Melanie Borden is the CEO & Founder of The Borden Group. She works with executives to align their brand with their LinkedIn strategy.
While artificial intelligence is the future, humans still drive the vision. This should be true for your personal brand, too.
I’m a big believer in establishing a personal brand no matter your age, career trajectory or job title. Your personal brand, simply put, is an extension of you. It’s an impactful way to express your values, personality and expertise to set yourself up for incredible opportunities within your industry and beyond.
You may be thinking that AI-powered personal branding sounds like an oxymoron. How could AI replace the vulnerability of a personal brand? The answer is it doesn’t. Leveraging AI, despite what many believe, is not about replacing humans. It’s about optimizing your efforts.
For me, running an agency and balancing motherhood doesn’t always leave a lot of extra room on my calendar for content creation, engagement and strategizing. Can you relate? If you’re reading this, I’m sure you can. After initial apprehension, I learned how AI could save me a lot of time and even help spark new creative ideas.
When it comes to personal branding, consistency is key. AI can support you as your on-demand assistant. Let’s explore the various ways you can use AI to power your personal brand.
AI: Your Personal Branding Assistant
As I mentioned above, when AI was first released to the public, I was apprehensive. Truthfully, I didn’t understand it and was intimidated by the thought of it. That was until a client of mine said, “AI is like having an assistant; you just have to learn how to effectively train it.”
As someone who advocates for the human touch and doing business human to human, this helped me see AI in a new way. Instead of seeing it as a disconnected robot, I started to see it as an assistant that’s there to support my vision, not destroy it.
Listening to all the ways my clients and colleagues were leveraging AI tools, I became inspired by the possibilities. The more I became acquainted with AI, the more I noticed that the majority of its success comes from effective training. Just like you train employees, you have to invest time in shaping AI to get the desired result. Typing a single prompt into an AI tool will typically produce generic results. However, strategically refining the output to match your tone, expertise and unique thoughts will set your content apart.
How To Train AI Tools
So what does it take to train an AI tool? Just like when you’re training human employees, it takes time and patience to get into a good rhythm. You’ll go through trial-and-error periods before experiencing the time-saving powers of AI that will have you wondering why you didn’t delegate sooner.
Here are some go-to tips for training your AI effectively:
• Give the AI an identity: First, tell the AI your expectations. For example: “You’re an award-winning marketing strategist with over 15 years of experience. You specialize in X and know how to Y.” This will position your AI for desired performance.
• Provide feedback: When AI provides assets for a project, provide your feedback. Tell it what you like and where there’s room for improvement, and further emphasize your unique voice and target audience to improve its effectiveness.
• Share examples: Can you show the AI an example of your preferred writing style as a model to reference? It should be able to detect the patterns and replicate them.
Creating A Treasure Trove Of Content
One of the biggest personal branding challenges many come up against is creating enough content. There’s no denying that social media is becoming a buzz-worthy spot for influence. LinkedIn (my preferred platform) now has more than 1 billion members. This means a consistent presence is paramount for being seen as a thought leader. And let’s face it, you can’t have large-scale visibility without consistent, value-rich content.
Here are some ways my team and I love to use AI tools to create and schedule content:
Social Media Strategy
• Management: Numerous social media management tools provide AI-powered features including creating, scheduling and publishing posts, social media monitoring, analytics and team collaboration to streamline the creation process. Sprout Social and Agorapulse are two options.
• Content calendars: To execute your social media strategy, creating an effective content calendar to organize, batch, track and house assets is essential. Tools like Jasper and Feedly can help with this.
Content Creation
• Generative AI: When you’re in a creative slump, generative AI tools can aid in generating your next idea. By typing a question or request into the chat box, the tools will provide research and copy to best support your goal.
• Recordings: To make the most of your daily meetings, try using an AI meeting assistant that both records audio and provides a transcript. This is a fantastic way to gather relevant topics and themes you can later use for content ideas.
Visual Branding
• Graphic design: A standout brand requires scroll-stopping graphic design. There are many AI tools you can use to create polished professional assets including social media graphics, flyers, banners, logos, e-books and more.
• Video content: AI video editing tools can identify the most compelling hooks and highlights within long-form videos to turn them into shorts. This is perfect for Reels and clips you can use for social media.
Keep Your Personal Brand Personal
While AI can immensely reduce the manpower (and associated hours) behind your personal brand, it’s important to prioritize authenticity over automation. My team and I always edit and fact-check all content produced by AI to ensure it aligns with our branding values, goals and tone.
Remember, the core pillar of personal branding is trust. Your audience wants to know they can trust and relate to you. Unfortunately, we’ve all seen content that was copied and pasted directly from an AI tool with no personal touches or proper training. This can do more harm than good for your brand. Keep things authentic, as this is what will attract aligned opportunities.
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