A Fortune 500 Executive Builds her Personal Brand, Becomes a Top Brand Ambassador for her Company, and Rallies her team of 20,000 on Social Media

You're in the marketing world and you're looking for inspiration, or you're a business leader who wants to understand what good marketing looks like. You're busy. You don't have time to sit around listening to a rambling 3 hour podcast. We get it. This is the Remarkable Marketing Podcast, where we celebrate the marketing rock stars that deliver truly remarkable marketing, when you'll hear short interviews with marketing execs who share stories about the best marketing they've ever done, how it delivered a huge impact and how they overcame all the challenges to make it happen. If you aspire to be remarkable, you'll walk away with ideas on how to do truly epic marketing. Getting right to the content of what you need for busy professionals, this is the Remarkable. Marketing Podcast. Now your host, Eric Eden.

Welcome to the Remarkable Marketing Podcast. Our guest today is Julie Livingston, who is president of One Leverage Communications, a PR and LinkedIn consultancy. Welcome to the show today, Julie.

Thank you so much, eric, great to be here with you.

Appreciate the time and I think you have some stories to share with us today about how you have helped people raise awareness about their personal brand online and on LinkedIn.

I certainly do. About five years ago I transferred my public relations skills I've been doing this for more than 30 years and coaching C-suite leaders on how to raise their visibility in their industry and really also among their internal audiences their employees, their investors, et cetera to LinkedIn. I really come to LinkedIn with a lot of great experience in, as I said, raising executive visibility, developing thought leadership and really developing an audience and interest in what a particular executive's personal brand is. What they're all about. When I started this about five years ago, it happened completely organically. I was developing my own content and amping up my own presence on LinkedIn as a way of attracting new clients. Somebody I had pitched for new business about a dozen years ago started noticing my content. Apparently she had been lurking on my profile for years, but she never commented or made any public statement about her looking at my LinkedIn content. I had no idea. She reached out to me because she saw my content and liked it so much. She saw a lot of value in it. She had moved jobs. She was now a director of corporate communications for a Fortune 50 company, a very large organization, and was reporting to the head of customer operations, who oversaw a huge field force of more than 40,000 people. She was a woman working in the technology field, which is unusual to have a female leader in a male-dominated industry. She had a great story to tell. I knew that immediately. I was tasked with raising her visibility solely on LinkedIn because the organization saw a wonderful opportunity to let her shine on that platform. Because we knew that her target customers, her internal team, initially hung out on LinkedIn. Most of them had LinkedIn accounts. Even if they were a little dormant, they were definitely on the platform. We started this program about three years ago and it's been a resounding success. We started by identifying her personal core values, what she stands for as a human being, which are? These are non-negotiable things like integrity, knowledge, emotional intelligence, for example, and I developed a LinkedIn strategy, a content strategy that would bring across her personal core values by talking about five different subjects. These became her content illers. For example, some of them are mental health, women in technology because, again, she is a female leader in the technology sector, increasing female representation on corporate boards she is a corporate board member on a very prestigious board and a few others, and so I started developing content on these subjects, of course, in her voice. So I had to get to know her a little bit, and I did that by speaking to her, but also watching her on videos and seeing presentations that she had given over time and started getting closer to her persona. Then I started developing content for her and over the course of three years we have built her following. So that's one of the most important things to really build fans and followers who are interested in your content and eventually are engaging with the content by liking, commenting and sharing your posts. That's where the magic comes in. So we started with she had about 7,500 followers on LinkedIn, which is excellent, and we are now approaching the 20,000 mark. So it's been really wonderful to watch this kind of bloom and grow over time. Now what's fascinating is that not only is her team you know her team of 40,000 plus engaging in the content. They're sharing their best tips and they're sharing stories from the field and what they're finding works for them. You know, in every post I compose for her, there's always a call to action message at the end, where we pose a question and that's like a thought prompt for people who are looking at the post for them to comment and answer the question with their own stories and they are doing it en masse. So it's been really exciting to see and hear their own stories. But also I'm finding now that over the past year or so that people from across the whole company are starting to put their comments and engage with people in her organization or field team. So this has created all sense of community and belonging, which is one of the most important elements today that leaders really want to develop. They want to make sure that people are really feeling connected, even if they're online, and so many people are either working in a hybrid space. Today they're working fully remotely. In her case, people are spread all over the country in different smaller teams because they serve as customers in different regions. So this was a pivotal thing to develop and it's not easy. But with the right kind of thought leadership content, you can do that. What I mean by thought leadership is really the ability for her to share her opinions and perspectives on these five content pillars that we've set forth for her. So she becomes known for being an expert in those topics and that's what people associate her with. It increases her positive reputation. It increases the perception of her status within the organization. So whereas before she was kind of flying under the radar a bit and people knew that she was obviously in the C-suite level of leaders, but they didn't necessarily have a sense of her. They didn't know her as a human being and what she is responsible for, because she didn't really speak out enough and LinkedIn has given her the right platform and opportunities to do just that. We post about three times a week, sometimes one more, or sometimes do another post if there's a company initiative that she wants to comment on that really falls within her five content pillars. But otherwise we've been regularly posting three times a week for the last three years and it's been so effective that when she travels and this is like the icing on the cake when she travels to all of her field centers and she walks in, people are now saying to her I feel like I know you. I really enjoy seeing your posts. I get so much knowledge out of your posts and information that I could begin applying to my job immediately and I just look forward to seeing the content because it provides so much value to me. So the first comment of I feel like I know you is extraordinary, because that's exactly what you want to develop on LinkedIn especially, you want people to get an idea of how you function, how you think, how you lead and why you are an exceptional leader, and all that interaction that we've developed over time with her followers, as I said, now approaching 20,000 followers, which is very significant it's really been amazing.

That's great. The first thing is almost a triple in the number of followers, from 7,000 to about 20,000. The second is quality always matters. Who are these people? In this particular use case? It's an interesting use case because what you've done with your client is you've turned her into a brand ambassador for the company. It sounds like where she is rallying these thousands of employees at the company to engage and to share and to present herself. The entire company also is a thought leader, with all the employees behind it. Do I have that right?

You have that exactly right, eric. I love how you said that she is a primary brand ambassador now for the company. What does that do for her? It helps her to attract and retain talent, which is so important today. We're in a very tight talent market. The positions that she hires for these are tough jobs. The people in her field force are having one-on-one contact with the organization's customers on a daily basis. That's not easy because they're a technology company. They have a lot of things that could go wrong on a daily basis, and showing who she is has developed a lot of confidence in the brand overall, but also in her as a leader among her field team. If people from her field team are looking at her content, they think, wow, she's one of us. She really stands behind our company mission. I believe in her. I want to stay in this job because she's making me feel really good about this job and what I contribute. We do express a lot of gratitude to the field team in her posts. That's another thing. It really raises morale. In addition, anybody from the outside looking in any of the company's vendors, partners, strategic partners is going to start thinking, wow, this company is phenomenal. I really like her a lot. I think I want to reach out to them and perhaps become a strategic partner on an initiative Vendors too. It raises them up and elevates them because they're working with such a fine organization, because of the way she presents herself. I totally agree with what you said. She is a phenomenal brand ambassador now. Now, when she does internal podcasts and she does her town halls, etc. It's like wow, we're going to get to hear her speak now and even embellish more on the content and what she's been sharing on LinkedIn that I like so much.

That's great and beyond becoming a brand ambassador the comments that's also remarkable you mentioned is that people feel like they know her, and the biggest part of personal branding is that people know who you are and what you stand for, particularly around. You mentioned building out five pillars for her. I think that that is notable. More than just getting thousands of more followers is that all those people know who you are and what you stand for makes her a unique brand ambassador for the organization.

It really does. And I mentioned the followers because it's an impressive number, but really, as you said, it's the actual engagement in the content that has been such a win for us. You know it's not easy to bring together a field force of that size. It's humongous. And how do you make personal connection with all of those people? How do you make them feel like they're part of something bigger, that they're really making a difference in the lives of the organization's customers and that each individual contribution really matters to the bottom line? That's how the LinkedIn content has really been working magic for us in getting people to want to contribute their stories, to share even challenges that they faced and how they faced them and come out okay, how they found solutions to customer issues, how they work with each other. We've seen so much of that in the internal collaboration that employees have with each other and how they're figuring things out. In the comments they're often giving shout outs to their teammates. I mean that's just fantastic and it just builds that momentum, that momentum about being part of a big team. And you know why you should want to be a part of that team, right? Because they all have a shared purpose that ties back into her content and her content fillers Now.

Julie, you've made this sound kind of easy. What was hard about this? It's not easy, you and her. What was the challenge?

in making this happen? Sure, that's a great question, eric, and it's not easy. It takes, first of all, I have more than three decades of experience in raising executive visibility through traditional public relations right, so I know how to do that intimately. But every time you work with a C-level leader, they're really busy. They don't have a lot of time to meet with you, even though you're contributing something valuable, they just you know, it's just a real thing they don't have the time. So I had to get her to know her very quickly. I do a lot of research before I embark on a project like this. I look at lots and lots of videos of her to get her tone of voice, any of the colloquialisms that she uses, the language it really it has to sound authentic. In this case, because it's such a large organization, I work hand in hand with her marketing and communications team so they can clue me in on different things that she's working on, that she's coming out with, and we plan a number of months in advance as much as we can. On the content Now, when I talk about company news et cetera, by itself straight company news can fall flat on the platform, why? Well, you can imagine it, just it's not coming from her, it's coming from the company behind her, so it doesn't really resonate so much. So we decide which company news we should share on LinkedIn and personalize it. So if there's something that's coming out on earnings, because it's a public company, we don't just, you know, broadcast that, but we actually make a comment that gives a shout out to her team. And also, if there's any outstanding metrics, increases in business that we can actually direct back, that we can give credit to her team for. That's what makes it personal and authentic. It sounds like, well, she's giving shout outs to her team because of the phenomenal performance that came across in the earnings report. I also have to be highly responsive, and that's something I pride myself on really working hand in hand with my clients so that things can change at the spur of a moment in her world. Businesses move very fast today and they're constantly, on a daily basis, dealing with sweeping change, and I need to be there, kind of at their beck and call, so that I can change up the content if I need to, and this happens all the time, often on a weekly basis, where we have a scheduled post but it's no longer relevant. They have something that's like breaking news or, even more important, that they have to address. I have to develop the content for three days a week, about a month in advance, and I'm reinventing that content all the time. This is not easy to do. I have to really be able to get into that customer's head and think, okay, she's got these five pillars. We've spoken about this pillar in this particular way that a month ago. How am I going to recreate it and enliven it again for the next month? I have to develop relationships with people across the organization so I can mine for those wonderful stories of magic that occur out in the field, so that I can insert that into the post, because anytime that I can give a shout out to one of the team members wow, it just explodes on LinkedIn. I often use team member photos of them in the field. I love to get photos of her in action in the field with groups of employees conversing with them, engaging with them. People just love that and they react to that. There's really a lot of work that goes into creating this content and being strategic about it, tying back to the content pillars on a regular basis. It's not simple at all, I have to admit I often can get writer's block but I keep pushing through it. I have my own resources of where I can get new ideas that I can tie back into her content.

A lot of content, a lot of planning, a lot of collaboration and over a significant time period as well. You mentioned this was going on, for it took a while to transform her into this brand ambassador. It's not that we're not.

Not at all. People really did not know what she was about. To tell you the truth, even though she has all these amazing credentials, it's a big company. There are lots of leaders. She was not the most visible one by far. It took about six months, I would say, to really start building momentum in the content I think that's pretty reasonable and start getting traction from people.

Fantastic story on transforming a executive into a brand ambassador. Thanks for sharing that with us today, Julie, my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Eric, and remember everybody. Marketing is probably never easy, but should always be fun. Thanks for joining us today.

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