It’s increasingly important for leaders to cultivate their online presence and personal brand — but every platform comes with nuanced questions about when and how to share opinions, values and insight on potentially hot-button topics.

Today, our senior advisor David Brown joins us to discuss how leaders can bring their true selves to their online platforms while anticipating these challenges, maintaining credibility and building loyalty among key stakeholders.

David has owned or managed five Ad/PR firms over the course of his distinguished career, and he’s been nationally recognized for his work empowering mission-focused organizations to make a difference in their communities. Today, David is the Assistant Dean for Community and Communication at the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University; the Executive Director of the Civic Coalition to Save Lives; the Managing Director of CommonSoul Communications and an ordained Reverend in the United Methodist Church.

While he wears many hats, David’s integrity and deeply-held values come through clearly in his own online presence and his counsel to clients. Here’s a look at our conversation:

Matt Broscious: We all recognize how valuable it is for leaders to build an executive presence online. It can be an important way to gain visibility while fostering trust in their leadership style, expertise and decision-making. But one of the biggest questions leaders face is how much of their personal selves — backgrounds, opinions and personalities — to include. What’s your take on that challenge?

David Brown: Both online and off, you have to be very careful and mindful of what you put out there. What you say online becomes part of your identity. And it’s not a one-way street; what you put out there generates reactions, whether you intend for those reactions to happen or not.

What you share, and how, should depend on which platform you’re using – but you have to keep in mind that lines blur. I personally tend to keep a professional tone on LinkedIn, whereas I do have more personal content out there on Facebook and Instagram. But whatever you put anywhere leaves a trail, so we all have to be prepared to manage our digital identity as a whole.

Along those lines, is there any specific type or style of content that you recommend leaders include — or avoid — in their social media posts?

When I’m counseling leadership on this, we first take a step back to consider their affiliations. It’s not just about your individual brand, because you are very often a brand champion for a larger institution. If you don’t consider how your posts will impact that organization, you do so at your peril.

I’ll use myself as an example. I have to make sure, if I’m speaking on behalf of Temple, that it’s in line with their organizational voice. Same if it’s on behalf of the Civic Coalition to Save Lives. But when I’m posting as David Brown, the individual, I still have to be mindful that because I represent those organizations, I can’t say whatever I want.

I used to write a lot of columns on issues that mattered to me about diversity, equity, inclusion, or other issues of social policy that I work on personally — but now I have to take into consideration that what I say in that regard will also have an impact on those organizations, whether positive or negative.

There’s so much nuance here. And capacity is a very real issue for leaders, which means they turn to agencies like us or their corporate communications team to help them do this. How do you advise executives to set up some parameters to help them maintain control, while empowering their communications team to build that executive brand?

The team certainly has to spend time with the leader of the organization to get a sense of their brand voice, organizational identity, and how it all stays on mission. But I also counsel folks to not just surrender their full online identity to someone else, because it’s not fair to that communications person or team. I completely understand having people to help keep the volume of social media content manageable, but by the same token, it’s less about quantity of posts and more about the quality of those posts. If I just tell a comms team, “Do what you need to do,” — well eventually I, as the leader, have to answer for that. It’s not fair to any team to say, “You be my voice and get back to me if there’s a problem.”

As we know about social media in particular, it is a living, breathing, organic dynamic. It’s a dialogue and you have to stay involved and engaged with it, even with a team of smart professionals managing it and advising you.

Let’s talk about values for a minute. It’s critical that leaders stay true to their values, regardless of the political or cultural temperature, but it’s also true that the cultural perception of those values can change rapidly. Concepts like DEI and sustainability come to mind. How do you advise leaders to live out their values online while rising above the cultural or political opinion of the day?

For me personally, as it relates to the multiple identities that I have – representing Temple, the Coalition, and even myself as a pastor within a congregation — I have to resist the urge to just jump into those issues because I have to be nonpartisan and apolitical in more settings than not. That doesn’t diminish the work I do physically, though it may or may not appear online. As a pastor, for example, I’m working in the community around immigration reform. But I don’t post much about it online. I just don’t need to be the one to throw up the flare on issues that may be more politically volatile and could negatively affect the other organizations I’m associated with.

I do believe that living your life with integrity in the offline, physical world is an important part of this conversation. The only thing you can manage is your own credibility. Once you compromise this in any way, you’re giving away some of your power.

Along those lines, you’ve had a uniquely powerful voice in advising mission-focused organizations. How do you counsel organizations to consider when, and how, they should enter a conversation online?

There’s an acronym I often use called WAIT, and it stands for Why Am I Talking? The first thing you have to do is ask if you should be a voice in this conversation. Have you done enough homework to really have something valuable to add? Of course, saying nothing is also a voice. Your absence can be really prominent.

But it comes back to credibility. If you are just coming into this conversation because it’s a popular issue of the day, and you aren’t willing or able to follow through on what you say online, your credibility will be compromised. And credibility is the currency that can mean everything. If you do one thing now, and when the times get challenging you decide to go the other way — consumers, shareholders and employees all pay attention to that.

When I’m advising an organization like Temple, I have to keep in mind the brand’s 180-year history. Where have we been? And if this issue is a new thing, how do we enter the conversation? Should we enter it at all? Organizations have to look at their history and determine how they will live into a particular value with a degree of authenticity before they speak about it.

You’ve led five Ad/PR firms over the years and have decades of advising companies and their leaders. How has the opportunity, and challenge, of building an authentic executive brand changed?

When I started the work that I did, social media wasn’t really a thing. However, managing your reputation has always been a thing.

The vehicle by which you reach people may have changed, but you still need to be selective about what topics you are talking about, the audience you’re finding, and the tools you use. As social media platforms pop up, even if “everyone” is on TikTok or X or Threads — you want to be intentional about which ones you use. We don’t want to reach “everyone,” we want to reach the right someone. That’s true both online and offline. Your goal is to use each platform, whether that’s a networking event or social channel, to maintain your credibility and authenticity. Social media as a concept is as old as banging drums to the next village!

So true. The tools and strategies will keep evolving, but the purpose of building and leveraging an authentic reputation stays the same. Thanks for sharing your time and insights, David.