Personal Branding: Getting Started - What It Does For You

Let’s face it, at this day in age ‘branding’ has become a buzzword that you probably hear more often than ever before. It has become an incredibly important concept across all fields and lines of business, and for good reason. Branding isn’t just a current trend or fad; it is extremely critical to both your online presence and to you and/or your business’s success. Most people when they think of branding immediately think of commercial/business branding, but what about your own personal branding? Personal branding is the process of marketing, selling and establishing yourself, and career as a brand of importance. This is developed through your online presence, content you post, and the interactions you have. Many may not realize it, but even if you have not thoughtfully built out your personal brand, you already have one so long as you are active somewhere online, or have a picture online. When you post something, it reveals aspects of your personality to the individuals that read it, giving insight into who you are, your values, competencies and goals. The importance of personal branding is of the utmost importance with all of us being hyper connected online with the ability to search out and obtain pretty much any information instantly.

To further emphasize the importance of your personal brand, lets take a look at building out your personal brand on Linkedin.com for example. As of 2018 LinkedIn now has over 560 million members in over 200 countries and territories. Furthermore there are 15 million jobs currently posted on LinkedIn and 60k+ schools listed. When you contemplate the sheer scale of having a brand on just this one website, and then couple that with the sheer scale of combining that with other websites and overall the internet, you should see tremendous amounts of opportunities. This is the ability to cast your voice, your message, you image, your brand to specific audiences whether to influence, persuade, sell to, find a job etc…

A Personal Brand

Teaches You About You

When you first set off in building your personal brand, you will quickly learn that it will require extensive thought, reflection and introspection on yourself both as a person and a professional. This is paramount in creating a successful personal brand, because without it, you cannot properly align your mission and vision to your goals. Nor can you successfully reach the right audience, with the right message, at the right time. You will need to take continuously sell-assess and take self-inventory, so you know completely the tool-set you have, the tools you need and how to obtain the ones you don’t. Additionally, to be successful at building your personal brand you must accept that you have weaknesses, confront them, and better them. It also gives you the opportunity to become organized, and hone in on your differentiating skills.

Gives You A Voice

With a built out personal brand, it allows you to network with people or groups that you may have not been exposed to, known about without one. Conversely, it gives the same people and groups the opportunity to learn about and interact with you.  This makes it extremely important to thoughtfully build up your followers, connection, friend base [etc…] with people that fits your target audience. By building up your connections/followers it allows you to have a voice to that audience, where they can learn more about you, your mission and garner a following that is then invested in your mission and success. It also gives you the opportunity to learn from your audience, what they care about, and help them along on their same journey.  However, your voice is only successful if you’ve followed the above actions in being introspective and honest with yourself about who you are, and who your target audience is, otherwise you will have a prohibitive misalignment of ‘product and market’.

Makes You Accessible

People don’t know what they don’t know. You could be the best candidate for the job, a promising salesperson, or an up and coming marketer but if people don’t know who you are then they will never know. They will never know that you were the best candidate for the job, because they don’t even know you exist. They will never know the awesome products your selling because they have no exposure to you or the product. By having a personal brand, it allows people to learn about you, from you and gives them the opportunity to contact to you. This makes you human, and is the beginning steps of building meaningful relationships, interactions, networks and pipelines.

Builds Your Reputation

Having a personal brand allows you to control your image, message and reputation. If you do not have a personal brand, or for the sake of argument lets say you have no digital presence at all. However, let's say you have friends that are on social media who a post picture of you on that one weekend where you had about a drink and a half too much. The entirety of your personal brand (image, message, reputation), is now established and controlled by that same friend. As far as the internet and strangers know, that picture is exactly who you are! There is nothing online that refutes it, nothing online that gives any differing reference points. Take control of your image and present yourself in a way that aligns with your core values, mission and goals. Control the message that you put out into the world, rather than others controlling your message. Build your message around your values, mission and goals. All of this will allow you to take control and manage your reputation in a way that is congruent to what you are looking to accomplish and the way you would like to present yourself.

Builds Trust and Credibility

Psychology tells us that the more we see something, the more we will typically like something. The more we like something, the more we will trust that something. The more we trust that something, the more likely we will be friends with that someone, buy from that someone, work or help that someone, etc… In building your brand you will be inherently tasked with building trust and credibility. This can only be done by interacting with your network and putting out messaging that establishes yourself as a person of importance, knowledge, or an influencer or thought leader. Trust can’t be built on inconsistent messaging or values, which is another reinforcement of how important your self-assessments are, and how important it is to ensure that everything you do is fully aligned.

Makes You Human

If you went to any consumer tech company’s website, you will see that on each website they most likely tout how they are all ‘customer centric’, ‘innovative’, ‘pushing the boundaries’, etc… In the movie The Incredibles, there is a quote that goes along the lines of ‘if everyone is special, nobody is special’. In the same way, the modern audience tends to distrust corporations because we have become so dismissive to the onslaught of buzzwords/phrases and canned lines that have gone through rounds and rounds of focus groups to calibrate it perfectly. Your personal brand is human and makes you human. Don’t let professionalism suffocate your personality, people do business with people they like. Let your personality shine through and compliment your messaging. It goes much further than most think. This means sometimes showcasing a weakness or being vulnerable, while incredibly difficult, will benefit your overall messaging. Additionally, by being human, it gives you credibility and leverage with your audience, while highlighting that you practice what you preach. 

Opens The Door To Opportunities

Having a personal brand opens the door to opportunities that would not have been possible prior. Many times having a personal brand will give you indirect opportunities as well (such as your personal branding mission to establish yourself as the go-to consultant for tech implementations, and in the process you have a publication reach out to ask your opinion on the state of tech in a certain industry). Some examples of opportunities that may arise:

• Job Offers
• Messages From Recruiters
• New Clients/New Business
• Building A Talent/Sales/Potential Pipeline
• Publications Requesting You Write An Opinion Piece
• Speaking Opportunities
• Consulting Opportunities
• Influence For A Change/Cause
• Grow Support For Cause/Mission
• Bring Light To Unaware Issue/Causes/Products etc...
• Becoming More Confident
• Finding More 'Luck' or Success
• Making New/More Friends
• Media Apperances
• Being Seen As A Thought Leader
• Increased Leverage
• Increased Network Power
• Collaborations
• All to name a few...

Get proactive with building your personal brand and allow yourself to grow! With the sheer number of opportunities available to us online, build and leverage your networks and create new successes! One of my favorite quotes is "you can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want" -Zig Ziglar. I particularly like this quote because when you are on your journey, you will find that there are more people willing to help you along the way than you ever thought. Additionally you will find yourself helping others reach their destination too, in turn creating meaningful and lasting relationships.

This will be 1 of several articles discussing personal branding. The next upcoming personal branding articles will discuss, 'considerations to make when building a personal brand', 'personal branding strategies', 'best practices of personal branding', and 'how to optimize your personal brand on LinkedIn'.

About the Author: In today’s world with an increasingly competitive talent landscape and the overwhelming amount of data in our digital age it is hard for organizations to stand out through all the noise. Leveraging technology & digital media creatively is the ultimate differentiation in attracting top talent. I coach CEOs, CHROs, Thought Leaders, Human Resources and their Talent Acquisition teams to develop their employer and talent brand to attract, recruit and retain the world’s top tier talent faster and more efficiently than ever before. It is my sole goal that I aggressively pursue that I make people my clients ultimate competitive advantage.

I am passionate about #TalentBranding, #EmployerBranding, #SocialMedia, #SocialSelling, #AI, and #Tech. I provide my clients relevant insights on #TalentAcquisition, #TalentInsights, #HRTech, #Branding, #EmployeeAdvocacy and #SocialRecruiting. It is my goal and hope that I can positively impact those around me and those that I work with in a meaningful way.

You can follow more of my thoughts on LinkedIn and Twitter @ChrisWilsonTS! I would love to hear from you, so let me know what your thoughts are!

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