Socialmediaworx

Rohit Bhargava’s new book, Personality Not Included, hit bookstores this week, and to promote the launch, Rohit invited bloggers to write in with questions about the book. Who needs an expensive agent when you can simply reach out to bloggers? Below is my interview with Rohit about Personality Not Included (you can read an excerpt of the book here):

1. What companies most impress you for maintaining their authentic personality? Not sure if I can pick on favourite, but in terms of scale and volume, Sun is a company that is particularly impressive in how they have managed to embrace having an authentic personality at all levels of their organization, from the top all the way down.

2. What are some creative ways organizations are co-creating their personality with their customers? I think that co-creation is a great trend that companies are using to demonstrate their personality – though I’m not sure it’s their personality that they are co-creating. If you look at some of the brands that use the Get Satisfaction solution, which allow customers to answer questions for each other … this is a great example where customers are co creating customer service with the brand. It is the use of the service that describes a component of the personality of the brand.

3. How can an organization rediscover their authenticity? Big loaded question – I spent all of Chapter 1 trying to answer this one. The short answer is, understand why you lost it in the first place and then you can start to take steps to gain it back. The most common first step is to lose the “employee silencing policy” – which means letting your employees be your brand ambassadors.

4. How is social media changing how a company cultivates their culture? Social media makes opinions more powerful because they can travel further, and also offers a more direct inside link to a brand. When it comes to a company cultivating their culture, social media offers a tool to help them engage in conversations both internally and externally, as well as more immediately share best practices between geographies.

5. What are some ways to convince in-house skeptics that nurturing a memorable company story is important? This is a very common question that I try to address in Chapter 5 of the book. In that chapter, I share that fear is the most common barrier, but that this breaks down into four key areas:

• Success – What we are doing is already working
• Uncertainty – We don’t know what will happen
• Tradition – We have always done it this way
• Precedent – No one else is doing it this way

Then I break down each situation into some actionable steps to help you get back that particular barrier. Thanks again to Rohit for the interview, and if you needed any more encouragement to order a copy of the book, purchasing through the Ultimate Marketing Bookstore will support DonorsChoose.org, an excellent charity that supports teachers.