In my humble opinion, the use of social media and personal branding techniques is a low-hanging fruit for corporate innovators and entrepreneurs. Nevertheless, there is not yet much activity on this.
Why do I believe that the use of social media and personal / team branding techniques is important for innovators? Because more than ever, corporate innovators and entrepreneurs need to build strong brands not only around their offerings, but also around their own capabilities. This is important as companies compete to build the strongest innovation ecosystems in order to get better innovation to market faster.
Simply put, corporate innovators and entrepreneurs need to pay more attention to terms such as “preferred partner of choice” and “we are in the matchmaking business” and here you can get strong results fast through the use of social media and personal / team branding techniques.
It would be great to share insights with others who believe this topic can bring value to innovators. As a discussion starter, I suggest the below topics as key elements for future articles and perhaps also for a session or workshop on this topic.
• Your Foundation and Strategic Reasons: Whether you are a big corporation or an ambitious startup, you need to have the right foundation in place and you need to know your strategic reasons before you start promoting and branding your innovation capabilities.
Are companies ready for this? This varies and it would be nice to have a quick-and-dirty assessment tool or exercise that can help shed more light on the starting point of those about to start this journey. Do you have any input on what such a tool or exercise should look like?
• Social Media for Innovation Efforts: How do you attract people to your blog or community? How do you get 8,000 followers on Twitter? How do you get value out of your followers? How can social media help your company bring out better innovation faster? I could ask many similar questions, but the key point is that we need to look further into the value of social media in innovation efforts. No need to say that this has to go beyond marketing and customer service where social media already is accepted.
• Personal / Team Branding: Everybody has a personal brand and so do teams. Taking control of this brand creates freedom and opportunities and unlocking these opportunities are imperative for you to achieve your goals. We need more insights on how to apply personal / team branding techniques in the innovation context.
Your feedback to my ideas and your views are highly appreciated.
