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The basic idea of personal branding is baffling to me – how do individuals market themselves as a brand? I know it’s possible to market an individual in a specific market, say real estate in Los Angeles, so that they become the real estate agent to work with. I’m even pretty good at helping people figure out how to market themselves as an expert in their field. But marketing myself? As the company and the product? This mentality starts to require a little more thought and planning than I’m used to when using social media tools like Twitter, Facebook or my blog.
At this point I feel so new to the online world. I have had my blog for a little over a year, mostly working in little bursts of inspiration, but never writing regularly enough or participating in blog communities often enough to build up a solid readership or make strong connections. I know I need to figure out how to make personal branding work for me if I want to expand my blog and start getting more writing projects.
The more I try to understand it, the more I feel like personal branding is becoming yet another step in the process of developing a career. On top of school, internships, extracurricular activities, resumes, and interviews, how you appear online is the next hurdle you have to cross to reach your dream job. I’m constantly having flashbacks to when I was 16 and I had to figure out which clothing style would display my personality best -- am I punk? Surfer chick? Cowgirl? Every day I felt like something different, and today, instead of clothing, it’s my online presence that I have to figure out.
It sounds like it takes a step-by-step, detailed strategy to make personal branding work, but I really don’t think it needs to be so calculated. It’s impossible to live up to a perfect image, even if it was created by you, for you. Personal branding should not be about how well-qualified you are for anything and everything, it should be about presenting what you are in a way that gets you closer to the people you are trying to appeal to.
What I’m (slowly) starting to learn, after worrying and fretting, is just what my mom told me when I was 16 – just be yourself. That image, that brand, that persona, that whatever, will all come across the way it should when you just go about acting naturally. When people see what you stand for and what you care about, that’s when the real connections are made. That’s when people come back to your blog, your Twitter feed, your writing/consultation/whatever service.
So, that’s what I am working on now – finding my audience and helping my audience find me, using personal branding as a tool.
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Comments
01.09.10
I'm with you - I had never heard of or considered personal branding before graduating college. Suddenly I'm realizing its importance and wishing schools included this in their career services "workshops". I honestly can't think of one aspect of business or education where personal branding wouldn't come in handy. The problem I'm having is narrowing it down and I imagine this is what naming a child is like ;-) Figure once you really narrow down a brand, the web makes it next to impossible to erase, so you're kind of stuck!
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