Nobody likes being just like everybody else, but at the same time unique is the only characteristic we all share

This provides us with an unparalleled paradox. To underline your uniqueness you can look at your person as a brand on its own. A personal brand! With personal branding everybody is an entrepreneur.

Online tools

Internet has provided us with lots of cool tools to emphasize our own uniqueness. On Facebook and Linkedin, Twitter every profile is different.

Klout is a worldwide used tool to provide an overview of your own influence and your influencers (and your influencers’influencers).

Other tools to brand yourself are Pinterest and Vizify. And of course, don’t forget a blog.

Brand yourself

Branding yourself involves everything that you would do when branding a product or a company.

So you define a mission, a vision, core values, desired image, target audience and you create a marketing-and-sales strategy (together called the brand essentials).

Because of these very clear elements, you will see that it becomes lots more easy to make choices.

As with any brand, discipline and a long term display of the brand essentials make you believable.

Building up trust

Building-up trust is core to any business. Because you know what they say:

” No trust no love”

Very important for building up trust are authenticity, humor, being human and open minded.

With online shopping becoming more and more social, the value of the opinion of your peers increases. Online there’s lots of tools to get reviews for a webshop for example, but also for your personal brand it is possible to get reviews.

Linkedin is a platform with extensive features to give people a professional review, called recommendations and, one of the latest additions, endorsements. The latter being lots more low-key than the former.

The power of endorsements, recommendations and reviews

We all value endorsements, recommendations and reviews highly, but what is the value really? Highly doesn’t make our stocks go up and doesn’t pay the bills. Has anybody ever valued these peers opinions? Don’t switch to Google straight away, I did that just now. Forbes published a useful article on recommendations on Linkedin at the beginning of this year.

Forbes gives the following tips:

Recommendations can help your cause
Failing to get recommendations won’t hurt you
Recommendations have unpredictable potential ( 😉 )
Recruiters use recommendations to search out new candidates
Recommendations can help you get promoted
Reach out personally when you ask for a recommendation
Only ask those who truly know your work
Help the writer out
Specificity is best
Get a range of recommendations
Don’t get too many recommendations

So, unpredictable potential. mmm… So net yet a figure or percentage. I guess for now we have to stick to believing in the value then.

Lot’s of great people have understood that personal branding is important, in the next blog post we’re going to see if we can get an insight in the value by looking at real examples.
About the author

Over the past few years Walter van der Scheer has been evangelizing marketing automation to advertising agencies, e-commerce companies and co-workers alike and has been building a team of determined sales professionals. He has made progress, but the road ahead is still very long. Walter shares his personal experiences and challenges along the road of changing the way that marketing is done, while trying to stick to the strategically chosen path. +