Posts tagged as:

corporate reputation

Crafting Business Avatars: An Authenticity Exercise

by cv harquail on October 19, 2009

We all need to stop playing around with how we represent ourselves visually online, at least where work is concerned.

That’s what Gartner Consulting advises. They released a report last week proclaiming that Enterprises Must Get Control of Their Avatars. The animated avatars that an organization’s employees use when they participate as organization members inside virtual environments, as well as those cure little photos on Twitter, need to be proactively managed by the organization. Why? Because these avatars are representing the organization. They are affecting the corporate brand and reputation.

Business Avatars are an Important Trend

mad men avatars.jpgAs crazy as it might sound to worry about controlling avatars, avatars are becoming big business. The corporate avatar trend went public in 2007, when IBM established guidelines for how its employees would use avatars and participate in business situations in virtual worlds like Second Life.

You might not have realized that the use of avatars in business settings is growing. With the rise in online virtual meetings, virtual training & learning simulations, and virtual businesses, not to mention social media within and across organizational boundaries, business avatars are becoming more and more common. Simultaneously, the processes for adapting and crafting an avatar’s appearance and movement are becoming both more sophisticated and easier to use.

Since avatars are becoming more common and easier to individualize, there will be more and more variation across avatars representing any one company. What will all these different avatars do for the organization’s image, reputation, and brand? [click to continue…]

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Brandividual In Action: Follow @cbarger to watch General Motors transform

by cv harquail on June 2, 2009

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

200906021307.jpg 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.

200906021306.jpg 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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