Everyone has a personal brand, but not everyone acknowledges it and manages it proactively. Some people don’t like the term “personal brand” as they feel people aren’t brands. Some people think that it is a thinly veiled term for self-promotion, publicity or image management.

In fact, your personal brand is so much more. It is a way of consistently projecting a true, authentic view of you, your expertise and your promise of value to the marketplace.

The personal branding process enables you to:

Discover who you are, develop a consistent image and make it visible both in person and through your web presence to provide value for your audience.

Why is personal branding important?

Personal Branding Process

Having a strong personal brand is important to your success or the success of your small business. Even if you work in a corporate position, it is important that your company support its employees in developing their individual personal brands. A personal brand:

• Helps you to clearly and consistently project who you are, what you do and why you do it;

• Is a promise of value to those with whom you work;

• Answers the question what makes you different and why;
• Allows you to focus on your strengths and follow your passion.

Passion, Purpose and Personal Branding

Understanding and following your passion and purpose, whether it is the reason why you chose to go into business for yourself or the career choice you made, is the key to your personal brand. The purpose – the emotional connections you make with those you help – is why some people naturally want to connect with you and not someone else in the same field. And if you are passionate about what you do and are comfortable with the way you are perceived, your confidence will start to become contagious.

Benefits of a strong personal brand

• Increases visibility and value:  You become the expert for those needing your solution, increasing your value in their eyes and allowing you to charge fairly for your services.
• Increases confidence: When your brand is strong, authentic and compelling, it increases the confidence you have in yourself and projects that confidence to everyone around you. We all know people want to be around strong, confident and successful people and having this strong brand becomes your beacon in the sea of business owners.
• Raises credibility and authority: The more you establish yourself as the authority and expert in your area, the more people seek you out. People want to work with the experts and although someone may be just as good as you, if they aren’t known through their personal brand, they will be hidden.
• Sets expectations: Your personal brand speaks volumes about what you can do and how you will do it, differentiating you from your peers, colleagues and competitors.
• Influences whether your prospects buy from you or your competitor. Your passion and purpose will attract those that will want to work with you.
• Creates trust with your prospects and clients. A strong personal brand that is well developed adds an emotional attachment that becomes part of the decision-making process.

An exercise that will help you figure out your personal brand regardless of whether you are just starting to develop it or have one, is to answer the following questions as if you were developing your personal marketing plan. To help with this exercise, I’ve adapted the my marketing plan template to help you jot down your answers.

• What is your passion and purpose?
• What are your values? What do you stand for?
• What are your short term and long term goals? Where do you want to be in a year? Three years?
• How do you want to be perceived? (i.e. linear, focused, collaborative, connected, expert, ethical, etc.)
• What are your core strengths? What are your weaknesses? (not to beat yourself up but to understand them so you don’t try to pursue something where one of your weaknesses is mandatory)
• How do other people describe you?
• Who is your target audience? Who do you want to work with or for?
• Who is your competition?
• What makes you the ideal choice for your target audience to do business with you rather than your competition, i.e. what makes you different?

Finding your personal brand is not a quick exercise. It takes time and thought to really know your passion and purpose in life. And sometimes it evolves through comments people make, people you start to work with and seeing yourself with a different perspective.

Have you started discovering your personal brand and does it work for you?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Personal Branding – Discovering the Authentic You is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

The competitive environment surrounding us encourages those who wish to succeed to learn how to market themselves effectively. Whether you are applying for a job, trying to win a client, or in some cases, applying to a university, using social media to present the real you can make be difference between you getting noticed or being overlooked.

Social media enables many to showcase skills that may not be evident otherwise. Using only the written word is sometimes not enough to evaluate a candidate, especially when it may be more important for a person to fit into the organization from a personality, culture and attitude perspective than just in aptitude. By using social media, people can get a sense of who you are, what you do, how you will add value to them or their organization long before ever meeting you in person.

I was asked by Fox25 News to comment on the one minute video supplement to Tufts University’s admission process and social media in general for a special report on How YouTube Can Help You Get Into College. The students could submit an optional essay using one of eight topics, one of which was a one minute video about themselves uploaded to YouTube. I found this an exciting addition to the standard application process and one that will become more common in the future.

Developing your online presence or personal brand by incorporating various aspects of social media into your activities enable you to show a multi-faceted person rather than a single dimension. Writing is an important skill, but it’s not the only one. Some people are good at showing their personality through their writing styles, but others don’t have that flair. Social media levels the playing field for those who are comfortable using other types of media to demonstrate their skills.

Tips for Building Your Personal Brand

Whether you are already in the workplace, starting a business or graduating from high school or college, you’ve already started to develop a personal brand. If you haven’t paid much attention to how you are perceived through your Web presence, you may want to do a reputation check and then spend a little time working on developing it further.

• Have a strategy – understand what you want your image to be publicly and stay consistent. This is no different than a company trying to market their company and build brand awareness. Successful organizations consistently portray the same image. Those that veer from their brand, confuse the market and lose opportunities. Your personal brand is no different.
• Know who you are – don’t try to be something you’re not. Figure out who you are, what is comfortable for you to project and then stay on course.
• Show a little personality – Too many people try to hide their real selves from the public in their social media profiles. Show what makes you unique, both professionally and personally. It’s what will attract the right people to you who then want to connect with you.

As Brian McLaughlin stated in the report, social media is their generation’s way of speaking, and allowing them to use these tools to present themselves is a way of seeing the world through their eyes. Give people a way to see the true you through creative use of social media.

How have you used social media to build your online presence and reputation? Have you been able to use it successfully to gain visibility in whatever you were pursuing? Share your success stories!

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Showcase Your Skills with Social Media is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Whatever you call it, you still need to manage it!

There’s a lot of conversation about the term personal brand. My favorite personal brand is Bono (no surprise here), but Tom Brady, Madonna, J. Lo, Manny Ramirez, Britney Spears and many other celebritites all have personal brands – some good and some not so good at times.

As small business owners in the social media world, it’s not about creating a celebrity-like image but about establishing your reputation and managing how you are perceived by others, especially those who may want to do business with you. Building and nurturing a consistent reputation for what you are good at (your differentiation) is something you should strive for to make finding your ideal client that much much easier.

And as much as some folks don’t like the term personal brand, there is a brand component to your online (and off-line for that matter) reputation that needs to be managed. When creating your online presence, develop your personal brand consistently across all of your social media profiles so that it can work to establish your credibility and authority. Here’s a checklist of things to do to help with your consistency:

Picture

For some reason, some people just don’t want to put their picture in their profile. Social networking is about developing relationships and people want to see a real person and get to know them. If you are trying to develop a relationship that results in brand loyalty for your business, use a good picture that shows your real personality.

The picture does not have to be a professionally taken picture, but it should project your professionalism. Don’t put on a business suit if you’re style is business casual and your typical client relates better to a more laid back style. Remember your brand should be the real you, not something made up because you think that’s what people want to see.

Have several pictures taken so that you can choose the best one. Use it on your blog, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to increase recognition of your brand across platforms. Sign up for a gravatar so that your picture shows up in comments on other blogs if that feature is supported.

Name

The name or identifier you use should be the same one for all of your social networking websites. If you want to build a professional brand reputation, don’t create something cute. Keep it relative to you and your business. If you have a common name that has most likely been taken, use a combination of your name and business name or add a middle initial if that makes sense for you. Decide before you sign up on something that you think would work across the social media universe and try to keep it consistent so you begin to be recognized.

Profile

Take advantage of LinkedIn‘s business oriented profile format to write a complete profile description using relevant keywords and then copy that description or pieces of it to all the other social networks, tailoring it to the audience. Since LinkedIn is the more business-oriented social network, they provide ample space to fully describe who you are and what you do. Setting one social network as the hub for your personal and professional information prevents you from writing something different for each network you join.

Actions

If you write a blog and update your status regularly, stay true to your discipline and expertise. Focus on how you help people and what’s in it for them. Build relationships, connect people to others that are beneficial to them, answer questions in your area of expertise and did I mention focus? I’m stressing focus because I’ve noticed recently on LinkedIn that there are people who have “best answers” to questions in 50 or more categories that are totally unrelated. Can they really be experts in that many diverse categories? Did they really answer them all or had someone else answer the questions for them (if so, not very transparent)? What is their strength? Who are they marketing to? Being a Jack of all trades and a master at none comes to mind. Pick your targets and focus on your strengths. It will draw people to you who need your expertise.

When you are participating in social media, you are establishing your reputation whether you know it or not. Make it a conscious effort and nurture the personal brand that is truly you.

How well do you manage your online reputation? Share your tips and tricks in the comments below.

U2 photo credit Phil Romans.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Personal Brand or Online Reputation is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

I attended a great event last night held by Next Level Executives on personal branding. Dan Schawbel and John Bates spoke of personal branding – John from the basics of identifying your target market, determining your unique differentiator and offering something your ideal client wants to buy (and will pay money for) and Dan from developing your Personal eBrand.

This event got me thinking that developing your reputation is nothing new – but doing so on such a global basis is what brings the overwhelming nature of personal branding to many business owners. Throughout my entire career, I have had to manage my reputation and “brand” from job to job. How many times were we told never to burn bridges because you never know when you will cross paths with that person again?

Now with the Internet and social media, crossing paths with past acquaintances is much easier and of course, much more likely. Finding out about your next boss or employee is as simple as searching for them on Google (or Googling them in the new lingo). The Internet and its social media tools have certainly shrunk the world and have made reputation management a very important part of our business lives. Managing your online and offline reputation today should be as much a part of your marketing plan as keeping your resume up-to-date was 10 years ago.

But like with everything, getting started may be hard but staying engaged is even tougher.

What should you do to dive into personal branding?

• Determine your goals for developing your personal brand
• Identify which social media tools will work best for you
• Develop a full, professional profile with picture
• Experiment with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and other social media tools if they make sense for your business
• Learn the culture of social media
• Listen to what your ideal clients are saying
• Join in the conversation

If this seems like a big challenge, engage the help of someone who can short circuit the learning curve and get you jump started into personal branding for you and your business. But by all means, get started. This stuff is not going to go away anytime soon.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Personal Branding – Is it really something new? is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

In this era of social media and our ability to effectively connect and build relationships with so many folks around the world, why do some people think that by filling out my contact form, I would ever consider outsourcing client work to them? 

This is a really big pet peeve of mine!

A few times a month, I get several emails similar to the following from people using contact forms on my web site. Some come from freelancers and some from college students looking for work.

This bothers me because it’s:

• Totally impersonal and solicitous, showing no interest in me or my business other than looking for work
• Inappropriate since my contact form is meant for people who may be interested in my services, not the other way around (if I were hiring, I’d have a careers page)!

 (Bob Smith is an alias so sorry any Bob Smith’s out there!):

email: bobsmith@bobsmith.com
first: bob
last: smith
company: bobsmith.com
telephone: 508 555 5555
message: Dear Team Vista, (Really personal greeting)

I am contacting you to offer my services as a Freelance SEO Copywriter.

My name is Bob Smith and I’m based in Boston. You can view a few writing samples on my website here: http://bobsmith.com/

I am very dedicated and available to start work immediately.

I can write any type of SEO article that you may need me to write and I can also include screen shots and images via Flickr’s creative commons in your articles if you so desire.

My rate is US$35/article for any article between 300-1200 words. I also write blog posts of the same length for US$35/blog post. Please feel free to mark my rates up to your clients.

Let me be very clear – this does not build trust or make me want to partner with you. Most business owners are careful about who they select as subcontractors because it reflects on them. I’m sure this person is a very good writer, but it shows no initiative to build a relationship with me.

Before you will ever get people to trust you enough to hire you as a subcontractor, you need to first develop a strong personal brand and make yourself visible to me via social media.

• Find out more about me by visiting my LinkedIn profile (it’s clearly posted on all my web properties).
• Start reading my blogs to understand my areas of expertise to see how you could add value.
• Join my community via MyBlogLog, follow me in Twitter and take an interest in what I do.
• Start writing your own blog and make your knowledge and expertise visible.
• Comment on my blog with intelligence and relevancy.

Develop a relationship with me first and then, maybe if I need a writer for some client work, I will seek YOU out.

Social media makes it so easy to develop relationships with people anywhere in the world who could potentially send business your way. Don’t turn them off by taking this shotgun, impersonal, almost spammy approach. Take the time to learn about that person, what they may need in the way of resources for their clients, engage in a conversation and develop trust and a relationship that will help both of you in the long run.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

How Not to Get Business is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

I answered this question on LinkedIn so I thought I would share my answer here with you as well, but with a bit more elaboration.

The way to gain visibility for your blog is to make it an ongoing marketing project.  Do all the marketing basics that you would do for any activity:

• Pick your target audience
• Understand what they need and how you fulfill that need
• Speak to them in terms they understand
• Provide useful, relevant information

Just as with all marketing, it takes time for you to build momentum and get the recognition that you want. Remember the three phases of relationship marketing: VCP model (visibility + credibility = profitability – defined in your terms of success) and apply that model to your online and social media marketing effort. Your blog is the medium to use to develop relationships with your audience, letting them get to know you, your expertise and your passion. It’s your “home base” for developing a strong personal branding and you need to put in a quality effort so that people can form their opinion of you based on what they see on the blog.

Post regularly (at least 2-3 times a week) with relevant content. Create a plan to get you on track and make a list of topics that you can write about if you find yourself with writer’s block. Just as I did here, use the questions on LinkedIn as food for thought. It’s always easier to write when you have a question posed to you. It’s the conversation starter!

Once you get the blog going and get beyond that first couple of posts, here are things you can do to make your blog more visible and stand out from others.

• Comment frequently on other blogs and add value to the community so you get noticed.
• Submit your blog to Blogged.com and use the rating to evaluate how you are doing against other blogs in your space.
• Create a community on MyBlogLog, add the widget to your site.
• Make sure you adhere to good SEO practices on the blog – if you use WordPress, install the All In One SEO Pack plugin
• Include video and images as well as text content. If you don’t create your own videos, link to others that are relevant.
• Include a link to your blog in every profile you create and in your email signature and make sure your blog is fed to all of your profiles in social networks.
• Notify your Twitter followers of a new post via the Twitter Updater plugin to WordPress
• Design your blog to appeal to your target audience, embracing your personal brand identity.

But on top of it all, keep at it with consistency. When you think you are only talking to yourself, all of a sudden your MyBlogLog starts filling up with little images, people visit and comment on your site and you start to feel like you truly belong to a community.

Please add your comments on your favorite activities for gaining visibility for your blog. I’ll take them all and create a checklist for folks to use.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

How to Make Your Blog Stand Out in a Crowd is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

In the workshop I gave last week: Personal Branding: Promote Your Expertise using Social Media, we discussed the importance of being authentic and transparent when developing your personal brand. With the ease of social media, what you do exposes a little bit more of your personality each time. You no longer can put on a false face and get away with it. You need to manage your online reputation to ensure you always come across to others as you want to be presented. In this world of always connected, everyone is important, every email is important and everyone who visits your blog or social network profile needs to see the authentic you.

Listen to Gary Vaynerchuk in these two video blog posts. The first is on the importance of listening and responding to everyone in today’s word of mouth on steroids world.

[viddler]5e27ef32[/viddler]

Gary is authentic. His Wine Library TV shares his knowledge of wine in an upbeat, easy to understand way. He lives and breathes his personal brand as viewed in his blog GaryVayerchuk.com where he shares his secrets of word of mouth marketing for his personal brand. This video blog is one of his secrets to a strong personal brand.

[viddler]702aeff4[/viddler] 

Watch one of Gary’s videos and you will view a strong personal brand in action.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Personal Brand, Transparency & Authenticity is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

I am hosting a three hour live workshop to help independent professionals, partners in professional service firms, small business owners and entrepreneurs understand social media and how to use it to develop their personal brand. I am sharing many hours of learning with my audience, helping them bypass the learning curve and get started on their social media strategy quickly.

The details of the workshop are:

April 22, 2008
9 a.m. – 12 noon
Key Executive Offices
33 Boston Post Road West, Suite 270
Marlborough, MA 01752
Registration Fee: $50.00 

I’m excited about giving this workshop as it will help these business owners start to do something in their businesses that make them stand out from the crowd. If you live in the Marlborough area, I’d love to see you.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Personal Branding: Promote Your Expertise using Social Media is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Works both Offline and Online

For many thinking of starting their own businesses, the fear of finding clients can paralyze them enough to sabotage their efforts. Cold calling prospects can make some of us break out in a cold sweat. One of the things that I learned early on in my business start-up days is that there are other ways to find clients. When you have worked in corporate America for your entire career, one of the skills you didn’t learn was how to network. As a business owner, networking is one of the best ways to get clients and today, adding social networking to the mix makes your ability to find business that much easier.

One of the first things I did when I launched the business was to join BNI (Business Network International). Some people feel that it doesn’t work, but when you are starting a business, being busy meeting new people, gaining a support organization and having a place to test your marketing message is really a valuable exercise. The next thing I did was to take a course on networking. The course taught me the basic principle of growing your business, called the VCP model – Visibility + Credibility = Profitability. Dr. Ivan Misner developed this three phase relationship development model: Visibility–Credibility–Profitability or VCP, to help business owners understand how to generate profitable relationships.

• Visibility – Be seen otherwise out of sight, out of mind.
• Credibility – Develop the relationship so that people understand your value and how to refer business to you.
• Profitability – Cultivating relationship with the right referral sources will result in profitable business relationships.

The principles of networking transcend to social networking. How does the VCP model work in social networking?

Building visibility and credibility using social media takes time but is worth it as it provides the venue from which you can create visibility and demonstrate your expertise. In many ways, it’s easier to develop this reputation online since the tools enable you to build your reputation on a daily basis. In person networking events happen frequently, but not 24×7.

Where to begin?

• Create a blog and write relevant posts;
• Create profiles on social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, MyBlogLog and other social networks that relate to your area of expertise;
• Link your blog to your profiles and look for other opportunities to get link love;
• Comment intelligently on other blogs;
• Submit your blog to Technorati and Blogged.com;
• Answer questions on LinkedIn;



• Share presentations on SlideShare with linked audio if you have it;
• Create videos and upload to YouTube.

You get the picture!

So why do we do it?

Because according to John Jantsch, ”Tis better to be found than to find“.

1) It’s just a whole lot more fun to pick up the phone and have someone on the other end go on about all the great things they have read, seen and heard about your products and services.

2) (And I think this is a really big point) Prospects that come to you by way of your information machine, that have logically progressed down a path of education, are probably ten times more likely to be ideal and equally more likely to close than those that you go out and try to convince to buy from you. In fact, your marketing system can be one of the greatest ways to qualify leads – if a lead won’t go down your education path, that might be a red flag that they won’t be an ideal customer either.

What other ways do you recommend people get visibility and credibility using social media?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Visibility + Credibility = Profitability is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

I’ve been following a few posts that have been debating the purpose of having a resume in this world of social media. In Seth Godin’s post, “Why bother having a resume;?”, he posits:

I think if you’re remarkable, amazing or just plain spectacular, you probably shouldn’t have a resume at all.

The rationale? It’s an excuse to reject you. A resume makes you ordinary.

And I agree.

Having a boring, play by the rules resume can be the kiss of death. When I was a hiring manager at my last company, I had a recruiter begging me to meet with a candidate of his for a technical marketing position I had open. I told him based on her resume, she didn’t have the qualifications. But he convinced me, I met with her and we hired her because of her personality (she fit right in) and she was extremely intelligent. In the end, she was a rock star! What a shame it would have been to have passed over this candidate (and thank goodness the recruiter was a good sales person!).

If you are remarkable, you need to market yourself in a way that you stand out from the ordinary and be noticed by those who are interested in your products and services. Whether you own your business or are marketing yourself to a company to get your dream job, you need to develop and nurture your personal brand to build visibility and credibility.

But just like the world isn’t totally ready to abandon traditional marketing activities for a plan of exclusively social media, the world is not totally ready to abandon the traditional resume for a purely social media portfolio. Even Google requires a resume!

Everyone, whether you are an independent professional, business owner, or entrepreneur, should have the following in your social media portfolio:

• Complete profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks relevant to your expertise.
• A blog written with authenticity and expertise.
• An about page on your blog that gives the reader a sense about who you are.
• Comments on other blogs within your expertise that are thoughtful, professional and add value to the blog.
• Put presentations you’ve given up on SlideShare and link to them from your About page. If you have a recording of the presentation, you can sync the audio with the slides.

For those seeking a new career opportunity, add your well-developed resume to the mix.

There is certainly more you can do, like develop a regular podcast, but you should create the basics and keep adding to them.

Then when someone is interested in what you have to offer, hand them the resume with a list of all the places they can find examples of what you can do on the Internet.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

A Résumé or a Social Media Portfolio? is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.