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.
The power of endorsements, recommendations and reviews
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. +
