A Guide to Personal Branding for Executives Who Suck at Social Media
The head of a PR strategy firm teaches you how to combine messaging for your organization with your authentic personal style
I will never forget the first time I recognized the power of social media for professional use. It was back in 2007 and I had been robotically tweeting inspirational quotes, statistics, and calls to action back to our website. One day, I was present for a conversation with our chief operating officer during which he was complaining that other organizations got more share of media on our issue than we did. What he essentially wanted to know was: Why is leader X getting more interviews than we are?
Back at my desk, I started researching. I looked up each competing organization, who their leaders were — and followed them on Twitter. I went down rabbit holes, looking at whom each one followed and following the people and organizations that were also relevant to us.
What started out as an “opposition” research ended up being a revelation in how we used social media for communications and marketing at our organization. Those “competitors” that I followed were some of the biggest names in the philanthropy space. And what I quickly noticed was that they followed back — and began…
