The View from the Office.

Kit Huffman, founder of Seneca, invited me to meet up at a cocktail party hosted by The Malin, a co-working space she uses.

Kit started Seneca, an executive ghostwriting agency four years ago. I started a firm with a similar mission, Principals Media, last year.

We spent 90 minutes swapping notes about executive comms and online writing. We share a worldview that more CEOs will seek to boost their personal brands by creating online content.

It’s still early innings. You see a number of West Coast tech executives active on social media, but most East Coast CEOs are not yet engaged, regarding it as a distraction.

There tend to be four stages to the CEO journey toward social media: initially, there is a vague awareness, then a sense of Fomo, which is followed by a decision to delegate posting to a junior staffer. Finally, they get to a degree of personal engagement.

Engagement is the enlightened state when you realize that telling your own story online is necessary part of your comms strategy because it attracts opportunities and media attention.

Kit agrees LinkedIn is the main arena for posting now, but it’s not the whole show. We encourage people to write in a way that content can be used on websites, in newsletters and elsewhere.

She said her big challenge remains explaining how social media content differs from marketing and PR.

Kit’s aiming to build her business by increasing her online presence (she already has a newsletter) and also wants to start organizing events.

One of the things she stressed was the importance of providing clients with analytics to measure the value of the content they produce.

We both struggle with client demands for traditional metrics. The need for ROI is understandable. But counting followers or readership can be misleading

We are both looking for new clients who want to complement PR with their own voice and writers who like to help other people tell stories.

You can reach either one of us via a DM on LinkedIn.