I am growing weary of the multitude of posts out there talking about humanizing your brand, but it’s not because they’re using the word humanize (Maddie and I don’t claim to own that term in any way). There are two main reasons these posts are bugging me. First of all, they all consist of a number of tips. Why is humanizing your brand always something that can be accomplished through tips? Why is there never a “Comprehensive strategy for humanizing your brand” post? Or maybe a “Well Thought Out approach to the tough job of humanizing your brand” post? Nope. Just 4, 5, 10, 20 or some other number of tips. If humanizing your brand were that easy–that a finite number of tips would get you there–wouldn’t everyone have done it by now?

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, no, I don’t have 7 tips for you, as is implied by the title of this post. I literally put that in the title to make this post more shareable (tip #1: be authentic and truthful, yet somehow be a slave to SEO’s free rank tracking tools and sharing).

Which brings me to the second reason these posts bug me. The tips in these posts are chock full of very simple-sounding commands that are frequently very difficult to do within our organizations or are contradicted by important realities. Like being yourself and authentic. That’s true…except when it requires you to admit that you did a 10 tips post to get more links. Or maybe the boss is quite authentically a jerk. Do we want that authenticity on social media? These issues are complex. I certainly agree with the plea for authenticity, and I think it’s an important trend (we identify it in Humanize as the behavioral aspect of being Trustworthy). But I think authenticity as a “tip” is doing us all a disservice.

Or how about “Let your employees be social.” That’s kind of like “let your employees innovate.” It’s hard to argue with the statement, or at least you’ll start to look “old school” if you argue with the statement. But there are so many critical implications of the statement, that by itself it’s almost useless. Do you trust your employees? Do they understand the organization’s strategy and success drivers? Do they even know what’s going on in other departments? Do they understand how to build relationships with other networks? Will departments and their existing processes pay attention to what develops out of social interactions? To “be social” has big implications for the whole system (just like “innovating” has big implications). We need to treat these complex topics with an appropriate amount of complex conversations.

I think humanizing your brand is ultimately about creating a social business. The humanization part (where we see people’s pictures, and CEOs are blogging, and our people have a voice in the community) will end up being a natural offshoot of integrating the ideas behind social media into your culture, process, structure, and behavior. And you won’t get there with just tips.

P.S. I’ll be talking about this very topic with some very smart people on Blog Talk Radio this Tuesday at 7:30pm. Join me!

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