Personal branding is recognized as a necessary and valuable strategy for professionals across all industries. Businesses that support employees developing a strong personal brand achieve multiple benefits. Most beneficial is the positive impact on your corporate brand.
Employees As Industry Experts
Organizations that place a value on encouraging personal branding have found it strengthens corporate branding both internally and externally. And when employees successfully brand themselves as experts in an industry, both your employee and company can achieve measurable benefits:
- Increased visibility
- Industry knowledge transfer
- Trend identification
- Stronger collaboration
- Leadership development
- Improved brand perception
Alignment & Leverage
Personal brands that align with your company provide multiplied visibility in addition to telling people that you employ the best of the best.
For example, create specialized Twitter accounts for your people to manage as ‘the expert’. Have them find and post relevant information. Leverage corporate blog posts by your people. They become your specialized arm to reinforce thought leadership, while you support from a corporate level, leveraging your combined contacts to deliver the message.
Responsibility
Create an environment where everyone in your company is responsible for their personal brand. Note that you need to take the lead and there’s responsibility at every level. There is significant impact on your corporate brand to have your employees visible with profiles that are strong, error free, and aligned with your corporate brand.
But there’s not much worse than encouraging a behavior that backfires – ranging from grammatical or punctuation errors to something worse like negative and inaccurate social media posts. Their profile has direct influence on how people view your company.
As Larry Linne points out in his book “Brand Damage – It’s Personal” it’s important to lead, train, and encourage personal brand management. It won’t happen on its own. And it won’t be done well without you as a guiding force.
Engagement
Companies and employees have everything to gain from working together to improve your brands. Are you having conversations about employee engagement? How much better can it be than to empower engagement by enhancing each other’s brands and harnessing the power of your different networks or contexts? Motivational, engaging, and beneficial to all!
Stronger Brands Mean More Profit
When the brand nourishment and enrichment happens at the corporate and personal levels, you can actualize 100% of your most precious asset - your human capital. By empowering them to build their personal brand, and nurture your corporate brand in the process, they have the ability to impact revenue as well as influence your corporate brand equity.
This week our focus is personal branding, leading up to our Brand Damage event you’re invited to attend on September 27 in South Bend, Indiana.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Please share them below.
