Why Personal Branding Matters to Big Companies
Posted by Tom Pick on Thu, Jun 30, 2011 @ 07:22 AM
I had an opportunity at a recent online marketing conference in Minneapolis to spend a few minutes with Steve Woods, CTO of marketing automation vendor Eloqua. Steve is a very interesting and smart guy, author of a couple of books, Digital Body Language
and Revenue Engine
.
We got to talking about the role of the corporate social media strategist, a relatively new position in large enterprises. At which point, Steve said something very interesting: “The role of social media strategists should be to put themselves out of their jobs. It’s about helping all of the customer-facing and subject matter experts in the company with personal branding, so that those individuals can use business social networking effectively on their own, without any need for a filter.”
What he was referring to was, in many organizations, the corporate social media strategist is much like the “Ernestine” character played by Lily Tomlin on the TV show Laugh-In years ago; a switchboard operator, routing calls to the right people, and injecting a bit of personality along the way.
But of course we no longer have switchboard operators, and haven’t for many years. Technology handles that. Eventually it will do the same in social media. Steve is right about the switchboard operator role going away (though social media strategists are likely to remain, with more evolved job descriptions) and the importance of personal branding.
This matters to big business because you don’t buy a car from Ford, you buy it from Bob, the salesperson at your local dealership. You don’t buy a home from Century 21, you buy it from Sally, your local real estate agent. You don’t bundle up all your insurance needs and buy a master policy from Allstate, you buy from Chris, the local Allstate agent.
Technology has been harnessed to make it very efficient to buy things like books, music, movies, gadgets and hardware online, with no human interaction in the transaction. It next needs to be harnessed to increase the efficiency of online-to-offline transactions, where human engagement is required.
It needs to contain the various elements of social media generally associated with personal branding into an interactive, brand-consistent, portable and finable online package. When a buyer is able to efficiently find, evaluate, and connect with Bob instead of Ford or Sally instead of Century 21, then corporate social media strategists can shift their focus to more interesting, strategic activities. And big companies will be able to differentiate themselves and win business not through some vague corporate image but rather through the thousands of employee personal brands that truly make up their core value proposition.