Business leaders of all kinds, not just those from the marketing and media industries, are taking advantage of social media in exciting and effective ways. One of the prevailing models is for senior people at organizations is to create individual profiles for themselves — Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc — and write and communicate about their particular area of expertise. Although these individuals are clearly connected to branded organizations, they understand that social media is about people first and brands second. The leading-edge thinking on all of this is that the very paradigm of doing business is now shifting — as a result of the new prevalence of social media — away from the notion of business living in the marketplace primarily as a “branded idea,” and more as a distributed network of “branded people.”

There are a number of sophisticated thinkers and writers on the vanguard of social media (Olivier Blanchard is one) who argue that what is really happening is a return to a pre-20th century way of doing business that was based much more on direct communication with “the people who are the brand” than on the 20th century media model of one-to-many messaging. Many things have made this possible — everything from the saturation of Internet use itself to the simple but game-changing notion of short-burst communication or micro-blogging (Twitter, Yammer, Socialcast, etc.). Smart companies are empowering their people to have their own individual, professional presence in social media — brand-connected, to be sure, but with a clearly individual profile.

Because social media is all about transparency and authenticity, it should focus on the individual, not the organization as a whole (it is also helpful to have corporate Twitter accounts, blogs, Facebook profiles, etc., but they serve a different purpose).  The idea to establish your people as experts in their areas. Then, by extension, the affiliated corporate brand has expertise. This is not to the exclusion of the effort to brand the corporate idea, or indeed to eliminate larger brand messages — but that is decidedly not the way to look at or use social media tools for individuals.

Think if it as a shift from people being associated with brands to brands being associated with people.