What adjectives best sum up my personal brand in your mind? What could I start doing, continue doing or stop doing, to help me build a strong and credible personal brand?
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If the people you approach are stumped by the term โpersonal brandโ, replace it with โreputationโ. Once you have assessed your current brand, you are in a better place to plan how to enhance it.
3. Start offline
Most discussion on personal branding focuses on how you present yourself to the wider world. However, your personal brand starts with how you wish to be perceived in your own organisation and with people you come into actual contact within your job.
That is, in the offline real world. Doing first-rate work, meeting agreed deadlines, building relationships, communicating well, and being a pleasant and cheerful human being will go a very long way towards building your personal brand. Not only do such activities not take any extra time, but you get paid to do them as part of your job.
4. Choose online platforms carefully
The usefulness of an online presence will depend on your profession, job, organisation and circumstances. There is no one-size-fits-all. The two usual places for professionals to build an online presence are their own organisationโs website and LinkedIn.
You always have a personal brand โ whether it be good, bad or indifferent.
Only when those two are working well is it worth exploring the multitude of other online platforms and maybe setting up your own website. Take your lead from senior professionals in your organisation and in organisations similar to yours who appear to be digitally savvy. And look at what your peers and competitors are doing.
Producing quality posts can take time but be careful not to overinvest. In deciding how often to post, again, be guided by others in your sector.
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Sometimes you will see exhortations such as, โMake a commitment to post every single day for at least one yearโ. If you think that is a great use of your time, knock yourself out. Frankly, I would rather commit to visiting the dentist every single day for a year.
5. Get feedback
As the saying goes, breakfast is the feedback of champions. Seek out feedback occasionally from your colleagues and clients on what they value about your online efforts.
If they are honest, they will probably tell you that simply reposting your organisationโs material, will be of little interest to anyone, apart perhaps from the business development people in your organisation who like to keep statistics on these things.
Come up with original material that is interesting and relevant to your colleagues, contacts, clients and competitors. This need not be lengthy. You should present as insightful and original. Perhaps comment briefly and incisively on some current development of interest in your sector.
You always have a personal brand โ whether it be good, bad or indifferent. With a bit of planning you can uncover the status of your personal brand and set about enhancing it in a strategic, thoughtful manner. In the digital age you will want to boost your personal brand with an online presence. However, start in the offline, real world.
If you do shoddy work, miss deadlines, and fail to build relationships and communicate well, then no amount of LinkedIn or other social media posts will be of much use.
Tony Frost, author of The Professional: A Playbook to Unleash Your Potential and Futureproof Your Success is a speaker, executive coach, trainer and author.
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