Personal Branding Archive

Consumer brands are livening up their social strategy by taking the humor up a notch. While this isn’t a new tactic by any means, some brands have started using social media to find their inner stand-up comics.

Brands like Taco Bell and Domino’s have been garnering attention for their sassy presence in the past 5 years or so. The level of humor used has been steadily increasing with various brands implementing the tactics highlighted below in a variety of ways. From all-out sass to casual jokes, there are certainly different levels of risk involved as well. But there are also benefits with some efforts even garnering media attention, like last year when Wendy’s capitalized on a social copy error on the McDonald’s Twitter handle.

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Business Cards Are Not Dead

When it comes to business cards, I am reminded of a chapter in my book, Pioneers of Digital, where the fabulous Avinash Kaushik talks about how he tested his famous blog – Occam’s Razor – on his wife and fellow work colleagues to get their feedback before he went public with it.

Well, when I started Delightful Communications, I decided to canvas industry peers about many aspects of my start-up, including marketing. What I found was that many people singled out business cards as a no-no. They’d scoff and say, “I don’t need to carry business cards, they’re out-of-date in this digital age.”

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Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter who lived from 1907 to 1954. In her art, we can see her reflection of personal value creating a great personal branding example. Fifty-five of her 143 paintings are self-portraits; she took who she was and created art that is prized for its uniqueness and creativity.

In today’s frenetic, digital world I feel we have much to learn from Kahlo’s legacy which can teach us how to embrace values, passion, mission, vision, and strengths. In Kahlo’s painting and life decisions, you can see how much she believed in her personal values. Even at a time when many of her values were seen as crazy, she was persistent and with her uniqueness created an image of a strong person.

Be Inspired By Your Surroundings

Kahlo was a person who embraced every part of who she was in a loving way. Her self-portraits portray a strong and determined vision in her eyes. In her early life Frida suffered an accident while she was on a wooden bus. Many in the accident died while Kahlo suffered severe injuries.

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In the final of 10 installments of our Personal Branding Strategy Series I want to encourage you to use social media for personal branding, to be “social by design”.

I first heard the phrase from Carolyn Everson, my former big boss at Microsoft Advertising and now Head of Global Advertising Solutions at Facebook. Adapted from the industry cry for brands to be “digital by design”, Carolyn’s morphing of the expression is the perfect discipline for the busy professional of today.

Here are a few ideas of what it means to be “social by design”:

Getting your social infrastructure right

I talk about it in detail in the post on How to Optimize Your Personal Brand Online, but this is about making sure your social profiles  – LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc. – are set up properly so you’re half way to success. Your profiles need to be discoverable, they need to have the right security settings activated and it needs to be easy for someone to interact with you, understand immediately what you are about, and share whatever you are trying to get out there.

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IFTTT, If This Then That, is ‘a free platform that lets you do more with all your apps and devices’. IFTTT is at its core an automation platform that can automate and connect services from Twitter to your Phillips Hue lights to spreadsheets. For examples, you can create an applet to sync your Amazon Alexa to-dos with your iOS reminders.

So how does it work?

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I have a story.

You have a story.

We ALL have a story.

If our personal brand is all about what kind of experience people have with us online and in-person, that experience has a past and we need to embrace it.

During a personal branding workshop I delivered last week, we talked about our professional past: what was our educational experience? How did we get into our niche? What were our professional passions? What did we find hard? Where did we want to be in 3 years time from a career perspective?

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When we deliver our personal branding workshops and training, one of the exercises is to have people work on a Personal Branding Statement.

The 3 step process starts with what we call “5 in 5” where we all sit down with a partner and talk for five minutes about:

• Their educational experience
• Their work experience
• What they love about what they do
• What they find hard
• Where they want to be in 3 years time

We use that information and our internal compass to define and establish a Professional Purpose – the reason why we do what we do and (beyond money) why we get out of bed in the morning.

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When it comes to digital marketing per se, one of the biggest gaps I see companies unable to fill is the real-time understanding of what their competition is up to. During my sixteen years in digital, I’ll be the first to admit being so down in the weeds executing on the tactical plan that I’ve not had the wherewithal to run a competitive analysis and notice what my competition has been up to.

Having learned that lesson, one of the first things we do at Delightful with our clients is conduct a competitive analysis to see who’s out there, what they are doing well and where the opportunities are to differentiate and stand out.

Competitive analysis is as important for you and your personal brand as it is for the company you work for. Understanding what other people in your niche are doing, saying and how successful they are is crucial to personal branding success and here are a few things you can do to figure out who they are, their impact and what you can do to wrestle attention away from them and onto you.

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Those of you who have been enjoying this series on creating the Perfect Personal Branding Strategy will know we’ve been talking a lot about being conscious of what content we share, finding our professional purpose, and ultimately improving your personal brand online.

While not super-practical, the more theoretical steps are designed to get you thinking about being more thoughtful and disciplined about how you present yourself both on/offline and improve digital presence.

Today I’m sharing a checklist of more actionable tips you can use to optimize your personal brand so you’re more discoverable, shareable and memorable:

Get a Professional Headshot

I’ve talked about this in a previous post, but no harm in giving you another nudge on this!

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One stumbling block for people looking to improve their personal brand often come across is the fear of not having anything to say online. For whatever reason, they feel they are not interesting enough or they are afraid to put themselves and their thoughts “out there”.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are those who have no problem updating their social channels with a stream of consciousness devoid of actual thought or empathy for those people they are broadcasting to.

In short, in our opinion, the perfect personal brand is a balance between the two.

I’ve written articles about writing in the past like How to Write a Blog Post in 30 Minutes, 5 Twitter Tips That Will Enhance Your Personal Brand and 2014 LinkedIn Buzzword List Revealed – Please Stop Using Them!

The main premise behind them is to encourage people to think before they share their thoughts online and to hone their writing skills over time.

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