Personal brand vs. institutional brand
To kick off BarCamp NewsInnovation Philadelphia, I was invited by Anna Curran – and by invited I mean I just happened to be standing next to her – to participate in a panel discussion on branding and whether the future relies more on the invidual than the institution.
A very timely discussion since organizations are looking at the separation of content creation from product development, and many journalists have lost jobs but have skills to collect content, create networks and gain dedicated audiences..
Review the session via the Twitter hash tag #bcnibrand.
The questions that started the session were this: How engaged are you with tweets from reporters as opposed to media companies. Where is that affinity going?
Julia Kaganskiy made a good argument from the outset saying personal brands have always existed as personalities that operate outside of an institution. What has changed recently, however, is that personal brands can now exist and thrive on their own.
With that said, most agreed it’s based on building a level of trust as to who you follow, who you read and who you interact with.
Howard Weaver said authenticity is what matters the most, not where the content originated from. The institutional tweets are less relevant to him than individual tweets, for example, he argued.
Kaganskiy asked a good question in reply. Is the institution part of a journalist’s personal brand? Is the institution the reason people engage with the journalists at least from outset?
So if the paradigm is shifting from personal brand to individual brand, how do they play together so the audience gets the best results? Do they play together at all?
One person said that journalists should operate under the philosophy that the media company they work for won’t exist in five years. His advice was to create your brand, your niche, publish, develop a specialty and do what you can to gain audience. Basically, make yourself indispensible because people want to connect with people, not institutions.
Here is how the session ended: We recognize that institutional brands are being broken down to individual brands. We’re not sure whether that’s good or bad, but we think we should salvage what makes since from the institution while given the personal brands the chance to thrive.
What say you?
I think maybe the institutional brand becomes a sort of subset of someone’s personal brand. Part of a reporter’s personal brand is that she worked or works for a specific company, i.e. that you work(ed) for New York Times or Washington Post is a part of your personal brand, can add credibility.
[...] reason why I mention this mentality is because it plays into the moving away from the institutional brand to the person brand. Our society and industry seems to be shifting to that mentality and having the skills and mindset [...]