The Buzz Bin

This Friday I will be participating in Albert Maruggi’s first “Social Media Throwdown,” a discussion about personal brands with Haji Flemings, author of Brand YU Life (image: Bliss by Bobster1985). Rather than simply say “I Don’t Care About Your Personal Brand,” in advance of this discussion I’d also like to offer LComm’s recommended corporate strategy on social media and personality, Team Social Media.

Obviously, this post will have a lot of sports metaphors in it, so I apologize to any who grow tiresome of such analogies. Before I explain the alternative Team Social Media theory, it’s important to show the weakness in personal brands from a corporate perspective.

It’s true, many, many people — including some of my most well respected colleagues in the business — subscribe to personal branding strategies for social media. Yet I cannot in good consciousness recommend to a company building a long-term social media strategy that they foster a personal brand as their primary social media outreach focus. A corporation that does this puts itself at risk.

Some of these pitfalls have already been fleshed out by Jeremiah Owyang:

Risk 1: The personal brand is a cost to the company: Why let employees build their own brand on the dime of the company or leveraging the brand of the employer?

Risk 2: The now popular employee is likely to get poached: Perhaps a common concern I hear is that competitors can easily identify the stars, and hire away these folks along with their market reputation and google juice.

Risk 3: Employee exits leaving a chasm to fill: In the modern workforce, we hear less of lifetime employees seeking pension than we do of job migrants, or career gypsies that move from company to company every few years. As a result, after they’ve built up trust with the market using social tools, they leave the company, and a gap is left that the brand can’t fill.

But there are additional risks:

Risk 4: The personal brand has a human failing, which then gets aired out in the marketplace and tarnishes the company’s entire social media effort in process. Think this can’t happen? Let’s go to sports and Barry Bonds. His steroids use has permanently tarnished the records he carries and the entire era of MLB he dominated. Another sports example, in U.S. swimming the now tarnished wunderkind Michael Phelps has hurt the team’s larger image. In hindsight, perhaps PR should have highlighted more than Phelps?

Risk 5: Similar to Risk 1: The company sacrifices building its own larger commitment to the marketplace by building a personality. In essence, building the personal brand — oops, reputation — is a distraction from the company’s real purpose, which is serving its stakeholders in the marketplace with true value. This is a basic tenant of public relations.

Risk 6: The beachhead is a bluff. Every company has their voice. But how long until people realize that seeing individuals as the only voice of the company on the Internet is an indication that the company doesn’t really care about the social web? Further, while such entities may have their beachheads set, what will they do when the personality quits? They may or may not replace that person, and if they do that person has a whole network to rebuild.

Risk 7: A solo personality can polarize customers, or push away potential prospects. A team offers different voices and tones for different stakeholders.

Teams Win, Stars Lose

We’ve seen it time in and time out in the sports world. Kobe Bryant cannot win without Shaq, Derek Fisher, and Robert Horry, and today Pau Gasol and Andrew Bynum. Jordan couldn’t win without Pippen, and role players like Rodman and Cartwright. The New York Yankees can’t hire enough personal brands – err stars — to win the big crown. No, teams like the Phillies, like the Red Sox win. Yes, these teams have stars, too but they are complimented by tons of role players.

The NFL’s only undefeated championship team, the 1972 Miami Dolphins, was led by the “No-Name Defense,” QB Bob Griese and Coach Don Shula. AP photo by Lynne Sladky.

Social media is no different. Yes, you do have individuals propelling brands into the spotlight; however, the best corporate social media strategies offer teams of people interacting on the Internet. Consider some of the biggest winners so far: Dell, and the Comcast Twitter team led by ComcastCares. All of these social media efforts feature teams of voices.

Do they discourage personalities? No, you have a Lionel Menchaca at Dell, a Bob Lutz at GM. Personality, in general, is important to your marketing effort. And while unfortunately this seems to be the sole terrain of our social web, it should infect corporate communications in general.

Some personalities naturally rise to the top. They are your star, and every winning team has stars. Yet the truth of the matter is they are still team players, and they intentionally focus on building a greater whole rather a personal brand. In such cases, there are other players who can step up and fill the void. There is a Richard Binhammer at Dell, a Christopher Barger at GM. Yes, losing a star hurts, but there’s more than one on these teams. The team will go on.

With teams the corporate social media effort can survive the departure of a personality, focus on its core corporate mission, and not lose a step with its community. Further teams provide a better demonstration that the entire company is committed to social media, as opposed to “letting Bob experiment with that funny stuff.”

The community expectation is that a company/organization is in actuality more than a personality, that it is in fact a group of persons (small or large) who are offering a specific marketplace an offering. Interacting with more than one person in a company only makes sense. Social media as one small set of communication tools for customers, vendors, company/organization members and investors should be no different.

Many companies need their pilot project, beachhead or one-person test to see if social media works. But if they want to build a social media effort to last the test of time, they need to extend their efforts beyond the voice of one. A personal brand does not make for a successful long-term corporate social media plan.