Personal Branding: Is There Substance To Your Hype?

“Really? Really? That was it?”

Those are thoughts we’ve all had, in a letdown we’ve all experienced. The 40-foot movie screen goes black, the credits start rolling and you wonder why you not only wasted a perfectly good ten bucks on the movie, but two hours of your life, (which you’ll never get back). And, the worst part? You feel duped. You had been anticipating the movie, for quite some time, because the preview looked amazing. But once you saw the entire movie, you realized all the good parts were in the trailer, the plot was weak and even the eye candy wasn’t enough to keep you satisfactorily entertained.

The concept of personal branding is a lot like our movie-going experiences. Sometimes the actual product doesn’t live up to the hype or the packaging.

While I do not discount the importance of personal branding in the slightest, I fear as tech-savvy Gen Y’ers we may often misplace the emphasis. We often focus on the packaging rather than the more important matters of what we are actually communicating or who we actually are. Or, to keep with the analogy, we focus on the movie trailer and advertisements to sell tickets at the box office, rather than the actual movie.

Personal branding is so much more than what you tweet, what you write on your blog or what you comment on others’ blogs. In fact, I think the online aspect is the smallest part of personal branding (although it is definitely a powerful and important part which can open many doors that would not be discovered otherwise). Personal branding really comes down to the good old-fashioned reputation you earnestly build IN PERSON. Your behavior and attitudes online shouldn’t just reflect your behavior and attitudes offline, they should be the same. Some call this transparency. I call it integrity.

As we put time and effort into developing our brands online, we cannot neglect developing our offline communication skills and especially not the very skills we are promoting through our branding efforts. Just as a movie producer wouldn’t put a scene in the movie trailer that isn’t in the actual movie, you shouldn’t promote yourself online by saying or doing things you would never do in person. Attracting Twitter followers or blog subscribers doesn’t really matter if they follow or read only to find you just aren’t nearly as good as you are packaged to be. When the movie isn’t as good at the trailer made it seem, the viewer WILL be unsatisfied.

Ultimately, I think you’ll identify your personal brand and discover the best ways to promote yourself online through your offline experiences. When you’ve sat in enough business meetings to intuitively know when is an appropriate time to present a new idea, online personal branding will become intuitive and absolutely transparent. When you have developed a reputation, not just for the work you do, but for the character you exhibit, online personal branding will just come naturally to you.

The big studios are experts in knowing how to produce hype and drive people to the box office, even if the movie is a dud. But, that over-hyped, dud-of-a-movie will fail in the long run. Conversely, some of the smaller or independent studios don’t have the resources to create hype, but their films are often of the most-high caliber. These under-promoted, fantastic movies will succeed in the long run. So it is with personal branding.

Before, during and after you advertise and package your product, make sure there is actually a product there worth promoting. Never forget that product is you. The you-in-real-life you. You are the lead actor/actress in this movie (as well as screenwriter, producer, director, etc.) You will either make that viewer feel exhilarated and delighted or annoyed and disgruntled they expended the effort, time and money to watch your movie. As such, always place your highest priority on developing your product more than your brand. If the product is good, the messaging, the branding, will eventually take care of itself.