The Charismatic Personal Brand: Change “Me” to “We”

If you’re reading this post in succession from yesterday’s post, you’ll remember our example of Joe:

Joe is a charismatic executive in a major corporation. He cares about making money, and ensuring that his bottom line is in good shape. He’s a phenomenal orator, and he has a loyal team of executives that he directs. Joe is always looking to help his team, and his attitude has cultivated a great deal of success for him in the past. However Joe is now hitting a wall. He’s always been a good listener, however he’s starting to realize that he may have been listening to the wrong people.  While his team is talented, they understand that they need Joe in order to thrive in their business, so sometimes they tend to tell Joe what he wants to hear. Joe doesn’t listen to his community of consumers.

Today I want to discuss what it is that Joe is missing. Again, he’s great at his job, and has been doing well, however he’s missing a few things.  The main idea that Joe is missing is an understanding that he can leverage social media to amplify his message, and the second thing is that he’s missing the appropriate social tools that will help him to properly listen to his consumers.  This second point is invaluable. Joe is great at speaking, however when he communicates his message it only lands on a few ears. When he speaks that message, he listens, but it’s to the wrong people. Joe’s communication strategy is flawed. It’s a linear strategy that would look like this: 

If Joe were following our guidance, he would soon realized just how flawed his strategy is.  By leveraging the appropriate social places, and creating distributable content that is discoverable not only by his employees, but his customers as well, he would see that his message would look very different. Once the message reached his consumer they would then be able to share the message with their network. This would effectively amplify every word that he created, and as a result create a dialogue between Joe and his community. This communication is the gem of social media. Once Joe would be able to let people in, he would learn about how to improve his product offering, and would learn where his team is doing both a good, or GASP bad job. Presently there aren’t many individuals or companies willing to take this “risk” of gleaning feedback.   I believe that this is a missed opportunity.  Since when did brands become so precious? You’re missing an opportunity to learn more about your product and improve upon it. If you have the appropriate social media governance in place you’ll realize that you can control the message in social (to a certain extent) and allow for true sharing to occur.

Over and Out.