Christopher Barger

Here’s your chance to see someone in the brandividual role taking action, over time, in the face of a big challenge.

When I gave my talk about The Rise of Brandividuals at last week’s Corporate Reputation Conference, I used the example (well-known in social media circles) of @scottmonty of Ford Motor Company to illustrate what makes brandividuals effective. Now, thanks to Christopher Barger (and a hat tip to Chris Brogan for the idea) we can watch how a brandividual helps an organization and its stakeholders handle a tough social, reputational, and organizational transformation.

All you have to do is follow @cbarger on Twitter .

(If you aren’t already on Twitter, it’s easy to join. If @cbarger (and @cvharquail ) are the only folks you want to follow on Twitter, you can just subscribe to the tweetstream with RSS and use your RSS reader to catch up whenever you want. [If you have no idea what I'm talking about but you're interested in learning, email me and I'll help you get started.])

Like @scottmonty, @cbarger is the official Director of Social Media and GM’s Director of Global Communications Technology. In contrast to @scottmonty, @cbarger has only a tenth of the number of Twitter followers– although that may change if/as GM stakeholders and assorted interested individuals start to follow GMs actions by following @cbarger on Twitter.

Christopher Barger has a sophisticated understanding of how social media can play a role in crafting an organization’s reputation and relationships with stakeholders, although he may not be as well known as Scott Monty. It’s also not entirely clear to me that Barger is a "brandividual " per se. Christopher Barger’s personal brand may only be relevant in social media circles… we’ll have to see what kind of ‘personal brand’ he has among car fans & GM stakeholders.

What should we be looking for as we scan @cbarger’s Twitter stream? Let’s look for transparency, personal expression & interpretation of situations, and fair brokering between individual stakeholder concerns and the GM party line.

And as a bonus…

Thanks to GM’s bankruptcy filing yesterday, this is a "two-fer"– we can watch a brandividual in action AND an organization coping with profound challenges and an undeniable impetus for change.

Let us know what you see. …

For more insight, see:

General Motor’s Christopher Barger Gives Great Rundown On GM’s Social Media Progress by Jon Cass, a corporate social media expert who follows the auto industry.

The social mind of a corporate marketer (podcast)

Blogging at Big Blue, Part 1, by Dan Greenfield. How Barger got his start in social media.

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