December 2, 2015
When you think about your how company’s brand is perceived in the public eye, you must also consider who represents your brand, and how effectively. That’s why we recommend conducting an executive positioning audit, which uses analytics to measure how your CEO, or other executives or subject matter experts, are positioned in the marketplace.
In a previous post, we looked at how to measure your CEO’s influence and positioning by quantitatively and qualitatively analyzing media coverage. But that’s only part of the picture. Analytics can also help you evaluate your CEO’s social media presence and other personal branding activities.
Social media presence
Whether your CEO is active on social media or not, there are ways to measure and evaluate how these important channels impact his/her overall brand and influence. For a CEO who is active on social media, you can measure how many followers he/she has, how frequently he/she uses specific channels and the types of content shared on these channels. Engagement will be the biggest indicator, however, because this type of interaction shows if the activity on these channels is truly impacting your CEO’s target audiences. Look at what types of content shared by your CEO receive the most likes, comments and shares, and use this information to build a stronger thought leadership strategy. You may also take advantage of free analytics tools from Twitter and LinkedIn to take a deeper dive.
If your CEO does not have his/her own social media channels, you can use social media listening tools to measure the conversation that is being said about him/her on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. If your organization has run a specific social media campaign around your CEO, you can also measure engagement from this campaign. Monitoring conversations on social media about your company will also likely lead to insights about your CEO, and may help you counsel your CEO on whether or not he/she should join a particular social media platform.
Other personal branding
Once you’ve analyzed your CEO’s position in traditional and social media, it’s time to look at other areas where your CEO has a voice, keeping in mind that these areas often influence each other. This could include speaking engagements at conferences and events, a thought leadership piece in an association newsletter or awards/recognitions. Using a scorecard similar to the one used to analyze media coverage can help you assess messaging and level of thought leadership, as well as style. For example, does your CEO have a warm, conversational style or is he cold and rigid? Does he/she make eye contact with the audience? Does he/she use words such as “um” when speaking? These are small but key characteristics that can strengthen the perception and influence of your CEO.
Once you’ve assessed the results of this audit, you will have a clearer picture of your CEO’s position in the marketplace. From there you can determine what personal brand attributes, thought leadership themes and key messages align with the CEO’s and company’s executive positioning strategy and goals. You may also consider auditing competitors’ CEOs to see who comes out on top.
If you’d like to learn more about executive positioning audits, feel free to drop me a line or tweet me at @angelaalmasy. For more fun with measurement, read how analytics can improve your (or your CEO’s) Twitter brand, by my colleague Lisa Zone (@LZone).
