Social Media Marketing: The Renaissance of Business Personalization?

Personality in the Digital Footprint

I occasionally participate in a ‘chat’ on twitter called #brandchat (a twitter chat is conducted weekly on some designated hour focusing on a specific topic – the tweets are identified with the hash tag for whatever the topic is) I happened to mention something about the Global Director of Digital Communication for ford Scott Monty , the topic was personal branding and I had mentioned something about how Scott’s personal brand was aided by his association with Ford. Well almost immediately as I had sent the tweet there was a reply from, you guessed it, Scott Monty himself.
His response corrected me by making it clear his personal brand was established far before his tenure with Ford and was part of the value Ford saw in handing him the reigns of their social media communication strategy. We exchanged one or two more tweets and Scott’s responses happened to be well aligned with another corporate blog that I contribute to (http://www.seamlessworkforce.com). I sent Scott a message asking if he would be gracious enough to grant me an interview on the topic of how personal brand development ought to be handled from an employment perspective. Scott graciously agreed (you can check the interview out here).

In preparation for the interview a quick Google search for “Scott Monty” yielded over 53,000 hits including plenty of video. I spent time watching probably about three or four of the interviews that Scott had granted over the course of the previous 6 months, read some of his blog posts, news pieces where he’d been quoted, checked out his LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. All said and done I probably invested maybe about 45 minutes poking around the vast sea of digital information on Scott, after all it was only a 15 minute interview that I was preparing for, and let’s be clear. . . leveraging the information on the internet to prepare for such a discussion isn’t exactly some revolutionary notion. But there absolutely is something different about it today than there was even twenty four months ago.

The newness is the contextual personality that can be found in the digital footprint of your subject. The top level of information won’t necessarily provide this. For instance connectivity on LinkedIn and seeing who’s connected to you directly or through your network is, on face value, simply a statement of network. Who knows who and can they get me connected with that person. But deeper are the fingerprints on content found on a LinkedIn profile. Which groups do they belong to and in which, if any, are they active participants? What is the common theme in their recommendations? What is their LinkedIn profile connected to? A blog? A Company website? Nothing? There is context to the individual found here and this is just LinkedIn. Their twitter feed inevitably reveals a bit about their interests. Their Google results reveal more about business interests, social interests, and expertise. For instance if you dug deeply enough on my Google results you would learn that I’m a parent, I do a bit of distance running from time to time, I have vacationed on Long Beach Island New Jersey, participated in an NFL suicide pool, appeared in publications that span at least 5 different industries, and contribute to at least two different blogs.

I suspect that there will be those that turn up their nose at the ‘violation of privacy’ that this represents but I reject that notion. One of the last things Scott Monty mentioned in his interview with me was that the advent of the social nature of digital communication in a way ushers in a by-gone era of personalization of our business dealings. For those of you in your late 30s or older you probably remember, for instance, when you were young the merchants in your home town knew your parents, their preferences, and a little bit about their life. From the mid 80’s through the 2000’s this concept seemed to have vanished, are we perhaps enjoying a renaissance of personalization in business dealings?

The applications of such personalization? Well perhaps limitless. As marketers, product managers, sales professionals, or business leaders we need to decide how we will use the matrix of personal and business information to advance the value of the solutions we bring into the market place.  It is a topic that warrants perspective. What have you experienced with the availability of information about your business partners, clients, or customers? How have you leveraged the information and what has been the result?

photo credit: Chad Miller