How to Build — or Erode — Your Personal Brand
A student asks a wonderful personal branding question. I’ll paraphrase:
“How can you project a personal brand online without coming off as arrogant? If all you do is go online and brag about yourself and how wonderful you are, doesn’t that make “arrogant, self-absorbed, narcissistic jerk” a big part of your personal brand?”
photo credit: probabilistic
To help answer the question, let me give you an example. Let’s say you’ve decided to project a personal brand that embodies the characteristics of “Smart. Funny. Friendly.”
How to Erode Your Personal Brand. So, what can you do to erode your personal brand online? Well, you can persistently repeat, “Hey, I’m smart. I’m witty, too. And I’m a terrific friend.”
Because, you know, that’s not smart.
And it’s not funny or friendly.
It’s jerky braggadocio.
What to try instead. So what can you do to positively project your chosen brand characteristics of smart, funny, and friendly? Why, you can publish posts that are — well, smart and funny! You can point to others’ posts that are witty, as well. You can also interact with your community in a tone and voice that exudes friendliness.
How it might play out. So let’s say that’s the personal brand building strategy you decide to deploy. You publish smart and funny posts. You point to other people’s smart and funny contributions. You keep a consistently friendly, positive, and upbeat tone. Over time, perhaps other people in your community will come to appreciate your contributions. You may find them saying,
“Hey. You’re smart. You’re witty. You’re friendly.”
After all, your personal brand isn’t what you say it is. It’s what other people say it is!
Bottom line? Don’t repetitively tell me what your brand characteristics are. Demonstrate your brand through consistent thoughts, images, tones, and interactions.
How else do you build — or erode — your brand?
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Comments
Imagine that you wanted to teach someone to be the brand you think you are (or want to be). What kinds of things would you do to show them what it looks like?
Brand building is about giving away… If yo give it away enough, people will begin to associate it with you. At the end of the day you don’t “create your brand” you influence and nurture it. Your audience ultimately decides what that brand is.
Seriously. I think people try too hard to convince others that they’re smart/funny/cool/whatever that the almost always come off looking like total jackasses. If you’re really that cool, you don’t need to tell me — I already know.
Kinda reminds me of rappers who are always rapping about how cool they are and how they get all the ladies and stuff and have to spend gazillions of dollars to shoot a video to show how big of an entourage of paid friends they have. They look like nothing more than egotistical, obviously-fake braggarts in the end.
Same advice as college creative writing class: “Show, don’t tell.”