Your Company Bios: Are They Helping or Hurting ?

Wednesday, November 28, 2012   |   Fred Berns   |   (Disabled) Comments


Thumbs Up Or DownYou can’t differentiate your company until you can differentiate yourselves.

That was my message recently when I addressed CEO’s, senior executives and business owners at two Vistage meetings in the Midwest. Vistage is the world’s largest CEO membership organization.

Promoting yourself and your team is particularly important in these highly-competitive times, I pointed out.

A random review of their company websites revealed that the personal promotion profiles of the attendees generally failed to “sell” them.

In many cases their bios blocked rather than boosted them, and disqualified rather than qualified them from working with their ideal prospects. They failed to pass the “So What?” test.

The director of a law firm opens his bio with the fact that he “graduated college in 2003.” The owner of an insurance agency starts his off by noting he was a “North Central College graduate.” The head of a communications company points out that he’s been the firm’s CEO since 2005, and started with the company as an account executive in 1975.

The problem: dated information. Readers might wonder if any one of them has accomplished anything since.

The senior principal at a prominent architecture and interior design firm refers in his profile to his “master planning and space planning skills.” That sounds all well and good, but what does it mean? And, more importantly, how do clients benefit from those skills?

In some cases, the executives chose not to include a bio on their websites. Like the CEO of a towing company, and the director of an infertility consulting firm.

That makes it much more difficult for them to stand out, I told them, given the fact that I came up with listings for more than more than 11 million towing companies, and 330,000 infertility consultants when I did a google search in their area.

Nothing differentiates an organization more clearly than the individuals who work for it. That’s why the promotional profiles of these individuals are among the company’s most versatile, valuable and vital marketing tools.

If you’re serious about distancing your company from competitors, you need to get serious about the “About Us” section of your website and marketing materials. The “About Us” information needs to be stellar.

And it needs to include personal “only’s.”

That shouldn’t be a problem since there’s an “only” in each of us.