What do you want your brand to capture? And who knows about your brand? Is it just your immediate work team, is it people outside?

Jennfier Brown: We live in a world and a marketplace where companies have brands with their products and services and their reputation but also leaders increasingly have brands.  So the CEO has a brand, executives have a brand and ideally every professional in your organization is in the process of building their brand.  The most forward thinking organizations are speaking about this to all levels of leaders and saying what do you want to be known for?

What do you want your brand to capture?  And who knows about your brand?  Is it just your immediate work team, is it people outside?  If you think of a brand in concentric circles where are you influencing and who knows about you and what do they say about you?  And then let's go outside of your organization, what sorts of community organizations do you have leadership roles with?  What other peer-networking do you engage in that's for business and networking purposes?

And this is true also for CEOs and executives.  They have I think been traditionally heads down and getting the work done.  And it wasn't necessarily again about who they are as people and what their top three values might be, but increasingly organizations are looking for them to share that.  And that is part of building a brand as a person that drives the brand of the company but that can stand apart when it needs to and talk about what's important personally to that leader.  So if these two things can meet and conjoin but also remain separate they are two different ways of thinking about your role as a leader.  And social media is obviously a big magnifier of brand.  You know, and we look at somebody and how they appear in the world of social media you get an immediate impression of what they're about, what they care about.  And this is true for executive leaders too.  

So I think in the future we'll see a lot of leaders wrestling with their social media knowledge and know-how and capabilities and also thinking about okay so the company has a brand, how does my brand drive the company?  How does it relate to the brand of the company and how does it stand apart?  What stories am I telling, what do I want to be known for and how can I make a personal connection to the people that work in this company that I am a person to?  I am out there, I'm building relationships, I stand for something.  And if they can both work together they are exponentially powerful together.  We can take the individual; we can take the organization and they create a sum that's greater than the parts.

Directed / Produced by

Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd