Today on my way back home I was hit by a car. I am ok, honestly, I am ok. The elbow is a bit swollen. It probably needs a bit of icing. So it makes you think. You can die in a blink of an eye. It also makes you think: What is my legacy? What am I actually leaving behind? Let me tell you something. Let your very identity be your legacy. Try an touch as many hearts as you can in your lifetime.
Being good to people is probably the greatest legacy you can leave behind.
I am sorry but I have to completely disagree with this statement. In my opinion, nowadays customers have a natural dislike for big corporations which are often seen a greedy, lying and faceless. On the other hand, yes, on the other hand, personal brands are individuals with unique personal qualities.
The more trustworthy they are the easier will be t generate trust among your shared user base. This can lead to more passionate followers and better initial customer relationships especially if you are trying to penetrate new markets.
Use different personal brands to cater to different audiences
My advice will be to use different personal brands to cater to different audiences. For example, you may want to develop two separate personal brands each of which becomes an expert in two opposite fields. For example, I may like mirrorless cameras. John may like DSLRs. This will greatly help you build niche expertise in separate areas without fully alienating the audience of your core corporate brand.
After talking for an hour about personal branding I realised that people will not listen to you if they don’t like you. How to change that? Well, you have to promise and then you have to deliver.
The importance of your personal brand
Is personal branding important?
Well in a word yes. But in order to understand it completely, we need to talk about two things. We need to talk about Social Identity Theory and Brand Behavioural values. And those two things although they are separate they are actually connected and the moment we take everything online they converge upon the individual and we come to question we are trying to address now.
I can talk about this pretty much all day and we don’t have all day so I am going to be as succinct as possible. Social Identity Theory essentially says that we join groups and we then enhance those groups through a behaviour sharing activity, judgements, biases and so on. Because the more powerful the group and the more enhance it is they are better that reflects upon us.
Brand Behavioural values essentially say that brands behave in very specific ways which project very specific characteristics in a consistent manner which allows that brand to be recognisable.
So if we are working online or even if we are existing online which is an intentional activity we essentially engage in activities which are intended to both enhance us and the groups which we join by association which then reflects back on us and this is classic Social Identity Theory and we also engage upon activities designed to basically make us stand out from the crowd which are essentially copies of brand behavioural, brand behavioural elements.
So, in a nutshell, how do we, what do we do when we get online we use a conflation of those two to enchase our own identity and enchase the groups which we basically join and reflect well upon ourselves. And in a manner of speaking, we are creating personal brands.
So there it is very quickly. I hope it helps.
Building an authentic personal brand
The first and the more important part of building a personal brand is to be authentic. Don’t insult your follower’s intelligence. People can spot a faker from a mile away no matter how convincing you think you are.
When it comes to building your personal brand online the biggest mistake I see is lack of clarity. So let me give you 3 powerful questions to help you a strategic, thoughtful approach to growth.
Who is your target audience?
The first question is ‘Who is your target audience? Who are you trying to reach online? And the answer cannot be everybody cause it just doesn’t work. I am sure you’ve seen this quote online a lot: If you are trying to reach everybody you end up reaching nobody.
What is your value proposition?
The second question is: What is your value proposition? Or in other words what type of content are you posting online and how often?
Who are you and how do you help people?
The third question is Who are you and how do you help people?
These 3 questions are critical to really standing out and getting noticed online.
One thing I wanna say here is:
Building your personal brand you should try and be as human as possible.
So for example, if you are an SEO like me yes you should be also talking about food, good movies, books but if I come to your online profile within 5 seconds I should be able to tell what your core, main value proposition is.
Talking about online profiles, don’t forget to come here next Sunday so you can ask me the questions and I can give you the answers.
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