How To Master Your Personal Brand
Anders Liu-Lindberg
Leading advisor to senior Finance and FP&A leaders on creating impact through business partnering | Interim | VP Finance | Business Finance
Recently, I gave a presentation for a group of business talents in Denmark with the topic of how they could become personal branding superstars. Now hold on. What’s a finance professional doing giving a presentation on personal branding? How can he be someone worth listening to? Actually, you can only judge for yourself but I’ll share my advice on how to master your personal brand as I did that Thursday evening for this group of talented individuals. First, let’s start with the basics.
“What is a personal brand? Essentially, it’s the sum of all the perceptions held by others about you”
What this means for you is that whether you know it or not you have a personal brand! So what can you use this new insight for? Well, first you must recognize the impact of your personal brand on your career. When your personal brand is the perception others have of you, it’s pretty much your ticket to everything. Getting hired, getting promoted, being recommended to a headhunter or being listened to and taken seriously by a bunch of talents on a Thursday evening when you don’t have the slightest professional experience or education in the topic you’re presenting on. If your personal brand is a bad one you need to take action. Otherwise, your career will feel like a long walk in the desert. So what can you do to change your personal brand i.e. others perception of you? Enter Personal Branding!
“What is personal branding? This is all your activities specifically targeted at improving your personal brand”
This also means that you do many activities every day that in one way or another affect your personal brand (deliver a good analysis, make a smart comment on LinkedIn or like me forgetting your business shoes on a business trip and showing up in your snickers) yet they are not all personal branding. Probably, you’re on LinkedIn to strengthen your personal brand hence the LinkedIn comment is personal branding. The rest are not although a good analysis will affect your brand positively while showing up to work in the wrong pair of shoes will not.
The journey towards a stellar personal brand
As I stood there that Thursday evening explaining what I had done to improve my personal brand and even called myself a self-made personal branding expert, I realized just how much my activities over the past four years had changed my personal brand. In fact, prior to 2012, I don’t think I had ever done any personal branding. In 2014 I wrote about how I followed 7 easy steps to start my personal branding journey which you can read here. Since then I’ve had more than 80,000 views on my blog, been invited to speak at conferences, will soon publish a book and now talking and writing about how I did it all. It hasn’t made me rich but it has certainly opened up a world of opportunities. The exciting part is that I still don’t know how exactly I’m being perceived by everyone out there who know me. Indeed your personal brand is not about who you know but who knows you. You can ask and get some answers but you will never truly know so what you can do is to create a specific strategy to improve your odds of creating a stellar personal brand.
Final piece of advice
As I was rounding off my presentation I wanted to give the audience my advice on what’s an absolute must to improve your personal brand. This is my top three but, of course, the list is quite extensive.
- Be consistent: You need to commit to a strategy you can follow through on. If like me you want to publish a blog on LinkedIn you need to find a posting schedule that works for you. If one month you post every week and the next three months you post only once a month you will not create a following. If you can only commit to posting once a month then do that and your audience will perceive you as credible. Having said that it’s not all my commitments and projects that turn out successfully hence you really need to prioritize.
- Choose what works for you: Maybe you’re not the greatest writer on earth but you can “sell someone this pen” any day any time. Then you probably need to do your personal branding in person and at networking events. This is the classical kind of personal branding which has somewhat been forgotten in the Internet age. However, if you’re a writer like me and do most of your “damage” online then an online-first strategy can certainly be just as effective as in-person networking.
- Don’t be a one-trick pony: Whether you’re best at in-person or online networking you have to become at least good at both. When I interviewed to become a member of the talent network I was giving the presentation to back in 2014 the Managing Director of the talent network asked me if I was serious about networking. Actually, I found myself to be terrible at in-person networking due to my somewhat introvert nature but I knew I had to become better at this to further advance my career. That’s also why I told him it was a Must Win Battle for me. Now I have improved a lot using simple techniques like “How To Avoid Ending Up Single In Networking” and “Hi My Name Is. The Powerful Self-Introduction” and I can work a room like never before (still a long way to go, though, before I can claim to be good at it).
You can do this too! All you need is a strategy, consistency, and knowing yourself including your strengths and weaknesses to keep on developing. If you do this well you will be called by headhunters, asked by professionals to collaborate on start-up ideas or even asked to share your thought leadership within your field. You will be the master of your personal brand. Now tell me what is your personal brand and what have you done to improve it? As always, I appreciate every like, comment or share you can spare to get the discussion going and spread the word.
For more posts about personal branding and networking, you can continue to read below.
7 Steps To Improve Your Personal Brand
Grateful To Be Here Or Already Moving On?
Why I Just Removed 10% Of My Network
Personal Branding Is Like Building A Business
Anders Liu-Lindberg is the Senior Finance Business Partner for Maersk Line North Europe and is working with the transformation of Finance and business on a daily basis. Anders has participated in several transformation processes amongst others helping Maersk Drilling to go Beyond Budgeting and transformed a finance team from Bean-counters to Business Partners. He would love the chance to collaborate with you on your own transformation processes to help you stay out of disruption. If you are looking for more advice on how to get the most of LinkedIn Anders also has a few tips to share as well as if you want help in your job search. Don’t be shy! Let’s get in touch and start helping each other.
Finance Director | Finance Team Transformation, Strategy, Systems design and implementation
7 年oh you are good!!!
Dealer Data Strategy Manager at Caterpillar Inc.
7 年Lori Boxer / Weight Loss and Anders Liu-Lindberg, both of your comments remind me of the saying "What You Do Speaks So Loudly that I Cannot Hear What You Say" (which seems to be a modification to an Emerson quote). I agree that our actions are essential to communicating a clear message to our target audience. If you say you can or want to help your ideal customers, but you don't DO things that actually help them reach their goals, those words are empty and meaningless. But I think branding isn't just about what you say. Sometimes businesses give a lot to their target audience, but they don't do it in a focused manner. The foundation of branding is identifying what you value and what you want to stand and be remembered for. Too many entrepreneurs don't stop to first get clear on those things. But once they do gain that clarity, it helps them prioritize and make sure they DO those things that support their values and reinforce what they want their customers to remember them for on a consistent basis.
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7 年I know I’m probably in the minority on the issue of ‘personal branding,’ and perhaps that’s because I’m from a different era. I viscerally dislike that term ‘personal branding’. Every time I hear it, a vision immediately comes to mind of either a head of cattle branded with ‘Ponderosa’ on its rump, or someone’s logo being hot-ironed onto their ass or forehead. To me, ‘branding’ = ‘image’. . . and with a little work, anyone can create an online (or print) persona that exudes success and brilliance. Anyone. Image is nothing more than marketing. Yet, the people who will actually be in a position to help us in life and in business understand this. No one will fool them with superficial image ‘design’ or ‘creation.’ They don’t care about it and know how to see right through it. To those I mentor and to anyone who might ask my opinion, I say don’t focus on a ‘brand’; just be what you say you are. Build a reputation for yourself. Talk less, do more. Let your work speak for itself. Michael Jordan didn’t spend all his time trying to build a strong personal brand. He practiced his craft. He trained. He worked his ass off to be the best basketball player he could be. It doesn’t mean you should stop blogging or making videos or speaking engagements, and the like. It just means that the ratio of doing vs. talking should clearly favor the former over the latter. Bottom line: If you really want people to know your name and take notice, go build something. Make something good happen. Be relevant, not just popular. Create. Invent. Help. Rescue. Solve. Improve. Apply yourself to any of those endeavors and in time, you will earn some measure of respect and even perhaps notoriety or fame. That’s how it works.
Cluster CX Manager, CMA CGM | Senior FBP & Cofounder
8 年As usual, very interresting post.
private investor
8 年you really have good posts Anders, i am glad i stepped on your profile today.