The Importance of Personal Branding & Personal Media | SXSW 2011 Video Interview

It's SXSW time here in Austin, Texas. That means we get the chance to meet some influential people in the enterprise software industry. One of those is Joe Chernov, Director of Content Marketing at Eloqua. Eloqua, a leader in Revenue Performance Management, hosted a panel at SXSW Interactive this year titled "Media Tomorrow: The Message is the Messenger." Panelists included experts from all corners of the media – journalism, consulting, PR, design – and the discussion centered around disruptive innovations in media in the growth of personal branding.

Joe was able to break away from the panels, parties and onslaught of free SXSW swag to come by our office and discuss the panel with us a bit more. In this first clip, he talks about the nexus of personal brands and personal media. He also explains how Eloqua, a marketing automation company, applies personal branding to their marketing automation strategy.

Tune in tomorrow when we discuss letting employees build personal brands.

Video Transcription

Don: Hi, Don Fornes here with Software Advice. This week in Austin, Texas we've got South by Southwest going on, which brings us some very interesting guests. Here with me right now is Joe Chernov from Eloqua. Joe: Thank you. Don: Joe, you hosted a panel over at South by Southwest on personal branding and how consumers are less trusting of the media. They're starting to turn to personal brands more and more. Tell us about this. What went on at the panel? Joe: Okay. So, yeah, that's exactly the right premise. The background for the panel is this sense that the public's trust in the media, at least in traditional media, is declining. Edelman has found that only 22% of Americans trust the press. That's fewer than trust the government, so it's fairly startling. And so what we wanted to do is get together a bunch of highly influential people in the media, from all different corners of the media, and kind of bang on this topic a little bit and look at what follows that sea change. If indeed we are consuming less trustworthy information from the press, or if we have less confidence in the information that the press is serving to us, where do we go for trusted information? And the supposition is that we go to one another, or we go to individuals who are sort of heralded by our social networks as influential, trusted voices. So the panel was really about the nexus of personal brands and personal media. Don: Got it. So, Eloqua is a marketing automation company or a revenue performance management company, the broader category that you're targeting. What does any of this have to do with that? Joe: That's the $64,000 question in the halls of Eloqua. It has a lot to do with it. So, you mentioned marketing automation and revenue performance management. We see revenue performance management as what's next in our category. So when we sat down to talk about hosting a panel at South by Southwest, we knew we couldn't do a panel on revenue performance management. This isn't the right audience for that. But what we did know we could do is a panel on what's next in an adjacent industry. We see changes in the media, changes in the way people consume information as adjacent to what Eloqua does, and so we hosted a panel on what's next in the media. Then, if you look at the composition of the panel, it was, what's next in research? We had Jeremiah Owyang. What's next in public relations? We had Sarah Evans. What's next in the agency/vendor relationship? We had our partner at JESS3, Leslie Bradshaw. And what's next in journalism? We had Jenn Van Grove from Mashable. So it was really a collection, a composite of people who represent what's next in their particular disciplines. It was hosted by Eloqua, who we obviously see ourselves as what's next in marketing automation and what's next in revenue performance management. Don: Got it. So, do you apply some of the principles that you talked about of personal branding, personal brands within Eloqua, within your marketing strategy? Joe: Yes, we do, and it's really been incremental at Eloqua. Nobody at Eloqua woke up one morning, Brian Kardon didn't wake up one morning and say, "You know what we're going to do? We're going to double down on personal brands." We just started to incrementally set our people freer and freer. Joe Payne, the CEO, started to set me freer and freer. That gave Brian Kardon some motivation for him to develop his own personal brand. He was just listed as one of the most influential CMOs on Twitter. So, it started to work. The more the organization trusted individuals to both be themselves and represent the best interest of the company, the more traction these individuals began to gain, and ultimately, the more influence the company's been able to exact over its potential buyers. Don: If you're Joe Payne, you've got to be thinking I hope no one goes off the message, no one makes any big mistakes. What are some of the issues that come up, and what are some good examples that we can have fun with? Joe: Yeah. You're right. I imagine it's something Joe struggles with. I imagine it's something any CEO struggles with, right? But Joe has been great at giving it a shot. Joe's an experimenter, and I give him an immense amount of credit for that. So, some stories. Change doesn't happen by fiat. I just read the book "Switch" by Dan and Chip Heath. Change is a much more sophisticated process. And so what we did is, rather than say nobody in the company can use social media, because we knew that was a losing proposition, we went in a different path. We said everybody in the company can use social media. That presents kind of a decision tree. That presents another challenge. How do you influence or how do you control what people are saying? I think you give people guardrails to stay on the road and a full tank of gas to accelerate as fast as they want to go. So what we did is we conducted workshops for every person in Eloqua to give them the best practices, what they should and shouldn't do, and then just set them free to say what it is that they want to say about the industry and the company. We have only a couple hard and fast rules. If you're going to talk about Eloqua or marketing automation, you need to disclose you work for the company. That's an FTC guideline. We also said no personal attacks. Other than that, go have fun. But I had to humanize this training, and Eloqua had to humanize this training. So I talked about mistakes that I have personally made, some from the Eloqua handle and some from my own personal identity, just to let people know that if you make an honest mistake, it's not the end of the world. And that really motivated people to start building up their own followings and their own personal brands. Ultimately, the promise to them is you are who Google says you are, so it is in your best interest to start carving out your personal niche right now, because it's just going to be that much harder to break in later if you want to. Don: Got it. So, if I'm a CEO of an old-line kind of company, an older industry trying to figure out this social media thing, that kind of thing, what's in it for me to let a bunch of my team loose on social media and let go of the reins and say, "All right, go ahead"? How do I measure the value of letting go? Joe: So, I think companies are struggling with that, old-line and new-line. I think there's always an attraction/revulsion thing going on, where companies cognitively know, business leaders cognitively know that the more influential their staff is, the better it's going to be for the organization. But then they kind of viscerally feel like, "Wow, in doing this, I am loosening the reins. I am losing control," and they start to fear with it's harder to retain the employees. Or what if somebody goes off the reservation and says the wrong thing? So I do think it's a struggle that organizations are having. What's in it for them is authority. Like this panel was all about, people trust people more than people trust institutions. And no matter what your organization says about itself or about its industry, it's viewed through the lens of bias. People know that an organization has an agenda. But the more you set your individuals free to create content, content that relates to personal interests as well as their professional interests, the more successful you're going to be at humanizing your brand and ultimately gain the confidence of your followers.