True story. In shooting down their nemesis, Scope’s marketers didn’t use logic or claims of quality. They appealed to consumers’ emotions, to their fear that if they used Listerine, their breath would smell like a doctor’s examination room. By all accounts, the tactic succeeded spectacularly.

What does this little story have to do with Personal Branding? Everything.

How to Snuff Your Competition: Take a cue from California’s anti-smoking marketing campaign – and plan to snuff your competitors.

The underlying theme in all this, which might better have been introduced first, is that it costs less to sell more to existing customers than it does to sell more by acquiring new customers.

Your current customers already know and trust you. That gives you the chance to establish your expertise and experience, which will differentiate you from your competitors.

Because it is meant to look fun, putting together a social media campaign – or integrating one into a larger online initiative – can be surprisingly difficult. There are many challenges to capturing and engaging user interests online – starting with finding the right person to lead that effort, says Andrew Ballenthin, president of Sol Solutions.

That point was driven home last December when Ballenthin put together Blog-Off II, a 12-day, seven-judge contest to test participants’ qualitative and quantitative effectiveness in social media marketing fundamentals.