Here is an interesting post, Are you promoting the company’s brand or your personal brand? by Dirk Shaw. Many firms are hiring social media evangelist. I know quite a few. Dirk is a social media evangelist for Vignette. He answers this question by citing some nice metrics that show the value of his work for this company.
“Brand mentions: 242 mentions of Vignette out of 918 total for top WCM competitors. Share of voice in WCM market: 25% of conversations about Content management include Vignette. Extend reach: Reached 40k people on twitter via re-tweets, 16 blog post resulted in 3k visits.”
Good for Dirk. Like many social media issues, the issue of company vs. personal promotion is not new. I know quite a few people who have been questioned for promoting their own agenda over their companies long before social media appeared. They were very active on the conference circuit and I could not understand how they maintained that level of promotion and did some “real work” for their firm. Perhaps the conference circuit was their main responsibility.
I never had that option, as my employers always expected the evangelist work to be extra on top of the regular work requirements. Perhaps I had the wrong employers. Now social media makes it easier to be a full time evangelist without quite so much travel. Although you still need to get out and meet some of your audience in person.
A number of my blog clients have this responsibility as part of their work. I think it is an important one and I am happy to help them. I would be very open to doing it myself for the right company. However, I go back to Dirk’s excellent question. I think it only works well in the long run if you put the company’s agenda first. People can see through too much self-promotion. Let your skills come through more subtly in the act of promoting the company.
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