The following post is a continuation from yesterday's Is Your Intern Or Your CEO the Most Influential Person in Your Company?

Once you Find out who is influencing your company’s brand you can build relationships with them. If the leaders of your company are not among them, they need to be and here are a few steps you can take to figure out who they should be and how you can increase their influence.

1. Choose your leader influencers.

Who are you proud to put out there, to say the things you want to be said for the good of your company? Identify who in your company has the

  • insight,
  • subject-matter authority (who knows what they are talking about the most on a particular topic),
  • communication skills, and
  • presence that best suit the brand positioning you want right now.

2. Get your leaders trained.

Make sure they understand social business and see your company as one of them. They need to understand the social platforms and how to use them and they need to appreciate how social impacts the company's growth. They need to know the role they can play and how to play it.

3. Build great profiles for your people.

Having a great online profile is the prerequisite to getting to know people and having them get to know you. And this matters because no one will pay attention to you if they can't get to know you a little bit.

4. Create an ongoing mentorship plan.

Mentor them and keep them close to your communication strategy and schedule. Help them decide on what to communicate and how they should be doing it, how to distribute it, and how to get the engagement you are looking for. This doesn't come naturally for most people and mentorship is extremely important in the social business era. There is a lot of art and a lot of science in social communications and having mentors and collaborators that your leadership team can can rely on is a big help. This is also important for anyone in your business who is playing a role in supporting your brand online.

5. Create and curate great content for them.

Helping people express themselves, decide on what ideas, questions, insights and honest revelations about themselves they should reveal, and selecting their views on their own expertise that should get out there will be necessary on an ongoing basis. The content they create and the content they find to share needs to align with and influence your company's brand according to your goals and your business leaders will often need help with this so they can continue to spend most of their time running your company.

6. Measure and adjust.

Measure what matters. What are they sharing that is getting reshared, talked about and having the influence you hoped for? Do more of that and stop sharing what people don't seem to care about. Measuring and adjusting is necessary to ensure your investment isn't a waste of time and money.

If your CEO and other leaders of your company are not influencing your brand on line, who is? Make sure that the people with the least skin in the game are not the ones writing the script for your business in the social space. [tweet this]