The 3 point shooter

A super brief quick start guide on your personal branding, on how to tag yourself and , as a result, a call to a wider, happier and closer audience to you and your targets.

Why P.B.?

Whether you are a professional searching for new opportunities, an artist hungry for new fans or an entrepreneur or a Know-mad avid for sales or collaborations, it′s all a matter of finding your right audience or community and connecting with them.

Parallel to what we see everyday , the same way a buyer is attracted to a product under a certain brand given its features and characteristics (but also its values, story behind it, rationals, etc..) , an audience converges with a person through certain drivers or links:

• Benefits
• Values
• Sensations (Perceptions)

And also parallel to how it's made with any product , any individual will need to work on that brand, which compiles and identifies that set of drivers, so it really reflects his or her objectives and values and it showcases his or her full potential. This is the reason for the crucial importance of a great Personal Branding.

How to develop your P.B.

It′s possibly as easy (and as complicated) as building a brand for any other product.

It starts first with a thorough analysis of the product and the project. In this case with a deep introspection, in order to know what your skill set, career and experience bring to the table. Then sorting all the possible outcomes of that, choosing the best possible mix in order to create your product definition.

This should be short and concise, as brief as two or three sentences, so it′s possible to be immediately pitched. And it should be known and accesible to you as a mantra.

Not long ago, Adrian Herzkovich , one of my referents in the matter of Personal branding, challenged me to build my Brand via 3 (and only 3) Hashtags. I think it′s a fantastic branding exercise, that applies to any product, but it′s way more interesting applied to an individual, as our complexity makes it way more difficult for us to choose just 3 main features.

Funny enough, twenty years ago I had a Philosphy teacher that despised tags, he called them "stickers", and with that he was referring to a concept very similar to what is today know a hashtag. So , he was kind of a visionary....In a certain way.

What would be your set of 3 hashtags? Which ones should you choose? It′s not an easy task, it′s a profound exercise of marketing.

The power of the Hashtags

I think hashtags are fantastic and help us get a deep idea of something on just a glimpse. If you go very generic, you will probably aim at a larger audience, however the grip should be weaker. If you go to very specific hashtags your seal will be unique and very differential, however it′s important that the volume of audience interested is large enough to allow you to reach your goals.

If you′re completely lost about how to define yourself, I recommend you to try a very dynamic exercise with the tool Tagcrowd (tagcrowd.com). Tagcrowd analyzes text and the frequency of words within that same text. If you use it with your resume you can find the keywords you have used more frequently and therefore the ones that should take the spotlight in your branding definition. ( if the result thrown by Tagcrowd is absolutely irrelevant, then you should consider doing some SEO work on your resume :) )

In my case the first result is "Marketing", second is "Brand", third is "Global", fourth is Program (discardable), fifth is "International" and on sixth we have two words: "Digital" and "Development". It′s pretty accurate. It′s in fact true that my hashtag set should include: #globalmarketing #internationaldevelopment , #branding or #digitalbranding. However I was somehow surprised that certain terms didn't make the cut, "innovation", "premium" or "strategy", for instance. This is in any case or result, a great analysis for your branding decisions or a wake-up call for potential missing content or keywords on your resume.

The combination that you choose and the hashtags that they form should be the 3 pillars of your personal branding. It is important to note that you might have to tweak them in order to optimize their attraction. It′s important that the hashtags:

1. Capture Attention (Interest side) / This means that they are contemporaneous and coherent with the marketing current demands. Being a "Lion Tamer" could be interesting some decades ago, now it might reduce your chances a bit.
2. Bring value (Benefit side) / Your audience will be curious about your voice exclusively if they understand that you can bring them some benefits or that they can get some learnings from what you said ( probably if you thought there was nothing interesting in my article you would have stopped reading some time ago, since you didn't, I hope you are indeed getting something out of it)
3. Authentic and close (Emotion side) / It's all about the community. Fandom is all about share emotions says David Meerman Scott, a great marketing strategist. And it's true that the closer you make them feel to you , the more powerful the link will be or the more relevant you will be to them, and therefore the more eager they will be to listen to what you have to say. I recommend that one of your hashtags has a more differential-niche-unique feeling and works in this romantic and emotional area.

Finally, like for any other brand, perceptions are not the only important ingredient, the realities are equally important. It′s not only about the cool names and tags you can find , but also about the actions and facts that go with them. And also a direction vector to focus and build around whatever you generate in the future, which should mainly revolve around these 3 pillars, for maximum and optimal effect for your audience.

And this is only the very beginning of a large story of branding, but a solid foundation.

I hope you are all safe and sound.

Releasing ourselves (at last!) from the bunkers,

Jaime Teulón