The Power of Personal Branding

November 17, 2010|In Branding, Business, Content Marketing|By Kyle Lacy

With 300,000 new accounts created each day on Twitter alone, it is understandable why some individuals and businesses have trouble standing out. However, part of their problems may be related to the failure to define a personal brand.

As Kyle Lacy mentioned in a keynote speech on Nov. 12 at the PRSSA Student Day in Cleveland, a brand is a combination of interactions and feelings. Interactions include experiences and storytelling that involve you or your organization. Feelings are emotions your consumers experience as a result of interactions with you or your company.

Leveraging your business’s ability to effectively communicate your personal brand through interactions and feelings among your customers could ultimately mean the success or failure of your company. It is also important, however, that you choose a brand that accurately describes you and your company. An ambiguous brand may leave consumers wondering what you have to offer that your competitors don’t.

Consider these questions when building your personal brand:

  • What are your goals?
  • Who do you value?
  • What are your passions?
  • What motivates you?
  • What makes you remarkable?

Social media are an important means to connect with your customers and share your personal brand. With 400 million people and growing on Facebook, social media are too big of a branding powerhouse to ignore.

Lacy presents six ways to communicate your personal brand through social media:

  • Engaging with your customers to figure out which sorts of content they want to hear, consume and remember, then interacting and fulfilling their needs.
  • Sharing the content your consumers are interested in via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs, etc.
  • Managing the conversation by monitoring, sharing, communicating and creating community between you and your customers.
  • Building a presence that integrates all of your social, mobile and traditional methods of communicating your personal brand.
  • Combining forces of the unique sub-brands of your overall company strategy to communicate an organizational story.
  • Tracking and measuring your success through fan counts, LinkedIn profile views, comments, Google Grade, retweets per page view, etc.

Whatever your personal brand may be, just remember to communicate it honestly and effectively through several channels, especially social media. Last, but not least, remember that you and your business should be producers not consumers of your brand.

How would you define your personal brand?

Also, be sure to preorder your copy of Kyle Lacy’s new book, “Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself” for more helpful branding tips.

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Today’s guest post is by Brittany Macchiarola. Brittany is a senior public relations major at Kent State University. She interns at Flash Communications where she writes about sustainability efforts at Kent State. Connect with her on Twitter @brittmacc or check out her blog Green Briefcase.

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