5 Steps for Turning Smart Personal Branding into Corporate Success

Branding consultant Dorie Clark explains how standing out and becoming a thought leader can benefit both you and your company — and how doing so is easier than you think.

If you’re looking for better job security and a larger, more active professional network, Dorie Clark has some advice for you: become a thought leader in your field. After all, in times of economic uncertainty and increasing staff commoditization, wearing the mantle of “go–to” leader attracts industry attention, and can do wonders not only for your personal brand, but for your company’s as well.
Clark, a branding consultant and author of Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future, recently sat down with OpenView to discuss five steps you can take to turn your own personal brand-building into a company-wide initiative.

Step 1: Lay the Foundation

Clark points to two important things for establishing yourself as a thought leader:

Concentrate on creating great content

Most people, when they hear about you, will immediately look you up online. When they do, having smart content associated with your name across the Web shows that you are a reputable source of information and insight. Your body of work, whether it’s blog posts or a smart and well-curated Twitter feed is the foundation that your reputation is built on, Clark advises. With the right content, she explains, “people understand that you have good ideas, and that you’re a player in the field.”

Take leadership roles in organizations

By doing so, you attract attention and visibility in a way that’s impossible as a team member. “It’s not enough just to be a member, or just to show up,” Clark says. You end up standing on the sidelines, and no one will see your role as important enough to take notice. Be active, take charge, and make an impact. That kind of proactive effort is crucial to building your reputation as an influencer.

Step 2: Make Time (Yes, It Is Possible)

Clark stresses that you can have a strong online presence in much less time than you might think. For starters, she suggests you set up a robust and well put together LinkedIn profile.
“It’s a very basic thing you can do,” Clark says, and “it’s a great way to keep your connections fresh and call attention to your brand without taking much time out of your day.”
Clark also suggests tackling Twitter with the help of apps like Spredfast, HootSuite, and TweetDeck. With those tools, you can “pre-program tweets in an hour or less per week,” and “create a really reasonable stream of content” that keeps your content in the pubic eye.
Blogging is another important step in the path to thought leadership and smart personal branding. “If you’re really interested in taking the leap forward and proactively becoming a thought leader,” Clark says, blogging is “the best way to demonstrate your intellectual expertise.” She warns that while it does have the potential to take up a significant amount of time, blogging is unique in that it allows you to set your tone and establish your voice. Set aside time once a week to write a fresh post so you can build a library of original content without getting bogged down.

Step 3: Know Your Target Audience

Determine your target demographic, find out where your audience, interacts, and focus your efforts accordingly. That may sound obvious, but a common mistake is feeling as though you need to have a presence on every social channel, which can result in you spreading yourself too thin. Worse, your audience may not be active on the platforms you’re wasting your time on to begin with.
For an example, “if your goal is to reach women between 35 and 55, by all means be on Pinterest,” Clark says, but if that’s not your audience, then you might be better served looking elsewhere.
For almost any profession, Clark singles out LinkedIn as “a great place to focus your attention.” She also points to Twitter as “a place where opinion leaders are constantly congregating.” Think about who your target demographic is, pinpoint where they spend their time online, and begin making connections.

Step 4: Measure Branding ROI

When it comes to measuring the return on your branding investment, Clark warns that it can be very difficult. Until there is a firm, accurate method for tracking the ROI of social media, Clark suggests setting up “interim metrics” as a way to measure success. Attributing social interactions to sales will remain difficult, since they’re rarely the last touch in a conversion path.
Instead, keep an eye on the number of Twitter followers you have, and observe if people are retweeting or sharing your content. You can also look at your Klout Score to see if it’s growing. Clark acknowledges that Klout metrics may not necessarily be KPIs, but they do represent one way to get a rough idea of your progress and popularity.

Step 5: Get Others Involved

Company brand-building works best when there’s buy-in right at the top of your organization. “If you have support from the institutional level, if the management is behind it, then you can publicize and track it, and you can reward people based on their social presence,” Clark says.
If the bosses are paying attention, then the rest of the company will, too. “Just knowing that personal branding is being looked at and valued implies to people that, ‘You should be paying attention to this,'” she notes.
Clark also suggests looking at what’s already going on at your company as fuel for social channels. “You can often repurpose things that you’re already doing and create new ways of sharing that information,” she says.
If a team is already working on a new white paper, record them discussing findings for a quick Youtube video. Rehash their research as a series of blog posts. Tweet some of their more interesting results. The more content you produce and make shareable, the bigger your company’s brand grows, and the more valuable it becomes.

For more smart personal branding tips from Dorie visit dorieclark.com and watch the videos below:

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