Katrishia Koh Case Study Assignment: Social Media Strategy of a Thought Leader. Thought Leader: Sally Hogshead. Professional Biography

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1 Katrishia Koh Case Study Assignment: Social Media Strategy of a Thought Leader Thought Leader: Sally Hogshead Professional Biography Sally Hogshead is known as a speaker and author of the books, Radical Careering: 100 Truths to Jumpstart Your Job, Your Career, and Your Life and Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers of Persuasion and Captivation. 1 She currently travels around the country promoting Fascinate, and stays active in the innovation and branding sphere by consulting brands on innovative media and branding. Recently, Fascinate has become a hit among the advertising and marketing-related communities, as it represents three years worth of research Sally s team has done to figure out the main influence of persuasion: fascination. 1 With their findings, they were able to develop a brand personality F-Score test lumping results into seven triggers for determine how a person Fascinates: power, lust, mystique, prestige, alarm, vice, and trust. Sally is currently making Fascinate her main initiative, using various forms of social media and speaking events to promote its message, and offer consultation to companies for brand innovation. 1 Prior to her books, Sally had a flourishing career as a copy writer, working at some of the world s best ad agencies, like Weiden+Kennedy, Fallon and the Martin Agency, before starting her own agency at the age of 27, bringing in big clients like Target and Remy Martin. 3 She then, opened the West Coast branch of Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, before working for Careerbuilder.com as a motivational speaker on career development, leading to her writing her first book, Radical Careering: 100 Truths to Jumpstart Your Job, Your Career, and Your Life. 3

2 Personal Brand: Author/Media Personality Brand: Sally has crafted her brand as a Chief Fascination Officer for her book, essentially living through it, utilizing speaking tours, consultation gigs, and online promotions to advocate Fascinate s message. 4 Sally targets innovators and aspiring creative thinkers, primarily within the marketing and advertising industries, as well as Fortune 500 companies, and teaches them how to maximize their persuasive potential, using the triggers they have that make them fascinating. 1 This group also represents her tribe, given her background in the advertising industry and the clients she s worked with. The main thing that makes Sally s brand unique, in my opinion, is the uniqueness of her F-Score test, backed by her previous experience and reputation as a copy writer and speaker on career development. 4 Strategic Needs and Goals The strategic needs of Sally s personal brand is to essentially be fascination. By essentially walking the talk of her latest book, Sally will be able to grow her following, increasing opportunities to promote her books and spread their messages further. Sally does a great job at managing a cohesive personal brand for herself, but one suggestion for a potential goal would be for her to try utilizing more social platforms to grow her audience.

3 As Sally s strategic needs really foster sharing and interaction, a huge portion of her tactics should cater to that. Through positioning herself (her brand) as a Chief Fascination Officer, Sally is able to really hone in on the core of Fascinate s message on utilizing personal persuasive power through sharing the book s insight and interactions with her audience to help them craft their persuasive process. 4 Tactics Speaker Events: Sally participates in speaking events to promote Fascinate s seven triggers to building a more fascinating brand, whether it s a personal one or for an actual company. A lot of her speaker events are generally geared towards business, marketing and advertising events that foster creativity and innovation, like the TED events. There s definitely a lot of interaction involved, and her events always seem to be pretty successful. Blogs: Sally maintains the Hog Blog, a blog on her personal domain providing updates on her public appearances and the progress of making her Fascinate results more marketable to businesses and people. She usually blogs about once a month, but she usually pushes to other media, so it s more collaborative, in terms of content. 2 Twitter: Sally uses her own personal twitter account to manage her brand, tweeting personally and in reference to her books tips and her hog-isms, quirky sayings that essentially define her personal brand. She s an avid tweeter and is pretty interactive with her followers, so this tactic is very effective. Newsletters: People are able to sign up to receive weekly newsletters on how to persuade. This is something people opt into when they either take the free F-Score test online or by signing up. It s very much a sharing tactic and is effective in providing updates and information, linking back to her main site. Website: Sally s website does a great job of focusing on her personal brand, while also promoting her speaker opportunities and books. Here, people can also take her F-Score test that leads to promoting the Fascinate brand. There s a lot of sharing and collaboration here, as the site effectively integrates Sally s books and speaker events without taking away from Sally herself.

4 Youtube: Youtube has been great for Sally in making her brand more interactive. She posts all of her speaking events on the site, including promotional clips for Fascinate, for people to view. It definitely fosters a lot of sharing and interaction among her followers. Testimonial Sally doesn t really say what her social media strategy is. Her strategy isn t platform-based, by any means, as much as it is content-based. She s done an amazing job of living what she preaches (her career/ Fascination tips) and has come up with her own Hog-isms that cater to sharing statements that define those ideas. Analysis Given how Sally engages her audience on a variety of social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, the Hog Blog) and speaking events to position herself as a chief fascination officer to promote her book Fascinate, I d say that Sally s social media strategy is extremely effective. Aside from a wonderful consistency in messaging and voice within her social media content, I think that the novelty of her product, Fascinate and the messaging behind it, really strengthen Sally s strategy in helping attract new members to her following/fan base. With those two components, I really don t see any weaknesses in Sally s social media strategy. She s really done a great job at leveraging social platforms relevantly, in a way that really builds and engages her audience. Recommendations for Improvement I do not have any suggestions for Sally s social media strategy. I think that for Sally s needs in promoting her book, Fascinate, she does a phenomenal job in sticking to certain social media outlets to not dilute her brand through over-extension.

5 Sources 1 Hogshead, Sally. Found February 28, 2012 on 2 Hogshead, Sally. The Hog Blog. Found February 28, 2012 on 3 Sally Hogshead. Found February 28, 2012 on 4 Hogshead, Sally. Found February 28, 2012 on