If you want to reach the Millennial generation, it’s probably a good idea to use the Internet. But according to new research from MTV, companies run the risk of alienating their target audience if they go about social media marketing in the wrong way.
Our online presence defines much of our identity both personally and professionally, especially for web workers. But how much of your online identity is controlled by someone else? The Indie Web movement is primarily about ownership and control over your identity.
Until now, many of us have seen the question of branding as two-dimensional: we have a personal brand, or a business brand. But is that all there is? Would it be possible, for example, for us to use personal brands to enhance the business brand?
Just as astute people-researchers may be viewing your social network activity to get an idea of your true personality, they may also see the Twitter @ replies you’ve received as the clearest indication of what your clients or colleagues think of your work.
A recent Fast Company article highlighted the issues surrounding the language BP has developed in response to its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. That article begs the question: how is your personal brand impacted by the words you use to respond to negative feedback?
If we put all the rhetoric of elevator pitches, unique selling propositions, authenticity, standing out from the crowd and personal branding together, mix it up and boil it down, this is what it comes to: What makes your approach different from anyone else’s?
You may have noticed that WebWorkerDaily now publishes many of its authors’ tweets beside their articles. The syndication of tweets like this is becoming more common as everyone from fitness instructors to real estate agents seeks to take advantage of social media’s personal branding possibilities.
In the “old” days, if something wasn’t going well for us, we’d share our difficulties with our friends and family. Today, with the advent of blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other social tools, we can broadcast our lives to the world. And the world talks back.
Using storytelling techniques to help communicate your personal brand can make for clearer, more consistent, more compelling branding efforts. In this final part of the series, let’s look at the storyteller’s other tools — narrative and description — and see how they fit into the picture.
In my last post, we tossed around the idea that storytelling techniques might be applicable to personal branding, and we looked at one — characterization — that’s obviously key to a personal brand. This time, we’re talking plot.
The catch cry of personal branding experts is “authenticity!” But sometimes it can be hard to know how much information is too much — when authenticity gets a little too true-to-life — in your personal branding efforts.
Personal branding reflects how you represent yourself in the digital world from both a personal and business view. I believe that in this social media age everyone — from high school graduates to established professionals — needs to pay attention to his or her personal brand.
Here are some tips for pumping up your image and improving your branding online.
In discussing personal branding, most people consider how it applies in the online environment, because, after all, it’s the Internet that has given each of us a very public voice, and promoted the “need” for personal brand definition.
Many times, I’ve heard professionals describe personal branding as “essential” for anyone working in the online environment. It’s a “business imperative”. According to many, the global financial crisis has only emphasized the already-accepted truth that personal branding is a necessity in the modern world.
Well, I’d like to confess something right here, right now: I work in the online environment, and I don’t have a personal brand.
Personal branding, whether you like the term or not, is something every web worker should consider. Don’t look at it as marketing or packaging yourself, but more as being true to yourself. Book Yourself Solid by Michael Port makes that distinction very well, and the Food Network demonstrates exactly how to make it work for you and your business.
Michael Port’s concept of personal branding starts with his belief that, “when you work with clients you love, you’ll truly enjoy the work you’re doing; you’ll love every minute of it. And when you love every minute of the work you do, you’ll do your best work, which is essential to [booking] yourself solid. Second, because you are your clients; they are an expression and an extension of you.”
The cornerstone of his philosophy is that “the greatest strategy for personal and business development on the planet is bold self-expression,” and many successful personal brands have used this very strategy to rise to the top.
The Food Network is filled with great examples of personal branding success stories using the “bold self-expression” strategy, and while the brands are very unique on their own, they all attract their individual audiences by being exactly one thing – themselves.
Take three of the popular Food Network personal brands, Rachel Ray, Paula Deen, and Emeril Lagasse. They each have individual flare and have used that individuality to create tremendous personal success.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about personal branding and finding myself disagreeing with the idea that it’s something that we should all be concerned with.
While I was reviewing “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Personal Branding”, I read a section about the personal brand extensions achieved by Madonna, implying that she had an affair and subsequent divorce in order to relaunch her waning career. This unnatural behavior embodies most of the reasons why I can’t think of personal branding as a priority.
Personal branding, as Pamela wrote earlier this week, is somewhat inescapable in the days of social media and working online. It really is just a fancy “Web 2.0” term for being aware of, shaping and monitoring your online reputation. And for us web workers, whether we like it or not, our online reputations are often crucial to our abilities to do business and advance our careers.
The thing I personally wrestle with the most about my own personal branding is finding the balance between being transparent and yet protecting my professional reputation and marketability.
“Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online,” by Andy Beal and Dr. Judy Strauss, was recommended to me by several online friends…
Having studied branding very briefly in another life, I was curious about “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Branding Yourself”, by Sherry Beck Paprocki and Ray Paprocki. How would product and service brand theory would be translated to the branding of people? And could a book set an ordinary human being on the path to be the next Steve Irwin/Oprah/Paris Hilton? In terms of structure and coverage, it seemed well planned and, from a glance at the table of contents, comprehensive. This Idiot’s Guide is broken into four parts: What is branding? Launching your personal brand, Branding in the modern world, and Brand extension and evolution. So far, so good. There are twenty chapters, totalling 228 pages, so it’s obvious that they’re going to be pretty easy to get through. Can you sense a “but” coming? Well, here it is…