Personal branding strategist Melanie Borden, founder of The Borden Group, on why the metrics that matter most for executive visibility never show up in a dashboard — and how AI search engines are quietly becoming the judge of who gets trusted.
I asked ChatGPT to describe me the other day. Not by name at first — just enough context to see what it would surface. It came back with a clean summary of my career, then zeroed in on something specific: identity resolution, hashed emails, unified consumer profiles. It knew what I was known for. That’s not an accident, and it’s not vanity metrics either. It’s the new version of a resume, and most executives have no idea it’s being written about them in real time.
That’s the conversation I had with Melanie Borden, founder of The Borden Group and a personal branding strategist who’s spent the last several years helping executives and founders figure out what they’re actually known for online. Her background isn’t LinkedIn-native — she came up in automotive marketing, building out personal brand programs for 80-plus salespeople before she ever built her own. What she’s learned since is that the metrics everyone obsesses over — likes, views, follower counts — are the least important part of the story.
Why don’t the KPIs that matter show up in a dashboard?
Borden’s central argument is that the real signals of executive visibility are invisible to the platform’s own analytics. She calls it dark social, and it shows up in three archetypes of people who watch you before they ever engage.
First, the supporters — people you haven’t talked to in 15 years who suddenly resurface to say “let’s schedule time” the moment you start posting with intent. Second, the lurkers — the silent majority who are watching, evaluating, and waiting until they’re ready to make a move. Third, the outwardly negative — the people who mock you in a Monday morning meeting for posting on a weekend, which is exactly what happened to Borden when she started in 2020.
“We have this conversation around the things that happen that don’t show up in a dashboard. It’s also known as some of the dark social that we’ve heard mentioned over the last 10 years — what doesn’t show up in a dashboard.”
— Melanie Borden, Founder, The Borden Group
Here’s the thing — that lurker phase isn’t wasted attention, it’s a trust-building runway. People watch for months, sometimes years, before they DM you. I’ve had it happen to me. Someone will message out of nowhere and say “I’ve been following your posts for two years” — and you had no idea they were even paying attention. Lurkers eventually become prospects. You just can’t measure it on the timeline it happens.
There’s a technical-industry wrinkle here too, one that Borden and I both flagged: in spaces like identity resolution or ad tech, people actively avoid commenting because a public comment tips off competitors that they’re paying attention to a specific vendor or idea. They’ll message you privately instead. That’s dark social by design, not by accident.
How is AI reshaping executive visibility and search signals?
This is where the conversation got interesting. Borden ties executive visibility to what she calls “searchable leadership” — the idea that visibility isn’t the goal, it’s the input. The actual outcome is being found, understood, and trusted when someone — a prospect, a VC, a journalist — goes looking for you.
“Executive visibility is essentially about being seen… and I kind of tie that together with what I call searchable leadership, which is about being found, understood, and trusted.”
— Melanie Borden, Founder, The Borden Group
AI systems are now doing the work that used to require a human researcher to dig through your LinkedIn history, press mentions, and podcast appearances. They’re synthesizing all of it into a judgment about whether you’re credible in your field. Every podcast, every article, every LinkedIn post is training data for that judgment.
“It’s not just you saying, ‘Hi, I’m great, I have a LinkedIn newsletter and I’m going to talk to you about the topic I’m passionate about.’ It’s — this is what I know, this is what I’ve done, and this is how it will help your audience.”
— Melanie Borden, Founder, The Borden Group
Her actionable advice for anyone starting from zero: pick two channels, not ten. She specifically pointed to podcasting as underrated — you borrow someone else’s trusted audience instead of building yours from scratch — paired with LinkedIn, because even people who never post are still consuming content there. Commit to a cadence, one post or one podcast a week, and don’t expect it to convert in 30 days.
“All of the things work over time. It just it might not necessarily happen in 30 days, but a lot of times it does if you’re intentional with what you do every single quarter, every single month, every single week.”
— Melanie Borden, Founder, The Borden Group
What is E-E-A-T and why does it matter beyond Google?
E-E-A-T — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness — started as a Google search quality concept. Borden’s point is that it’s no longer confined to search rankings; it’s the exact framework AI models use to decide whether to cite you, recommend you, or describe you as an authority when someone asks about your field.
Broken down, it’s a gut-check most executives haven’t run on themselves:
- Experience — have you actually done the thing, not just studied or hoped to do it?
- Expertise — can you demonstrate original insight beyond what you could generate by prompting Claude or ChatGPT yourself?
- Authoritativeness — has anyone besides you vouched for you? Media features, podcast appearances, keynotes?
- Trustworthiness — is there a consistent, verifiable record of who you are?
“Authority a lot of times is borrowed before it’s earned, essentially. Others vouching for you and talking about you is a signal for those AI platforms.”
— Melanie Borden, Founder, The Borden Group
“Trust is a currency. And it’s hard — especially when 98% of who I work with are people I’ve never met before. They’re really trusting that I am the authority when they hire me.”
— Melanie Borden, Founder, The Borden Group
That last point lands hard for anyone in marketing right now. We talk about trust constantly on this show because the entire industry has an erosion problem — bad data, mistargeted ads, a wrong name in an email subject line. Every one of those moments chips away at the thing Borden is describing. Building executive visibility, done right, is one of the few remaining ways to rebuild trust at the human level instead of the platform level.
The bigger picture
What stuck with me most is Borden’s reframe of attribution. Marketers love to draw a straight line from a post to a sale, and when we can’t, the CFO starts asking why the LinkedIn budget exists. But the honest answer is that visibility compounds across channels you can’t fully instrument — a podcast someone heard, a post someone screenshotted, a conversation at a conference where they’d already half-decided to trust you. Borden’s advice to loop the CFO into the process early, so there’s shared context instead of a dashboard fight after the fact, is something every marketing leader should be doing right now.
The tools will keep changing — she’s bouncing between Perplexity, Claude, and ChatGPT the same way I do, testing them against each other for different jobs. But the underlying shift is real: AI systems are becoming the interpreter of your digital footprint whether you’ve opted in or not. The only question is whether what they find is accurate, and whether it’s you.
Connect with Melanie Borden on LinkedIn or visit humantobrand.com to learn more about The Borden Group.
This article was adapted from an episode of Deconstructing Data, BDEX’s weekly podcast on data-driven marketing. Tune in live every Thursday at 4:15 PM Eastern on LinkedIn.
About BDEX: For companies that need clean identity data to power their products, BDEX offers unmatched quality and execution. Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert” to get started.
