In 2016, a CEO of a growing company, startup, small business or established enterprise, cannot afford to take a back seat on their online branding and PR. As the company’s best salesperson and visionary, they have to be front and center.
As a CEO, there are many things you can do online to help promote your unique selling proposition, product and company brand. Also, being visible can make your brand advocates more engaged with your content and help amplify and distribute it to others.
1- Empowering Your Employees
To create trust with your company brand and with your leadership style, devote some content to the empowerment of your employees. This helps engagement internally as well as promotes a more authentic online reputation management (ORM) externally.
Lead by example, if the CEO has a Twitter and writes on LinkedIn Pulse and Medium, the co-founders and others may follow suit. Employee driven content is a powerful way in 2016 to amplify your brand’s presence online and it all starts at the top.
2- Amplify your Own Personality
A CEO is a person, being comfortable in sharing that and being transparent with the public demonstrates you are not cagey but rather, open and generous with customers, investors, employees, competitors and critics alike. We are just human after all, and the more authentic your vibe and branding is online, the more prospective customers will trust you and your corporate brand by association.
3- Engage with your Social Followers
A CEO is not just a figurehead, they are a person and so they should be social on social media. Responding to questions on Quora, responding to DMs on Twitter, answering a comment on a pulse article on LinkedIn, is all a part of that. If CEOs make the time to communicate on the phone, they should be doing the same thing online.
Being accessible and engaging with your audience on all channels is part of this. Being social online is increasingly important to your social credibility. It’s not just about how many followers you have, but what you do with them. Do you take the time to nurture them and your image? Being responsive on an omnichannel basis, shows you are sincere and never too busy to relate to the people who matter, the customer.
4- Public Relations Mishaps or Inappropriate Comment
Sometimes a situation or a person online will take things too far. We’ve all been in this situation. It will even sometimes become necessary to remove complaints from Google. Using a professional service with the reverse SEO expertise can help with these cases. Your online reputation management is your brand, so minimizing the negative and boosting the positive interactions is always your goal.
5. Establish yourself as a Thought Leader
Finally, it’s extremely important as a CEO to be a thought leader in your field. You are an expert and you care about your customers, so creating content and a social media presence and even videography will enable you to make a positive impact in your industry.
As a CEO, you will want to brand yourself as an experienced entrepreneur and not just as a manager. Do countless interviews, share your dreams and passions. Reach out to journalists and go to events. Share your failures to build trust with your audience and powerfully imprint them with the key pain problems and solutions of your business.
Leadership is not just offline, but online, and CEOs must improve their ability to reach and be available to their digital audience.