Personality not included-The interview

As Rohit Bhargava, at the Influential Marketing Blog, prepared to launch his book "Personality not included", he sent across a couple of sneak peeks about his book to his online groups.As part of his facebook group, a look at the contents piqued my interest enough to send across a series of questions to him when he offered to respond to a 5 queries each, sent across to him by a set of bloggers, as part of his book promotion.This is part of the innovative Personality not included Interview Series. (Rohit is Senior Vice President, Digital Strategy & Marketing, Ogilvy Public Relations and is atop marketing blogger)

Read on.....You can read the rest of the series here

1.Can Social media help a great brand turn around the lost face value of a company?
I think it can, as long as it is used to give people a deeper look at a company and what it stands for. Dell is a good example of a brand that has managed to do exactly that.

2.You talk about new styles of marketing in your book.How relevant would social media be to 'Participation marketing' and 'Curiosity marketing'?
Social media is perfectly relevant when it comes to the idea of participation marketing. In fact, this is probably heavily about social media in the first place. As for curiosity marketing, that is really described as more of a viral marketing strategy, but could definitely relate to social media as well.

3.Can a corporate blog add to a company's personality?
Of course, in fact this can be a great way of bringing a company's personality to more visiblity.

4.How useful is personality in maintaining customer relationships?Personality is a key element in personal relationships with customers, particularly when it comes to longer relationship types of sales such as those that frequently happen in BtoB sales.

5.How big a role do you think social media can play in enlightening and empowering a consumer?
I believe it plays a very big role and it is a key element of the book to share some insights on how this may happen. For example, one brand that did this particularly well was the new aloft hotel chain from Starwood which allowed customers to collaborate and share feedback on the design of the hotel early in the process and is now in the midst of launching many properties worldwide.