Why Executive Social Media Campaigns Fail

Every company wants to sell its products, but C-suite executives build their personal brands by articulating a compelling vision, not with product marketing. Executives' social media posts should inspire credibility and trust rather than immediate sales. Properly conducted, executive social media campaigns and keynote addresses reveal a unique and attractive perspective that becomes a personal brand.

Most executive social media campaigns fail because they're fulfilled by marketing and marcom personnel. As such, posts tend to focus on current challenges and how their products address them, and they become nothing more than additional noise in a marketer's playbook. But by creating a vision of the future, executive ghostwriters make an executive an industry leader whose posts resonate beyond micromarkets.

For example, what if your company's core technology absorbs and interprets sensor data? Product marketing applies that technology to current problems like facial recognition, traffic management, and other applications that address today's issues. But sensors can capture all kinds of human and industrial activity.

The real question is, "How will an intelligent interpretation of that activity impact our world five or ten years from now?" By projecting a vision of what the world will look like, an executive becomes a visionary whose posts are read, appreciated, and reposted.

Case in point: In 1987, Apple CEO John Sculley demonstrated the Knowledge Navigator - a live desktop that understood voice queries, found answers, and responded to follow-up questions about data points and other information. This was years before widespread internet access and the web, and decades before Siri, ChatGPT, and the huge variety of online research and commentary that we now take for granted with the smartphones in our pockets.

Apple wasn't guessing about the future - it was projecting what would happen by thinking broadly about where tech would take us.

Now, It's Your Turn: It may seem daunting to come up with fresh, bold ideas every week or two, especially when you're conducting day-to-day business in your department or company. To kickstart your own brand-building campaign, here are some tips:

• Feed your brain. New ideas often come from reactions to existing ideas, so maintain a daily diet of reading and conversations with other thought leaders. Seek out, connect with and subscribe to feeds that spark your interest.
• Calendar some regular thinking time. Take 15 minutes a day to consider what you've read or heard lately about upcoming trends. Do it after your daily reading.
• Make notes. Jot down the germs of ideas, just the key points. You can discuss them with your ghostwriter or flesh out longer outlines later, but capture the initial thoughts so they're there when you need them. Review past notes and expand on them or table them for later.
• Create a calendar. Map out a rough topic calendar for the next half dozen posts so you'll have time to consider future ideas in advance.
• Post every week or two. Consistency builds a regular audience.
• Be concise. Even a couple of hundred words is enough to get a point across, and readers often appreciate economical writing.
• Use graphics. Illustrate each post with a line graph, photo or even a cartoon. It helps grab readers' attention.

Of course, if this all seems like too much work, you can always ask me to help.

These pieces are written for founders and C-level operators at B2B technology companies. If you want this kind of writing under your own name, that is how I work, and pricing starts at $1,500.