A couple of years later the digital world turned upside down. Flash was out, Search Engine Optimization was in and just about everybody was screaming, mobile, hyper-local and a host of other buzz words.

By now it should be obvious that I did eventually return to twitter and almost immediately I knew I was going to stick around. I quickly noticed that Twitter grew somewhat of a multiple personality. Letting your friends know what you’re up to evolved into deep thoughts and spur of the moment status updates all tightly packed into 140 characters.

Twitter’s other personality was much more engaging (to me at least). Tweeting along side writers, poets and your everyday person were big brands like Dell, who had great success as an early adopter arguably helped push twitter to the masses.

Younger more agile brands started getting their feet wet. Twitter is the marketers experimental laboratory, it’s used to engage customers and prospects, help existing customers solve problems and be an all around fun and engaging community to be apart of.

OK, so Twitter has become the social media pot of gold for marketers, now what?

In the case of Dell, they succeeded by taking a risk, being a pioneer out on the frontier and talking to their customers (and making new ones) where they spend their time. They succeeded by engaging people in an organic and meaningful way.

For smaller brands and individuals with a message or a product to sell, the approach is similar. The overall message here is that in today’s noisy, hyper local, mobile and generally jaded world, customers need to feel special. They need to feel exclusive and rewarded for participating in your brand narrative.

Based on my personal experience there are few brands taking advantage of Twitter. Companies like @TazaChocolate who actively engages their audience by letting them in on the process of chocolate making. @Sixpoint, a Brooklyn New York based Artisanal Craft Brewery, who polls their fans and followers on which logo design they like best.

The lesson here is that Twitter has become a viable marketing tool, and if you’re a new brand of hyper local small batch whiskey, or a family-owned dry cleaning business Twitter should be on your company’s radar.

What is your company known for? How do your employees feel about the work they do? Does your competition have strong loyalty? These are just a few questions that can be answered after doing some branding exercises.

A good brand exercise to start with could be a brainstorming meeting with top employees where you all put yourselves in your customers’ shoes and start to ask and answer these questions. Then apply that to real customers, write 5 brand related questions and send them out as a survey to a small group of customers. This feedback is priceless and will steer the improvements you should make to you brand. Essentially answering the questions: What changes to we need to make within our company to improve the likelihood of customers buying our product or using our service.

Building a company’s brand is about emphasizing its value it has already been building and broadcasting that out to the masses. People like to feel attached to the things that surround them. Companies need to communicate their strengths, purpose and value.

You might be looking at branding all wrong. Dropping $40k on a new website just to have a new website is clearly not a strategy worth discussing. The same goes for any other touch point of your brand: logo, business cards, mission statement, etc. These are all things a branding/design agency can create for you, but should they? Well that’s the critical question and as a company owner you should be involved in that decision. And I believe that decision can only be made by first taking a thorough look at your company and deciding what your audience needs to better understand your product or services.

That brings us to the purpose and role of a brand, the communicator. Your brand needs to be a broadcasting Swiss army knife. It must speak for you when you’re not around to drop you elevator pitch, it should act as a symbol of trust to comfort your customers if they’re ever in doubt, and it must also evolve when your company evolves. These things don’t just happen over night, in fact a strong brand takes years to develop. But that doesn’t mean you’re starting from scratch. You need to build on what your company already means to people, this is the first step in discovering effective brand tactics.

No one understands your company as well as you do. You need to be the steward of how it’s perceived to the world and your responsible for interrupting that to your customers. A good branding or design team can create beautiful pieces of work but the root of the message needs to come from you.

Start the branding conversation and put your brand back to work.