Bant Breen is Founder and Chairman at Qnary, an executive reputation management and talent branding solutions company he founded in 2012. Since that time Qnary has grown quickly, adding features and tools along the way that make it easy for clients to monitor — and interact with — social media channels.
I wanted to catch up with Bant to trade notes on how social media — and reputation management — has changed in the past decade and how Qnary has adapted to these changes. As he notes, online reputation management was primarily search-centric 10 years ago, but today has broadened to include many disparate social media channels. And while LinkedIn remains the most important platform for executives to establish and maintain a presence, other platforms, including YouTube, Instagram, and even TikTok, are gaining influence, all of which means that executives need to think much more holistically about their personal and brand reputations.
Bant and I touch on the subject of media training and how executives who might be camera-shy should go about establishing online presences. We then turn to why it’s a mistake for executives to attempt to “bifurcate their brains” by limiting their social media interactions to those exclusively relating to the brands at which they happen to be employed. (As Bant observes, Millennials and GenZers — many of whom are becoming corporate leaders today — don’t seem to be affected by this particular malady.)
We discuss mistakes that brands often make with respect to reputation management and PR and trade notes about content creation/distribution strategies for brands in “boring” industries. We then turn to what Bant’s excited about for 2023 and beyond.
