Melanie Borden is the CEO and founder of The Borden Group. She works with executives to align their brand with their LinkedIn strategy.
Although artificial intelligence is the future, humans still shape the vision. This should also apply to your personal brand.
I’m a big believer in building a personal brand, regardless of your age, career path or job title. Your personal brand is, simply put, an extension of yourself. It’s an impactful way to express your values, personality and expertise and prepare yourself for incredible opportunities within your industry and beyond.
You may think AI-powered personal branding sounds like an oxymoron. How can AI replace the vulnerability of a personal brand? The answer is that it is not. Deploying AI, despite what many think, 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 in my schedule for content creation, engagement, and strategizing. Can you relate? If you’re reading this, I’m sure you can. After my initial concerns, 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 take a look at the different ways you can use AI to power your personal brand.
AI: Your Personal Branding Assistant
As I said above, I was apprehensive when AI was first released to the public. To be honest, 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 train it effectively.
As someone who advocates for the human touch and human-to-human business, this has helped me see AI in a new way. Instead of seeing it as a disconnected robot, I started seeing it as an assistant that is there to support my vision and not destroy it.
As I listened to all the ways my customers and colleagues were using AI tools, I was inspired by the possibilities. The more I became acquainted with AI, the more I noticed that the majority of success comes from effective training. Just as you train employees, you must invest time in shaping AI to achieve the desired results. Typing a single prompt into an AI tool usually produces general 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 train human employees, it takes time and patience to get into a good rhythm. You’ll have to endure periods of trial and error before you experience the time-saving powers of AI, which will leave you wondering why you didn’t delegate sooner.
Here are some tips to train your AI effectively:
• Give the AI an identity: First, tell the AI what your expectations are. For example: “You are an award-winning marketing strategist with over 15 years of experience. You specialize in X and know how to do Y.” This will position your AI for the desired performance.
• Provide feedback: When AI provides resources for a project, provide your feedback. Share what you like and where there is room for improvement, and further emphasize your unique voice and target audience to increase its effectiveness.
• Share examples: Can you show the AI an example of your favorite writing style as a reference model? It must be able to detect the patterns and replicate them.
Creating a wealth of content
One of the biggest personal branding challenges that many face is creating enough content. There’s no denying that social media is becoming a buzzworthy place for influence. LinkedIn (my favorite platform) now has over 1 billion members. This means that a consistent presence is paramount to being seen as a thought leader. And let’s face it: you can’t have mass visibility without consistent, value-rich content.
Here are some ways my team and I like to use AI tools to create and plan content:
Social media strategy
• Management: Numerous social media management tools offer AI-powered features including post creation, scheduling and publishing, 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 for organizing, batching, tracking, and housing 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 help you generate your next idea. By typing a question or request into the chat box, the tools provide research and text to best support your goal.
• Recordings: To get the most out of your daily meetings, you can use an AI meeting assistant that both records audio and provides a transcription. This is a great way to collect relevant topics and themes that you can use for content ideas later.
Visual branding
• Graphic design: A striking brand needs a graphic design that stops scrolling. There are many AI tools you can use to create polished professional assets, including social media images, flyers, banners, logos, e-books and more.
• Video content: AI video editing tools can identify the most compelling hooks and highlights in long videos and turn them into short films. This is perfect for reels and clips that you can use for social media.
Keep your personal brand personal
While AI can dramatically 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 review all AI-produced content to ensure it aligns with our brand values, goals and tone.
Remember, the core pillar of personal branding to trust. Your audience wants to know that they can trust you and identify with you. Unfortunately, we’ve all seen content copied and pasted directly from an AI tool, without any personal touches or proper training. This can do more harm than good for your brand. Keep things authentic as this will attract aligned opportunities.
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