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Is AI compromising our curiosity?
As AI becomes increasingly prominent in our lives, it is time for comms professionals to consider the impact on creativity and curiosity. ...Read more
The concept of personal branding is gaining a lot of traction in marketing media. The concept is straightforward: your activities on the web leave an indelible mark that says something about you. Or, worse still, your activities on the web are so insignificant; they barely leave a mark at all.
For marketing and PR leaders this presents an important question: what is your CEO’s personal brand equity?
Whether you work for a consumer-facing brand or a business services firm, it’s important that your boss has a positive online reputation. If you can help get it right, there are three upsides for you personally.
[caption id="attachment_9317" align="alignright" width="200"] James Dyson - a prime example of personal branding at its best[/caption]
The first step is to audit your boss online. At a basic level, this is Google his/her name. Also, Google his/her name, plus your company name (advanced reputation building also considers attribute keywords, such as “venture capital expert” or “cloud computing commentator”).
There are other search analysis activities that can also be deployed here, such as looking at the Google page rank of sites that you own and adding his/her name to your keywords that your search function is working on.
Having completed an online audit you’ll see that some of these aspects contribute to establishing a presence – in other words, the “digital footprint” – and some are about the content and what it represents, “the reputation”.
While it’s important to begin by building the digital footprint, you must consider the brand attributes that your CEO stands for. I’m not talking about obvious stuff – like honesty and trustworthiness as that’s assumed – it needs to be what he/she wants to be known for. For example, being responsible for introducing a new online security product to market, or having strong views about exporting to emerging markets. This will really help you with your media relations work, too.
A full personal branding programme can be a mini PR campaign in its own right, but you can still make a difference with a few quick wins.
Finally, this wouldn’t be an article on personal branding if we didn’t mention Wikipedia. The short advice is: be very careful. It’s against Wikipedia’s neutral point of view principles to write articles on behalf of yourself or someone you may have a “conflict of interests” with. You can engage with the Wikipedia community to make it happen, but it has to conform to a set criteria, so this is one that I would put in the “advanced” personal branding camp.
These are just a few of the basic tactics. If you’d like more in-depth advice or would like to find out about some of the advanced options to really help your CEO to stand out from the crowd, get in touch.
Further reading:
As AI becomes increasingly prominent in our lives, it is time for comms professionals to consider the impact on creativity and curiosity. ...Read more
Often, when communicating about technology, conversations can become quite technical. How can brands cut through the noise and communicate effectively? ...Read more
Barbie's reputation hasn't always been positive, but this year's Barbie film has changed the tides. What can this teach us about reputation shaping? ...Read more
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Paul Stallard
Great post Phil. Some excellent advice here
Phil Szomszor
Thanks Paul, really appreciate that.