly adapt to the digital & social age in order to survive. Read this book to find out how. Now. 

– Dave Kerpen

New York Times Bestselling Author of

Likeable Social Media and Likeable Business

"Anybody who wants to win the future must learn to build their personal and company brand with digital media. With compelling stories and expert guidance, Activate! provides a blueprint for online success." 

– Kevin Kruse

New York Times Bestselling Author,

We: How to Increase Performance and Profits Through Full Engagement,

and Forbes Magazine Leadership columnist.

Thankfully, you don’t need millions of dollars or a huge audience to dominate your industry niche. A little time, a bit of amazing content, and a solid process makes all the difference. This book will show you how.

– Joe Pulizzi

Founder, Content Marketing Institute

and Author, Epic Content Marketing

"In Activate!, you get the best of two worlds as Gal Borenstein fuses the unchanging best practices of traditional marketing with strategies specifically tailored to the ever-changing realities of the social media. Every page has practical brand-building ramifications."

– Richard Levick

Richard is a global PR thought leader and CEO of LEVICK, a global strategic communications firm, and co-authored books including,

The Communicators: Leadership in the Age of Crisis; and Stop the Presses: The Crisis and Litigation PR Desk Reference.

"Activate! is a call to digital arms – and just what many leaders need to win in today’s evolving, competitive landscape. A true digital warrior and champion of established and emerging leaders, Gal Borenstein presents not just ‘what you need to know’ but ‘why you need to do it now,’ in one quick read. This book will give you the courage to embrace the digital groundswell and successfully establish your brand. Do so now; before someone else defines you!"

– Cary Hatch

CEO, Brand Advocate of MDB Communications,

Named to POWER 100– WBJ, Washington, DC

Creativity can no longer be ignored as the key success factor for sustaining strategic advantage. Yet few know what or how to make it happen. This book wakes us up to the importance of digital branding in this innovative journey, and the tools for getting it done.

– Don Schmincke

Author/Speaker/co-Founder, Creative IQ

"In today’s fast paced business world, smart marketing is often the only difference between knock-out success or just being ignored.

Activate! will give you the inside track on building a business exploding with impact. Gal weaves witty anecdotes and smart storytelling around solid marketing strategy that you need to take action on right now." 

– Dan Waldschmidt

Bestselling Author of EDGY Conversations

In a world heavily dominated by digital media and communications, building key relationships and your personal brand continue to be important components of achieving success. Gal’s book provides keen insight and guidance on how to build and manage your digital brand and key relationships that allow you to drive the desired results. 

– Sid Fuchs

President & CEO, MacAulay-Brown, Inc.,

and author, Get Off the Bench

Introduction

Imagine a leader. He or she is a CEO or a president or a king.

The leader receives a communication.

In ancient times, this communication could only have come from another human source: a messenger or colleague. In 490 BCE, Pheidippides, the famous Greek messenger, ran from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens to announce that the Persians had been defeated in the Battle of Marathon. Upon delivering his good news, he collapsed and died.

Fortunately, since that time we humans have made tremendous progress in communications technology.

By the Middle Ages, a man on horseback could deliver a handwritten message on parchment. An amazing improvement!

Then in 1445, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Identical documents could be printed and distributed in large quantities.

In 1832 came the telegraph, the first electronic messaging system that permitted the instantaneous transmission of information over long distances.

Alexander Graham Bell gave us the telephone in 1876, and the human voice could be transmitted in real time. Then came radio and television.

As technology progressed, successful businesses embraced each new possibility. After all, in business, the only constant is change. If your business is static, you’ll quickly lose ground and be overtaken by your rivals. That’s the beauty of our free market system: every company, CEO, and stakeholder has a powerful incentive to embrace change, improve, and move ahead.

Today, we’re in the middle of another great leap in technology—the digital revolution. It’s happening right now. You and I are experiencing a period in history as important as when Gutenberg invented his printing press, or Bell invented the telephone. We are witnesses—and participants of history.

The name of this book is Activate! How to Power Up Your Brand to Dominate Your Market, Crush the Competition, and Win in the Digital Age. The word activate has been chosen carefully. It means to energize, to infuse with vitality. It’s kinetic, not static. It’s like life itself. You can activate your company or organization by leveraging the new wave of communications technology—digital engagement. By doing so, you’ll stay at the forefront of the very best business practices. You’ll have confidence in knowing that you won’t be easily overtaken.

Communications is at the heart of every enterprise. It’s essential both internally and externally. The stakeholders of an organization—board, staff, vendors, consultants—need real-time, comprehensive communications about relevant events happening both inside the organization and outside in the marketplace. Data overload is undesirable; precision, speed and accuracy are essential.

The digital revolution is changing the standards for communications. What was acceptable twenty years ago is now unacceptable.

The goal of this book is to introduce you to the vast potential of the digital era and to de-mystify many of the concepts that you may have heard of. I’ll talk about ideas that are both cutting-edge and practices that have quickly become ubiquitous.

The book starts with a fable. Our hero, Emperor Ceo, is a likable enough monarch who tries his