Digital Branding’s Biggest Fan

Joanna Lord bills herself as “dedicated to building brilliant brands that leave an impact, connect us in beautiful ways, and do great things,” and it only takes about two minutes of talking to her to realize that the words “dedicated,” “beautiful” and “great” are severe understatements. Through her blogging at Entrepreneur.com and her own site; speaking at conferences all over the world; and marketing leadership at a variety of tech startups, Joanna has become one of the most important voices in online brand building today (she also happens to be one of my best friends in the whole world).

Brands are more than a job for Joanna – they’re a passion. When she’s not working (she recently became the VP of Consumer Marketing at home improvement darling Porch.com), she’s a board member of local startups in her hometown of Seattle, and is the founder of her own social style app.

When you live and breathe branding, you start seeing how it can change what companies do and how they talk about themselves, but what’s even cooler is you start seeing how valuable a personal brand can be to someone’s sense of self and the image they project to the world.

“I’ve always lined up ‘brand’ with ‘identity’ and I think individual creators, bloggers, artists and others can experience so many great things by spending time on their identity. It brings you closer to your voice, and establishes your values,” reveals Joanna.

Joanna’s Confluence keynote “The Future of Brand” comes from that place of discovering who you really are, as a business or as a person. “By focusing on your brand you get really clear on what you stand for and what you want to do with your time and energy. It’s clarifying and freeing to know what you, and you alone, are bringing to this world in your own special way. Investing time on it is critical to unleashing its full potential.”

Confluence will mark Joanna’s first visit to Oklahoma. “I’m honestly super excited to meet the marketing community in Oklahoma. I personally love meeting new marketing communities and hearing what they are jazzed about these days,” Joanna says. “I also hear there is a place there that actually sells both cupcakes and cowboy boots…so that is near the top of the ‘things to be excited about’ list as well.”

Talking with Joanna, I couldn’t help but brag about Oklahoma City being named #1 on CNN Money’s “10 Best Cities to Launch a Startup” list. “Well first of all – congrats! That is huge,” she says. Knowing that she’s worked in no fewer than four amazing startup cultures, I asked if she had any advice for OKC’s burgeoning startup community.

“I think startup marketers love a certain type of chaos. One of our biggest challenges is balancing all of the channels that are competing for our time. When I’ve been on super small teams, running extra lean I’ve had to execute and strategize across all the channels or prioritize them the best I could. It’s a lot to make progress on at once—especially with few resources, which is what most startup marketers have available. My best advice is – constantly force yourself to only work on the projects that have the biggest impact to the business right now. Get comfortable with some channels sitting in maintenance mode. Accept what you cannot touch and spend all your energy, time and resources on what will truly drive the business forward. Focus, focus, focus!”

With resources in short supply, it can be difficult to convince yourself (or your boss) to spend time on a brand, in part because it seems like a fuzzy area. Branding has a bad reputation as being nebulous and hard to measure – which is one of Joanna’s pet peeves. “At this point we have the surveying, models, and tools available to us to help us understand if our consumers are falling in love and staying in love with our brands. We know if they are sharing on our behalf, advocating for us, and referring others in. We can tap them for product suggestions and community guidance. We have a direct line to the consumer and their activities so there is no excuse to not measure, and improve based on those opportunities,” she explains.

It’s all about love, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a legit marketing strategy. “Brand marketers today have a very real job—to build, share and measure the strength and impact of their brand. It’s personally something that I am particularly passionate about, and I love seeing other brand marketers take on the responsibility so seriously and so fiercely.”

Blending work and play is one of Joanna’s fortes. She’s been pouring her love for branding and her love for personal style into a passion project: ISITaYES, a social sharing app designed to help shoppers crowdsource their most difficult buying decisions. In blog posts like “Sometimes the Blues Just Feel Right,” she connects personal style with the emotions behind it – like finding a color blue that turns everyday occurrences into a “soul moment.”

“I love style and blogging about styles,” Joanna enthuses, adding that it’s a fun way to change her energy from day to day. “I think our styles as people are way less about fashion than we think they are. Instead I like to focus on the way an outfit makes me feel. How does it have me walking? Talking? Maybe even dancing through my day. Personal style is a way of saying ‘here I am today world, let’s do this.’”

“Let’s do this” is Joanna in a nutshell – she’s a heads-down, no-holds-barred business and marketing powerhouse. When she hits the stage on September 6th, prepare to be hit with an energy blast.