Welcome to OUR EXCLUSIVE COMMUNITY
for Marketing leaders

In today's video, I'm sharing a talk I put together recently that will become a real staple for me over the next year. It started life at the CIM's conference at their headquarters in Maidenhead, where I was asked to speak on why personal brand matters more than ever in the AI era. I added my own caution to the title: a prompt is not a personality.

Over the last 12 months, we've moved from "can people find you?" to "will AI recommend you?". LLMs triangulate signals from third parties, check whether what they find is consistent and corroborated, and lean heavily on sources like LinkedIn. That means the people in your business are now a big part of how your brand gets surfaced. Its something I've already talked about here but is clearly going to become very important over the coming years.

I actually think this could be one of the most significant additions for marketing teams since they had to start thinking about the inclusion of social media in their marketing strategies. Just as social became its own line in the strategy and budget, I think the content and digital footprint of your key client-facing people will go the same way. This isn't about writing everything for them, but it is about starting to include them in your thinking.  

In the video I walk through the key slides and my six steps for building a strong digital footprint. The full deck will be available as a PDF on the downloads page, so you can use it internally with your own team.

I've also built a quick personal brand scorecard:

https://personalbranding.scoreapp.com/ - You're welcome to share that with colleagues to see how they are doing right now.

✅ What you’ll learn from watching the video

🤖 Why the question has shifted from "can people find you?" to "will AI recommend you?"

🔍 How LLMs assess people.

📈 Why your key people's content could become a new line in the marketing strategy  

🧭 How to audit where the key figures in your business currently show up online  

🪜 My six steps to building a personal brand and digital footprint, adapted for the AI era  

🚫 How to help your people create content without falling into the AI slop trap

Links of Importance

Slide PDF's from my CIM (and updated for CMO group) Keynote

Your Action(s):

 🔎 Look up your key people 
Ask ChatGPT, Claude and Google what they know about your senior client-facing leaders and subject experts, and get them to take the personal brand scorecard (https://personalbranding.scoreapp.com/) so you know where you're starting from.  

🧑‍💼 Work on your About pages 
Give crawlers more to go on by adding talks, podcasts, articles and areas of expertise to team profiles on your website.  

🎯 Share your personas
You more than likely own the ICPs, so help your people understand who they're trying to reach and what those audiences care about.  

🎤 Find the opportunities for them
Your experts are unlikely to go looking for interviews, articles and speaking slots themselves, so this will probably fall to you. Make a plan. Find those opportunities and reach out.   

✍️ Show what good looks like
Help your people use AI for content without producing lazy, generic posts that could have come from anyone.  

💬 Encourage real engagement
Get them commenting on other people's content in their own voice, as this is the bit AI still struggles to fake and its what makes a real difference when it comes to building networks. 


Next Video Due - Friday 30th October